My study buddy Sonja, her husband Craig, and their mutual friend Mark, drove me down from UWM to the McCormick place at 8 AM this morning, for seven hours of heaven in CAR WORLD!! Ahhhhh... :)
Everything went so well today, it was hot! Craig and Mark were so nice to me; Craig even drives a silver 2005 Scion tC. I gotta say, I was always secretly crushing on that car since it first debuted, but after riding in it for a cumulative four hours today, it feels and rides just like my Beetle, and I love it. I think I'm adding it to the 'Next Car Serious Contender' pile I am racking up, for when the Beetle (UGH, I don't even want to think about this!!) passes away. Acura TL, Volkswagen Touareg, Mazda 3 four-door, and Pontiac G6 have been the top floaters for awhile. But damn, that tC! So sporty! Craig's had the panoramic roof, too. *Sizzling* Yes, I have it on my list of cars to test drive when it comes time to go car-shopping, as bittersweet as it is.
Anyway, I had more fun at the show this year than last year, probably all because of the people I went with!! When I make my pilgrimage to the Greater Milwaukee Auto Show in a few weeks, it will all look like small potatoes compared to what I have all seen since...oh, I dunno...January in Germany. :) :) But yeah! Sonja, Craig, and Mark taught me a lot more stuff about cars, which I admit I've been falling behind on in the past few years. Disc brakes versus drum brakes, clean architecture and orientation of the engine block and batteries and etc. under the hood of a vehicle...you name it, I got a few more fine-tuned opinions on it today, that I will carry with me and my Quality Control degree that I plan to apply to the automotive industry. :)
They were so good about letting me go off and do my own thing. If I wanted to go grab some brochures from Pontiac? Sure thing, run on off and take your time; they were just going to head over to the XM Satellite Radio booth, and when I was done I could just give them a cellular call to hook back up with them. They let me spend an hour at the Volkswagen booth, just dinking around and reminiscing about my marriage to Wolfsburg and all things Germany. :) Sonja would sit with me at each individual booth for each car company that had a concept car on display, and talk to me and point out all the little things on the car that I would never have known to look for. (Prior to the show, she sat down and looked up every single car company on the internet to research the concept cars; so when we got to the show, she could just make a beeline to the car and spew all this information out to me already, it was very helpful!!)
We also got to try all the hands-on stuff that these bigger auto shows have to offer, versus the dinky ones like Milwaukee. For example, Sonja and I got to wait in line and get a ride in the Dodge off-road obstacle course!! It was so cool, it was this obstacle course for the Dodge Ram, Doge Nitro, and Dodge Dakota trucks to test their body strength, stability, and horsepower. Sonja and I were watching the trucks for the longest time, trying to figure out which driver was the raunchiest with this course. We really wanted to have a rockstar ride, you know?? It was all free, too!
With just our luck, we got the driver of this silver Dodge Nitro that totally hammered the car, going through the obstacle course. It was awesome!!! The truck first went on these stationary sine-graph looking tire tracks, that had humps. Then, it drove on this ramp that was peaked for one side of the car, so at the peak point the car was sitting with three wheels touching the ramp, but the rear passenger wheel was just hanging down low. Although the car was teetery, the test was ment to show off how strong the truck performs with its uniform body and torsion tests. Pretty effing cool, if you ask me.
From there, the truck drove over railroad ties to demonstrate suspension. Finally (as always, the best part for last), we went up this hill with a thirty-five degree incline, from a standstill at the base of it. The driver (a trained professional racer, by the way) floored it to get up to the top, where he just paused riiiiight at the tippy-tip-top of the ramp. From there, you could look out and see alllll the car company displays. It just about went on for a mile, it was breathtaking.
Of course, just as you weren't looking, he took his foot off the brake and went flying down the hill, which had a matching thirty-five degree decline. Totally cool, if even for a truck that looks uglier than my left ass cheek.
As always, I got the coolest FREE gadgets from today, too! Beautiful, beautiful gloss printouts and brochures from my select favorite luxury car companies, as well as a few of my guilty-pleasure American brands. A Scion sampler CD of 'cruising music,' a Mitsubishi shopping bag, and of course, my two favorite souvenirs ever: VOLKSWAGEN STUFF.
The first one is probably the cutest and COOLEST Volkswagen tee shirt I have ever seen, and I got it for free!! All I had to do was fill out enitrely fake information on this credit card come-on form, and BOOM, this guy on the Shell Gas Card team handed me my glorious XL Volkswagen tee shirt that I am already going to wear tomorrow (even though I need to also wash it to shrink it!!)! Side note: the whole team was from Germany, they had German accents!!! Oh, how I had a flashback to my trip abroad.
The shirt is black, and on the front side is the classic blue-and-white shaded VW emblem.
The backside is what is the kicker: it is the sign language for the new Volkswagen marketing campaign: making a V and a W with your two hands!!
Of course, this emblem sources Volkswagen's charming old German fellow on the Golf GTI commercials, stating in his thick German accent (awwwww) "V-dubb in da haus..."
Well, THAT IS WRITTEN ON THE BACK OF THIS TEE SHIRT!
Hot. I am so wearing it to school tomorrow. This shirt was made for me and passed down to the show from God, I swear. I love it!! I feel it already is my good-luck shirt.
Anyway, the second Volkswagen souvenir I got, figures to only have come from Volkswagen, because it is so clever: Volkswagen had this itty bitty assembly line put up with a clear glass bin at the beginning of it, stuffed full of ground up little red bits, the size of confetti. Well, it turns out that the confetti was actually old recycled tail lights from older Volkswagen models!! And a funnel would suck the red shavings from the glass bin, down into this stainless steel cooker-cylinder thing, where the shavings were comprssed until they turned into a fluid-solid mixture, kind of like a slush. (Laws of chemistry demonstrate that as you increase pressure, you also increase the temperature of the object, thus 'melting' it ever-so-slightly.) From there, the slush was poured into a mold in the shape of a 1:30 model of the Volkswagen Golf GTI!! Cooled, trimmed models then were spit out every two seconds on this black conveyor belt that wound around one of the Volkswagen display 'rooms,' or foyers. A staff worker was waiting there to hand you one of the models, with a matching sticker kit where you could customize your car and put three different types of body-style stickers on it!! It was totally cool. You can bet I a) nabbed one of those cute little models to add to my sick collection of Vee-Dubb stuff, and b) snapped a lot of weird, zoomed-in pictures to capture the engineering of this simple recycling apparatus. :)
Towards the end of the seven hours spent at the show, I was over at the Infiniti booth, checking out their ultra-attractive SUV, the FX45. A man, in either his late thirties, or at least forty, came up to me and made a comment like, "She's beautiful, huh??"
I murmured a 'yes' in my state of car opium, but jerked my head up because I detected a European accent on him.
Being the little stinker I am, I wanted to funnel this opportunity into a way to possibly start talking to him about Europe, since I have some relatable experience to it now. :) I casually started talking to him about the SUV, and he responded with how he currently owned a minivan, but liked the idea of an SUV.
Bingo. Yeeup. Definitely. The more he talked, the more his accent stood out. It seemed Austrian!!
So, I found the perfect segway from talking about cars, to Europe. Check me out, I just mentioned, "Yeah, I just got back from studying in Europe, and there are no SUVs over there. Probably only the Volkswagen Touareg. Everyone loves the two-door hatchbacks and station wagons!"
Cha-ching! His head was the one to jerk this time, and his eyes brightened when he then asked, "Europe, eh??? What part did you study in?"
Smiling inside with my success of pushing the conversation over to the topic of Europe, I told him I studied in Germany!
Ha ha ha...after 45 minutes of talking, we knew each other pretty well! It was AWESOME, you guys!!! It turns out the guy's name was Tomas, and he was from the Czech Republic. He has family in Munich, but immigrated to the U.S. about nine years ago, to become a painter in the housing construction industry, and work slowly towards a better opportunity of living here. He is now a U.S. citizen, don't worry. :) I am not getting cozy with the immigrants that come over and take the blue collar jobs away from our own men.
But we were just hangin' out, at the rear liftgate of this Infiniti FX45, talking and talking about all the little things that only we knew about. Public transportation in Europe versus America, punctuality, paying for public restrooms, how the shower nozzles work differently on each continent, learning English, learning German, engineering, American cars versus European cars, European history, European scenery. None of the 10,000 (no joke) bumbling people around us could relate. And that is exactly what I figured.
And also exactly what I wanted.
This was a chance for me to re-live my trip to Europe!! For those 45 minutes, I had images reeling through my head of the German countryside, the food, the trams, the car museums...I could see it in this man and found it pretty cool how I could keep myself guarded to a total stranger, but talk with him enough to get his life story and make him feel proud about this world.
Greg would be proud of me, being so candid like this. :)
Sonja, who was gone to the Audi booth this whole time, had managed to find me in the throngs of people; I was talking to Tomas for that long of an amount of time!! She just came over and gently rubbed my arm, smiling slightly since she knew what interesting conversation I was engaged in.
Tomas and I ended up parting ways, so Sonja and I could finish up looking at the booths.
However, when we were leaving, he bumped into me again!! I was walking down one of the main carpeted pathways, and I heard his accent call out my name from behind me. "Ahhhshley! Ahhh-shleeey!" I stopped and whirled around. It was Tomas!
He came up to me and handed me his business card. He then explained:
"If you or your friends are ever interested in cosmetics, my sister-in-law owns a business here in Chicago that you can always seek for some help. Here is my name and website, feel free to stop by! Thank you so much for talking with me, it was a lot of fun!"
Not quite sure if he was insinuating I needed "cosmetic help," or if this was some sort of a come-on, or what I'd ever do with make-up from a total stranger's sister's-in-law business, I graciously accepted the card and thanked him in return for his time. Then, we all ducked out on our way, and that was the last of Tomas.
He was a nice guy, but I don't plan on contacting him anymore. Since I've returned to the States, I have just been craving to talk Europe with somebody who has also been there, because I just can't say enough good things about life over there and my experiences. Alas, this random stranger was my outlet. No strings attached, non-committal: I just met him and was nice enough to him to hit it off and talk openly. And that satiated my craving for the time being.
No cosmetics needed. :)
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