Back in the Saddle Again – September 11 – 16

I’ve decided that I’m only going to make one blog entry for this week and probably only one per week for this trip. To tell you the truth, so far Toronto just isn’t that exciting. We’re not in a great area of town. That’s not to say that we’re in a bad area; it certainly doesn’t appear to be. We’re just in a boring area. There’s not really a whole lot to do around our hotel.

Speaking of the hotel, it’s very nice and very crowded. There’s been this travel agent convention or something like that going on there, so there have been lots of hotel people. We had dinner with a guy from Hilton the other night. I saw a woman with a Holiday Inn nametag walking around. They’re all staying at the Airport Marriott. Kind of funny.

We went to downtown Toronto for dinner the other night. Got stuck in traffic a bit, but nothing too bad. I think I saw a drug deal go down, and it was right out in the street. There was this homeless looking guy on the median. He wasn’t very old, probably somewhere in his late teens or early twenties with ratty looking clothes (what do you expect? He’s homeless.) and dirty blonde hair. Anyway, this well dressed guy maybe a few years older stopped on the other side of the street, got out of his Mercedes, and called something out to Mr. "I-don’t-have-a-home-because-I’m-free". The kid took a small package out of his pocket and tossed it to Flashy Dresser. It really looked like a drug deal to me.

They really do their arenas right around here. There’s no putting your playground out in one of the suburbs with lots of parking and plenty of feeder roads. Nope, they stuck both their baseball stadium and their hockey (basketball too?) stadium right smack-dab in the middle of town. And parking is brutal downtown. I guess that makes sure that only your real fans, the ones that are willing to suffer, come to see you play.

Speaking of hockey, I’m going to get to see the Maple Leafs play next week against Montreal, I think. One of the bigwigs up here offered my boss and I his season tickets for that night when he found out I was interested in going to a game. I was just going to pay for it myself, if I could even get a ticket. I’m getting the impression that hockey fans are a bit, well, fanatic around here. Eddie Belfour better have his game on for me. I miss seeing him in a Stars jersey. Good goalie. Old though.

Lake Ontario is pretty cool. I was about to say that this is the first Great Lake I’ve seen, but that wouldn’t be true. I’ve been to Chicago once or twice and I remember seeing Lake Whatever. I think it’s Michigan, but it’s probably something else. When I first saw Lake Ontario I thought it was an ocean. It’s just that big.

Had a horrible nightmare the other night. I dreamt I was in one of those gigantic two story mansions that you only see in mysteries. It was very nicely decorated. Almost exactly what I would have made for a Nancy Drew episode. Spooky. I was upstairs in some room and there was a big poisonous lizard on the steps. He was well hidden, so no one saw him until it was too late. Once they got to the right spot though, he jumped out and bit them. So eventually someone made it up to the room and I told them about the lizard. We got together and went to the stairs to see if we could find the toothy bastard. He was hidden away under the carpet with his snout pointing out. As soon as we spotted each other, he jumped out on the attack, but we somehow managed to scare him away. Unfortunately he ran into the creepiest room in the house. The one with all the furniture covered in sheets and no working lights. For some reason, I went into the room alone, armed only with a club of some sort and a candelabra to provide light. The light from the candles caused strange shadows and didn’t do a terribly good job of lighting the place up. I was poking around the room when I heard some noises behind me, between me and the door. I looked up, and I could see this vague lizard like shape on the ground a few feet from me. By time I realized what it was, it was on the move and jumping at me. I sat straight up in my bed gasping for breath and looking around the hotel room to make sure there weren’t any lizards in the room. I have no idea where the dream came from. Perhaps some handy dream interpreter will figure it out for me.

Last night (Thurs) we went to a little French bistro in downtown Toronto. We’d gone downtown once earlier this week, but we must not have been on the right street for entertainment purposes. There was much more to see on this street. We started off at the little hippy artist section and perused a fine display of hemp-based products as well as various forms of street art. Then we admired the booming business being done by the hot dog vendors. Our final stop before dinner was in a little record store. And I do mean both "little" and "record". I don’t really know how the store manages to stay in business. There wasn’t a huge selection. I imagine that it caters almost exclusively to the DJ crowd. There were real, honest-to-god records for sale and turntables up against the wall so that potential buyers could sample that old record feeling. I’m not a big music person, so most of it was lost on me, but it was kind of cool. After dinner we wandered around a little more. I was drawn to the giant television screen outside Chapters (think Barnes & Noble but put it in Canada). If you were standing right and looking at the corner the right way, you might have thought you were in Time Square or Picadilly Circus. The payoff wasn’t that good though. We didn’t bother going in and it didn’t attract us to a significantly more interesting area. We ended the evening in a little pub. Funny, but it looked just like all the pubs I went to in England.