Wednesday, October 11, 2006
back from niagara falls and toronto :)
took a night coach to the falls, arrived early in the morning on saturday and had mooncake by the falls at night, watching the water change colour.
stayed over saturday night at a motel. there were 9 of us booked into 2 rooms: one six-person family suite and a two-person private (exclusively for our very lovely couple). the Motel Man suspected that we were sneaking in more than the permitted number of people. we would have paid for the extra person to stay in the 6-person room, but he wouldn't allow it - told us that if we had more than 6 people in the 6-person room, we would have to split into two 4-person rooms instead or risk being evicted. in the end, we staged a (hilarious) distraction involving two groups of people walking out of the room and coming back at separate times and snuck skinny jl in wearing wj's jacket. actually i think the Man knew what we were up to all along but just decided to close one eye to our antics. sometimes you have to resort to sneaky little alternatives to beat the Man when the Man gets unreasonable.
sunday morning was spent grabbing coffee and cookies and riding the rickety greyhound to toronto. our group had split (with three going to buffalo) and then we were four (not counting the couple in room 2 who said that they would sleep in and join us later). our happy little group took a long-ish time wandering around downtown toronto (gawking at the eaton center mega mall) looking for our hostel. the walking directions i printed out were smartly THROWN OUT by mr. arora before he realized that small streets did't show on the free map we got from the subway station control.
three full days of walking the streets really killed my feet and calf muscles. nevertheless, we did most of what we aimed to do in downtown toronto - visiting CN towers, the rogers center, the harbor front (and its associated shops, art exhibitions and museums), trawling the sprawling university of toronto campus, devouring dim sum in chinatown, exploring cheese, chocolate and little jamaica in kensington market, concussing on the rosy grounds of casa loma... my favourite experience was catching the stand-up comedy at yuk-yuk's. 5 acts and one awesome headliner (who verbally assaulted mr. arora for trying to be funny with him). good stuff.
and yes, i finally finally finally had japanese food that looked and tasted reasonably like japanese food.
planted @
2:05 AM
