Posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago at 11:33 pm. 2 comments
Over reading week I got a chance to visit the Toronto Auto Show. It was a cool first time experience courtesy of being invited by some friends from my first year res — oh how long ago that feels like now. I’m pretty sure I haven’t been to an auto show of any sorts before, but I could be wrong, for some reason I think I may have been to just one. We went on a holiday, which of course meant that the place was absolutely packed >.<
One thing that really puzzled me is how many people were there with very young children. And I mean like under 10 young. There were so many of them! My other social observation of the crowds is that guys like to have a picture taken while making a ridiculous facial expression in the seat of an open top car. Women like to check out the trunk of any car they touch, the SUVs and hatchbacks that have the huge rear door seem to be a bonus for them.
But, lets have some pictures. I feel like mine turned out ok, considering I'm still taking them with my cell phone. Adrian of course had his DSLR along. I’m pretty sure if we ever see his pictures there won’t even be close of a comparison XD
This is a somewhat messy shot of the Ford GT. But I happen to find the car to be really cool. Even though this is a remake the original does come with a very nice
racing heritage.
I can’t remember who made this or what it was called. But I don’t really have any other weird car pictures, so I figured I’d snag this one. Could you actually imagine having a party in the back of one of these?!
The sexy Jaguar that Top Gear recently called the one that finally brings the kick back. I’d drive that.
In the back there is the Mercedes SLR that was impossible to get close to. I’m not sure who decided to place a showcase car right next to a wall on one side and a display stand at its nose! In front is a Maybach of some sorts. What’s really cool about this brand is you can customize it however you want when you order it. They’ll mix custom colours, they’ll change any component inside, they’ll put in a backtub, whatever you want as long as you have the money to pay. It’s also totally integrated with trendy technology inside like wireless and Bluetooth which adds geek points.
Mr. Bond would be so proud of this baby. He actually had one in a very recent movie that I’m in love with. It’s too bad he crashed it in it 
Ok, here is perhaps one of the most anticipated cars in North America. The Nissan GTR. I have to be totally honest and admit to liking the looks of the previous models a bit more then this one. But hey, at least this one is legally coming to North America!
Purrrr! 
Most of us came to an agreement that we didn’t really know what Pontiac was thinking on this one. I mean it’s kinda cool, but totally not practical and just weird. But it does look pretty, so here you go.
There weren’t a lot of exotics around, but I had to get at least some Italian flavour in there. I didn’t so much care for the colour choice. That blueish tint looked even worse in person than it does now in this picture.
And finally… I can’t remember what it was, but it’s orange!
In closing, parking in Toronto is effing expensive!
Posted 1 year ago at 5:18 pm. 5 comments
Welcome back from the intermission and in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the first part that you’re looking for.
I actually had to do a double take on the closing of part 1 since I couldn’t remember where it was exactly that I stopped. So, with that done, here we go!
Indecision. It’s sometimes awesome, and sometimes it’s kind of annoying. Our plan was to walk somewhere, and do something. Which basically resulted in us talking and walking up some street just to do a u-turn because we’d realise there was absolutely nothing in that direction. There were several aspects of Toronto that I suppose are worth mentioning at this point. The taxi drivers are out to hit something, or someone, no exceptions. If they can’t accomplish plan A, then they will do their best to drive with a vendetta as plan B. There are a lot of homeless people who need some of your change for whatever reason they give you. I sort of like the ones that just don’t give me a reason at all, I want to believe them more XD
We found ourselves at the movie theatre, we actually came to this decision after Andrew insisted on us going to see the Much Music building because he hasn’t been there himself. I actually think I have. It was closed, and dark, and disappointing. We were going to make an effort to see Elizabeth, but since we lacked the power to traverse through time, and the last show was more then 4 hours ago, we opted for the only available option in American Gangster. Interestingly enough, someone has leaked a DVDrip version of this movie earlier last week and it seems that just about everyone had it before the movie was even out. We bought some drinks for the movie and bought our tickets, both of which made Andrew’s recent post on the value of entertainment that much more painful to our bank accounts
I won’t spoil the movie, but it was good. It is rated 18A and does live up to that rating in covering just about everything that those labels talk about as far as bad material. What was annoying is that there was someone’s car outside for large parts of the movie that was blasting music and it was really annoying! We joked about asking for refunds, then actually tried to find the customer service desk and failed =/
On the way out, there were a lot of flashing police lights, lots of police cars, lots of police on horseback, and eventually even 2 trucks from the special task force. A couple of guys were “spread” over the hoods of the cruisers and there was a large crowd. We didn’t stick around, but it was like the movie we had just seen continuing for real. It was based on a true story after all!
After getting our north/south direction (no seriously) figured out again. We went off towards Andrew’s place of residence. All the public transport had stopped, even though we felt since the clocks were brought back an hour the subway was technically still open. I guess the operators didn’t agree with us on that one. It was a pretty cool walk and it was around 2-3am, but we did visit Andrew’s campus, which he was so proud of, dodged some light posts in an apparent game that I’m awesome at, figured out what another building on campus was and finally caught a cab for the rest of the trip.
My name’s Bond, James Bond
Sometimes I like to think that I’m totally normal. And every second that I don’t have those thoughts something happens to prove otherwise. Since Andrew we couldn’t invade Andrew’s private sanctuary (I heard that he has an Apple tree there and keeps a caged Steve Jobs under it) we got a room for actually really cheap. The catch! The room was for one person, and for some reason having a second person stay in it was more then the room in the first place! So with a cell call initiating our dastardly plan and synching the timing I went to get the keys while Andrew and Alice snuck in through the back door. It was actually amusing because the person at the desk has all these camera monitors and he turned to check them out and I got his attention again by asking something I can’t even remember. Turned out the guy working the desk also spoke Russian. Mission accomplished and we were in the building safe and clear.
I guess we haven’t had any pictures yet, ok, here we go:
In the morning we discovered the TV had a choice of about 6 channels, which were really mostly static, but at least 2 of them were those channels where one guy sits in front of the camera and talks about something religious.
We actually examined the room in an effort to find something shady and wrong. But we were pretty tired so that didn’t last long. That brown blanket thing is a static making machine, it hurts!
The floor was nice and uhm, nice. It actually wasn’t too bad, except it was pretty cold. Also I snore, it was described as sort of like a “machine” that might be a “lawnmower”. That kinda sucks! XD
Andrew had left to perform at a church service, so we were on our own, and after sleeping in for a bit we finally made some plans. After having to unplug the alarm clock because through joking around about it having a USB port to charge a BlackBerry, Alice somehow set it off and we couldn’t find the off button!
We mostly just walked around and looked at things like tourists. It was Sunday morning and a lot of everything was still closed. Our only real goal was to get some breakfast somewhere, pickup some cakes for someone’s birthday and then catch the bus.
We finally decided on this nice, small place called who’s name I have now forgotten. It was “Samantha’s Place” or something like that. It was pretty nice and we got some breakfast there. One of the reasons it stood out was because I actually realised they had the Food Channel playing on the big LCD TV they had hanging above the counter area. I thought that was really clever and interesting.
It was seriously like $10.00 for that. I ate the pickle :p
The bread was the best part, but the chili was good.
Sorry for the bad picture, I chickened out when one of the people working there started to walk towards the screen. But the lady on the Food Channel was wearing this really low cut shirt thing, and it was probably not the best thing for a cooking show where you know, they show your midsection and what you’re doing with the food.
We walked around a bit more around the fancy and expensive part of Toronto where we found ourselves. I think I saw a lot of over $100,000 cars. Alice took me to this Italian style boutique food shop she found earlier. Everything was really fancy and pretty and expensive. I only got one picture off before we were informed that they were so exclusive that we actually weren’t allowed to take pictures there. So here you go sweet tooth lovers, rejoice:
At this point it was pretty much time to wrap it up. The cake lady opened her store on time at 11:30, we grabbed the cakes and made our way to the subway. I can actually say I’ve been on the Toronto subway now, because I’m pretty sure I haven’t before. The bus back was at 12:30 and was absolutely full. We grabbed a bus that headed to Kitchener instead and was almost empty, it even got there an hour earlier, I take that as an overall win.
Well, as they say all good things must come to and end, and so must this one. We were on our way home, tired, but happy about the weekend. Pretty much slept the entire trip on the bus. So here’s one for closing time (it turns out neither one of us has been to the CN Tower).
Posted 1 year ago at 9:51 pm. 7 comments
Thank you once again for coming here and actually reading this junk and leaving your thoughts. I thought I would give you a fair warning on this one that once again this is going to be one of those patented wall of text performance style posts (although I do try to use proper breaks and grammar). If you’re ready for some of that, some fun and some pictures then please buckle your seat belts, remain comfortable until we’re well on our way through the first couple of paragraphs and that’s that
I didn’t officially have this weekend off from donning, but I did make arrangements that there was a very good chance that I won’t be around Saturday evening and most of Sunday. The story begins with a concert performance in Toronto of “St. John Passion” by Johann Sebastian Bach. Through her intricate network of connections Alice managed to snag some tickets to the show. Originally Andrew was supposed to go, since he needs all the chances to see how it goes, since we expect him to be performing for us in the near future now! That plan was of course scrapped when it was beginning to look like Andrew would actually be performing in this show, as part of the main choir. Go plan changes! Of course it was to our great sadness that we later discovered that that would actually not be happening, guess what, plan change!
Alice left on the Greyound early Saturday morning, she had to meet some friends and I opted for the sleep in and catch a later bus approach. When I finally went to get my tickets around 10 I realised it was tour day here on campus. So many people, groups and families it was crazy. Our Student Life Centre (building to hang out at and do work at and live at) was absolutely packed with presentations from all the faculties on campus and people eager to digest that material. I weaved my way through the mass of bodies to the Turnkey Desk and got my tickets. They keep changing these tickets and how they work. Apparently now they’re technically for a specific bus, but at the same time as long as the source and destination is sort of the same you can still use them on almost any Greyhound, even though they say they’re for a time and a bus >.< They totally contradict themselves! Which did lead to a conversation with the girl who was working at the desk:
Me: "So, I don't know which bus I'm taking back"
Her: "Don't worry about it"
Me: "But this ticket says it's for a specific bus, which I'm not sure I'm going to take!"
Her: "Don't worry about it"
Me: "..."
Her: "There's another bus at 7pm"
Me: "Ok, so..."
Her: "Don't worry about it!"
Me: *blink* *blink* "Thanks!"
I got to the bus stop about 30 minutes early. Good call me! By the time the bus left there were 5 or 6 people standing with the promise of more seats when we stopped off at Kitchener. By the time we got there and everyone who needed to get off did so, and those that were standing seated themselves we had 1 empty seat left and about 30 people who needed to get on. I felt kinda bad for them, but I guess they were going to have to wait for another bus close to an hour later. I did benefit from this a bit though as we weren't going to stop in Cambridge anymore or any other stops and headed straight to Toronto instead.
So there I was standing outside of the Royal York Hotel. Really expensive by the looks of the clientele. As Alice was bored in Toronto for at least the last 4 hours she was actually pretty close, in fact, she was probably inside of the Hotel. But it did lead to what I for some reason found to be an absolutely hilarious conversation.
Alice: "Where are you?"
Me: "By the entrance"
Alice: "Oh, ok, well, I'm kind of lost... no actually I'm totally lost inside"
Me: "o.O"
Alice: "So which side are you on, north, south?"
Me: "I see the, uhm, CN Tower from this side"
I don't know why, but when I hung up I was definitely laughing. The fact that Alice was lost and asking me which geographical side of the building I was on in a city where I haven't been for in a good year, so I definitely had no idea, to me it was hilarious. I'm easily amused, ok, I'm sorry!
Pro-dinner tip: if it says meant for sharing, it’s really meant for sharing. If it says it’s for 1 person, they’re lying (it’s for 3)!
From a quick conversation with Shannon, one of the awesome Dons on my buildings team, I was told you either “love it or hate it” about the building that the concert was taking place in. I’m going to go with the former. It looked really interesting in its design and was definitely different and lively enough to impress. I’ll save the detailed impressions, which will make reading this unbearable, and just stick to some pictures!
The performance was fantastic! I’m really not an overly religious person, and the theme of the performed piece was, but that didn’t matter at all. It was just nice to listen to and see. I’m sorry I don’t have more pictures, and especially didn’t get a chance to take one of the soloists, but there was a no picture rule in effect and I decided to obey it. Speaking of which, the last post was made from Alice’s BlackBerry. We’re such stereotypical UW students it’s amusing. But what we also found through this process is that as soon as intermission was over, that both our devices lost signal completely. They’re probably using some kind of signal blocker, which is curious for the geeky. The only negative I have to mention is that the gentleman who sat next to me was falling asleep for most of the performance, or at least listening to it with his eyes closed, which to me seemed to defeat the point of him changing his glasses every time the show started! I think he snored a couple of times, and he kept using my ribs as the stopping rest of his elbow!
Having fully taken in the performance we were on our way out and had a chat with Andrew! He was totally blowing us off and giving us such a hard time with where he actually was, bastard! XD It was easy though, as he was actually waiting at the doors where we came in. Making our way there we found him talking to some people who were in fancier dress then us. We just waited outside and had a fun conversation about how Andrew is now a big shot somebody and how we’re just his previous university friends from way back when. We thought of taking some pictures and taking bets on how long he’d be before he noticed poor us 
— but it wasn’t long, and some guy walked into the picture totally ruining it. The last remark is the trio was together!
Stayed tuned, or even better take a break, part 2 coming later!
