Well the madness in East Coast weather has certainly thrown our travel plans in flux. Instead of being in Dulles going to Casablanca, we are at O’Hare going to Prague…

I saw something which makes me really question the entire Tim Hortons organization (for the non-Canadians, Tim Hortons is an overrated donut chain)… we stopped at a TH at the border crossing to Buffalo, NY and saw this sign:

Haunted Tim Hortons

Seriously, WTF?? Am I crazy or is this nuts? I do have a couple of theories as to why such a severe sign is required:

• The stairs are really steep and the lightbulb has been broken (permanently).
• The employees are all vampires.
• The donuts are actually made, not by people, but by a colony of murderous gnomes who only come out at night.
• Mr. Horton is actually a werewolf and built a chain of stores across Canada so that he was never more than 5 minutes away from a place where he could be safely contained during his lycanthropic transformations.

If anyone has any better ideas, please let me know!

I feel it is telling that by the time I got back outside from eating my overrated donut and coffee that the door was closed.

Me, my brother and our respective wives spent New Years in the Eastern Hemisphere – Abizer & Alifiya in Chennai and Mumtaz & I in Dubai. Both of us ended up getting caught in massive traffic jams from hell. It took over 2 hours for the stinkin’ cab to even get to our hotel and in both our cases, we ended up spending New Years in the car – what should have been a 10 minute commute took us both 1.5+ hours.

But what we found really interesting was watching the thousands of people out on the road – in *both* cases, they were ALL men!?!?! All we saw were drunken hoards of roaming men, with no women to be seen anywhere.

Now Abizer and Alifiya were shocked and appalled (“WTF??” was Abizer’s exact quote as I recall, Alifiya referred to this experience as the “Gay Parade!”), however, I was much more understanding. After all, what business does a woman have outside the home, drinking and carousing in the middle of the night no less? She should be home cooking, cleaning and caring for the 8+ children that she has sired for her husband! Anything additional is just not appropriate.

Mumtaz was in total agreement (Hey, I can dream, can’t I??).

We spent 4 days in Japan on our way to India over the holidays, some thoughts…

• I was surprised at how many many chunky people (especially girls) I saw walking around. Guess I have an incorrect stereotype of how petite Japanese people are.
• Speaking of chunky… It’s funny, that considering how much more advanced the Japanese cell phone market is from the US, functionality and capability-wise, the Japanese cell phones seemed positively chunky compared to an average US phone. Americans value size over functionality while the Japanese make the opposite trade-off.
• It is an amazingly orderly society… some examples come to mind
  • No matter how large the crowd of people that merges onto an escalator, by the time you have traveled 2 steps, people who prefer to stand have all merged to one side allowing an aisle for those who prefer to walk.
  • I find it amazing that the the “busiest intersection in the world” at Shibuya *ever* clears out!
    
• At the sightseeing and shopping places, there are no freaking place to sit… no benches or chairs or anything anywhere!!
• It is amazing that the country is so clean… there is *no* trash anywhere! Ironically, there are no trash cans anywhere either (maybe the occasional recycling bin) – I have no idea where all the trash goes.
• People wearing facemasks in public is freaky.
• The Oedo line at Shinjuku is built so deep in the bowels of the earth that you really think that if you go any deeper you will be knocking on Satan’s front door.
• It is pretty funny that given the tons of vending machines everywhere, I didn’t see a single one that served any food item.
• The hand air dryers in the bathrooms pump out some serious air power! Your hands dry out in mere seconds, it’s awesome!
• At every toilet I used, they didn’t have toilet paper but sandpaper. I don’t know what those Japanese butts are made of… this is especially ironic given…
  
• My opinion on the butt squirter in the toilet evolved over the course of the week…
  • This is just weird
  • I couldn’t figure out how to turn the damn thing off
  • Man this is really strange
  • How do they know how to aim the thing so well?
  • Dude, I could *totally* get used to this!
• Really, I shouldn’t be surprised, while not as high-tech, the butt squirter concept is common in India as well from the pretty nice to the super ghetto.

I did a doubletake when I saw this at a rest stop off of I-10 in Arizona. At the risk of sounding like a completely insensitive ass, is the population of handicap truckers so large that they deserve a dedicated spot at a rest stop??

I think I am struck because I have never seen this before, and I’ve been to my fair share of rest stops…