canada two: ice cream special

wow i nearly forgot to tell you the best part about friday - the toronto zine library! located in the tranzac building, 292 brunswick avenue, south of bloor, this is a tiny room of discovery with a really inspiring and comprehensive selection of zines. i felt honoured to leave a copy of my zine here and to know that i was going to become a part of something so awesome! my host and companion very kindly bought me a cute blue tzl button badge, of which i am very proud, and a surprise package of zines, which included copies of wavelength and the assassin and the whiner and quite possibly some other things too...

saturday - my fifth full day in canada - was special for one important reason. that reason is the phenomenon of the YARDSALE. they were *everywhere*. i was in heaven. the only criticism i have relates to signage, but that's a minor grievance and maybe part of the fun... it's this way! oh no - it's over there! oh, it's back there! dang! so by the time you finally locate the yardsale (or perhaps you stumble across a different one), it's a thrill.

we rummaged through a few yardsales whilst walking into oshawa on saturday morning. the sun was strong and i wished i'd been wearing sunscreen and not 60 denier hosiery. i ate a bagel along the way. it was enormous and the cream cheese was incredibly creamy. actually i couldn't finish it. now this is the point where i should have returned to star records to buy the feelies lp i had prevaricated over earlier in the week. it was only $10; i should have just taken a chance on it. the one that got away... sigh.

we had a look around the art gallery; there was an interesting installation by Maria Hlady, of a piano that had been deconstructed to a degree and hooked up with some mechanical gear to make it plink plonk at intervals... it was great to come across this in a dark and unpopulated room, in the middle of oshawa.

by way of contrast this was followed by a trip to the mall for dairy queen ice creams... (isabella's gelato eluding me once more as they close early on saturdays during the summer). i had "strawberry cheesequake"... an interesting experience, not as good as haagen dazs strawberry cheesecake ice cream but fun and authentically junk foody. i couldn't eat all the biscuity bits. also it was a huge portion, and i got the smallest. it was served in a paper cup about the size in which you'd be given a normal take away coffee. i felt pretty full after that.
the walk into town was about an hour so we took a bus back home, i had a shower and a nap, then scrabble and tv to fill up the evening.

sunday was a very exciting day for me as this was when teresa and i had planned to meet! i got to know teresa after i contacted her about her band the haircuts, asking if she'd like to be interviewed for my zine, and we had been emailing each other nearly every day since. it seemed so amazing that we'd ever have the chance to meet, considering the distance between us. teresa arrived with her friend kevin hainey who lives in toronto and was letting us both stay over at his apartment so we'd get a reasonable amount of time to hang out, considering how i am usually in england...

we walked around kensington as it was "car free sunday"; a lot of people had turned out, it was sunny, they had street art and performances. we all got an icrecream - i chose a double cup of watermelon and coconut, the watermelon had chocolate coated oats to imitate pips and alltogether it was delicious and exotic. we visited a few record shops around queen st. west, including rotate this which had a pretty great selection of new vinyl as well as some second hand records (nothing special) and loads of cds that i didn't have the energy to peruse.

the other record shops were mainly second hand and while i'd normally be desperately keen to browse, i didn't want to find *too* much as i was already spending a lot and i was worried about how i'd get things home. so i tried to stick to buying stuff that i thought would be hard to get hold of at home, or that was a lot cheaper to buy here. kevin was trying to find a miles davis record to complete his collection of the years 1965-75 but he didn't have any luck with that. i was surprised to learn that teresa isn't really interested in record shopping! but it's understandable as the kind of things she likes would probably not turn up too often in these places.

working our way down queen st towards kevin's place, we stopped at fresh to eat dinner. i can recommend this chain of vegetarian restaurants (there are three in toronto) because the food was really tasty - well flavoured and cooked just right, healthy, and reasonably priced. the portions here were enormous too but when it's basically just tofu, vegetables and brown rice you don't feel so guilty about that!

staying at kevin's was great and i'm so pleased teresa decided to make it an overnight trip... just one afternoon together would have felt confusingly short... we had a lot to talk about! also, i felt pretty at home in that apartment as kevin has similar interests to a lot of people i know in brighton - he's in a noise band (disguises) and we shared a lot of cultural reference points. he had a record that one of my ex-boyfriends had played on, which made the world seem very tiny indeed, but then, he did have an awful lot of records...

the next morning kevin went to work and me and teresa went out to get breakfast and finish browsing rotate, before going back to the apartment to pick up our stuff and go to the bus station for teresa to catch her bus home. it was really sad saying goodbye after having such a brief but enjoyable time together but i've promised to come back and spend more time with her in the not too distant future.

after she left i didn't feel like going straight back to oshawa so i wandered off into toronto. toronto is amazingly easy to find your way around: i wanted to go back to the kensington market area for lunch and i found it on my first attempt. then i needed to travel up towards bloor and i found where i was going easily. my next destination was the beguiling, a famous comic shop at 601 markham st, they have a vast selection of self published comics which i am always interested to see, as well as everything else you might wish for in terms of manga, graphic novels, comics etc... truly a great shop. peter, the owner, was really friendly and helpful, he asked what i liked to read and suggested a few things i might find interesting.

the shop was quite hot and stuffy so after i left i went to find yet more ice cream. this time i happened upon a little kiosk on bathurst st, called sweet favourite i believe, and i chose new york cherry cheesecake flavour (yes, more cheesecake ice cream, i know, that was just the kind of mood i was in). sweet favourite is worth mentioning i feel, because that was the best ice cream i had while in canada.

then i went to write and drink coffee at a bar i'd seen near the zine library, with seating outside... i got hungry and ordered fries (even though it was hard not to say chips) and when they arrived, well guess what, it was a bloody enormous portion. i wanted to try and share them with someone but couldn't think of a way of offering that wouldn't seem weird. they were great. so much nicer than chips at home.

after that it was getting late so i had to get back to oshawa... toronto was quite seductive in the evening and i entertained fantasies of staying out in bars and making new friends but it wasn't to be. end of part two!