Asian Drive-In et. al.

This weekend was the back half of 2 rather mundane weekends in a row, although last weekend sure was productive. Friday, Liz and I decided to do nothing. She had some school work, I had some TV to catch up on. Come 8:30ish, after some of the catching up was finished we decided to go for a drive. We ended up at the 11pm showing of Ratatouille in Newmarket. What's more shocking, Ratatouille or Newmarket? The movie was good, and the Pixar animation is still out of this world, but the lack of stars in this one, and mediocre storyline ranks it my least favourite Pixar movie, but still worth seeing. The highlight to this movie was the Pixar Short Movie before the main movie - it's really funny.

Saturday was a trip to Brooklin! SnH visited her kickass new house to ensure the couple she's buying the place from didn't sell her new stuff! Nice couple, crazy nice neighbors, Brooklin versus Toronto will take some getting used to for S&S... Yonge Street and Homeless Crazy people will be missed I think. We of course did the slow stalker style drive by of our house 4 minutes away - two very different houses for sure - both super kickass! Looking forward to calling it home. Upon arriving back home Liz and I decided to go out again, furniture shopping. Nothing major, not much I liked, but it killed an afternoon. I did buy a decent wood table in the "Loonie Bin" at the Brick Warehouse - basically if it's in that room there's a reason it's listed at a stupid price. The table was listed at $99, and had a ding on top, and a hole out of the back - but since I was going to transform this gem into a TV Stand anyway, it didn't much effect anything. I found a salesman who I asked to save me the tax, I wanted to pay exactly $99. He said "no way" it's final price in this room. So I did what any good haggler would do... found a new salesman. After deliberating if this was a good purchase or not for an hour, I paid my $99 no tax and stuffed it in the car. On the way home we saw the Pacific Mall - the Asian Mall of Markham, and decided what the hell.

Asian Malls - I've been in one before in Toronto - it's where I got my PS1 illegally mod-chipped to play burned games. Where else would you get something like that done? Or more specifically, where else would you see a big sign on a store window advertising such "Mod Chips - Play Burned Games - $20". Anyway, the Pacific mall puts the other mall to shame - after all, it's smack in the middle of Markham, aka Little Shanghai. There are 5 types of stores ONLY in the Asian Mall, and considering there are 100+ stores, it's interesting there's enough Yuan to go around. It's like a bad episode of the Flintstones with the rotating background of these places:

Store #1 - Female Clothing / Accessories Store: There's no male clothing in Asian Malls - duh?! The culture dictates that Men wear whatever the can find in the trash, while the women wear designer (or atleast designer knockoffs) clothing on every aspect of their body. Hats, Glasses, Dresses, Shoes and Purses. You're not going to find a Gap or Old Navy in these places. Oh, and you think White Mannequins looks funny

Store #2 - Hair Salons: Men & Women in this case - Equally. Women get the big thick blond or red streaks done while the men turn their heads into a beds of nails. For not purchasing clothing the men do love their ninja star hairdos. Don't light a match around these stores

Store #3 - Food / Ingredients: The food court style food actually looked really good. Authentic obviously, but it looked really tasty. Even various meat hanging in store windows! I'll also add the Bubble Tea stores into this category. Buy 2 pairs of socks and get a bubble tea... these places were EVERYWHERE, and everyone in the mall walking had one. Various cooking ingredients were in a lot of places. In a game of name that ingredient I would have failed miserably. I recognized a few mushrooms, but there were jars and jars of other items that I couldn't tell you if it went with appetizer, main course, dessert of if they were just put out to see if any white people bought them as a joke.

Store #4 - Pimp My Asian. Okay now we're into the fun racist stuff. Rogers, Rogers Wireless, Bell, Bell Mobility, Fido, Telus, not to mention various accessory and hardware stores selling Cell Phones by the weekly contract. The new Samsung i5billionxtwentyR is in stock, I got to have one! The Cell Phone market amongst these people is OUT OF CONTROL. The stores mentioned above were all there - and most of them all there in 4 or 5 (no lie) locations. White people love their cell phones, but we're in the stone age as far as new models are concerned. I may as well have the Zack Morris Brick compared to these things. Wait til the iPhone gets into these stores - Unbelievable. And what would an Asian mall be without Car accessories. Spinning Rims, neon lights, Garbage can sized exhausts - walk into "Rice Rockets R Us" and ask for Charlie... he'll hook you up. Or of course you can try Phung at "Civic's? Damn near Honda'd!" but his prices seemed high.

Store #5 - Bootleg DVDs. There were more Bootleg DVD stores in this mall than Chins, Wangs, and random deadends combined! Of course the morality behind such a store is questionable at best. But that didn't stop us from buying a few. 10 movies (cough still in theater) for $32 Doll'a. Our list consists of:

Transformers
Sicko
Georgia Rule
Liscence to Wed
Pirates of the Caribbean 3
Fantastic 4 - Silver Surfer
Reign over Me
Blades of Glory
Hostel 2
Mr. Brooks
(Were going to buy Harry Potter, but since it came out only 2 days previously apparently the quality wasn't so good. I can picture Kramer taping it in the movie theater... no thanks)

So, from Saturday night until today Liz and I attended our very own "Asian Drive-In". We watched PotC3, Blades of Glory, Georgia Rule, Liscence to Wed & Sicko this weekend. All worked, and all were 7/10+ quality for still in theater movies. Sicko was a 9. Couple that with Ratatouille and I'm done with movies for a while.

Potc3 = 5/10 the worst one of the 3 by a landslide.

Blades of Glory = 5/10 - chuckled in spots, but should have been better

Georgia Rule = 2/10 - I was playing Nintendo on the computer all movie, but Lohan did make me look up a few times as every now and then she did something so whorey that I had to take note. Shocking she was cast in this role. Don't watch this movie with a daughter - guessing they don't mention that to you on the cover. PG13 - yeah if your 13 year old's a HOOKER!

Liscence to Wed - Honestly I was still in Nintendo mode, so got about 30 minutes in before sleeping.

Sicko 10/10 - Excellent! Proud to be Canadian, wondering when the US will get their heads out of their asses. As far as Moore's biased movies go, this is pretty even keel in the sense he's just bashing health care. No sides of the coin regarding that issue, unlike for example Gun Control.

So that was our weekend in a nutshell. Lots of KM's on the car for not really going anywhere. Lots of movies which was fun. Now it's time to take full advantage of our Summer weekend plans for the next couple months.