(Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
We are on the way back from a quick trip to Toronto: before I go any further, I apologize for not meeting up with more of you while there. However, we have quite a “social backlog” with our Toronto friends and we didn’t have time to see everybody this time around!
Of course, there is always time to eat…and so I brought my wife to the legendary Jumbo Empanadas restaurant on Augusta Avenue in the Kensington Market district. It doesn’t look like much from the outside (it is on the left side of the picture at the top of this blog) and it is very spartan inside. However, their empanadas are very good and very large, while their corn pie is magnificent.
In Chile, corn pie is served in a pie plate and consists of a top layer of shredded and cooked sweet corn over a bottom layer of ground meat, olives, raisins, onions and even a hard-boiled egg. Words can’t do it justice…and I don’t have a picture either because I ate mine so quickly! All I can say is that I eat a corn pie at Jumbo Empanadas every time I am in the Kensington Market area. When I think about how much I enjoyed the Argentinean empanadas in Costa Rica last year, a trip to Chile and Argentina may well be in the cards someday!
In between meet-ups with friends, we managed to squeeze in a visit to the CBC Museum on Front Street. While it is by no means comprehensive, it is also free and you can visit between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. on weekdays. Check out the incredible 1970s windbreaker in the photo above…I can still remember the orange suits (!) that also featured this “exploding C” logo.
We also enjoyed looking at their sounds effects displays, although it was also sobering to realize that Scully and Cartridge machines are now considered museum pieces. We both used to work on those machines during our days at CFRC-FM and I guess they now qualify as ancient technology.
That evening, we went to see a 1950s-style rockabilly band called “The Straight Eights” at a bar in the Beaches district of Toronto. I’m not a huge rockabilly fan but I recognized almost all of these songs as ones that were played by the Beatles (“Twenty Flight Rock”, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, etc.) during their formative years. If you’re familiar with the Toronto music scene, you will recognize their lead singer as “Big Rude Jake” of Toronto blues fame.
We also took advantage of the trip to see a very special movie. “Red Army” has only a limited engagement in Toronto and I doubt that it will appear in any of Kingston’s theatres. It is an excellent film about the hugely successful national ice hockey teams of the former Soviet Union…told by the players from those teams. I won’t give away too much, as this documentary contains an awful lot of surprises that I don’t want to ruin. However, you don’t need to be a hockey expert to appreciate it: it is just as fascinating from the Cold War and human interest perspectives. See it if you can.
Coming up in the next few weeks: more travel flashbacks and then a week-long trip to a completely new destination for me. Stay tuned!