Road Trip 2009: Days 6 & 7

Day 6

We left Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, and we were on our way to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We had to stop in Detroit, MI, because my buddy needed to get a Visa to enter Canada. I've never been to Detroit, or entered into Ontario, Canada from the west, so it was a day of many firsts. We left Cedar Point around 6am and arrived in Detroit around 8:30am.


The downtown area of Detroit was surprisingly nice, especially the waterfront area. But the odd thing about downtown Detroit was that no one was around. You can walk a block and not run into another person, so it made things a bit eerie.


My buddy got his Visa and we headed for Toronto. During our drive there were several delays getting to Toronto. First, instead of taking QEW 401 we took QEW 403 and we ended up having to backtrack about 30 minutes. Then we hit some major traffic due to a fatal car accident on the Gardiner Expressway ... so in retrospect, we should have stayed on the QEW 403 because we would have avoided this delay. But we made it there safe, so it doesn't matter if we arrived an hour or so behind scheduled.


We arrived at the hotel, freshened up and made our way to Chinatown.


It was a really chilly day so we had to bring our jackets. Yes, jackets ... in July! Walked along Spadina Ave. and we knew reach Chinatown when the all the signs change to Chinese (an obvious sign). We stopped in a couple of markets, before looking for a place to have dinner. We didn't know where to eat, so my buddy stop an elderly Chinese couple and asked for a recommendation for a restaurant. In Chinese, they recommended a restaurant called New Sky. We thanked them and made our way to the restaurant.


Food was Cantonese and it was delicious. There was so much of it that I stopped eating halfway through. I was pushed by my buddy to eat more .. so I did and we cleaned our plates. My buddy asked a waitress to recommend a Dim Sum place so we can have lunch the next day. She thought for several moments but she finally told gave us place to visit.


We left the restaurant and walked around the Eaton Centre...


and the Church & Wellesley gay area...


before taking the TTC back to the hotel for some rest.

Day 7

We headed back to Chinatown to the Dim Sum place recommended to us the previous day. I had no idea of what Dim Sum consisted. I thought it was something like potstickers, but I was so wrong. Dim Sum in a bunch a light dishes that you can order a la carte and the meal comes with tea.


If my memory serves me correctly, we had about 10 different Dim Sum dishes. My buddy urged me to try chicken feet and I resisted for a bit before relenting. Our first dishes came out and we began to eat our meal. I tried the chicken feet and I didn't hate it. Maybe if it was fried I would had liked it a bit better. Dish after dish ... when I thought we were done, something new came to our table.

We finally finished our meal and walked around a bit. We headed to the University of Toronto, headed back to the Eaton Center because it was open


then we headed to the CN Tower:


After viewing the city from high atop the CN Tower, we quickly walked back to the hotel to get cleaned up and meet my friend Paul for dinner. During our travels around the city, we noticed that the trash from the receptacles were just overflowing throw out the city:


I didn't know why, but we decided to ask Paul since he is a resident of the city. We hopped on the TTC to the Danforth Area of Toronto and had dinner at Astoria which has great souvlaki (I like the lamb). During dinner we were informed that trash is not being collected throughout the city because the sanitation workers were on strike. That explained the squalor we've seen on the street. After dinner we walked back to the downtown area through wealthy Rosedale neighbourhood, past the Royal Ontario Museum to see the completed renovations, around University of Toronto and back to the hotel.

More to come ....