A Short Trip to Toronto

Bo and I just had a 2-day trip to Toronto, the biggest city in Canada. Ten of thousands Chinese people live in this City,which makes it a true China town in Canada (or at least in eastern Canada). That is why if you even look for some specific, hard-to-find Chinese merchandize, try Toronto first.

The trip started on Sunday morning. We arrived in Toronto about 1:30pm. The first stop was a Chinese restaurant called, Shanghai Xin Tian Di. (Bo has a collection of Chinese restaurants in Toronto and her plan is always to hit each one every time we go there.) I have to say, the food tasted much better and the price was much reasonable than Ottawa's. Maybe we were too excited about this, we ordered way too much food than we could have...

The next event was shopping. The famous "Pacific Mall" is right across the street from the restaurant.  Just imaging a 3 story shopping mall packed with hundreds of small stores selling all kinds of stuff ranging from dried food to cell phones, from office supply to airsoft guns. 

At about 5:00 pm, we decided to check into our hotel, Delta Chelsea. I bid the hotel from priceline.com for merely $70 USD. The hotel is located right beside Eaton centre, quite a downtown location. The following is a night shot from the hotel room balcony.

After a quick fresh up in the hotel, we were heading to Distillery District, an area with many restored Victorian Industrial buildings served as a tourist hot spot. 

Bo had been waiting for this trip for awhile. She wouldn't waste any chance for Chinese food. For dinner, we chose a small crowded seafood restaurant on Spedina and Dundas streets.

On the second day, we visited Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a place that many of our friends recommended due to its Chinese exibition. We spent about 5 hours in the museum browsing through each exhibition area. It's a big place combining the content of (Ottawa's) Civilization museum, National Gallery of Canada and Museum of Nature together, but most of all, it displaces hundreds of items from ancient China. No need to mention how they got those items from China :-), it was a proud moment for me to face the fact that China has deep culture and once huge influence in the world.

Finally, Bo found her favorite food in the seafood section, a king crab.

I will have to skip about 1 hour of the errand for private reason. We had dinner again at Shanghai Xin Tian Di, then we headed home. At about 11:30pm, we arrived home.


Thanks for reading. The End.

O Canada !

It is a bit late but this post is about 2011 Canada day. It's the 10th Canada day since I came to this country. Every year I went to downtown Ottawa joining the cheering and excited crowd and watching tradesmen singing, dancing and performing acrobats. Every year, I parked at downtown and started my day trail from Wellington street to Sussex street and came back... I am a very predictable person. 

Ottawa is growing bigger and bigger. More and more people showed up every year. My tolerance to huge crowd has reduced at the same time. Not like the first a couple years, I never watched the flag raising ceremony or musical ride and any of the shows that attract huge crowd any more. However, some activities that I kept doing were 1) picking up free ice cream and cheese at Major Hill park; 2) attending orchestra at NRC and 3) the firework. These became a tradition to me and I wouldn't feel it's a Canada day without them. 

One more thing I really enjoy doing is to bring my camera to capture the moments from the crowd.  It's a good opportunity to see so many people wear color clothes at the same time.

Oh, this year Will and Katy came. A lot of people from different parts of Canada (even the states) came to the town just to hope to take a glimpse at them. They are more like pop stars rather than royals who will soon become the king and queen of this country.

Ok, let's see some pictures... first, face painting is a major event for kids.

Of course, some kids were more engaged than others.

Performers were all over the streets.

As well as beautiful ladies :-)

Don't forget Will and Kate.

The end. Thanks for watching.