It was a pretty quiet week, the highlight being a bit of a lowlight.
(Restaurant review alert…)
That was going out for dinner the day after Krish’s birthday. We chose a Philipino restaurant we’d thought about for a while now. We’ve not liked the idea of this cuisine but then enjoyed the Philipino fast food we’ve had so were going for a real restaurant this time. I think we should have stuck to the fast food counters! We chose one prix fixe and one a la carte item. We started with grilled oysters, buttery and cheesy. I liked them. This was followed by a skimpy belly pork with some rice and a vinegary cucumber and tomato salad (more like a relish) and some sizzling kalbi ribs. The cassava and coconut cake finish was sweet and interesting. We enjoyed the kalbi ribs the most but at $26 we might have done better at the Korean place across the street and had some banchan to round it out. On top of this, the meats were dripping with grease and I ruined my new favourite top.
Pork belly with rice and tomato and cucumber saladCassava and coconut cake served in a banana leaf
However, silver lining, we got OUT. Was nice being adults for the evening. And this week we are going back to Batibot the Philipino food counter down the street for some adobo pork – lots of it at a fraction of the price. (Well, I think we are.)
Not much happened until Saturday and that was a thrilling walk to a bargain supermarket down the street. Freshco has cheaper prices but we go there mainly because they have a lot of ethnic food on sale, like freezers full of Chinese dumplings, Korean noodles, Indian snacks and meals.
To get to the Freshco we have to walk under the railway bridge at Dufferin Street. I dread that bit of the journey but it’s the only way. To think how much I enjoyed walking through the Blackwall Tunnel and the underpass to the Isle of Dogs when I was a child. Now walking through these longer tunnels are somewhat terrifying. At least no trains thundered overhead.
At the east end of the tunnel is an engraved plaque that confuses many Torontonians since there is already a Queen Street subway station on the Yonge-University line. This, however, is the name of the tunnel – subway meaning underpass.
Once through the tunnel, Gladstone House, now a hotel greets you. It’s Toronto’s longest continuously operating hotel  Built in 1889, it has traditional light hardwood floors, restored exposed brick walls and works by local artists throughout the building.
‘The Gladstone’
By the Freshco is Island Foods, a popular Trinidadian roti shop In 1974, the first Island Foods. This isn’t the original location, of course. That was opened in Ruth and Ramasar Sawh, who arrived in Canada in 1968 with no previous restaurant experience, but with a desire to build a bright future for their family. Krish knows them well and we go by sometimes for their doubles and roti.
Island FoodsShepard Fairey (@obeygiant) art by the FreshcoMixed architecture by FreshcoFinally in the Freshco
I finished The Giver of Stars. I’d tried it twice before and not got very far before abandoning it. This time I stuck with it and, although the Kentucky mountain accents put me off at first, I quickly began to enjoy the character and story development. It got very gritty towards the end and that surprised me. Recommended. After that heavier-than-my-usual read, I started a fluffy romance from Christina Lauren, whose books are fun to read if you don’t mind her common themes and frequent forays into soft-almost-hard pornographic paragraphs. Denise has sent me the entire audiobook of The Perfect Mother (Caroline Mitchell) so @Denise (hi!) , OK I will but you now have to promise to read a Jojo Moyes in return – unwritten law.
I have a very busy week coming up. I’m seeing a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist ( on the same day) a consultation for lens replacement, and getting a phone call from the Women’s College Breast Centre, as well going to lunch with my sister.
The fasting is going OK. Most days I can make it till noon, but there are definitely some rough patches. If I don’t make it a religion and circumstances allow, I’ll continue. Do I feel any different? I don’t think so. However, I am thinking about meals, mostly out. Where should I go next? Well, there’s lunch with Ruth but maybe also somewhere else. Thinking.
Quiet days yet busy in their own way. I have now made three different soups from my chicken stock. A laksa with chicken, a pho with chicken (photo last blog), and a Chinese soup with shrimp and tofu. Eating on the balcony is relaxing, much more so than on the coffee table.
And diet update – well, who knows. I start eating at noon and finish by 8. The mornings are the hardest. By 11am I am usually feeling quite woozy. This is expected. My other choice is to start at 11 and go till 7pm but that might be hard to do. After a week, if my blood sugar continues to not cooperate, I’ll know that’s the better plan. I’m mostly buddying with Krish as he does this, but maybe I’ll benefit.
I’ve flipped through way too much Netflix, Prime and Roki screens to find something to watch. I miss live TV but I don’t want to be one of these ‘I never watch TV’ people.
I went out briefly again yesterday to meet a friend, Esmeralda, who is visiting her old home of Toronto from Bologna. We ate in the Portuguese cafe where they served me a matcha latte, disappointedly from a sweetened (ugh) mix. This friend is one of the few I have that seems to drift through life, as I have, letting the waves carry you along while you make decisions based on the scenery and the weather. No forward plans, not really. I’m not sure this has served me.
She has talked for some years now about moving from Bologna and she’s now thinking perhaps the Azores (she’s from Macau so has a connection with Portugal) or Bolivia. I envy her the ability to even think about this. I talked to Krish about how the single woman I know are usually keen to have a relationship but, when it comes down to it, they love being able to make their own decisions, without conferring with anyone else. I’m a tolerant and cooperative person but this sounds perfect in some ways.
I went into the Dollarama to buy a paintbox and a sketchbook, partly to finish a birthday project for Krish (it’s TODAY!) and partly to have something more creative to do from the balcony than blow bubbles.
Out on the street lady yelled at me angrily when I took this photo. What was in my view was one group of homeless people on the corner. They gather here on each corner and across the road daily. I told her ‘I take photos every day.’ She raged on
The weather was very warm and stiflingly humid. In my haste to get back and cool off,  I forgot I promised to get cilantro to make mango salad and cold spicy tofu today.
Last night I took hours to watch a video on how to make a ‘paper dancing man’ – I watched it over and over, stopping it and cursing the large Pause button that covered my view of the instructional video, and I made about six, all of which failed. I wondered then worried about the state of my brain or at least the wiring that made it so impossible to translate what’s in front of me to an actual creation. How can I even pretend to be an artist when this is the case? I seem to manage really, but my dolls were the first thing that I could just create without getting tangled up in directions, left or right, purl or plain, up or down, which way to turn this, how will it look when I turn it inside out? This morning I got up and pretty much breezed through my final and acceptable version. Then I wrapped the little present, started on some applique tissue design on the outside and wrote the card with more applique hearts made from Post-Its. Needs must.
Why such trouble with the dancing man? What goes on during the journey from brain to hands? I shared the video with my brother and sister, over Messenger – as a test – could they do it to see how long it would take. My sister was characteristcally quiet and my brother (who I knew would spring to the task) left the chat and came back within about five minutes with a video of his creation. Well, damn! Anyway, here’s the video that shows you how. Want to try it?
Hurricane Beryl is passing through. The intemittent rain has been heavy, the sky has been mostly leaden. There have been a couple of very windy periods with some huge rain.
The rain was a loud, heavy and furious curtain
We stayed indoors and even our plans to go out for dinner were foiled, so we will go out tomorrow instead. We planned where and when and that’s almost the entire battle around here. The plans were not foiled by the weather but rather the inability to choose where to go. This is far from new. It happens all the time.Â
Krish went for food and I finished up the present wrapping, and made a bunch of salads for lunch, including the mango salad now that Krish had bought the cilantro. We ate on the balcony and somehow didn’t get wet.
Birthday lunch – beet, squash and orange salad, baba ganouj, cold spiced tofu, mango salad and naan. We ate on the balcony and the meal was fun
I listened to more of The Giver of Stars and managed to nap. The book is good – it’s about an English woman who is living in Kentucky with a new husband who has never touched her. She gets hired into a new visiting library scheme in the Kentucky mountains and this will change her life – I’m already sure of it. Jojo Moyes manages to write love stories where the romance isn’t the only focus. Strangely, this is rare, and makes the story feel more real.
My gift was a success – as predicted, the wrapping was the biggest success. So I’m going to try to draw and paint more. Little things and maybe more paper crafts. They feel disposable, a bonus these days.
The gift-wrapped box, in which the robot toys were, and my final and only successful paper dancing man.
I think about my discarded arts and crafts supplies, though. I’m pleased I was able to pass them along to someone in Hackney, but sometimes I look over to see them here and they’re gone. I took a lot of pleasure in gathering those things – the fabrics, from donations, from remnants in the fabric store in Stoke Newington, cut from old clothes found in charity shops. Then there was the lace, the buttons, the beads and brooches, the felt, the embroidery threads, colourful and some metallic. The pipe cleaners and glue gun and fake flowers to pull apart to make skirts for the little Day of the Dead and the Christmas peg dolls. The paints and the pencils and who knows what else. It will be a challenge to collect a new box or three. Looking forward to that.
Meanwhile, it’s Toronto, it’s Parkdale, it’s Hurricane Beryl leftovers and it’s Krishna’s birthday and it’s been a pretty good day.
(Does that sound Dickensian? Bronteish? Not sure.)
At any rate, I went out for a short while today, just ordinary errand running, and it occurred to me that I’m waiting for something big to post here. Maybe that’s not necessary and it means weeks go by where ‘nothing big’ happens or things seem bleak and I can’t bring myself to put it into writing – it might feel too real or put people off, but it’s still my life and I can’t really imagine a day when I don’t see or do something that makes the day easier. So here we go, me deciding to blog no matter what, when I want, and…have I said this before?
Today I felt determined and made a To Do list. I had little work and a full day ahead, a day that promised to be very hot with the usual humidity so I didn’t have or want to commit to very much.
We are in a loft condo. When we took the place we saw it as a one-month stop gap. When we moved in, we were not at all happy but that balcony and shower sold me in the end and after a month our landlord gave it to us off of Airbnb – always a plus.
Our loft building on Brock Street. Our balcony is towards the back, five floors upThe electrical box in front of our building has elephants. They feel like friends but guards
There are two bedrooms – one is empty and we are storing things there. There are two bathrooms – one with a tub, which has become Krish’s and the other (en suite) is quite far the nicest walk-in shower I’ve had anywhere and that’s mine. The kitchen and living room are open-plan. The kitchen is small. but there’s an island at least or there’d be no counter space at all. The living room is narrow and is saved by French floor-to-ceiling doors leading to the balcony spanning the living room space. There are no curtains and it opens the space and the view. And I like the view – in this immediate area it’s all houses and nothing tall (except this building at seven floors) and the trees are higher than the houses, so from up here there are trees in every direction. There are birds and my birdsong app says they are mostly sparrows and cardinals. I haven’t seen the latter yet. Krish has shown me hawks (two circling each other at times) in the sky. They never land.
The sanity-saving balconyThe tree line view at sunset
We are back in Parkdale again, this time a bit further east (closer to downtown by three or four streetcar stops). I like this area better than the first. We have a greengrocer, a five-minute walk away, something that other places have lacked. And Krish has easier access to all the supermarkets he likes to visit. So all in all, despite a bit of a rough landing in this place, we’ve found it works well. If only the streetcars weren’t in such a mess, but that’s another story.
A homemade quick chicken pho for lunch on the balcony
I walked along the street opposite, admiring the overgrown gardens, to the next main road. It was a hot 30-degree, 55% humidity day. First a visit to the post office where I was delighted to find no queue. Next a visit to the greengrocer – an Alphonso mango, three limes, and two Ontario pickling cucumbers for a salad. Krish and I are trying to stay within a fasting period. We’ll see how it goes.
Inside the greengrocer
I folded clothes, filed papers, worked an hour, sent in my timesheet to be paid in a couple of weeks, and listened to the final 90 minutes of my audiobook House by Christina Lauren. A very odd book – boy meets girl, boy lives in a house that’s ‘alive’ – it takes care of him and always has, until he meets girl and jealousy takes over and tries to entrap him and kill her. Yes, that’s odd but interesting. All done. And now I start Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, my new favourite author.
The neighbourhood here on Brock StreetI’m always looking for the overgrown wild gardens
I didn’t have much recent experience of Parkdale when I first came here to the flat we sublet from someone who planned a winter getaway from Toronto. There’s a reason for that. Parkdale has always been a west end neighbourhood with a bad reputation – drugs and prostitution, that’s what I heard. I’d passed through it on my way to the Polish neighbourhood of Roncesvalles. sure.
Green marks Robin’s place and the pink is ParkdaleParkdale neighbourhood
A very long time ago I even lived here – on a street called Spencer perhaps in 1967. I wasn’t there for long and my memory is vague, but in those days the bad reputation wasn’t there, it was just a family-oriented and easy for single living, an almost suburban area on the edge of Toronto . I llived for a while with a group of guys from Salford (Manchester) – they had a band. One was a boyfriend of a friend of mine, Angie – her parents owned a nudist colony near Hamilton, but that’s another story. That one was very handsome, out of my league I thought. Then there was another – and how shameful that I don’t remember the names of either one – Geoff, Ray? I lived in this apartment with ‘the other one,’ there was no love but it was convenient and friendly… It was here I met my first serious boyfriend, Jimmy, a young genius musician – at a party and again that’s another story. My biggest memory of those days is that I was carefree, it was a rock n roll sort of life but more everyday, and that was a store on the corner where I could call and order groceries and they’d show up at my door. Maybe it was just a few months but I was cocooned from the reality of the neighbourhood, it was just a place to stay.
This is Jameson Avenue – a street with apartment buildings on both sides. Each one is different. Krish read that it’s the most multicultural area in the world. Could be, I suppose
Fast forward many years, and Robin and I once bid for an apartment a street or two away from where I am now – Dunn Avenue. It was the ground floor of one of the very large Parkdale houses and there was a patio off of one of the bedrooms. I thought I had that apartment in the bag after I found out that the owner was a cyclist and talked with him about my cyclist ex husband. Then I was stunned to not be offered it. Not long afterwards, my mother died and the shock of it, the reality of what life stretched ahead of me and my need to go for what I needed and wanted in my life, meant that I left Toronto and headed for London. Crazy days.
The desk I thought I would use but haven’t. I’m too used to the coffee table Winter view from the balconyWhere we are
So here I was and still am in Parkdale, not far from these two places, and in the first several days neither one of us was happy with it. ‘Don’t walk alone here,’ Krish asked. ‘Always take a cab home if it’s dark, no matter how early.’ He was referring to the many people who prowled and lounged on the streets, homeless, sometimes drunk or high. I reminded Krish of our early days in Hackney when it was derelict and neglected, and tried to make light of it. Then we grew to liked it. Like many such neighbourhoods, Parkdale had its share of community and pride. The shop owners were friendly, the mix was eclectic, people spoke to each other here and there.
We found restaurants, shops, the library, the community centre. I explored the streets as much as the winter weather allowed. In one shop, Soepa, I met Jenna and her family – husband Karma who was a chef, and little daughter Suki. She may have singlehandedly won me over, immediately knowing my name and remembering everything I asked her about, ‘That parsley you asked about? I’ve got some in now.’ Suffering a little from the price of food, we went and still go every week to get a box of food – they’re given out without question from the community centre on a street corner on the main street – keeping what we know we needed and giving away what we didn’t. It all helped us feel more welcome.
Soepa from outsideSoepa inside
Food-centred as always, we found two Indian shops, Soepa of course (it’s a specialty food store), a restaurant called Mezz which is a bar with a daily changing menu, a Filipino takeaway, a hole in the wall shop where they make fresh samosa chaat, a Tibetan restaurant called Himalayan Kitchen that makes a great lassi… this area is called Little Tibet, one of the largest Tibetan diaspora outside of India and Nepal/ There are so many Tibetan cafes and shops – Tibetan, Nepalese, Indian. i already knew about the Skyline diner where I’d eaten with my friend, Leslie and who served the breakfast Krish would get sometimes – steak and eggs – I’d get a small Greek salad and a few pieces of the steak, enough.
Bells at one of the Buddhist temples in large houses on the side streets. This one is very close to meQueen’s Supermarket – an Indian variety store with some interesting groceries. On this day they had green mangoes on the stalkMandala Corner is just off Queen Street and sells a small selection of Indian shelf goods, as well as snacksSamosa Chaat from Mandala Corner
Tibet restaurants and cafes everywhere. Momo heaven for someMezzBag of food from the community
Something else about Parkdale – the homes. There are streets of large houses, with so many different architectural styles it’s bewildering. The roofs are my favourite, but also the balconies and verandahs The ice and snow has kept me from wandering or lingering too long, but now our days here are getting shorter but warmer I really do have to take the time to do that. There’s a lot of history here.
Parkdale was founded as an independent settlement in the 1850s, became a village in 1879 and ten years later amalgamated with Toronto. It was originally an upper-income suburb and that’s why there are so many grand houses. Maybe of these have interesting histories. With any luck, in the warmer weather approaching now, I can look more closely at some of them. It seems that the building of the Queen Elizabeth Way (highway) in 1955 changed the neighbourhood. It became denser, apartments sprang up, immigrants and lower-income people moved in. In the 1970s it was an area where inpatients from the psychiatric hospital to the east were released to be integrated into the general population again. That’s in part how it gained its reputation as a neighbourhood with poverty, crime, drugs, homelessness, and large numbers of people living with mental illness. It’s commendable that a caring community has sprung up to help Parkdale’s very mixed population. There are definitely characters on the streets, you get used to seeing them, but I also know that they are clothed and fed well if they know where to go.
One of many of the large houses in the neighbourhoodThere’s a penchant for these conical shapes on top of small buttress-type additions, with some being what the internet tells me are Frustums (flat sided cones). This is one of my favouritesAn example of a grand house with many verandah styles
We are also close to the lake. The train tracks and highways (two of them) stand in our way but there are pedestrian bridges that go across. While I’m not really a lake person here, I do have a thing for the water (looking at rather than being in it) and so we have gone down there to take photos. On the day we went it was snowy and icy so I chose the route with the least slip and fall possibilities. There’s another bridge at the bottom of my street but the parkette area is much bigger so I avoided it. The bridge further west was my choice. On the way I was struck with the curve of the bay and the number of transport routes stretching below me, the suburbs looming across the sweep of the lake, not so far away. The bridge was a long pedestrian one and covered in graffiti. Once across there was a parkette and a rugged wooden fence bordering the road. Then walking back the view of central Toronto seemed stunning with the setting sun at my back.
There may be some more talk about Parkdale but for now that’s it. We’ve had hard times here – the bugs, the space we’re in and how little of it we were actually given, the way the building smells of (many) dogs, the noise from neighbours – crashing about, heavy feet, loud arguments that worried me, the way I hear the wind howling when I open the window at night, the cost of laundry…we hope these things are temporary, especially the bugs (how we fear taking them with us). These things apart, we will miss it here.
Spring is finally coming
We’ve been here since early January and so I’ve taken a lot of photos. I can’t choose to feature all of them, but I’ll try to be guided by what’s written here and more may crop up if I’m inspired.
I’ve been reading a blog for some years written by an American woman who goes to Venice every year for a month or two at a time. She’s also called Jan, and writes every day while she’s away – six or seven paragraphs with five or six photos. I enjoy seeing how she spends her days. She’s very different than I am, filling her days with museums and art galleries, usually eating one meal out and one meal in (I found her on one of my foodie sites, The Hungry Onion, after all). Should I do this? Would it work better? Jan’s Continue reading “Parkdale Living”
