Guam Day 1 – Signs of the Times

Unlike the supposedly organized tour of Tunisia, I’ve opted to see Guam using the patent-pending “tourism by walking around” method. I have no set plan besides the marathon tomorrow at 3 AM. I haven’t booked any day trips or even scoured Viator or Orbitz for activity recommendations. I’m embracing the island lifestyle and just trying to flow through this trip. I’m sure I’ll miss hugely important Guam sights but I’m hoping to just be and exist in the moment and shrug off cries of, “I can’t believe you didn’t see X!” where “X” is the greatest thing in the history of Northern Mariana Islands… and thus maybe the world.

As yesterday’s post can attest, I’m seriously jetlagged and messed up on time and space and general being. So zoning out may be the best option anyway.

For much of the night, I had been in and out of consciousness. Finding the hotel was a bit tricky as google maps and Guam are apparently not 100% in sync. But turning in around midnight, I said a little thank you to the Carrier brothers as the air conditioning works great here at the Guam Business Motel. The humidity is strong, perhaps because, ya know, it’s an island.

I woke up this morning to the tolling of the bells at 5 AM. The sun wasn’t up. It wouldn’t be up until closer to 6… which means tomorrow’s run will be mostly in the dark. Yet I’ll still wear sunglasses. Because that’s how I roll… er um… that’s how I run.

The expo was a couple of kilometers away and I figured I’d rather walk it to avoid parking. Traffic is seemingly not a real thing, at least not on a Saturday morning. I was able to “Frogger” around the “busy” highway and roundabouts with maybe a car or two as obstacle in the entire distance.

Because this is just a stream of consciousness amble through the streets of Guam, I’m going to post a photo album with a few comments on pics here and there. But the one prologue to this is yet another of my “memory informing the present” stories.

One of my best friends in college had this idea for a sitcom. It was about a wealthy family that lost everything… everything except a deed to a strip mall in Delaware. So they had to go and run this thing and each season there’d be some returning leased stores and some now shopfronts to keep the characters fresh. He pitched it as a kind of “Cheers with Stores.” It was going to be called “It Ain’t Over… ‘Til It’s Dover!” In the intervening years, there’s been Strangers with Candy and Schitt’s Creek and various other shows that had me occasionally think, “Man, Harper really had something there….” I thought of him again as I walked past one particular strip mall in Guam. The streets near the ocean were populated with your typical beach town varieties – massage parlors, souvenir stands, dive bars both for alcohol and for self-contained breathing apparatus adventures, tattoos, and the like. This strip mall seemed to have the perfect mix for my imagined “reboot” of Harper’s sadly never produced show. Maybe we’d call it “Here Today… Guam Tomorrow.” Nah, that’s lousy. Harper’d know what it should be called. He was (and remains) a TV genius. But I digress.

Here’s some choice storefronts that could be featured in Season One:

First thre’s Mom’s Burger, which is near the Pachinko Place which all happens to be just below the American Chocolate Factory.

And then just next door is the Shogun steak and lobster place with a mascot that is either caricature racist or cultural re-acquisitive. I’m leaning toward just straight up racist but ya never know…

And finally there’s the “New” Latte Store. What happened to the “old” Latte Store? Oh, that’ll be a mystery saved for season 4… but let’s just say it involves (at least in part) a three-legged beagle, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and a faulty-wire in the percolator.