My husband and I decided, pretty much on the spur of the moment, to go to Buffalo for the day (yeah, I know, we're real exciting folks). We left at 8:00am to beat the traffic, though I really wanted to leave earlier but that's besides the point. We hit the border around 9:15 and waited about 30 minutes which wasn't too bad.
We eventually got to the mall just before 10:30 and then we were off and running. (Well, in all honesty, I was running and my husband was unenthusiastically keeping up with me). ;)
I went into Kaufmanns and did a bit of looking around but unfortunately I didn't find anything that appealed to me so we went downstairs to the men's department. My hubby found four golf shirts that were marked down from $30 to $15. When we got to the till, it was further marked down to $12 (he was a happy camper).
Then it was time for me to head to my favourite store for some retail therapy of my own. I went a little nuts and got six hand soaps in coconut lime verbena *drool*, four body lotions (1 black cherry vanilla and 3 brown surgar and vanilla), a mesh sponge, and a bunch of hand creams for my sister-in-law. After some creative accounting and $70+ later, we walked out of the store. (Hey, it's my one indulgence, a girl's gotta have a bit of enjoyment...right?)
We decided to head off in search of lunch and went to customer service to ask for directions to Applebees . The twitty woman behind the corner gave us directions that, while given in English, took us a few minutes to understand. Now don't get us wrong, we're not stupid people but this is what she told us. "Head out of the parking lot this way (she pointed...yeah that helped), then head down the street until you hit the four corners, make a left and then it's a quarter mile on the right."
My husband looked at me like the RCA dog and I looked at him and we asked her to repeat the directions. Of course, she didn't bother to change the explanation or (g-d forbid mention street names), so we just walked away and tried getting there on our own. Apparently, by saying "four corners" she meant a major intersection, but had she simply said "at Walden and Union make a left" that would have made our life much easier, but I digress. We had a nice meal and then went to Target to get my brother some Slim Jims (ugh).
After that we had enough of Buffalo and decided to head home. Right before we hit the border we noticed that there was a bit of a roadblock, apparently Homeland Security was looking for someone. Everyone with Ontario plates they waved through, but anyone with U.S. plates they pulled over, asked people to get out of their cars and went through the cars with a fine tooth comb. They forcibly removed one gentleman from his car and went over his car VERY carefully. We were curious about what was going on, but we didn't ask any questions and simply headed on our way to the Customs booth.
We rolled up to the booth and the lady asked our citizenship and all the 'usual' questions, but we both noticed that she didn't ask about any alcohol, tobacco or firearms, as they normally do. She asked my husband what the purpose of our trip was and how much he spent (which he replied 'about 40', but she didn't ask me how much I spent.
We saw that she took a yellow piece of paper and scrawled '$40' and told us to pull up to the building up ahead to the left. We both got a sinking feeling at that point and got a little worried because we had to show our receipts. As soon as we got to the building I told the Customs official that the lady hadn't asked about what I spent and he just looked at me, rolled his eyes, as if to say 'sure lady, like I haven't heard that before...'
They asked us to get out of the car and they opened the trunk, looked in all our bags and compared the receipt to the amount on the yellow piece of paper. We had about $140ish, but thankfully it was too hot out for them to bother writing us up for a lousy $40 over and told us to go on our way.
I'm just glad I didn't find anything else to buy. :P
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