Emily and Linda’s Travel Blog

Benny is just back from the dog kennel. Pretty exhausted after a week of non-stop socializing 

Which is not really a district. More of a complex of buildings that were once an old distillery.  Now restored with shops, restaurants and art galleries. The most interesting to me was a shop for and run by deaf people. Most of the folks inside were signing so it was of course very quiet. I bought some delicious smelling tea to take home. One of the coolest things there was an almost life sized puppet/doll that was designed so that someone could put their hands through the sleeves and then sign for the puppet instead of speaking. We watched a little girl and her parents using it. She was loving it. It didn't feel right to take a picture so here's a close approximation I found on another web page, but imagine the puppet twice as big and instead of putting your hands into gloves as in this picture, there were only sleeves and you put your whole arms through so that your hands become the puppet's hands. Pretty smart design.  

We also watched some fellows starting the process of making sake

Here are some pictures from the Distillery complex.  The brains in the glass cases are kind of like the cows that other cities have done, where different people offer their unique take on how it should be designed. Why brains I'm not sure. 

We loved the Chihuly exhibit. It was mostly set in an all black space and floodlit. Not as organic as some of his garden works, but very dramatic. The room with the glass ceiling had mats on the floor so you could lie down and look up at the glass  

We took our first Toronto subway ride today - to the Royal Ontario Museum. Very different feeling from a NYC subway. For one thing, no doors between cars so it's like one long corrodor inside

Here's how you know you've arrived at the Museum Station

We wanted to see the Chihuly glass installation, but first we had to check out the building. Here are the old and new entrances. Anyone who knows Linda will see that I was well asvised to find myself a nice spot in the shade because she and her camera would be busy for a while

Happily I had some entertainment 

We'd heard about this on our various tours, but not seen it till today. For $200 you can don a red jumpsuit, hook yourself to a rail and hang out over the edge if the CN tour. Today we were having cocktails on the balcony when we looked up and sure enough, there was a group of people doing it. Even with Linda's super zoom lens, they're still tiny which gives you an idea how far up they are. Here's a link to a video of the process from up there. I can assure you we will not be filming it ourselves.   

Linda picked our destination for today, but I got to choose the lunch spot. We went to Banu, an Iranian restaurant which was spectacular. We started with sour cherry juice and pomegranate juice, mast o khiar (a yogurt dish with cucumber, rose petals, walnuts,and raisins) and salad e sekanjebin (grilled romaine hearts with pomegranate seeds, fried mint, sheep's milk cheese, and sekanjebin-  sweetened syrup with vinegar and mint).  The main couse was zereshk polo va morgh (turmeric and saffron braised chicken with barberry saffron rice). We took pictures of all the dishes except the last which we were enjoying so much that we were halfway through before we realized that we had failed to capture its beauty. The rice part is called wedding rice because its so beautiful and "jewel-like” and therefore suitable for a wedding party. So the last picture is cribbed from the internet, but ours looked very similar, though a smaller plate.  The service was very good and our waiter took a lot of time to explain the dishes to us. She seemed to really enjoy sharing her culture's cuisine with us even though she must have answered the same questions many times.

Today was Linda's pick - the West Queen West neighborhood which feels a little like the old Soho or the old Dumbo in NYC with a dash of San Francisco's Mission District. The further west you go, the more edgy and scrambled the shops and galleries are. As you move east, closer to Bathurst St, the chichier stores predominate, but few chain stores and a lot of very different points of view. Along the way we encountered a place that sells crocheted "plants you can't kill", a store that has everything you could possibly want for a bar (who knew there were sooo many varieties of bitters?), a doorway that invites you to shake hands,and a whole lot of other stuff.  There's a brand new Shinola store we popped into (I was surprised to see a Shinola bocce set - or was it lawn bowling?).  Then there was the place that will turn your selfie into an action figure (selftraits).  [I still haven't figured out how to control the order of the photos so they're a little scrambled- the last one is the action-figure selfies].

We also stopped for a while at the Stephen Bulger Gallery which has a show  of about 40 of Vivian Maier's photos.  For those who don't know the story, she grew up in NYC, was a nanny employed in the suburbs of Chicago, and made one trip around the world in 1959.  No one knew she was a street photographer until a fellow named Maloof and two other fellows came across negatives of her photos at about the same time and one of them posted some the photos on his blog in 2008-2009.  Suddenly she was a sensation posthumously. We spent some time looking at books of her photos as well as the ones in the gallery. Photos were forbidden, but you can see some at this link. http://vivianmaier.blogspot.ca/.  They're black and white, mostly street scenes and people. Fascinating story and interesting show. 

The boat left us off right at the old Power Plant, now an art gallery. We had a great time at an installation of interactive work by Franz Erhard Walter it was a little high concept for me. You walk into a room with a lot of folded canvas cloth in piles. The idea is that you open the piled fabric out and then interact with it, creating new shapes that change and occupy spce in different new ways. Four kids did a better job of letting go and enjoying it than the adults:

Next we headed West to the Toronto Music Garden, designed by Yo-Yo Ma and Julie Moir Messervy.  It has six sections, each one a reflection of a movement in the Bach Cello Suite no. 1. A really lovely refuge.  We sat for a while on a comfy bench and listened to the Suite on Linda's iPhone.  Ah yes, vacation mode definitely kicking in now.....

There are several tour bus companies in Toronto, but we chose the City Sightseeing bus because it also included a boat trip out onto Lake Ontario and around the Toronto Islands. This morning we made our way down to the Harborfront which is quite the scene. Boats of many kinds including canoes and kayaks, an outdoor theater with free concerts, restaurants, ice cream booths, and the Power Plant Gallery which has rotating shows. We started with the boat ride.  Here is how Canadians line up - so much less stressed than in NYC

The trip was a great cool way to pass the morning and the islands are lovely. So close to the City and yet seemingly another world

Next stop was the Power Plant Gallery, but more about that in the next post. And finally lunch at the Amsterdam Brewhouse, supposedly voted the best patio in all of Toronto. It is a great location right on the water  plus they even had gluten free beer (though from Milwaukee) which was perfect with my fish tacos