![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogNot the exact lyrics, certainly not matching the band in the icon, but we're just bursting with all things Canadiana right now, so deal. We celebrated the 20th anniversary of Emily's birth by entering our peace-loving neighbouring land to the north (well, west in our case), three days into the bicentennial year of them declaring war on us and eventually burning our city down.
Hey, no hard feelings, eh? Your roads are clear, your people eclectic and your parking meters take American quarters.
Buffalo dawned frigid and with a bit of snow as we worked out when we'd depart and where we'd go. By the time we got on the road, the snow had progressed into squalls, but within minutes of touching Royal soil, the snow stopped and the sun came out.
It's been years since any of us had been over, more than a decade since the three of us last went together, but oh how I love how subtly and wondrously things change within 45 km of your front door. Just a few ticks down the 405, you pass The Beer Store; how can you go wrong in a neighbourhood like that? Not long past, we went by a Don Cherry's Sports Grill I'd not seen before. (No link; the corporate site is pretty annoying, just like Grapes is;) Eleanor speculated that they probably have a pretty strict dress code; "sorry, sir, but we can't let you in; your sports jacket isn't loud enoof." Then, somewhere around Missasaugua, we passed a van belonging to the Two Small Men With Big Hearts moving company; I don't know what it is about this industry that inspires such cleverness in naming, but these two certainly moved me far more than the Seven Santini Brothers ever did.
Once off the highways, we headed through Chinatown to get to the Art Gallery of Ontario for the Chagall exhibition. First, though, a Brinks truck decided to try making an exhibition out of the right front end of my car, cutting across two lanes of Spadina in front of us to make a left onto King Street. (What were we gonna do, get into a shootout with the guys in the back?) We happily survived that, I dropped the grrls outside the entrance and scored cheap on-street parking within a block.
The exhibit, organized by Paris's Pompidou, showed a lot of the man's work and plenty, too, of his contemporaries from both the Old Country and France. The multimedia components included some pretty spooky Soviet-style architecture and an ongoing loop of early film that Em instantly recognized part of from her studies in the field. We then wandered through some Canadian artist wildernesses before heading out to meet up with a dear friend near The Danforth.
----
I'd met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
la_rainette and family a number of years ago, but today, Em and Eleanor got to, too, and it was a delightful repast. Cathy caffeinated us, plied us with all makes of sugar, and shared the company of mere, as well as Froglet and Tadpole (both of whom have grown amazingly since I last saw them) and some very reluctant-to-come-out cats. We literally herded cats, as they prepared to take them all to the vet for some routine shots, and we bid adieu to one of the nicest folks we've ever been blessed to meet in this place.
Her final blessing was recommending a restaurant nearby for Emily's birthday dinner- a wood-oven Italian place, in what must have once been a dress or shoe shop on Danforth Avenue, called il Fornello. Marvelous pizza and pasta, a melted-brownie SOMETHING in lieu of cake for the birthday girl, and her first official legal-outside-the-lower-48 drink. We talked on the way back about how responsible she is about such things; both of us grups retired on New Years Eve long before she came home from a night downtown here, and neither of us ever had a worry that she would have done anything, or even gotten in a position to do anything, that would have kept us up all night. We done good 20 years ago in an equally cold-dawning Rochester morning, and it echoed just as done-good today:)
We cleared the border before 8, survived the herding of our own poor-pitiful-late-for-dinner animals, and the Sabres just pulled off a win that we can't see on the damn telly. Tomorrow, reality returns to our working lives, but life, right now, is pretty sweet:)
Hey, no hard feelings, eh? Your roads are clear, your people eclectic and your parking meters take American quarters.
Buffalo dawned frigid and with a bit of snow as we worked out when we'd depart and where we'd go. By the time we got on the road, the snow had progressed into squalls, but within minutes of touching Royal soil, the snow stopped and the sun came out.
It's been years since any of us had been over, more than a decade since the three of us last went together, but oh how I love how subtly and wondrously things change within 45 km of your front door. Just a few ticks down the 405, you pass The Beer Store; how can you go wrong in a neighbourhood like that? Not long past, we went by a Don Cherry's Sports Grill I'd not seen before. (No link; the corporate site is pretty annoying, just like Grapes is;) Eleanor speculated that they probably have a pretty strict dress code; "sorry, sir, but we can't let you in; your sports jacket isn't loud enoof." Then, somewhere around Missasaugua, we passed a van belonging to the Two Small Men With Big Hearts moving company; I don't know what it is about this industry that inspires such cleverness in naming, but these two certainly moved me far more than the Seven Santini Brothers ever did.
Once off the highways, we headed through Chinatown to get to the Art Gallery of Ontario for the Chagall exhibition. First, though, a Brinks truck decided to try making an exhibition out of the right front end of my car, cutting across two lanes of Spadina in front of us to make a left onto King Street. (What were we gonna do, get into a shootout with the guys in the back?) We happily survived that, I dropped the grrls outside the entrance and scored cheap on-street parking within a block.
The exhibit, organized by Paris's Pompidou, showed a lot of the man's work and plenty, too, of his contemporaries from both the Old Country and France. The multimedia components included some pretty spooky Soviet-style architecture and an ongoing loop of early film that Em instantly recognized part of from her studies in the field. We then wandered through some Canadian artist wildernesses before heading out to meet up with a dear friend near The Danforth.
----
I'd met
la_rainette and family a number of years ago, but today, Em and Eleanor got to, too, and it was a delightful repast. Cathy caffeinated us, plied us with all makes of sugar, and shared the company of mere, as well as Froglet and Tadpole (both of whom have grown amazingly since I last saw them) and some very reluctant-to-come-out cats. We literally herded cats, as they prepared to take them all to the vet for some routine shots, and we bid adieu to one of the nicest folks we've ever been blessed to meet in this place.Her final blessing was recommending a restaurant nearby for Emily's birthday dinner- a wood-oven Italian place, in what must have once been a dress or shoe shop on Danforth Avenue, called il Fornello. Marvelous pizza and pasta, a melted-brownie SOMETHING in lieu of cake for the birthday girl, and her first official legal-outside-the-lower-48 drink. We talked on the way back about how responsible she is about such things; both of us grups retired on New Years Eve long before she came home from a night downtown here, and neither of us ever had a worry that she would have done anything, or even gotten in a position to do anything, that would have kept us up all night. We done good 20 years ago in an equally cold-dawning Rochester morning, and it echoed just as done-good today:)
We cleared the border before 8, survived the herding of our own poor-pitiful-late-for-dinner animals, and the Sabres just pulled off a win that we can't see on the damn telly. Tomorrow, reality returns to our working lives, but life, right now, is pretty sweet:)
