Culturally Preconditioned

So how many people are going to continue missing this show on AXN? I have failed to see a single advertisement or promo on The Amazing Race 12 despite we’re well into Week 2. Only thing I see is the WIN A TRIP TO SINGAPORE … WATCH THE AMAZING RACE ASIA 2 promo. Lame. Like shoving that into the viewer’s face will do any good.

I honestly thought this was going to be a god awful episode, but it picked up about 10-15 minutes before the episode ended. There isn’t much to talk about for the first half hour, so I’m going to skim through it. Teams started off from their last pitstop. They had to fly to Amsterdam. Despite the 3-hour difference between the first and the last team, the usual airport bunching occuredd yet again. Some airport drama going on.  The tall lanky useless grandson was ‘too abbrassive’ at the ticket counter in Dublin, which somehow cause the Old Asian Fart to  blow up. Didn’t really catch why he blew up, but it was kind of a what-the-hell moment for a bit.

They were split into two different planes, and off they were to lovely lovely Amsterdam. Once they were in Amsterdam, they had to board a train to the Centraal Station and find a particular bridge for their next clue. The clue was for a detour between (1) Hoist It - where they had to use a rope pulley system to hoist furnitures up a building, or (2) Hunt It - where they had to search through thousands of bicycles to find the specially marked bicycles and ride it to a man who was standing awkwardly in the middle of nowhere to give out their clue.

Most of the teams did the hoisting detour, which was personally what I would’ve done (but tying those damn knots sure looked challenging - but I just don’t have the patience to look through thousands of bicycles). And this is where the annoying old Asian fart started to get on my nerves. He keeps second guessing himself (ie. should we do the hoisting? those knots look tricky. Should we do the bikes? but there’s so many bicycles).. and then he had the fucking nerve to tell off his daughter for not making her mind up. I mean.. what in the fucking shit was that?

Okay, enough of that asshole. But oh nooooo.. he keeps harping on the poor little girl on what a disappointment she was to him. Seriously, folks. Going on the Amazing Race with a parent has got to be the WORST IDEA EVER.

Anyway, after finishing the detour, teams had to take a bus to Ransdorp, a rural village, and look for a clue in a field. Okay, who else besides me was excited to see yet another random Shopping Lady in A Field?

Alas, she did not appear The cluebox brought them to a Roadblock where they had to perform the Ditch Vaulting. Oh joy. This totally reminds me of the TAR Asia car washing challenge in Singapore. Or in other words, Pointless. So what happens at Roadblocks? Teams are given a rough ‘clue’ as to what the roadblock would be, and then they had to decide who would be doing the roadblock, before they were given full information of what the roadblock was going to be.

Now I thought Useless Lanky Grandson was smart to stay back and watch what the teams ahead of them were doing, so they don’t have to figure out what the task was going to be. Unfortunately, after watching how the task was done, I still am stumped as to why they decided to let the grandad do it. I think this just proves that the Useless Lanky Grandson is the Mitchell (from Survivor Outback) of TAR. And you all can thank him for giving us this :