Gibosn House Museum… what in the world. A quick google yielded a boring description of the place. “Why oh why did you pick this place Mark?” I thought to myself. One thing did catch my attention as I perused the page: “Regular admission Adults $5.48”. My Asian senses were raging. Mark offered to change the location but it was already blogged so I just rolled with it.
As I prepared to head out, I had no idea what to expect. I armed myself with my “OMG It’s a navy bleu” shirt and a need to find a cheap Asian barber shop for conversation topics and left my place. Good god it was cold outside… -17 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) and major wind chill. I walked for a good 20 minutes to where the place should have been and all I saw was a construction site. Crap.
I kept walking, hoping maybe the address was a bit off but no archaic buildings were in sight. Toronto sure has a ton of skyscrapers. As I turned around, defeated, I noticed a sign:
What do you know, Gibson House was behind the construction site, with only one sign directing to it in the opposite direction of whence I came. And what’s this?
Free admission today! And food and games and music and crafts! Things were looking up. I walked towards it, hoping for the best. Lo and behold, The Gibson House Museum.
This place sure looked small from the outside. From the inside it wasn’t much better. There were only two rooms open to the public: the living room and the kitchen. The dining room and everything upstairs were closed off. The people there: 4 employees, all Caucasians dressed in ye olde clothes, and 2 families – Asian parents accompanying their children for a day of educational “fun”.
It was time to decide which stranger would be “the one” for the day. Talking to the little kids would have been pedophilical so I tried talking to a parent:
“So… this is pretty cool…”
The parent gave a creeped out look and slowly nodded in agreement. Wow, that failed. “Fuck it”, I decided, “I’m just going to talk to the employees. They’re paid to talk to me after all.” (I forgot about Mark’s rule about not being allowed to talk to paid people but technically I didn’t pay them so it slides this time..? Noted for future rounds though) I started a conversation with the lady employee in the kitchen (insert women and kitchens joke) who was making scones old-school over the fire:
I didn’t really know what to talk about so I just asked her about the place and her recipe for the scones. It wasn’t a particularly interesting conversation but I filled my 15 minutes quota so whatever; I wanted to get out of there ASAP. Before I left I asked her if she knew any good hair salons around here and she directed me to one called NC salon (North Carolina!?!).
I then headed back out into the cold to find the salon hoping, in the spirit of talking to strangers, to perhaps strike up a more interesting conversation with someone. I arrived at NC Salon (it turned out to stand for Natural Creation, what a bummer) and saw that it was $40-100 per haircut. Damn that’s expensive… I knew I should’ve asked the Asian parent instead about where to go! I kept walking, hoping to find a cheaper place, when I saw a Korean salon that had $10 haircuts. I was wary since I didn’t want Korean hair but $10 is better than $40 so I went with it.
There turned out to be a line of customers as there was only one barber but I figured saving $30 was worth the wait. Behind me came in two chicks discussing in Chinese whether to get their hair cut at this place. One of them switched briefly to English for who knows what reason and the other whispered in Chinese:
“Don’t speak English, they might understand you”.
They glanced at me and I thought, hey I guess this is a good chance. I said in Chinese:
“Hah, I understand you guys…”
Man I’m so smooth with my talking… They looked a bit surprised but not disturbed or creeped out so I continued:
“So do you guys go to high school..?”
“No, we’re working.” they responded.
Curse Asians and their eternally youthful faces; it’s so hard to tell how old they are. We spoke briefly about where they worked and where I worked but then they decided this place wasn’t worth the wait so they left.
And that was it for my adventures for the day… It was an interesting experience albeit the conversations were sucky. Mission semi-accomplished? I guess it wasn’t bad for the first time. Still a long way to go to overcoming my shyness and awkwardness though.
A Stranger A Week 
lucky break
So GG.
I have several similar experiences to your post, keep up the good work! Interesting blog
Didn’t you break rule #2?
Yeahh, Mark made the rules and I didn’t really read them before I set out. I mentioned in an edit “I forgot about Mark’s rule about not being allowed to talk to paid people but technically I didn’t pay them so it slides this time..? Noted for future rounds though”