that’s whacked

canada, eh?

Monday, Sep 22. 2003  –  Category: Food, Music, Travel

My family and I went up to Toronto, Canada this past weekend to have a mini-family-reunion and celebrate my grandfather’s 87th birthday. We also went to both the Buddhist temple and the burial site to pay respects to my grandmother who passed away in 1996.

I seriously spent the entire weekend eating. We took a horrible red-eye flight leaving SFO at midnight and arrived in Toronto at around 9am. While my parents napped, my cousins Peggy and Gilbert took Jaime and I out on a “Toronto Eating Tour”, which while really just localised to the local Kensington Market, was awesome. We were pretty much eating non-stop. Gilbert & Peggy also introduced us to these things called ‘two-bite brownies’ which were so damn good, we brought back 6 bags to the states with us. After stuffing ourselves on cheese, enpanadas from a Chilean restaurant, brownies, and crisps, we got back home only to find out we were going to Dim Sum with my parents and my uncle. So we had dim sum at 3pm (great chicken’s feet!) and headed home to take a nap in order to rest up for……. family banquet at 6:30p!

The banquet was your standard fare, with the best part seeing my granddad so happy. I’ve never seem him so happy; he was smiling the whole time!

After 12 courses, we headed home to relax for an hour or so before heading out at 11:45pm to go to a lounge called “Habitat” in downtown Toronto. We met up with my other cousin Albert (Gilbert & Peggy’s middle brother), who was on a steady path to getting wasted while celebrating his last exam of his life ever (he’s an ER doctor). Anyway, after hanging out there for a bit, we went to a billiards club where Gilbert subsequently whooped our collective asses.

We then headed home to partake of toasted bagels with cream cheese, sliced cheeses, ketchup chips, and (more!) brownies sitting on a chilly and crisp outdoor deck on the third floor of Peggy’s house on a nice Toronto morning at 4:30am.

The next day we headed out for….. dim sum. After dim sum we went to pay respects to my grandmother’s grave, and the Lau family burial plot. After that, Peggy, Gilbert, Jaime, and I drove home and stopped at an estate sale we saw signs for.

After browsing around for 10 minutes it finally hit me (I’m a little slow, okay?) that a (very much) older woman had just passed away, hence the estate sale. While this put a slight damper on things, it was still cool to see all the stuff she’d accumulated throughout her life. We saw a ceritificate from some royal board of medical examiners in London certifying her to resuscitate people who had ‘apparently drowned’ in London… from 1918. We also found a really cool fire extinguisher from 1938 that Peggy bought. I picked up an old ceramic mug labeled “PORK DRIPPINGS”.

And that’s about it….after a long weekend stuffing and gorging myself on great food, I’m back in the states. Time to take a break….stop blogging… and go eat some brownies.