Adventures in Toronto

I apologize for not posting in (let's see.. whoah!) 10 whole days. Last week, I decided to get out of Ottawa and spend some time in Toronto since it has been quite some time since I've had an opportunity to hang out there. Conveniently, Moddy had to go there to do some work for her masters' thesis, so we headed down for a few days. Plus, I got to hang out with my sister, the Snowboard Chick Extraordinaire, who was gracious enough to let us crash at her sweet downtown pad. (Muchos Gracias!)

We took the train down on Wednesday afternoon and got there in time to grab some dinner and head over to the Mod Club, where we went to see Of Montreal. They played an awesome show; well over an hour of material covering several albums (I recognized most of them from The Sunlandic Twins and Satanic Panic In The Attic.)


Totally not awesome: All of my pictures turned out really blurry.
Totally awesome: Duelling Bass Rickenbackers!

Anyhow, after the show we were all pretty exhausted, so we went back to the pad and crashed out for a long time.

The next morning, we started by walking downtown to grab some breakfast and peruse a few key stores. Later in the afternoon we booked out to another area code (Markham) and hung out for a while at the Pacific Mall, which was pretty nuts. If I lived in Toronto, I would certainly pick up a lot of apartment stuff there. I had to restrain myself a little bit (particularily in a store called "One's", which had all sorts of cool gadgets, clocks, fountains etc) since I would never have been able to get them home. And I discovered the greatness of Bubble Coffee. Fantastic!

Afterwards we went for dinner in Koreatown at a place called Se Jong, where we ate bulgogi for hours. It was so good. For the uninitiated, it gets cooked live in front of you on the table. Check out this action shot:


And then we were all really tired so we went to crash. I spent the following day walking up and down Queen Street (and up and down again) getting severely caffeinated and hitting some places I was wanting to check out. I went to Capsule Music to see a guitar I'm thinking about buying (it is indeed as cool as it appeared to be online) and spent the obligatory 2 hours going through records at Rotate This, although this time I left with far less than I usually do; I picked up The Clientele (Strange Geometry) and Rogue Wave (Out of the Shadows), which for some reason I never bought before. Oh, and I got the last Grandaddy EP (I was sad to learn they were splitting up... ah well). And that about wrapped up my Toronto visit, since Moddy & I then headed to the train station and came home (but not before a chance encounter with our favorite Toronto photographer in the Eaton Centre. So random, dude!)

Awesome fun. I need to do this more often. I should keep an eye on who's coming to play Toronto more frequently.

Good times!