After what was literally a 12-hour bus ride, we arrived in Toronto via Megabus well after 7:30 p.m., when in fact we should have gotten there two hours earlier, at around 5:20 (chalk the late arrival up to rainy weather that slowed us down somewhere in upstate New York and the bus driver’s insistence on waiting for two passengers who were detained at the Canadian border for carrying liquid items with hospital labels or something or other (Mama Hog got wind of this somehow). Meanwhile, after everyone departed the bus so that it could be searched, Mama Hog sent me back to get the entertainment bag with all the netbooks and DVD stuff, just in time for a drug sniffing dog to corner me. Good thing its handler was nice enough to call it back before it sank its teeth into me.
At any rate, following that ordeal, we got back on the road and the bus eventually pulled into town. We walked around the corner from the depot after that and hopped in the cab of a really reckless Arab cabbie who chatted on the phone the whole time while repeatedly asking us for the street we were heading to, which we iterated over and over again, and all this while a perfectly good GPS system hung from his windshield. Eventually we convinced him to punch in the address, but we didn’t intend for him to do so while driving at excessive speeds that nearly took the life of a crossing pedestrian and very nearly landed us in the rear of several turning cars. Karen made him pull over before long to finish inserting the address, because his driving became more and more erratic.
The apartment we rented for the week was located at 95 Craven Road in a Toronto neighborhood called Upper Beaches. The owner called the apartment Craven Cove, and we found it to be quite charming—a two-level affair with full kitchen, living room, and sun room (or office) upstairs, and a bedroom and bathroom downstairs in the basement. There was one flimsy lock on the front door that made us feel uneasy, and the basement bedroom was like something out of Dexter (made us, well, me feel like someone could make their way downstairs and hack us to pieces). All jokes aside, we thought the place was really accommodating and inviting.
The worst experience of our first night in Toronto, however, was the horrible, dreadful, and downright disgusting Thai food we had from a local restaurant on Kingston Road, about four blocks down. I ordered coconut rice (which was supposed to be sweet but turned out to be half so and half uncooked) and chicken satay, which was overcooked, and the peanut sauce of which was too thick and unappealing to look at much less savor. The spring rolls were the only thing we ate without complaint.
After braving the cold apartment (and we’re talking middle of SUMMER here) we all hunkered down in the king size bed under a nice set of warm covers for a good night sleep, hoping that the next day would bring us better experiences.
The apartment we rented for the week was located at 95 Craven Road in a Toronto neighborhood called Upper Beaches. The owner called the apartment Craven Cove, and we found it to be quite charming—a two-level affair with full kitchen, living room, and sun room (or office) upstairs, and a bedroom and bathroom downstairs in the basement. There was one flimsy lock on the front door that made us feel uneasy, and the basement bedroom was like something out of Dexter (made us, well, me feel like someone could make their way downstairs and hack us to pieces). All jokes aside, we thought the place was really accommodating and inviting.The worst experience of our first night in Toronto, however, was the horrible, dreadful, and downright disgusting Thai food we had from a local restaurant on Kingston Road, about four blocks down. I ordered coconut rice (which was supposed to be sweet but turned out to be half so and half uncooked) and chicken satay, which was overcooked, and the peanut sauce of which was too thick and unappealing to look at much less savor. The spring rolls were the only thing we ate without complaint.
After braving the cold apartment (and we’re talking middle of SUMMER here) we all hunkered down in the king size bed under a nice set of warm covers for a good night sleep, hoping that the next day would bring us better experiences.
No comments:
Post a Comment