By Michael Downing
We stepped out of the subway, onto Dundas Street, turned left and walked straight into Chinatown. It was impressive: Clothing, jewelry, grocery, restaurants. They have it all. We stopped at a little souvenir place and bought some keychains and magnets for next to nothing and walked through several grocery stores, checking out the goods. It’s hard to know what to buy. Plus, we weren’t really in a position to experiment with Chinese food in the kitchen of our Air BnB, so we moved along. Soon were were at the intersection of Dundas and Spadina (spa-dye-nah), which is considered the center of Chinatown.
We went North on Spadina and took a left which took us to Kensington Market. It reminded both of us of Pittsburgh’s South Side. There were lots of places to eat and lots of little clothing spots. We had chicken momos at a Tibetan restaurant before wandering back toward St. Patrick’s Station on Dundas. We bumped into a beautiful artistic piece of Vincent Van Gogh on the way back.
St Lawrence Market is like the central markets in Harrisburg, Lancaster, or any number of markets housed in enormous former warehouses. It’s very beautiful and you can buy anything you want from olives, cheese, fish, meat, pasta, seafood. After we took a lap, we ended up going to for lunch at Paddington’s Pump, which is famous for its peameal sandwich. Everybody says you have to have a peameal sandwich at St Lawrence Market, so we did. It was okay.
I come from the working class, so I have all respect in the world for comfort foods and I surely understand why Torontonians would pay homage to the peameal sandwich. But now that I’ve had one, I think I’m good. It’s basically Canadian bacon rolled in cornmeal (which used to be peameal). It was invented by William Davies, a British immigrant. After some research, I think we were served in the “traditional fashion,” which means meat and mustard on a bun, but when we looked it up online, we saw that most of the peameal sandwiches had lettuce and tomato, along with the mustard. Ours just had mustard. No lettuce or tomato. So I still have questions.
Would I rather have a pastrami Reuben? Yes, but it was good to try the peameal and share in a local tradition. It’s probably meant to be consumed with large quantities of beer, but it’s not good for me to start drinking in the middle of the day.
From there we wandered down to the Esplanade past David Crombie Park where there were lots of kids playing. There was a grade school on one side of the Esplanade and the children were being taught a lesson. We walked along the Esplanade for about six blocks until we came in The Distillery District.
The Distillery District features cafés, restaurants, and shops housed within the buildings of the former Gooderham and Worts Distillery. We went into several art galleries, which were all pretty cool. The District doesn’t get hopping until night time. We were there in the late afternoon, so some of the local pubs were getting set up. We tend to go to bed early and rise early so plus we’re not big drinkers so it is what it is.
But if you like to drink there’s a lot to explore. They put up these big white plastic seats and they have a big screen so as the lights come on it’s probably very beautiful. Lots of fun to meet friends down there. But we we were at the end of our day so we headed back toward Union Station. Our final stop was a bookstore called Indigo Spirit, where I bought a book called The New Normal by Jeffry Rubin. He’s a Canadian economist. I’ve been reading it and it’s been quite interesting.
Our train was delayed by about 30 minutes. Not the end of the world but it does kind of throw you off kilter. We just sat and read our books and played games on our phones until we started to see the line move and then we got up and got in line and just walked into the train and sat down on our seats. We made our way home and had dinner and relaxed. The end of a good day.
My Writing Wanderland 