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Back from the Boardwalk~
Feb. 9th, 2003 12:56 pmWhee, yesterday was fun! Mm, except for two things:
1) running out of money and
2) having to wake up so damn early on a saturday
But all in all, going to Santa Cruz was FUN! I woke up around 8ish with the intention of leaving at 9 so I could get to Gene's by 10, with any buffer time needed because of my slowness or Muni or whatever. -.- Turns out that I didn't leave till 9:30 because I had to haggle my mom for money, and she was pestering me about not wearing my contacts again "when she paid so much money for them." I know she did, but I was running so late and under pressure I didn't want to have to put them in, and/or possibly worry about them falling on the floor, making my eyes irritated, or getting lost. -.- So there. I had spent some time online checking to see if the Boardwalk was even open, and it WAS~! YAY, in February! On the first and last weekends of the month, it's only got limited operation, so we came at the perfect time.
I got to Gene's house by 9:50, miraculously, but my MP3 CD player was being a bitch and I couldn't listen to the Para Para Paradise Nonstop Megamix all the way through. Blech. I'll try to burn it again, but it might just be something with the CD player and MP3s... I dunno. I could always try to get my hands on one of those 800 MB/90 minute CDs, so maybe I could try converting the file to a CDA (it'd be around 752 MB). But it's not THAT important. So, it seemed we had time to spare before heading over to the Caltrain Station at 4th and King, but since I'd eaten a monstrous bowl of oatmeal before I left the house, I wasn't all that hungry. So we headed in the general direction of the Caltrain station, taking the 45 that stopped in front of Union Square (yes, we walked that far). When we finally got there, it turned out that the bus wouldn't leave tilll 11ish. Caltrain is doing weekend retrofitting on their tracks (for baby bullet trains! HAH! Just NOW they're ripping off the tried-and-true Japanese shinkansen system!) so that's why there's busses running to most of the places where the Caltrains would have gone. -.- But they're EXPENSIVE AS HELL! $6 one way, and the Amtrak train from San Jose (where we got off) was $6 too! ARGH!
It also turns out that the Caltrain to Santa Clara has gone up in price too. I looked it up because Gene mentioned the prices going up because of the budget defecit, so it's no longer $4.75, but $5.25. Not *that* much of an increase, but worth telling all the Fanime-goers about. I better reserve that room and put Amber and Will on the registered goers list. ^_^ Oy vey though, all my $250 that I haven't even GOTTEN yet is going towards Fanime... and other things. Mom could only give me $22 for yesterday, so I barely went on any rides (in fact, I only went on 1-- the Big Dipper rollercoaster) and since $12 of that was for transportation (Gene was getting his friend Greg to lend us his car for the ride home... yay!) and spent the remainder of most of my money at the arcade.
*insane giggling* Oh Jer-e-my~! HAH! YOU WERE SO WRONG! *cough* I just had to say that. Upon entering the luxurious coolness that was the Boardwalk (which we walked to from the Metro Station... owie, my feet and legs hurt...) I saw the Casino Arcade which had the following games of note:
1) DDR Extreme - no one knew how to play but me. I hogged the machine for about 15 minutes playing my usual sets - Break Down/So Deep/We Will Rock You & Kiss Kiss Kiss/Waka Laka/Ever Snow. I drew quite a crowd too, though it coulda been because of my bright sunny-themed shirt... or the fact that I kept taking my shirts off till I was down to my tie-on tanktop. ^^; Ugh, but I screwed up on So Deep and Kiss Kiss Kiss, and so I got a C overall on both of them. DAMN, and I nearly PAd Break Down! *sniffle* At least the pads were brand new.
2) Dance ManiaX 2nd Mix Append J-Paradise - honestly, it didn't look much different from ours, and when browsing through the songlists (hehe, I finally managed to do that little menu-thing on my own!) I only noticed a few songs I'd never seen/played before. I played my usuals though, proably out of fear of wasting a dollar's worth of tokens for nothing: Butterfly/Dam Dariam/Boom Boom Dollar. The sensors were probably set on 4 or 5, since it was somewhat harder than RTA, but MUCH LESS difficult than at MGL. Plus no one else was playing it, so it was quite fast. There WAS some white kid later on (all acne-covered... O.o) that was trying to Fred a course ('Fred' is now my verb for playing a marathon course on DMX and getting a HUGE arse combo) but didn't succeed, especially once people started watching him. Tee hee hee.
3) Pump It Up - I'd never seen this before, and no one was playing this, either. It, like DDReX and DMX, a $1, but this one was a complete rip-off of it. -.- First off, there were no 'song samplings' that let you hear even a tiny clip of the song before you played -only a BPM, which means next to nothing to me, since some songs that are fast I can play damn well, but others I can't. I was doing pretty well, too, until everything started speeding up for some reason-- and I was playing a Level 1 song! Well, I still passed it with a C, but I spent so long picking my second song, that even though it was a Level 2 song, it had a TON of steps that showed up really fast... and the center step was always a pain to hit, since I was so used to having front, back, left, and right. In PIU, there's two diagonals in the front, two diagonals in the back, and one in the center. -.- Blech. Waste of a buck.
4) Percussion Freaks 5th Mix - I was surprised that this was the real name of it in Japan... eheh, but I sucked playing it at MGL, and I couldn't remember how to set the Bass to Auto. So I stayed away, and some people tried to play, but I didn't pay attention. I wanted to play vaguely, but only because they had 'The Power of Love' on there (from Back to the Future!). God, I love that song. ^_^
In other arcades throughout the boardwalk, they had other mixes of DDR-- I saw MAX on a stage near (ironically) the Riptide ride, and the original DDR in a tiny arcade that had nothing else going for it besides skee-ball. *laughs* But yeah, in terms of Bemani/rival games, there was quite an assortment. I blew most of my money there... with the last of my tokens, I played one of those ball-rolling games (RIP OFF! NOT FAIR!) and got enough tickets (well, thanks to my sneaky foot, too, I swiped some from the floor of the prize counter... and Gene won me some with skee-ball, which I beat him at ^.~) to get a cheap tin San Francisco mug (haha) and some plastic airplanes for Gene. ^^; I don't know why he wanted them so bad... but they didn't have any other cheap prizes, and NO CANDY! ARGH! But they did have a saucepan for 300 tickets. @_o
Anyway, before we even left San Jose for Santa Cruz, Gene and I walked to Togo's about a mile away. Ugh, damn San Jose had all these useless stores near the Metro Station, all of them with the name 'Arena _______' or 'The Alameda ________,' since the Arena's across the street from the Metro Station, and the street that it's on is called 'The Alameda.' Such uncreative names. Well the food was good (my apologies to Jimmy for my previous bashing of Togo's, maybe it was was my previous bad experience with the one in Alameda) and I didn't have to pay for it... Gene thought I should save my remaining $9 (I spent $1.25 on a Juice Squeeze which I hadn't had in so long at the Caltrain station) for having fun. So yay! Muchos thankies to him for that. Plus the cookie was delish!
Later on, Gene and I called up his friend Michael (*dr00lage*) who probably should have come with us on the Giant Dipper... a total blast, by the way! ^_^ WHEE, it was dark at first, and everyone was screaming, but when the actual ride started, it was SO FUN! They had another coaster too. I have to go there this summer, maybe (well, assuming I win the lottery -.-;) after Fanime. Things to do: go on the other coaster, the water rides, play minigolf, hang on the beach, go to all the arcades, play laser tag, buy goofy stickers, shirts, and tattoos, and eat corn dogs, corn on the cob, onion rings, and lemonade. ^_^
Well, so we took Michael's car back to Greg and Peter's place, with the intention of going out for Thai (the corn dogs smelled so much better than the thought of Thai...) and so we did... after Michael played with Peter's M-16ish gun that shot some sort of pellets. It was funny watching the guys try to shoot stuff in the house without damaging them (or each other) or "alerting the SWAT team." ^^; They had a Sega Genesis too, and I hadn't seen one in SO LONG! I kinda wanted to play Sonic (if they had it) but we had to get going to eat...
I was squished in the back of the rental-ish car with Peter and Greg, and we went to this Thai place not that far away. Everything on the menu (when we finally got seated 20 minutes later, that is) looked the same as a Chinese food place, but with different names... I didn't dare try the spicy stuff, so I stuck to the Sweet & Sour Plate with Chicken, and it was cooked rather differently than Chinese-style. It was good, though... the Thai Iced Tea was VERY sweet, but you could always taste that hint of real brewed tea underneath whatever orangey fruity stuff made it so sweet.
Yeah, so after leaving there, we went back to Greg and Peter's place, and Peter showed us around UC Santa Cruz. I sorta had my eye open for Brooke, my cousin who's supposed to go there, but even if she still does, she wasn't out that late or something. It wouldn'ta mattered anyway. LOL, some students asked Greg, Gene and I if we were going to the "Sexcapades." I was like o_O but I didn't want to know the details. People were partying and dressed up... ugh, UCs. Just... ugh.
Afterwards, Greg dropped himself off at home (and did I mention, Greg looks like some guy I've seen on a TV show before...) and Gene drove me home. I was so tired, I fell asleep the whole ride home, waking up only to fumble with my CD player, which was being stupid. I had the whole back seat to myself, since when on the bus, Gene had kept poking me to keep me awake (it was rather annoying, but he finally did stop and let me sleep). Now he couldn't, since was driving! Nyaha! Thankfully, he didn't need me to keep conversation, and he didn't need the Red Bull he'd gotten at Safeway.
We got to SF at 11ish, and I thanked him for paying for my food and asking me to go and all, because it was fun... and he was going all the way back to SC by himself, which made me feel kinda bad, but it was best, since Mom's sick and I want to go out today here in SF. So I'm going to go get ready and hopefully see Will, watch him kick some more ass at initial D, teach him some more cooking techniques (Will's secret talent 'Sense of Taste' just opened up! 100 SP!) and maybe browse Japantown. The sooner I leave, the better. =D
Jaaa everybody~
1) running out of money and
2) having to wake up so damn early on a saturday
But all in all, going to Santa Cruz was FUN! I woke up around 8ish with the intention of leaving at 9 so I could get to Gene's by 10, with any buffer time needed because of my slowness or Muni or whatever. -.- Turns out that I didn't leave till 9:30 because I had to haggle my mom for money, and she was pestering me about not wearing my contacts again "when she paid so much money for them." I know she did, but I was running so late and under pressure I didn't want to have to put them in, and/or possibly worry about them falling on the floor, making my eyes irritated, or getting lost. -.- So there. I had spent some time online checking to see if the Boardwalk was even open, and it WAS~! YAY, in February! On the first and last weekends of the month, it's only got limited operation, so we came at the perfect time.
I got to Gene's house by 9:50, miraculously, but my MP3 CD player was being a bitch and I couldn't listen to the Para Para Paradise Nonstop Megamix all the way through. Blech. I'll try to burn it again, but it might just be something with the CD player and MP3s... I dunno. I could always try to get my hands on one of those 800 MB/90 minute CDs, so maybe I could try converting the file to a CDA (it'd be around 752 MB). But it's not THAT important. So, it seemed we had time to spare before heading over to the Caltrain Station at 4th and King, but since I'd eaten a monstrous bowl of oatmeal before I left the house, I wasn't all that hungry. So we headed in the general direction of the Caltrain station, taking the 45 that stopped in front of Union Square (yes, we walked that far). When we finally got there, it turned out that the bus wouldn't leave tilll 11ish. Caltrain is doing weekend retrofitting on their tracks (for baby bullet trains! HAH! Just NOW they're ripping off the tried-and-true Japanese shinkansen system!) so that's why there's busses running to most of the places where the Caltrains would have gone. -.- But they're EXPENSIVE AS HELL! $6 one way, and the Amtrak train from San Jose (where we got off) was $6 too! ARGH!
It also turns out that the Caltrain to Santa Clara has gone up in price too. I looked it up because Gene mentioned the prices going up because of the budget defecit, so it's no longer $4.75, but $5.25. Not *that* much of an increase, but worth telling all the Fanime-goers about. I better reserve that room and put Amber and Will on the registered goers list. ^_^ Oy vey though, all my $250 that I haven't even GOTTEN yet is going towards Fanime... and other things. Mom could only give me $22 for yesterday, so I barely went on any rides (in fact, I only went on 1-- the Big Dipper rollercoaster) and since $12 of that was for transportation (Gene was getting his friend Greg to lend us his car for the ride home... yay!) and spent the remainder of most of my money at the arcade.
*insane giggling* Oh Jer-e-my~! HAH! YOU WERE SO WRONG! *cough* I just had to say that. Upon entering the luxurious coolness that was the Boardwalk (which we walked to from the Metro Station... owie, my feet and legs hurt...) I saw the Casino Arcade which had the following games of note:
1) DDR Extreme - no one knew how to play but me. I hogged the machine for about 15 minutes playing my usual sets - Break Down/So Deep/We Will Rock You & Kiss Kiss Kiss/Waka Laka/Ever Snow. I drew quite a crowd too, though it coulda been because of my bright sunny-themed shirt... or the fact that I kept taking my shirts off till I was down to my tie-on tanktop. ^^; Ugh, but I screwed up on So Deep and Kiss Kiss Kiss, and so I got a C overall on both of them. DAMN, and I nearly PAd Break Down! *sniffle* At least the pads were brand new.
2) Dance ManiaX 2nd Mix Append J-Paradise - honestly, it didn't look much different from ours, and when browsing through the songlists (hehe, I finally managed to do that little menu-thing on my own!) I only noticed a few songs I'd never seen/played before. I played my usuals though, proably out of fear of wasting a dollar's worth of tokens for nothing: Butterfly/Dam Dariam/Boom Boom Dollar. The sensors were probably set on 4 or 5, since it was somewhat harder than RTA, but MUCH LESS difficult than at MGL. Plus no one else was playing it, so it was quite fast. There WAS some white kid later on (all acne-covered... O.o) that was trying to Fred a course ('Fred' is now my verb for playing a marathon course on DMX and getting a HUGE arse combo) but didn't succeed, especially once people started watching him. Tee hee hee.
3) Pump It Up - I'd never seen this before, and no one was playing this, either. It, like DDReX and DMX, a $1, but this one was a complete rip-off of it. -.- First off, there were no 'song samplings' that let you hear even a tiny clip of the song before you played -only a BPM, which means next to nothing to me, since some songs that are fast I can play damn well, but others I can't. I was doing pretty well, too, until everything started speeding up for some reason-- and I was playing a Level 1 song! Well, I still passed it with a C, but I spent so long picking my second song, that even though it was a Level 2 song, it had a TON of steps that showed up really fast... and the center step was always a pain to hit, since I was so used to having front, back, left, and right. In PIU, there's two diagonals in the front, two diagonals in the back, and one in the center. -.- Blech. Waste of a buck.
4) Percussion Freaks 5th Mix - I was surprised that this was the real name of it in Japan... eheh, but I sucked playing it at MGL, and I couldn't remember how to set the Bass to Auto. So I stayed away, and some people tried to play, but I didn't pay attention. I wanted to play vaguely, but only because they had 'The Power of Love' on there (from Back to the Future!). God, I love that song. ^_^
In other arcades throughout the boardwalk, they had other mixes of DDR-- I saw MAX on a stage near (ironically) the Riptide ride, and the original DDR in a tiny arcade that had nothing else going for it besides skee-ball. *laughs* But yeah, in terms of Bemani/rival games, there was quite an assortment. I blew most of my money there... with the last of my tokens, I played one of those ball-rolling games (RIP OFF! NOT FAIR!) and got enough tickets (well, thanks to my sneaky foot, too, I swiped some from the floor of the prize counter... and Gene won me some with skee-ball, which I beat him at ^.~) to get a cheap tin San Francisco mug (haha) and some plastic airplanes for Gene. ^^; I don't know why he wanted them so bad... but they didn't have any other cheap prizes, and NO CANDY! ARGH! But they did have a saucepan for 300 tickets. @_o
Anyway, before we even left San Jose for Santa Cruz, Gene and I walked to Togo's about a mile away. Ugh, damn San Jose had all these useless stores near the Metro Station, all of them with the name 'Arena _______' or 'The Alameda ________,' since the Arena's across the street from the Metro Station, and the street that it's on is called 'The Alameda.' Such uncreative names. Well the food was good (my apologies to Jimmy for my previous bashing of Togo's, maybe it was was my previous bad experience with the one in Alameda) and I didn't have to pay for it... Gene thought I should save my remaining $9 (I spent $1.25 on a Juice Squeeze which I hadn't had in so long at the Caltrain station) for having fun. So yay! Muchos thankies to him for that. Plus the cookie was delish!
Later on, Gene and I called up his friend Michael (*dr00lage*) who probably should have come with us on the Giant Dipper... a total blast, by the way! ^_^ WHEE, it was dark at first, and everyone was screaming, but when the actual ride started, it was SO FUN! They had another coaster too. I have to go there this summer, maybe (well, assuming I win the lottery -.-;) after Fanime. Things to do: go on the other coaster, the water rides, play minigolf, hang on the beach, go to all the arcades, play laser tag, buy goofy stickers, shirts, and tattoos, and eat corn dogs, corn on the cob, onion rings, and lemonade. ^_^
Well, so we took Michael's car back to Greg and Peter's place, with the intention of going out for Thai (the corn dogs smelled so much better than the thought of Thai...) and so we did... after Michael played with Peter's M-16ish gun that shot some sort of pellets. It was funny watching the guys try to shoot stuff in the house without damaging them (or each other) or "alerting the SWAT team." ^^; They had a Sega Genesis too, and I hadn't seen one in SO LONG! I kinda wanted to play Sonic (if they had it) but we had to get going to eat...
I was squished in the back of the rental-ish car with Peter and Greg, and we went to this Thai place not that far away. Everything on the menu (when we finally got seated 20 minutes later, that is) looked the same as a Chinese food place, but with different names... I didn't dare try the spicy stuff, so I stuck to the Sweet & Sour Plate with Chicken, and it was cooked rather differently than Chinese-style. It was good, though... the Thai Iced Tea was VERY sweet, but you could always taste that hint of real brewed tea underneath whatever orangey fruity stuff made it so sweet.
Yeah, so after leaving there, we went back to Greg and Peter's place, and Peter showed us around UC Santa Cruz. I sorta had my eye open for Brooke, my cousin who's supposed to go there, but even if she still does, she wasn't out that late or something. It wouldn'ta mattered anyway. LOL, some students asked Greg, Gene and I if we were going to the "Sexcapades." I was like o_O but I didn't want to know the details. People were partying and dressed up... ugh, UCs. Just... ugh.
Afterwards, Greg dropped himself off at home (and did I mention, Greg looks like some guy I've seen on a TV show before...) and Gene drove me home. I was so tired, I fell asleep the whole ride home, waking up only to fumble with my CD player, which was being stupid. I had the whole back seat to myself, since when on the bus, Gene had kept poking me to keep me awake (it was rather annoying, but he finally did stop and let me sleep). Now he couldn't, since was driving! Nyaha! Thankfully, he didn't need me to keep conversation, and he didn't need the Red Bull he'd gotten at Safeway.
We got to SF at 11ish, and I thanked him for paying for my food and asking me to go and all, because it was fun... and he was going all the way back to SC by himself, which made me feel kinda bad, but it was best, since Mom's sick and I want to go out today here in SF. So I'm going to go get ready and hopefully see Will, watch him kick some more ass at initial D, teach him some more cooking techniques (Will's secret talent 'Sense of Taste' just opened up! 100 SP!) and maybe browse Japantown. The sooner I leave, the better. =D
Jaaa everybody~
