Walmart!
Was trying to figure out yesterday what I should do this weekend and decided that I should try taking Baltimore's public transport. Obviously cabs do not count. Dragged Yiran along (luckily he has nothing to do too) and planned out how exactly we should go about doing it.(By the way, Yichung went over to Philadelphia to visit his friends in Penn, so the Inner Habour sightseeing trip suggested by Chyan Ying ought to be postponed...)
Baltimore has 3 main kinds of public transport: Buses, Light Rail, and Metro. Johns Hopkins University, sad to say, is situated at a location served only by 2 bus routes, both going south towards Downtown and north towards Towson. There is also a light rail station somewhere around North Avenue about 1 mile away which can bring us to the Airport directly. The main train station, Penn Station, is also nearby, and this would be one of our gateways to Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. (And I am waiting for Yichung to come back with his experiences on Greyhound...)
So we set off in the morning, trying to walk towards the light rail station at North Avenue. We reached the station after a rather long (probably 1/2 an hour?), a direct effect of me misreading the map causing us to go a really big round around this semi-industrial area before getting back onto the main road. Well, I guess the right route should be walkable as we knew this guy from Indonesia who walked from the station all the way to JHU with his small luggage (his big one was delayed) when he first came......
The small black figure on the right is Yiran. Too bad I didn't take a photo of him; people can tell that he's from RJC 100 feet away because of the pullover he wore!We took the light rail from there to Penn station (which is only 2 stops away) to try out how it is like. It is pretty comfortable, clean and spacious, so it can be a good choice when I am travelling light, considering it only costs $1.60 per trip. Of course, for today, we bought a day pass for $3.50; we are not so mad that we will pay $1.60 for 2 stops...
Penn Station was surprisingly small (and really empty). I expected something more spectacular to be Baltimore's main station. Well, I thought it was supposed to be a bustling place with people rushing in and out (that is my idea of a train station) and lots of shops and stalls selling food. Probably it might look like that during a weekday?
We took a bus back to school to have lunch (Yiran needs to consume his meal blocks, so I got to pay $9.40 in order to eat together with him...), and then up to Towson to revisit the Walmart we went to previously. It was not an easy journey: I was misled (again) by the online schedule that the bus goes directly to Walmart from JHU, but it turns out that that bus runs an alternative route on weekends! At first we waited a wrong stop, then didn't get on the right bus as the driver misunderstood me, then got help from this lady who was really nice by explaining to us how to go about going there, and finally got up the right bus. The driver got us to alight somewhere near Walmart and asked us to wait for a connecting bus, which only runs once per hour. It was a really long wait... So when we were going back we decided to walk instead of taking the connection. It was a less than 10 minutes walk.
The Penn Station bus stop
From the connecting bus-stop
Outside Walmart
Walmart!Bought back a vacuum cleaner. That is the only way to clean my carpeted floor by the way, and it would really be disgusting if I just let it accumuate dust. Anyway, it was only $19.88 so... Cheap enough for me...
No rice cooker though. The only rice cooker there was a display unit WITHOUT a power cord. So am I supposed to use superpower to cook my rice? I don't need a rice cooker to do that...
By the way, my food! (Haha as you can tell I am REALLY quite proud of what I have done :))
Chicken Stew! Quite successful finally. Still without carrot. Should look nicer without the leaves from the celery though... and the shattered potatoes...
Chicken chop again :) but this time it's marinated with soy sauce instead of salt and pepper.
This is an experiment: attempts to make bread taste better. Have already successfully made french toast with sugar filling, now trying to make (normal) toast with sweetened peanut butter. The peanut butter here is not sweet enough to be used in french toast by itself, and the honey I bought tasted awful on it. Depending on sugar for the time being.
