Creative Juices and Solids

Reflections on taste-ings.

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

5.5 years late, but still… Argentina pics up!

Posted by John Manzo on August 24, 2009

On my first sabbatical (Winter 2004), Brian and I went to Argentina for a month. I’ve posted a blog post about it (a BLOG blog post, that is, a post about a blog post at a blog site that has exactly one post) earlier, but it’s here again if you’d care to check it out. Today I was going through my iPhoto archives and came across a file comprising 551 pics from that trip, all taken on Brian’s camera but the vast majority never posted anywhere… so here they are. Picasa only allows folders of up to 500 photos and with that in mind I chose 383 to publish. Still, that’s an F of a lot of photos.

Seems so long ago, but, no, really it doesn’t. We’re thinking about heading back to South America for my next sabbatical (Winter 2011 is my next scheduled one, though I might hold off until fall to take that one).

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Toronto

Posted by John Manzo on August 12, 2009

I didn’t take a huge number of photos this leg but what there is, is here. Mostly food- and coffee-related as you can see.

The trip was almost completely good. The flight from Vancouver to Toronto (I had the option of flying PDX-YYC-YYZ which would have given me the bizarre option of transferring at my own airport, but YVR was cheaper and got me into Toronto earlier, though still at night) was a good hour less than I thought it would be, about 4 hours and 20 minutes gate to gate, and it was on a comfy but packed 767. The flight from Portland to Vancouver, I should note, was on a turbo (I hadn’t flown on one of those in, oh, two years), and both flights were smooth as silk and on time.

Anyway, I arrived in Toronto just as a weeks-long garbage strike was ending and so it was, as you can imagine, completely filthy and ugly. That said, my hotel (the Sutton Place on Bay) was very nice. The room was not huge but I had, to my surprise, a delightful private balcony at the rear (on the east side) of the building. Sutton doesn’t appear to have balconies based on looking at its west-facing facade on Bay Street so this was nice to have. AC worked brilliantly and at a perfect sleep-inducing white noise hum that let me sleep embarrassingly late almost every day I was there (six nights). Another neat thing was that one could pay for high-def movies on a a beautiful 42″ Philips plasma in-room; I took the option and watched Drag Me To Hell ($15.95 but we’re talking 1080p here) my last night. I got a superb deal here on, I think, travelocity, and I’d stay there again in a heartbeat.

Toronto is, to an extent, hurting. I have to laugh a bit at the frequent references in The Globe and Mail about how Calgary (and Alberta) are “hit hard by the recession,” because of that’s true, then Toronto is an apocalypse. Shuttered businesses are EVERYWHERE, more than I saw even when I first started visiting Toronto regularly when I first met Brian in 1995, worse than my vacation there in 1993. It is far, far worse than what we’ve seen here. But that said, there are too many new restaurants to comprehend. I’m not talking about high-end places (which may or may not be opening, I didn’t look for them), but rather a profusion that’s shocking, really shocking, in (1) cheap Korean and Chinese sushi places, (2) shawarma, and (3) viet-thai noodle places. Yes this sounds like Calgary, minus the “thai” aspect, but the scale is unbelievably greater. I should have done a photo thread of just new and new-to-me sushi places, because it’s mind-boggling. Now not all of my food experiences were good, in stark contrast to Portland where everything I had was at least “good” and at best spectacular. The low points happened with all of three of my last meals; Monday night was an I-deserved-that too-salty and generally unbalanced carnitas burrito (not one-tenth as good as what I had in Portland) at Canada’s first Chipotle at “Toronto Life Square” by Dundas Square, where I went to see the very fun horror flick Orphan; the next two were lunch on my last day at a terrible sushi place on College Street (I needed air conditioning and also thought sushi would be nice and light; the AC was fine but the sushi rice was horrible sticky stodge, the consistency of cold oatmeal), and the last was at a Trinidadian place near Yonge and Eglinton that had, my heart leapt, shark and bake on the menu, but it was terrible. Highlights? Well nothing beats a boneless chicken roti from Islands Foods, a chicken and eggplant sandwich from Mustachio at St Lawrence Market, or the sublime lemongrass chicken at Ginger (Yonge and Bloor location), or this new-to-me place’s AMAZING salad rolls; it’s called “Hue” and is also around that Asian fusion paradise near Yonge and Bloor. Great food and value that puts us to shame here in Calgary. While we’re now used here to paying $15.95 for Indian buffets, in Toronto you can still find all-you-can-eat similar for $8. This is part of why I love Toronto, but there are some bad choices to be made so one has to be careful sometimes.

The COFFEE scene in Toronto has improved markedly over the last couple of years and it was great to witness it up close. I had nice cappuccinos at Manic Coffee on College Street (east of Bathurst) and, to my happy surprise, at Bulldog which was for a long time the closest thing to a third-wave shop in Toronto, but my fave was Dark Horse Espresso Bar on Spadina, a new location for them (original is in Leslieville though I’ve not been there) that has all of the ingredients of a great cafe: excellent beans from 49th Parallel, a gorgeous machine setup with a La Marzocco FB-80, a Clover, press pots (no drip) and the same cool-as-hell siphon machines that I saw in action at Blue Bottle in SF last year, well-trained and friendly baristas, cool tunes, a lovely, open space, and a vibe that is just perfect. It’s so nice to see this in Toronto and I hope that this place sees more success.

NOW, I was going to write a treatise on Toronto and its place (whether it likes it or not) in Canada but I think most of that can wait. I have to just say that Toronto is a very inward-looking city and this focus can seem almost insulting to visitors from the rest of the country, because Toronto really is (unlike Calgary, REALLY unlike Calgary) pretty much indifferent to it. The thing is- it could be worse. Torontonians are not, like many Vancouverites, HOSTILE to the rest of the country. They don’t HATE the rest of Canada. They just have their own things to worry about. This gets lost in the stereotyping and it’s really, really easy to confuse this issue of concern with one’s own city and its unique (in Canada) problems and challenges to mean that the denizens of that city are actively abusive of the country outside them. I don’t think the latter is the case but it’s hard to remember this. I guess there’s a lesson for dealing with humans there, somewhere, too.

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Portland pics up at Picasa

Posted by John Manzo on August 6, 2009

What a great but too-short four days that was! Pics here. It was hot but we had a great time. Portland is, if anything, more of a food mecca than it was on previous visits and we made out like bandits. It was especially great to show Brian a bit of what’s left of my history there.

In Toronto now after a long but very smooth brace of flights, as I had to get here via Vancouver. Though things are supposed to change for the hot, humid, and worst of all stormy near future, right now it’s gorgeous here and I’ve aready enjoyed one long AM walkabout with stops at two of Toronto’s insurgent third-wave coffeehouses, Manic and Dark Horse, the newer location on Spadina just north of Queen and a perfect urban coffeehouse. Cool stuff; more to come.

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Seattle pics

Posted by John Manzo on May 30, 2009

At Picasa: John in Seattle, May 2009. My camera battery died on day 4 so there is a lot that I couldn’t take, but at least I got the skyline shots from the harbor cruise, which are nice.

Made it to Salumi yesterday and in my opinion (and given the limits of how informed that opinion can be, with one visit and one sandwich, a “Moffo” or however they spell their spin on a muffuletta, under my belt), I have to say that it lived up to the hype. Superb.

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Quick, as in public-library-internet quick, report from Seattle

Posted by John Manzo on May 28, 2009

I’ve been here a week (well, five days) and am not unreasonably happy with the place. The weather has been knock-me-on-my-ass perfect and this is a really beautiful city, all green and hilly and water everywhere. Built form is, to my surprise (and not having been here since 1985), not remotely like nearby Vancouver but VERY much like Calgary, although Calgary wins (believe it or not) on the sprawl front, as this conurbation is endless and public transit rather terrible, especially for a city that’s so self-consciously “progressive.” Do I sound unhappy? Maybe a little- I’m not sure what the point was of this visit, idle curiosity aside, because Portland is cheaper, friendlier, and better designed (with much MUCH better transit) and Vancouver might be full of unfriendly ass-clowns but one doesn’t have to traverse US Customs to get there, and Vancouver has more and better cheap eats, more and MUCH cheaper sushi, and like Portland, better transit.

BUT I haven’t been having a bad time, I just needed to get some of the above off my chest because Seattle has a rep as some sort of eco-liberal paradise that I think is rather unearned. But one needs to travel and to experience places close up (and on foot as is my wont) to see things for one’s self and that’s what I’ve done on this trip, so, curiosity sated, I can talk about specs. But no pics for now, because my camera battery has died, but look for those after my return home Saturday, here, on facebook and at picasa.

What I’ve seen/done: Pike Place, the Experience Music Project, the Folk Life festival, a same-sex marriage rally downtown, the Space Needle, the Seattle Aquarium, the Science Center, a one-hour, very fantastic Harbor Cruise, the Burke Museum at the UW and its coffee exhibit, the neighbourhoods of downtown, Belltown, Capital Hill, and the U District, the main branch of the public library (right this second), and as coffee goes, two each of locations of Vivace and Stumptown (Stumptown wins) but also marvelous espresso at Top Pot Donuts. Good donuts too. Eats? Fantastic but pricey sushi at Shiro, teriyaki–THE cheap eat in Seattle–at several places, all very good and CHEAP, an amazing salmon sandwich at this tourist-trap-looking place near where I boarded on the cruise, good but not great tacos, and a bit of  crap too but mostly I’m happy and my tummy is too.

Seattle is ridiculously, cruelly hilly, so the workout is part of the experience and my legs and lungs thank me.

Ace Hotel is very nice; just ask for an interior room unless you like a combo of 2am drunkards and 4:30am garbage trucks outside your window. I changed rooms and am happy and well-rested, not sure what I’d be feeling now if I hadn’t. Also- glass transoms above all room doors=light at all hours. Sucks. I brought a sleep mask, thank God, and you don’t forget to either if you stay here. Upsides: cheap, friendly staff, spotless shared baths, and MAKE YOUR OWN WAFFLES (!!!) in the breakfast room.

Home Saturday (2 days from now) then Sunday is  LILAC FEST! See you there!

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