Digital Wanderer

we crashed a Rainforest Cafe restaurant. It's a chain, of course, and its whole gimmick is being styled like a tropical rainforest. This means there's a big illuminated waterfall in the lobby, and inside there are piles of trees (sadly, plastic ones) and aquariums (thankfully, real ones). Every half hour thunder rumbles from the subwoofers and lightning flashes from the spotlights, which is supposed to simulate intense tropical rain. The restaurant staff are dressed safari-style, if memory serves me right.

 
This is how they park in Chicago
(If anyone was born under a rock, all pics in my LJ are clickable, meaning you can click them with a mouse. Usually — to enlarge them, which wouldn't hurt in this case.)

And now — a paragraph specifically for lazy Lena, fulfilling her unspoken request, which by all rights should have been in the comments.

Voila! Presenting astonishing facts!

"Foyer" in English is called a lobby — very, very weird and suspicious!

Another fantastic fact for Lena — while we were waiting for lunch, a congratulatory song was heard nearby and the staff brought the kids a stupid cream cake. For those who don't know, I'm letting you know — the majority of cakes in America are just cream with sugar and food coloring — meaning, absolutely nasty garbage. Buying a good cake isn't hard, but it'll run you about 30 bucks. And what they bring you for free in any restaurant when they find out it's your birthday is probably pure horror and dread. But at least it comes with a burning sparkler and an accompanying song.

And finally, the last in this series of extremely surprising facts. During the hour and a half we were at the restaurant, they sang the song to different kids 4 times!

This can only be explained by the fact that the restaurant's business strategy is aimed at kids as the primary target audience. By the way, I also wrote that in such a soulless style specifically to please the fans of anti-globalist slogans, who can frequently be seen in my journal. Also, for them I'll add that raising your child in the US so that they prefer speaking Russian is practically impossible. Even though the melting pot policy is no longer the party line, you can't stop the inertia. To achieve this, you have to constantly and endlessly talk to them at all stages of life, show them Russian TV, read Russian books to them, and put them in a Russian kindergarten. All this can only be done by very stubborn people — for example, pre-war hardcore Orthodox first-wave emigrants. And what's better — militant Orthodox Russophilia or annihilation  assimilation, is obvious to Europeanized Russian-speaking emigrants from the Baltic states.  In general, the viewpoint of those who support migrant assimilation looks more convincing to me after all those Arabs in France or Muslims in Britain.

Melting Pot.
Some say that what comes out is not a melting pot, but a salad bowl. Catch the metaphor?

Here's a recent example. A Muslim woman sued a hairdresser for a ton of cash because she didn't hire her. The Muslim woman wanted to work as a hairdresser and at the same time constantly wear a headscarf covering her hair. The hairdresser, or rather the salon owner, who barely managed to save up for it over 10 years,  figured she didn't need a shoemaker without shoes. Then she politely escorted the fool out, without even telling her in unpleasant terms what she thought about the whole thing. But she should have, at least she would have had some fun for her money. It's funny, but they say that big companies, whenever possible, don't invite at-risk groups (Muslims, Black people, old people, women, the disabled, etc.) for interviews, so as not to be accused of discrimination later, and their response is usually carefully crafted by a giant army of lawyers. Meaning, as usual, it's the ordinary person who suffers, not the evil megacorporations.

 
The cunning Muslim bastard on the left smiles in satisfaction
and the master of the informal hairdo on the right does not lose heart

However,  as the yuppies say, starving African children don't concern us. So let's get back to our sheep, or even better — to pigs, to piss off the spirit of Muhammad who flew into my LJ over the blasphemy against Muslims. I was eating exactly grilled pork ribs and breaded fried shrimp at the Rainforest Cafe. The side dish was rice. Unfortunately, before the meal I got filled up on juice and cola, and so all this beauty wouldn't fit inside me anymore. I can only say that Barbecue Ribs don't do it for me at all — the meat is too mushy, there's nothing to chew on. And the shrimp were somehow too basic. By the way, Americans love breadcrumbs and dip a lot of things in them before frying. What I did like was the rice — it had dried fruits and spices, I'd eat that by itself, without meat, especially since I love rice. We were served by a waitress named Anna, and she got an extra-large cash tip due to the fact that she was Mexican.

Here I need to make a digression and explain something. My sister, a rational and pragmatic individual, once ironically told me that the men surrounding her gauge their own mental age at about 13-15 years old, meaning they don't hide their childish nature. At the same time, she took me to a kids' restaurant and gave the waitress extra dough just because my sister's boyfriend is a  Latino, just like the waitress. Total WTF!

Not much enthusiasm visible, but at least the shirt features Al Capone — "There are no mobsters in Chicago"

After dinner we filled out a survey where we indicated that the food was so-so, and headed back to the hotel. The view from the window, by the way, from my bed was alright, but not perfect, because perfect costs extra money. There you have it, the savage grin of capitalism again.

At the hotel, I watched TV in the evenings, and I have to say that I understand it much better than conversational speech. What is this connected to? On TV, people have good diction, the words are more literary, and it's easier to concentrate in the peace and quiet of a hotel room. Since I've brought up the hotel, I'll tell you a bit more.

The bathtub and shower are average in size, in Germany they were even bigger. The notice that they don't wash towels to save resources unless you throw them on the floor — is present. The shampoo was good and expensive, in a micro-bottle — if the guests steal it anyway, at least the loss is small.

Next to the bed on the nightstand stood a clock radio with an input and a cable for connecting an MP3 player. A small thing, but nice. There are two beds in the room, but each is double-sized and length-wise they're huge too. They tuck the bedding under the mattress every day, and very deeply at that, which pisses me off — why, if I have to pull it out anyway. There are about 3 or 4 pillows, one blanket. Americans don't use duvet covers — the blanket lies on top of a second sheet. For some reason, there's a sign hanging in the closet saying that the maximum rate for the room is 800 dollars a day. Doesn't do much for your peace of mind, you know.

My namesake was a Latvian, turns out — see, it says Vladislavs

There's a ton of commercials on TV, and constantly this frantic intonation. If you aren't aware, Americans usually speak "with expression", and to us it looks excessive and exaggerated, but for them it's absolutely necessary, otherwise it's very hard for them to comprehend speech by ear. Sometimes you get the feeling that they convey half the meaning through intonation — because the infinite number of accents and dialects of the peoples of the US are impossible to understand. By the way, by "us" I mean Russian speakers in the Baltics, and it's not a substitute for the word "Russian" — many of us are Poles, Belarusians, etc., but mostly speak Russian. And also by the way — the worst accent is among Black people, followed by the Chinese and Latinos, the British, and then Californians and everyone else. My name, Vlad, turned out to be a tough nut to crack for them — consonant clusters don't make them happy, especially those kinds. But everyone very coolly asked again: "Blood?" (sounds the same) and their eyes would go wide.