Home-cooking Chinese meal

I really wanted to share the very homestyle-tasting bamboo shoots and mushrooms dish I learned to make recently. It was so successful that now I need to be sure to have some bamboo shoots in my pantry to make this dish in a pinch. I was a little heavy-handed with the sauce. And I knew it wasn’t very real-vegetable heavy so I tossed together a “fusion” sautee with two types of zucchini (NPY’s favourite) in hoisin sauce and lemon with cute button mushrooms. And for a fruit dessert, I’ve discovered Cara Cara oranges (a cross between orange grapefruit) and strawberries.

Spam & Egg “Mc”Muffin Meal

Ever since making the Spam and egg breakfast sandwich a month or two back, I really wanted to share it with NPY and looked forward to his arrival. I shopped for hashbrowns and picked up Milo for a really hearty meal. It was all fun to prepare because I have a Cuisinart grill on which I can make the whole spread at once.

This meal really held me for a while!

NPY’s Request: Mac ‘n’ Cheese

NPY made a request and I wanted to fulfill it: to have some homemade mac ‘n’ cheese. I pinned a Lunch at Six Point Beer Mac and Cheese recipe and followed it except it was very flexible. Chose the beer (sweet Innis & Gunn), pasta (cavatappi which we love from cavatappi Alfredo at Cactus Club), cheese (Asiago, provolone, and Bremmer), and instead of bread crumbs, I crumbled some of the sour cream and onion Popchips we have around. I will eat potato chips if it is part of a meal.

Since the pasta dish was not so veggie at all, I threw together a soy sautee of asparagus, zucchini, and tomatoes. Because when the kitchen is nice, cooking is easy… almost fun.

Thompson Diner

After the Yonge Street 10K and we stopped moving, we were cold! It was only about 6 degrees. In addition to the streetcars on Queens Quay being messed up due to construction, the additional load from runners and spectators meant it didn’t look like we’d get on a bus soon so we started walking and Bathurst looked viable for brunch.

The wait for a table felt long. We ordered and the wait was long… for everything. I had barely formed an idea from the menu what to order when Lil Sis pointed out the Brunch burger that had fried egg topping a burger that is on a donut! Both Lil Sis and NPY had eggs Benedict and I shared with them part of my burger and fries so it wasn’t so bad for me after all. ;)

Real Sports Bar & Grill

I walk by Real Sports all of the time and more recently I learned it had been voted in 2010 by ESPN as Best Sports Bar in North America. Not shabby! There is a two-story television screen surrounded by medium screens on the left and right and smaller screens line the bottom edge. We got a good seat along the back row of tables (even better would have been a booth but it was just the two of us) and overhead, a second level dining room gets a bird’s eye view of the big space. We were there to watch the all-important game 5 between Canucks and LA Kings with the Canucks fighting to stave off elimination from the play-offs. My reservation was half an hour before the game started and we watched as the place filled up and I was delighted that the big screen switched from the Raptors game to the Canucks game at 8 p.m.

NPY ordered a predictable beer while I tried The Winner. I couldn’t get away from the name! I has a mixture of vodka, Red Bull, Gatorade and OJ. When I told Lil Sis about it, she made a face. But it looked like an innocent tall glass of orange juice and it provided me with a buzz and energy. We ordered a pound of wings dipped in a winning sauce of maple bacon mustard. The wings (about 7 of them) were meaty and delicious. I loved dragging it through the tzatziki.

Ten-Ichi Japanese Cuisine

Since our last visit in late January, Ten-Ichi moved to a different unit in the same plaza and renovated so NPY was treated to a modern-looking restaurant. Just like last time, we waited for about 20 minutes and I had made a reservation! I was eager to show NPY our favourite dishes and in the second round, he confidently took control and made an order in order to fill in his gaps. I raved about their hand rolls – crispy nori sheets used each time – and after NPY had his first hand roll (a salmon one), he ordered two more unagi ones! We had a lot of fun and ordered a bevy of desserts. I didn’t take many pictures since we have been there twice before.

Destiny Tea House [yelp.ca]

There’s an amazing little “plaza” at Highway 7 and the 404 with all the Big Box Restaurants you would want to hit up for a while: The Keg, Marlowe, Alice Fazooli’s, The Melting Pot (new!), Jack Astor’s… and Destiny. NPY was impressed by the size of the place and wondered if it gets filled. It might suffer during the dinner rush but I have the feeling it’s really busy and hopping in the late hours and after clubs close (if they are still open). Service is just as you expect in a Taiwanese shop (less than non-existent, worse than at other Chinese restaurants). It was cold while NPY visited and additionally it was a rainy day so we warmed up before dinner with warm milk teas.

Bannock

Bannock is one of those new iconic restaurants in Toronto that I’ve actually wanted to try. I’m getting older, or the scene isn’t so exciting, or I usually have no one to go with, but I don’t have great hankering to try much around here… except Bannock. “Canadian Comfort Food” is its tagline and I made sure we got comfort food for at least one of our dishes. I would have liked mac ‘n’ cheese but I thought I saw one served and it looked puny and I was making my own later in the week.

So we went with a shrimpwich that was just okay and as a cold sandwich, not so comforting. But it was light and the bread was buttery. NPY’s Arcadian chicken pot pie was a success with generous and big pieces of tender chicken and the mashed potatoes were creamy with a fragrant gravy that was strongly chicken.

Prairie Girl Bakery

I wish there was more choice but since there isn’t, it seems that Prairie Girl has the cupcake market in downtown Toronto cornered. My closest location is in the PATH and at lunch time the queue to order/pick up cupcake orders is long and dominates the hallway. I was successful getting the the flavours I wanted when I went down around ten in the morning, my strategy from now on as I might indulge and get these cupcakes, oh, once a month.

We enjoyed the chocolate cake with strawberry icing over lunch and the cake was divinely moist and the icing so fluffy. We saved the cafe au lait chocolate cake (the day/week’s special) for dessert in the evening but by then the chocolate cake was getting chewy and the icing was more solid. Still intensely flavourful.

Spice Route

When I asked V for a suggestion where we could all meet up, she suggested Spice Route. We’ve wanted to check it out when it turns into a lounge later on but it was also a cool place to have dinner… but the reviews are not so great. We all go in wary because it’s an Asian fusion place and we have high standards for that stuff.

The dining room is really dark so my photos are so grainy! We would have ordered separate dishes as it was most convenient and we have different tastes and waved away when the waitress asked if we had dined there before and explained it was “family style”. But something about how it the food was plated and we switched over to family style and shared all the food. Mongolian beef that was spicy and tenderized slices of beef. Teriyaki beef with cabbage-wrapped steamed rice was well done. Soy miso cod was good but not plentiful and came on a bed of Shanghai noodles. Seared yellowfin tuna was alright.

Mill St. Brewpub

After poking into every corner of the Distillery District, we walked into the most lively spot, Mill St. Brewpub. The New York Rangers-Washington Capitals game was on one of the screens and NPY could point his bar stool towards it. He got an organic ale from the microbrewery while I pored over the beer flights and got a G&T instead. NPY surprised me, ordering a pulled short rib poutine. Nice to nibble on and just as we were finished it, all the screens were changed to the Blue Jays-Mariners game. Time to leave!

Tofu Village [yelp.ca]

A trip to Toronto is not complete without a Korean meal! Given my homebase is downtown, we went to Korea Town at Bloor & Christie. But which restaurant of the tens to patronize?? I’ve been to the North York version of three of the top four Korean restaurants in the Annex: Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu, Owl of Minerva, and Joons Korean Cuisine. We walked by Imonay and Tofu Village, both of which have 100% ratings on Urbanspoon with 24 and 16 votes, respectively. NPY liked the look of Tofu Village better so we ended up there. After a wait, we were seated in a packed dining room.

I hate to point it out but I was jarred and then a little worried because my usual barometer to read how good a place can be had to be re-calibrated. In North York, all of the customers are Asian. It’s the nature of the neighbourhood and proximity to Richmond Hill and Markham. I like the flaked firm tofu that came with our banchan and each time I see the bean sprouts dish, I am reminded of how I want to figure out how to make it. I ordered the oyster soon tofu (tofu soup) “medium” on a scale including plain, mild, medium and spicy. We were a little full from the day but tofu soup will open up my appetite.

It is with the heaviest heart ever that I have the time to blog and write this post because it means that NPY’s weeklong trip to Toronto is wrapped and he is back in Vancouver. After last October’s trip that was nothing short of disaster on all fronts, I needed to make sure this trip did not permanently scar him about the city that will, in some way, always be a part of me, my home-away-from-hometown. So these are the things that I did to make sure I struck a balance between presenting the city as a place to call home and making it feel like a trip with new things to see and do (emphasized in bold).

Part way through the week, he asked me if I wasn’t making it so nice with the activities I had planned that he could stay. Yes!! No!! I just wanted him to have a good trip. Toronto ain’t so bad….

• cleaned out a drawer so he wasn’t living out of a suitcase, freed up a bathroom bin
• apartment tour to show off the amenities like fancy gym, squash courts, basketball court and pool
• a home-cooked pasta “carb-loading meal”
• a trip to my local market, Longos in the fancy Maple Leaf Sports complex
• meeting up with me and Lil Sis at the Exhibition grounds after the Yonge Street 10K
• indulging in one of our traditional post-run brunches at swanky Thomson Diner

• getting good use of our two-rides-for-one TTC day pass zipping to Bloor-Yonge/Yorkville, Bloor-Christie (Koreatown), Chinatown and Kensington Market, including a visit to Carole’s Cheesecake Cafe for taffy apple cheesecake that pleased NPY (apple) and me (cheesecake)
• watching the Canucks’ last game of 2011/2012 on the two-storey screen at Real Sports (North America’s best sport’s bar, according to ESPN)
• “road trip” to the ‘burbs to check out large and new-ish Vaughan Mills mall that has the Banana Republic Outlet that delights us
• visiting an enormous bubble tea house, Destiny Tea House, at the “plaza” of big box restaurants at Highway 7 and East Beaver Creek
• an all-you-can eat Japanese food feast at Ten-Ichi in Scarborough where NPY ate three handrolls

• DYO salad and DYO grilled cheese lunch from Druxy’s, a favourite and standby for me
• my gift of a $10 GC to Second Cup so he can enjoy the honey vanilla tea latte I discovered
• on-the-point directions through the PATH from my work (southern tip) north to the Eaton Centre
• meet-up with his client at a Panera, in Canada only in Ontario so far
• take a dip in one of two condo hot tubs followed by visiting the sauna–not just for fun but therapeutic reasons
• lunch at Clipper Cafe, for Bay Street people “in the know”
• pre-movie dinner at Bannock for Canadian-sourced comfort food
• finally watching The Hunger Games and NPY, who ignored all reviews, was roundly impressed and says he’ll read the next two books in the trilogy!
• lunch from Soup Nutsy was marred by it being 1 p.m. and they were out of the sherried lobster bisque I wanted NPY to try and the chunky chicken noodle soup he wanted to try; dessert to our lunch was a divine chocolate cupcake with strawberry icing from Prairie Girl Bakery
• totally spoiled him for dinner because I can now easily execute two dish dinners in my dream kitchen (i.e., roomy, bright, modern, long counters); dinner consisted of beer mac & cheese, soy sautéed asparagus-zucchini-grape tomatoes, NHL Alumni Hat Trick wine (a blend of Riesling, Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay), fresh fruit dessert of mango and strawberries, and a second cupcake from Prairie Girl Bakery with chocolate cake and cafe au lait icing.

• lunch at Marche was unfortunately very average
• dinner with L&V at swanky, lounge-y Spice Route and an eye-opening tour of SPiN, the table tennis club found in New York and Milwaukee
• since making it for myself a few weeks ago, I was looking forward to making Spam & Egg “Mc”Muffin with hashbrown patties as our lazy Saturday brunch dish

• followed by a big exploration day on the TTC pass we could share: Toronto Music Garden where we made our own fun, St. Lawrence Market, Distillery District and a visit to Mill St. Brewpub to catch part of the NYR-WAS game until all the screens were changed to Blue Jays baseball, bleh. We strolled through Trinity Bellwoods Park and sought out the exterior of Being Erica’s apartment at 337 Palmerston Boulevard. We ate in Korea Town at Tofu Village which has exceptionally high reviews.

I almost feel like I was on a week-long vacation with some work that occurred at regular intervals during the day. It was brilliant but real life resumes now.

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What’s this High Park area of Toronto that people speak of? Most recently, I was listening to DNTO segment and one of the poems included in the Toronto Love Letters project was regarding High Park. Something like how it would takes years upon years to completely know it. Further, some tweets about cherry blossom festival going on in Vancouver prompted me to wonder if Toronto’s climate could also support cherry blossoms. It does and I did not have to go far, but to High Park to view them.

Lil Sis, who stayed with me Thursday night through to Monday morning, said that if we were “good” enough (re: our diets) we could go for brunch on Easter Sunday. After two nights of home cooking with delicious and plentiful fresh Chinese vegetables from T&T each of us had completed rigorous workouts on Saturday evening, she green-lighted brunch at Barque Smokehouse on Roncesvalles. We got a good dose of their candied bacon in their most ultra-rich versions of grilled cheese sandwich and French toast!

Which provides energy to walk around in nearby High Park.

I can’t find the link any longer but there was a hilarious website about High Park where the writer admonishes people trying to access the park by car. But… the in-park parking is free so we certainly were going to drive around a couple of times looking for a spot. Fortunately, the spot we finally secured was right by where the Sakura trees started and we quickly got our obligatory cherry blossoms photos at the most blooming tree in the park. (The blooms had just appeared at most a day before.)

From Hillside where several cherry blossom trees were in bloom, we walked down the Sakura-lined walkway to Duck Pond and came to appreciate the terrain of the city park. I kept thinking, “This is Toronto’s Stanley Park”, without the water view. I suppose I could go running there….

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In the past week, I learned about the documentary film Jiro Dreams of Sushi from an Angry Asian Man post and despite most stunning cinematography of the sushi-making, I nearly forgot about looking it up, assuming it was not accessible to me.

On Saturday morning, it occurred to me to look it up and my first local Google result showed that the TIFF Bell Lightbox was showing it several times during the day. The Lil Sis had heard our favourite morning radio show host, CBC Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway, rave about the film, claiming he went in after a meal and still came out hungry for sushi. I did not have to twist her arm to go and she hadn’t even watched the trailer.

So I bought tickets (er, in their lingo, “made a reservation”) for a 5:00 p.m. showing and it was good because we actually peeled ourselves off the couch and got out of the apartment compared to many a weekend day in all her visits so far. We zipped to a Canadian Tire and then another looking for patio furniture and picked up Don Juan (food truck on Front Street West) hot dog and poutine on our walking route to the Lightbox.

To me, the Lightbox is a “movie theatre” screening extra special/festival/foreign films with the additional bonus of special exhibits (like last year’s Grace Kelly one) and great gift shop currently stocked up with brilliantly coloured merchandise to celebrate the upcoming tiff.kids, TIFF Kids International Film Festival. The Lightbox is also the permanent home to TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) headquarters.

It’s no wonder that our screening sold out as the theatre held just 80 seats but everyone was very enthusiastic and there was a friendly “film festival vibe” amongst the patrons. One of the promo trailers was for the currently running Spirited Away: The Films of Studio Ghibli. The following video is a montage of the fifteen animated films being screened at the Lightbox over six weeks and I was newly impressed by the beautiful and cohesive work the studio has produced. For starters, I need to finish watching Ponyo, and get onto My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle!

The Leaf’s last Saturday home game of the regular season (and their 2011/2012 season, period) began shortly after we got out of the theater and it was a decision to make whether to duck into a bar and catch the game or give into the small sushi craving Jiro Dreams of Sushi created. Since I told Lil Sis a few months ago that the ACC blares a fog horn whenever the Leafs score during a home game, she has been anxious to hear it for herself but they have been blanked in all Saturday home games the same weekend she decides to visit me downtown. Tonight was her last chance for the season.

Since we already had poutine and a hot dog, I decided that pub food was only more of the same and we went to Oyshi Sushi near my place which has high Urbanspoon ratings (88% of 108 raters). I experienced a little bit of sticker shock and was momentarily at a loss of what to order. I thought I might want 20 pieces like the three “movement” tasting menu that was in the final segment of the documentary but that was going to get steep when any nigiri was a whopping $2 or more. Although salmon was not mentioned at all in the film, the prized fish being tuna, it’s what I grew up on and I wanted to ensure I enjoyed my post-Jiro Dreams of Sushi sushi. I ordered the salmon sushi dome with 10 pieces of salmon draped over rice for $13. (NPY: “It’s called salmon don.” me: “No, I know salmon don, but it said sushi dome on the menu.” Because it looks like a dome.) After watching the film, I jokingly threatened to make my own salmon nigiri with the ingredients on my plate!

Oyshi Sushi is a cute little restaurant and a decent find for my area. We were fascinated by the laminated placards that adorned the place, signed 8.5″ x 11″ papers by the NHL and NBA players who would have come across the restaurant on their walk between the ACC where they played and the Westin Harbourfront where I suspect the athletes are often put up. Prudently, there were not dates apparent with the autographs so athletes may only have visited once but they included the Calgary Flames, Ottawa Senators, San Jose Sharks, Toronto Raptors, and Manitoba Moose. As a restaurant kid, it would be a highlight for a professional sports team to descend upon my establishment!

We gobbled down our sushi and got home to catch the second and third periods (by streaming) and Lil Sis was treated to four goal horns in a Leafs’ does-nothing-for-them win over Buffalo. Lil Sis thought the audio announcement of a Leafs goal was “neat.”

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I was totally delighted when I saw this Google Doodle today! In the top left corner of my Google search results–as I tend to exclusively use the combined search and address bar in Google Chrome–I spied that today was a Google Doodle Day and I had to know the occasion, as per usual. This beautiful and simple and geometric graphic greeted me in the center of the Google search page and as I moved my cursor to hover over the image, I had a feeling it was as familiar to me as the office building I work in every day. Indeed, the Doodle was in honour of Mies van der Rohe‘s 126th birthday!

I just had to share it with two of my co-workers, James and Carol. It sounds tremendously geeky of me when I download to them all I know about van der Rohe which I shared recently in my blog entry about the TV series, Suits. In fact, I don’t know very much except the following:

• Starting with and Seagram Building in New York and using it as a prototype, Mies designed several more iconic North American office buildings including the Dirksen and Kluczynski Federal Buildings in Chicago, the IBM Plaza in Chicago and Westmount Square in Montreal. As his last project, I logically conclude that the Toronto-Dominion Centre where I work is the perfect culmination of his ideas. Before I started working here, it was wonderous to walk amongst the towers which are rigidly mathematically ordered , “each building offset to the adjacent by one bay of the governing grid, allowing views to ‘slide’ open or closed as an observer moves across the court.” More poetically, “the light as it moves across the building surfaces, playing the mullions like stringed instruments, and the orchestration of the various buildings are together paradigmatically symphonic.”
• While the Doodle looked to me like the ground-level banking pavilion at King and Bay, it is more likely to be depicting the stunning US Post Office Loop Station in the Dirksen Building that is a “visual gateway through the complex”.
• The “black monoliths”, as we call the striking design, are in the architectural style known as International style
• Mies’ “personal” touch is palpable in the presence of the Barcelona chairs (which he co-designed) in the lobbies and the TD Centre part of the concourse-level underground-shopping “mall”, PATH, adheres to his strict design sense: “the store fronts must consist only of the glass panels and black aluminum that he specified. Even signage graphics were restricted to only white backlit letters within a black aluminum panel, and only in the specific font that Mies had designed for the T-D Centre”!

Mies’ architectural and design contribution extend far beyond black monolith towers but that’s my context and the one Google Doodle played up, too.

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I “watch” a lot of TV yet I don’t watch the screen. I’m hard-pressed to sit in front of the screen and do nothing and just absorb the story and scenery. I need to be cooking or cleaning or running or in transit between places. Which is why when NPY and I were watching the first two episodes of new series, Suits, and we even talked about it being filmed in Toronto (standing in for New York City), I forgot all about that conversation.

And then I was watching the fourth episode and there was a sky-ward panning shot to remind the audience about the skyscraping office towers of New York and I spotted my office building! From then on, I paid a lot more attention when there were outdoor and street scenes to see what I could recognize. I visually identified and then confirmed with Wikipedia that the fictional offices of Pearson Hardman are located in one of the newest, fanciest, and shiniest towers in Toronto: the Bay-Adelaide Centre (or BAC).

What’s funny is that Scotia Plaza is right next to BAC and at 68 floors (second tallest skyscraper in Canada) and with a rich red exterior, it is kind of hard to miss if they are filming in a BAC office with a view. In the same episode, Mike and Rachel pose as potential condo buyers and visit a fancy high-rise condo presumably not in the Wall Street area where their office is. But Scotia Plaza, which is right next to their office, Pearson Hardman, is still right there seen through the set of windows at the right!

I figured out that my office towers figure so prominently in the panning shots to suggest the New York setting because they aren’t uniquely Toronto (like the TD Canada Trust Tower) but might even vaguely look like some office buildings in New York. But which one(s)? I figured out that monolithic black steel TD Centre towers resemble both the Seagram Building and One Liberty Plaza, with the former sharing International architectural style with TD Centre. And it’s no wonder! Seagram (1958) and TD (1967-1991) were designed by the same architect, Ludwig Mies van der Roche and, well, I got a big enough dose of architectural design reading the TD Centre’s very logical site and governing order. Another fun fact is that Mies co-designed the Barcelona chair which explains why they are the furniture of choice in my lobby!

So, Suits has been renewed for a second season to premiere in the summer. If they have a similar shooting schedule for their second second as with the first, they will be shooting around BAC, South of Temperance (the bar), and Bay Street from the end of April to mid-August. Maybe I’ll run into a set!

******** This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

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Every morning I check myself out in the full-length mirrors on Bay Street, otherwise known was the gold one-way windows at ground level of the Royal Bank Plaza at Bay and Front.

******** This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

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I’m resigned that in the future, I have to live in the “‘burbs” and drive or (shudder) take transit to get to work. One day, I will have a live-in partner and we decide together where to live. Until then, I continue to be loathed to have more than a 10-minute walk to work, hah!

At first, I thought I’d get a Concord CityPlace apartment, perhaps even in LV’s building. But Lil Sis and I noticed the Pinnacle development and particularly their amenities. During a whirlwind tour of apartments available for rent, we saw older (2-5yo) units and new units (a few months old), the latter with an address the same street as my workplace.

Living so close to work in Vancouver was something of a coincidence. I did chose my apartment on the west side because I thought I might (and did) end up at the cancer research facility 490 meters away. But it was not for forever and I spent a year commuting to North Vancouver and did not know that I would really luck out and get an offsite UBC job located just 253 meters away from my doorstep. This time around in Toronto, I got the job first, then looked for a place to stay. Work is a whole 651 meters away and it works out I can say that I work and live on Bay Street.

Others: “Who wants to see their office from their apartment?! What if you have a bad day at work?”

Me: “If I have a bad day at work, or if I’m quite loathed to go in (because I’m tired or cranky), I’d rather just get home or get into work after an 8-minute walk instead of dragging it out!”

My little apartment hit all that I wanted (and I pay dearly for it): new one-bedroom, first tenant in, high-30s floor (of 52 floors in total), good view (mostly north and east facing), undermounted sinks, ensuite laundry, laminate floors, 24-hour concierge, the “Club” amenities that include a state-of-the-art gym, pool, hot tubs, saunas, tennis court, squash courts, outdoor running track , and basketball court.

But… aside from being right next to the Air Canada Centre (ACC) with an event or game very second night on average, it’s super-quiet and dead after business hours thanks to the nearby Financial District and all the businesses existing to serve it shutting down at 6 p.m. My daily commute takes me through the grubbiest of grubby Toronto, under some overpasses that is the Gardiner and Union Station train platforms, and through the god-awful messy headache that is Front Street so-called revitalization. A view of the CN Tower would be the cherry on top but I don’t have it and only see corroded train station roof, a maze of train tracks and industrial Port Lands. My building is so fancy and new there’s no visitor parking, event rates apply nearly every evening at the public lots, and it took two weeks at gouging rates to get to know some parking attendants and get down to $10/day parking at a public lot.

My favourite Canadian/Toronto series from 1999 was the short-lived show The City and I remember one line in particular said about city Councillor Katharine Strachan by her lover, played by chiseled James Gallanders, “She gets a nosebleed if she goes north of Rosedale.” Heh. Rosedale is darned close compared Richmond Hill and Scarborough where I have to go every now and then!

When I do have to leave the core and foot power will not take me there, being just 400 meters from Union Station is a boon. The Union stations house the subway to get elsewhere in the city, GO trains to get around GTA, and VIA rail should I really need to bust this joint. The Gardiner Expressway is at my doorstep which means arriving and leaving by car is efficient, more so than living deeper in the core. All this access and I’m happy as a clam just spending time at home. I haven’t even visited LV yet who is a mere 20-minute walk towards the Entertainment District but we’ll blame it on the weather and not my laziness. ;)

Right now, I’m totally satisfied tripping down to the condo gym that with Life Fitness treadmills, ellipticals, and bikes equipped with television screens, I’ve been timing my workout with the televisions shows I want to catch since I’ve cut the cord and don’t have a television. At some point, I will need to train outdoors (booo…) and the Running Room is 800 meters away and we will probably often connect with the Waterfront Trail and head out to Humber Park and The Beaches ad nauseum.

Finally, supermarkets are more important to me right now than restaurants in the vicinity and I thought I couldn’t have it better than before with four to chose from within a 10-minute walk. It’s close. Going to to Longo’s (300 meters away) involves stepping into the shiny and bright ACC/Maple Leaf Square area and Longo’s has a great high-end market feel like Whole Foods. It’s a bit like an Urban Fare, actually, in that it also carries the the Western Family house brand. The 24-hour Loblaws where Top Chef candidates are taken to to shop is 800 meters away but a bit of a sketchy trek past the Redpath refinery. I would never have to visit the Sobey’s 600 meters away–they are so expensive–except it houses a Wine Rack and Wine Racks carry the Inniskillin East West series wine that I’ve adopted as “my” wine (more on that later).

There, that’s my world outside of my apartment. It’s pretty complete with the large and glaring exception of NPY’s absence. :( Next up, an apartment tour!

if i ate in the caf, which i don't usually,i can look at my apartment.

******** This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

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At some points, I really wonder if I did the right thing. Sometimes I use precedent as “logic” to justify an alternative I’ve already  decided to pursue.

When I got a job on Bay Street, the “life” was completed by also getting an apartment downtown. I’m the first occupant of a new high-rise completed just a few months ago. On a high, high floor because I wasn’t going to compromise after living on the 1.5st floor of a 30-year-old building for six years.

I pay about $100/month more in rent than I’d like to. When NPY came to visit in October, we learned that (1) there are no reasonable parking options and (2) the financial district where famed Royal York Hotel is located really shuts down on the weekend. My apartment isn’t so close to Dundas Square (Toronto’s attempt at Times Square) and Eaton Centre and it’s not like Concord CityPlace at Spadina and close to Entertainment District with restaurants, lounges, life in general after 9 p.m. Aside from having an eight-minute walk to work, did I make a colossal mistake renting this apartment?

After some initial disappointment last week, my first full week in the apartment, things started to look up. LV came over for a visit after work and they showed me a five-minute shortcut to Longo’s which has a really nice market feel. A trip to the market takes me into the ACC (Air Canada Centre) complex where there are shining spotlights and there is event night nearly every night.

Lil Sis came to visit me for a “weekend in the city” and we walked north and east to see what the ‘hood offers. St. Lawrence Market is under a 15-minute walk and we were completely delighted by Kozlik’s mustard shop and the vegetable stand (Phil’s) on the lower level. The walk east on Front Street takes us past a Winners which answers the question of, “Where the heck does one get useful household stuff?” We had brunch on King Street East which is more down-to-earth than the more hip and trendy west side. It was also bitterly cold this weekend so we ducked into the PATH at King to get to Eaton Centre. Turns out when you know your way, it’s a really fast walk to the mall! While the PATH stores shut down every night after work and on the weekend, the walkway itself remains open as a warm route that is traffic light-free and I can start walking in it after just a four-minute walk from my apartment! Instant feeling of connection.

Over the weekend, I also checked out the condo gym for the first time. While I was wary after my first peek inside, actually entering and using the equipment was a joy. The gym is in a big space with plenty of treadmills and the Lifefitness cardio machines have the built-in television screens taking off nearly all the painful edge of the task–I could more than make my fitness goals with access to this kind of equipment!

The only thing missing–and it’s a big one–is NPY to continue exploring with. :(

******** This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

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A bonus is that the souvenirs do not scream “tourist!” so much as other merchandise and transit (design) enthusiasts with some civic pride will also be interested in transit merchandise.

Recently, blogTO published a post to stir up some discussion about desirable merchandise to be sold in a reincarnation of the TTC gift shop. It’s a nice idea but TTC management is working out other issues at present and souvenir sales revenue is not a priority. I’m pretty vanilla and would like to pick up my TTC (and GO Transit) shot glass and colourful reusable totebag with the system maps but other people are way more creative than I am. Thus I was surfing all morning around related links, reminiscing, and generally procrastinating from studying….

Back when I was in junior high or high school, I was in Toronto over school break and hanging out with my cousin Sandy. She lived in North York at the time and one afternoon we accomplished one of her city goals in that we rode all along the Yonge-University-Spadina Line and collected a transfer at each station. I’m pretty sure I still have that bundle of transfers somewhere. More recently, Toronto NaNoWriMos did a Subway Write-In, and rode the whole Yonge-University-Spadina Line–about 3 hours–while writing up a storm and I dearly wished I could have gone but had other commitments to attend to.

Even more interesting than my vanilla “put the transit map on a bag” idea, are the pins for each of the TTC stations, coloured by the stations’ familiar tile colours. I don’t know what I would do with so many pins so I may prefer the them as pushpins or really strong magnets.

We were waiting for a table at “Din Tai Fung” a little while ago and saw someone else was waiting for a table and poring over a new book he bought, Transit Maps of the World. Lil Sis and I also looked at the book over his shoulder trying to guess the cities, laughing when one was particularly dense or sparse. I think I would like this coffee table book as well, but I’m not that interested in the bulk of the maps if I don’t have much connection to the city. I simply have to visit the cities, too!

Did you know there is a TTC font, Toronto Subway Regular? To me, it kind of looks like Helvetica but font enthusiasts would be quick to disagree! It can be purchased for $25.

I like the idea of removable wall decals but how to choose just one station?

I love this Jonathan Guy collage poster of the stations on the Yonge-University-Spadina and Bloor-Danforth line. It is made from photographs from each station and a good refresher of the stations’ colours. I grew up with the TTC and MTR (Hong Kong) station colours and you just have to glimpse the colour and know where you are if you’ve missed the announcement. In Vancouver, the stations are all white and you have to cran your neck to look up out of the train to orient yourself.

Finally, this doesn’t have to do with transit but that’s where all the sleuthing takes you, I learned that the following poster prints using typography to show neighbourhoods in a city are called Ork Posters. I love looking at the cities I know and have lived in. Like in Vancouver, I lived in Fairview while NPY is in Hastings Sunrise (I think). The Toronto Ork Poster is insane! Either Toronto is too subdivided and enthusiastic about naming everything or perhaps Ork went down too low a level? I think Toronto’s currently the densest of the Ork Posters!