Detroit and Back
This past weekend, I attended the North American Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan. It was my first trip to the US in a long time, and one of my few ventures into the automotive world. It was fun looking at nice shiny new cars, and spending time with my brothers, but other stuff happened along the way.
- The drive down was boring as expected, but at least I got to talk to my brothers along the way. I don't care how much you love Leamington etc., the drive from London to Windsor is dull, dull, dull.
- Being a car show, of course we were all encouraged to look at and touch the cars as we wanted. This of course means that the cars would need to be wiped down from time to time. So there was a whole crew of people who's sole job it was to wipe down the cars, and that crew was almost exclusively black. I say almost, because there may have existed somewhere in the building a white car wiper, but I sure didn't see one. I know they were getting paid, but it seemed as though I was walking back into Michigan's slavery era.
- Originality seems to be frowned upon in the automobile industry. Among the new and impressive models this year, were a lot of SUVs and Hummer rip-offs. Hummer's third line (the H3) vehicle looked less like a Hummer than the Ford Bronco whatever did. There were almost no concept cars compared to other years too. I like looking at and sitting in sleek expensive cars, but I want to at least be able to look at somebody's idea of what a weird car possibly could look like.
- I always thought that my black exposure in my little, pre-dominantly white, Canadian city wasn't quite complete, and in Detroit I had that verified. Local black kids get a passing grade in looking the part. In Detroit I saw a few guys dressed in out fits I'd only previously seen in rap videos, like I mean right P.I.M.P.'d up. I also heard ebonics in person for the first time a while. Admittedly, I don't make it to the black neighbourhoods of Toronto too often, but the conversations I overhear on the GRT (KW's transit system) imply to me that ebonics is not a Canadian thing.
- I try to compensate for the ways in which I am not a man's man, but walking around the car show, listening to guy's explain to each other various benefits of various designs of various parts of various engines, I realized, I still know little to nothing about cars. I would sooner discuss the way the car looks than be wowed by the number of horsepower or the engine size. My response would generally be, "Clearly nobody needs that much power, and really, that shade of brown interior does not suit that shade of blue exterior."
- I love Mexican food. We went to a Mexican restaurant that I had been to before, but only as a kid on a 1980's cross-border shopping trip. It was as good and better than I remembered it. Driving around the desolate Hispanic neighbourhood trying to find the place and being called senor multiple times by the waiter convinced me of the place's authenticity before I even took a bite.
Since I didn't get fingerprinted and retina scanned at the border, maybe I'll visit the US again. Next stop: Nashville.

   [ posted by William @ 4:36 PM ]