Random afternoon..!

The other week on a Friday off work, Masato and I went to a mall to have some sushi at a kiosk where his mate works. We were sitting there eating our sushi when this old guy comes along and sits at the next table. We looked over and he pulls out a piece of paper with A, B, C… X, Y, Z written on it, and underneath the letters are z, y, x…c, b, a. Then he started to write something on another piece of paper. Obviously a code, very odd but I stopped watching as I thought it must just be another kooky Christchurch person! When he was done though, he got up, put the paper in a plastic bag and walked over to the post box, looked around, then hid the bag under it!?? I was cracking up, and Masato starts insisting that the guy put $100 in the bag. I didn’t see what he put in there, but he was certain that there was $100 in the bag.

It was all very weird. I told Masato that he should go and get it, but he said I’d have to help to keep watch. There was this other random guy standing around, then Masato was sure he was keeping watch! I thought he would have just been waiting for his wife shopping at the supermarket, but he did look quite dodgy. Finally, it turned out that he was just waiting for wife at the supermarket! Then the coast was clear, so we got up, and while I stood semi-watching, semi just thinking, ‘what the f*#k are we doing, this could be drug money or something!’, Masato got the plastic bag and we quickly walked out to the car!

Once in the car, Masato opened the bag, and sure there was a $100 note in there – a $100 notepad page – with a code message on it!! I was cracking up eh, so close to finding money, but so far! We decided we should work out the code over coffee, so we went back in got coffee and deciphered the code, it said “the next clue is on the palm near the food”. There are a whole lot of palm trees in the food court in the centre of the mall, so off we went looking… quite hard to look inconspicuous while walking around looking in and around plants! Then we saw a $100 in a plastic bag in the planter box. So we tried to act natural, while stealthily taking a plastic bag out from under some plants, and we headed off again to work out the next clue! The clue said, “The last clue is in the plant next to the escalator”. It also had a note, not in code, saying “if you can’t find the clue, meet me at McDonalds at 4.45pm”!! So off we went searching the plants around the escalators. There was nothing at the first escalator so headed to the next one… Then we saw it, an empty bag the same as we’d been finding on the ground. Gutted, thinking that someone else had thought they’d seen $100, and stolen our clue – now we were never to know what the last clue would be. We decided to search the wee gardens around the escalators anyway, and then we found another $100 in a plastic bag! Was very exciting! So we went back down and worked out the clue. This one was a bit cryptic – can’t quite remember what it was, but something about “The man who needs rescuing is in…” Then again it said, ‘if you can’t find him meet me at McDonald’s at 4.45pm’!

We had no idea what that was all about so we decided to call it quits. Before we left though, we wrote a message back to the guy. It said (obviously in code), “Hi, how are you? We are too busy to rescue the man. Gomen ne.” We put it in a bag with a piece of Japanese gum (wee present for him), and hid it back under the palm in the food court closest to McDs. Then we left. The most bizarre thing ever! Imagine if we had found $300 for real!!? We wandered around the mall for 2 hours following clues that we don’t even know who they were meant for, or anything. I felt like we were part of some social experiment and somewhere there were people laughing at us! After all that, I have no idea why the guy had planted clues thru the mall, who they were meant for, whether he was back there at 4.45pm, or if he even found the message we left for him..! Crazy, crazy, crazy! Novel way to fill in a Friday afternoon though!