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Halloween Town
Oct. 14th, 2008 06:17 pmIt seems that the dreams are here to stay, but fortunately they're the frightening/nonsensical mixture rather than the really bad ones. Yesterday I played loads of Resident Evil 4 again and during the night my brain crossed it with Trilby's Notes, and I was in my parents' house (why always there?) aware that every time I changed rooms there was a random chance of a man in a welding mask coming in behind me. I was armed only with a bottle of Tippex, but when he eventually appeared I used this ingeniously against him by splattering it across the visor so he was unable to see.
As I said in the last entry, my parents have been visiting the Boston area for a while, staying in a bed and breakfast near us and coming round to spend the evenings together. They're up in Maine visiting a friend now, and will be back after a few days. During the weekend we went up to Salem, which is a nearby town that's something of a record-holder in witch burnings and seems to have now styled itself as a sort of Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the first time that I'd used Zipcar to actually hire a car for the day and drive a significant distance along American freeways, and my mum's nervous enough about me driving on the side of the road that I actually learned on, but they both seemed to be happy enough even when we took several wrong turns.
American roads are amazing - have I mentioned this? They're terrifying things and you have to drive carefully but aggressively to avoid being squashed in between the giant monsters that a lot of the population drive, but British roads are happy just staying on the ground, and in America they swoop around and over each other, forming a complex three-dimensional maze at each junction. I was marvelling at being elevated up above the streets and houses as we navigated a multi-tiered curve - in Britain we would just put a double roundabout in and expect you to deal with it. Of course, it's probably better if you can actually look around and your eyes aren't firmly fixed on the bus in front of you.
Once we got there, it emerged that no matter how much the town tries to Halloween itself up the most frightening part of it is the parking. Lemming-like pedestrians mill about all over the road and you have to just rely on luck not to hit any of them, and even though the map on the brochure we had showed about twenty car parks all over the place, in reality you will trundle around at five miles an hour for the rest of eternity looking for one that has a space free and preferably costs less than your soul. In the end we drove to the edge of the town and parked at the railway station, which cost $2 via an antiquated honour payment system involving a big metal board with slots where you had to fold your money up and shove it through with a supplied metal rod. I'm not comfortable with crowds and had to try and avoid the centre of the town for the most part, but my mum seems to absolutely love being a tourist like that.
We'd spent so long looking for a space to leave the car that we only had time to have lunch and see two shows in between fighting our way through the crowds - one at the Salem Witch Museum, the most misleadingly-named building ever, as it contains in total one auditorium with a narration about the trials and a gift shop. The other was a re-enaction of an actual witch trial, where some American youths dressed up and talked in posh accents to attempt to get a majority vote from the audience at the end as to whether they should burn a witch or not. They invited comments from the watchers - sadly nobody claimed that "she turned me into a newt", but they've probably heard that about a hundred times a day before anyway.
Strangely, even though I'd done the most walking of the day, to pick up the car, move the car between parking spaces, drop it off at the end, and then go out to the supermarket for emergency supplies, in the morning it was my arms that ached terribly. I'm forced to guess that it must just have been me gripping the steering wheel like it was a hand-bar on the subway when the floor's just fallen off.
As I said in the last entry, my parents have been visiting the Boston area for a while, staying in a bed and breakfast near us and coming round to spend the evenings together. They're up in Maine visiting a friend now, and will be back after a few days. During the weekend we went up to Salem, which is a nearby town that's something of a record-holder in witch burnings and seems to have now styled itself as a sort of Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the first time that I'd used Zipcar to actually hire a car for the day and drive a significant distance along American freeways, and my mum's nervous enough about me driving on the side of the road that I actually learned on, but they both seemed to be happy enough even when we took several wrong turns.
American roads are amazing - have I mentioned this? They're terrifying things and you have to drive carefully but aggressively to avoid being squashed in between the giant monsters that a lot of the population drive, but British roads are happy just staying on the ground, and in America they swoop around and over each other, forming a complex three-dimensional maze at each junction. I was marvelling at being elevated up above the streets and houses as we navigated a multi-tiered curve - in Britain we would just put a double roundabout in and expect you to deal with it. Of course, it's probably better if you can actually look around and your eyes aren't firmly fixed on the bus in front of you.
Once we got there, it emerged that no matter how much the town tries to Halloween itself up the most frightening part of it is the parking. Lemming-like pedestrians mill about all over the road and you have to just rely on luck not to hit any of them, and even though the map on the brochure we had showed about twenty car parks all over the place, in reality you will trundle around at five miles an hour for the rest of eternity looking for one that has a space free and preferably costs less than your soul. In the end we drove to the edge of the town and parked at the railway station, which cost $2 via an antiquated honour payment system involving a big metal board with slots where you had to fold your money up and shove it through with a supplied metal rod. I'm not comfortable with crowds and had to try and avoid the centre of the town for the most part, but my mum seems to absolutely love being a tourist like that.
We'd spent so long looking for a space to leave the car that we only had time to have lunch and see two shows in between fighting our way through the crowds - one at the Salem Witch Museum, the most misleadingly-named building ever, as it contains in total one auditorium with a narration about the trials and a gift shop. The other was a re-enaction of an actual witch trial, where some American youths dressed up and talked in posh accents to attempt to get a majority vote from the audience at the end as to whether they should burn a witch or not. They invited comments from the watchers - sadly nobody claimed that "she turned me into a newt", but they've probably heard that about a hundred times a day before anyway.
Strangely, even though I'd done the most walking of the day, to pick up the car, move the car between parking spaces, drop it off at the end, and then go out to the supermarket for emergency supplies, in the morning it was my arms that ached terribly. I'm forced to guess that it must just have been me gripping the steering wheel like it was a hand-bar on the subway when the floor's just fallen off.
