Anyway. Nummy picnic on a park bench! I forget which park, but there were lots of pretty trees around and nice flowers everywhere and a bajillion ants and everybody who walked by had an adorable dog and I just wanted to feed each and every one, but I didn't want to share the sandwiches so I didn't. We fed the ants some mango, though, because it's really hard to keep a grip on a mango when you're cutting it on your lap without a board or a table or anything. Mangoes are yum. I didn't know I liked them until Tom showed them to me. I should eat mangoes more often.
After the picnic we had to find a new park, because Tom had not realized there were quite this many trees until we came here with kites. So we started walking! We wandered the mean streets of St John's until we could find a suitably kite-friendly patch of land. We would have walked for hours if necessary, though I would have complained ever step of the way. But we didn't need to walk for hours, we just had to walk for ten minutes or so until we got to The Rooms. The Rooms, along with all its fantastic displays inside which I will talk about another day because we went there and I took pictures of the giant squid and it's fantastic but it's not the point of this post, also has a very large grassy front lawn with no powerlines overhead and hardly any trees at all. Perfect for kite flying!
Like I said, we got our kites from the dollar store. I picked a lovely large parrot-shaped kite and Tom got a traditionally diamond-shaped kite with fighter plane jet things all over it. Before we went out we agreed that Tom's kite would probably fly better, because after all kites are traditionally diamonds, right? It must be the best kite-shape if that's what they're all like. And while we were putting our new kites together on the lawn of The Rooms, it certainly seemed that way. Tom's kite was much easier to put together than mine, the clip thingy on mine was bent so I had to pretty much break my kite and put it back together to make it work. But once our kites had been assembled, it turns out that my parrot (whom I decided to name Percival) was a natural flyer, and his wings caught the breeze easily and took him delightfully high up. Alas, Tom's kite must have been afraid of heights. It wouldn't go more than five or ten feet off the ground and only flew in dizzying loops before crashing to the ground again. But it was still lots of fun! I flew my kite for ages while little children running around turned green in envy, and Tom flew his kite in loop after loop after loop until his string clip broke and his line became hopelessly tangled. Then, because I was very nice, I let him fly Percy!
He proved to be a much more skilled kite-pilot with a working kite. While he showed off his skills, I went to his goofy kite and tried to untangle it to see if I could fly it, because to tell you the truth those loopy-loops looked kinda fun. So I only had half an eye on Tom and Percy, and when I looked away, tragedy struck!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PERCY COME BACK
It was inevitable, really. Percy crashed into the ground, as kites are wont to do now and then, and his poor cheap dollar-store string-holder broke, so he got free. Being the excellent flyer that he is, the wind caught him easily and he flew away, loose into downtown St. John's. I hope he did not land on anyone's car windshields. That's why I don't have any close-up pictures of Percy, by the way. I was gonna take some after getting tired of flying him so I could show the world how pretty he was, but you can't take pictures of a kite that isn't there. Sorry, my fellow kite-fanatics. You will just have to take my word for it, and also maybe the far-away pictures where Tom is flying him.
But the loss of Percy wasn't the end of the world! Birds are meant to fly free, after all, and with no more working kites Tom and I went to get some Chinese noodles, because we were right next to one of my favourite Chinese restaurants (Mea Mei Wok Eatery!) and noodles are delicious, and then we went to....THE GEO CENTRE. Fuck yeah! I love that place. I haven't been since I was a little kid! And it's just as rad as I remember. There was the Titanic room and the rock wall with the spray bottles and there was a room about oil and stuff and all kinds of geology! Awesome geology! The Canada guide from Lonely Planet described the Geo Centre as an interesting way to learn about stuffy boring geology, but fuck that book because geology is always amazing.
And then the next day we went back to The Rooms! But I'll save that for another blog post because hey, if I tell everything all at once what am I gonna blog about then, huh?
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