Basically we took a trip to it when I was in the seventh grade, towards the end of the year. I was a journalist, and I wasn't very good at it. Probably because the school had the brilliant idea of making our kid's business town field trip on the same damn day as the school play, which the whole school had to watch at 1 PM. It was Alice in Wonderland and I was the White Rabbit who has a whole song and about forty-five lines (huge for me back then) so it was hard to focus writing fake stories about a fake town. I tried writing an introductory guide to the town for new citizens, but my editor thought that was a stupid idea, so I had a really bland interview with the local Domino's manager and wrote about that. Was taught a valuable lesson about standing up for my ideas.
Anyways, the highlight of the day came when my grandma told me to go tell my friend's grandma something important about ride coordination, for when me and said friend would have to leave early to go be in the school play. We were leaving really soon so I had to speedwalk, and a "cop" who looked like he was in the fourth grade yelled at me "No Running!", and approached me, and when I turned around he was going way faster than me, and fell and broke his nose on the fake grass which you weren't allowed to step on. I helped him pick up his notepad and he promptly used it to give me a ticket and confiscated five of my fake dollars. This experience opened my eyes to how, if this was on a real-life scale with actual stakes, it would be incredibly frustrating and perhaps even dangerous.
Last thing about my business town experience - it turns out the journalists were not allowed to have a free copy of the newspaper they had helped to write, which struck me as very odd? Like we're paying for it with fake money anyway? I just assumed I would get one for free and so I spent the rest of my fake money on snack size MnM's. On my way out the door I fished a newspaper out of the trash that someone had been done with.
BTW that night, an older girl put stage makeup on me, and when I looked in the mirror I genuinely thought I was a woman for a minute, and not in a joke way or anything. Which definitely didn't have a major affect on me or anything!
Weird day. I wanted to punch that cop kid so much.
I met Caitlin Glass and had her sign one of the Fullmetal Alchemist mangas for me back in 2019 so she shouldn't be too hard to meet if she was able to come to a random city in the middle of Canada lol. I think she's still the only actor/actress I've had sign something of mine so far.