Toronto trip

Back from Toronto, here are a couple of things that I thought were remarkable.

1) you hear a lot of golden oldies in Canada, they pipe it in everywhere.

2) lots of diversity including white males in green army coats who have a beard and who stare at you. They all look like they used to play hockey at some point or another and they all look like their highest achievement was scoring a goal in high school, that in some way they are still reliving the experience somehow.

3) it's flat flat flat there, no sign of a hill anywhere which made Julie and I think it would be PERFECT for riding bikes. I don't know why we came to that conclusion, it just came to us spontaneous like.

4) The Grand Hotel in Toronto was something just short of fabulous! And I say that cuz it had great breakfasts and great beds. You can see why Shaq likes the place so much! That reminds me (celebrity sighting) I visited the bathroom in the lobby one day and by the smell of things, I think Shaq had just been in there.

The breakfast consists of:

a) scrambled eggs (yum)

b) sausages (yum, but only have one!)

c) bacon (you can have more of these cuz they are good for ya!)

d) French toast (skip this, it looks soggy)

e) diced potaters...could have been better but what the heck, huh?

f) go over to the pastry section and have yourself an apple something or other.

g) toast available but sucks. Lots of jam in little jars, good to steal and eat later.

h) coffee

i) juice, Julie didn't like it but drank it.

j) that's about it.

Now THAT is a good breakfast and you could probably go back for more if you wanted, but I didn't.

If that wasn't enough, the elevators in the place were the BEST I have ever been on. The second you would hit the button (and it didn't matter which floor you were on) the little bell would go "ding" and the yawning opening door of an elevator would be at your service.

5) Toronto looks like a bunch of different cities all rolled up into one. The following are the cities it looks like and the person who said it: Tacoma (EunJean), Rochester NY (Julie, Eugenie), Barcelona (EunJean), Boston (Ed), Cleveland Ohio (Ed) New York (Ed and Julie) and Vancouver.

6) We usually make it a rule not to laugh at anyone, but sitting outside of a store that sells vibrating chairs and watching an older asian woman calmly take off her shoes and insert herself into the vibrating chair and then proceed to writhe in ectasy for about twenty minutes (that we know of, we left before she was done) was too much for us.

When she went from Sleeping Lion to Dying Swan, Hopeful Crane, Julie just lost it, big time.

7) Whatever you do, DO NOT ask EunJean what she encountered when she went to the bathroom in Chinatown.

8) I still have the reoccurring nightmare of turning and seeing the waiter holding two bowls of STEAMING hot soon tofu at the Buk Chang Don Soon Tofu restaurant right over my shoulder as he waited for a big table to leave the premises in a very crowded restaurant.

As a Korean food aside, the taste for hot water added to leftover rice in a soon tofu bowl is apparently an acquired one, one I HAVE NOT ACQUIRED.

9) When going to the Beaches while Eugenie shops, it's best to allow for more time to get back to pick her up than we allowed for. However, in the Beaches section, (celebrity sighting) we saw the general area where John Candy used to live.

10) Although I do enjoy a good walk, I was glad I suggested that we use the high quality transportation provided us by the city of Toronto. They have street cars that start out at the beginning of the route with nobody in them and by the time you're done, you've got everybody in Toronto (literally) riding on them. I think there's like a hole in the back of the street car cuz people kept getting on and getting on and NOBODY WAS GETTING OFF! If you've recently lost somebody who has visited Toronto you might want to check out the holes.

11) There were the coolest graphics in the movie Stranger Than Fiction that we saw in Toronto. That movie, by the way, although members of our party begged to differ, I thought was EGGS-cellent!!!

12) Eugenie is caught up in SOMETHING very hard to explain in her studies at Rochester Institute of Technology although she valiantly did try to explain it and I got some of it (I think).

13) We all decided that a cold weather destination for a vacation was a VERY GOOD IDEA although a warm weather destination would be EVEN A BETTER IDEA!

14) the driving in Toronto wasn't too bad and you actually noticed that they were better drivers than Seattle, plus they were more friendly letting people in and stuff.

15) Julie did EGGS-actly what you ARE NOT SUPPOSED to do at the airport as a policeman politely pointed out, by trying to help a woman with her bags. That woman (from India!) is probably still at that airport trying to explain why she had to answer "yes" to the question, "Did anyone help you with your bags while at the airport?"

16) While I do like shopping, I only like it for about a minute and then I could easily move on to something else.

17) Toronto was the BEST.

18) It's good to be home.