2005-06-26 - Toronto day trip extravaganza:

Well, the bad news is that I forgot my camera yesterday. The good news is that I had a lot of fun and I will still tell you about it.

First, of course, I went to Toronto to meet some people from the Korean province that I will be working in. I think it went pretty well, and hopefully they think so, too!

After that, I went to Union Station to meet Linz! I was early, but I sat and read for a while, because I am a big nerd and always travel with a book to read during lulls and in transportation. (Right now I am reading Timothy Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage, which I will write about when I am done). Union station is pretty interesting, because it is a large transportation hub, and right downtown, so there are lots of tourist taking pictures and looking around in an open-mouthed kind of way. Which I don't mean in a negative way: I find them cute and funny to watch.

Anyway, after Linz arrived, we tromped off to the Distillery District. But first, we stopped in at the St Laurence Market along the way. The market was really busy because it was such a nice day, although very hot. We got chocolate covered strawberries on sticks, and tried not to buy groceries, as both of us didn't want to carry things around with us for the rest of the day. We both ended up buying tea, though, from this nice tea lady who gave us samples of some really awesome iced tea she made with Lemon Balm herb. I bought some, and will make some of my own, later!

Anyway, we eventually made our way to the Distillery District, and there were lots of people enjoying the ribfest that was happening. My general rule is not to eat ribs in public, because they are messy and stuff. But we each got pulled pork sandwiches from different vendors and sampled each others food. Both sandwiches were really excellent, but Linz' choice was better than mine, we agreed. There were two more vendors we could have sampled, but we were kind of full, so we bought home made lemonaid. The lemonaid was a little expensive but very excellent, with lemon bits and a couple of seeds in your cup, so you really know it was made from actual lemons. Yay!

Of course, the district also has lots of shops and art galleries, so we checked out pretty much everything. We went to the Mill Street Brewery which is a nice little micro-brewery that will give you a good-sized sample cup for a quarter! We sampled everything, and Linz and I selected our favorites: Linz liked the stock ale best, and I liked the organic beer. We were going to do a brewery tour, but we missed it because we got distracted and stuff. Oh well!

After looking at more shops, we headed up to Church street to check out the Pride Week festivities. There were lots of people and everyone was in a really excellent mood. Boys were spraying each other with supersoakers and girls were playing around on skateboards; boys were walking around in tight underpants and girls were walking around topless; girls and boys were walking around holding each others' hands, and there were the mandatory crazy costumes and get-ups from both boys and girls, and lots of people were taking pictures of each other. I got hit on twice, but Linz saw more shirtless women than I did, even though I was trying harder than she was to see strangers' boobies. Oh well!

It was an excellent time! Everything rocked, even though both Linz and I got horrible feet blisters because we were both wearing new shoes for the first time. We are dumb!