buffalo soldiers

kris and i took a trip to buffalo today - which technically is now yesterday.

ever since kris went to seattle and saw in person how drastically cheaper the goods in the states were, we've been planning to go cross-border shopping as soon as we had a free weekend. this was the weekend. i actually haven't bought any clothes since july, when we went to quebec city and montreal, so i was ready to binge.

we went to the walden galleria, after hearing so many good things about it from my students. we saw a sign on the way that said the wait at the queenston-lewiston bridge was 1-2 hours, and that there was no line at fort erie, so we opted to take the fort erie bridge. there was still a line-up, but it moved quickly.

we went to the olive garden for the first time and after i requested a salad without strands of hair in it, the food was great. huge portions though, and no lunch menu, at least that i could see.

we set off shopping after that. banana republic proved to be the store of choice this time, because in the states, their clothing doesn't look like it belongs on old women, which is always a plus. after banana, we didn't have much luck, and decided that this mall was overrated and desperately lacking a good shoe store. we did visit sephora and i was able to redeem a $50 gift card that i received in june. it was lovely to see that my gift card was worth $52USD!

we left around 7:30pm so we could be home for the oiler's game at 10pm. we didn't use the fort erie bridge this time, and instead opted for the queenston-lewiston bridge. i'm not sure why we opted for that, but that was a big mistake....huge! it took us 2 hours to drive 2 kilometres to get through customs. we occupied ourselves by playing "name that tune," with the ipod hooked up to the car speakers, on shuffle mode...that quickly turned into "name that artist" since we learned that we actually don't know many names of songs. finally we declared our purchases and were devastated to see there was another ridiculous queue to actually do (due?) our duty to pay duty. tee hee, i said "doody". so we waited in that line for an hour, most of it outside. we didn't bring the ipod headphones so we had nothing to do other than spy on suspected criminals getting their car searched, which was surprisingly uneventful. sigh.

after that, we met a toll booth - the canadian toll was $3.50, but the american toll was $3. apparently they haven't yet adjusted the toll booth prices. luckily we had three american dollar bills left. we brought four american dollar bills with us since that was all the american money we had, good thing we didn't spend it so we could save on the toll! YES, finally something went our way! take THAT, US of A!

we got home at 12:45am. the oiler game was over. and they lost. our house didn't magically clean itself while we were gone, either. i was kind of banking on that, so more disappointment. ho hum.