So Rach and I are heading to New York with another couple for the long weekend coming up. We are lucking out that the Canadian dollar is worth more than the American one right now. Well maybe lucking out isn’t the right word as it will end up with us spending more money while we are there (new iPod?). Anyways, what should we do while we are in New York? Anyone have any recommendations? We are only there for 4 days.
“If only I was younger.” – Rachel
Rach and I went to check out the big foam sword fights that go on in summer in Montreal. Michelle and Sean told us about them when they stayed here over summer (though they called them “Nerd Wars”). The sword fighting is much better than the tam-tams (which happen right beside where the fighting occurs). To get it out of the way, here is the picture of the tam-tams:
You can find many hippies here. I made a short video of the tam-tams to save you the bother of ever having to attend this. You can check it out on youtube and waste 30 seconds of your life. In case you can’t tell, I’m not a big fan of the tam-tams.
So the foam sword fighting. These guys put foam around wood sticks for swords, put foam onto the end of arrows, make big lances, make shields and many other weapons. On a field they stand in 2 lines facing each other and then charge and fight. Everyone seemed to be pretty honest about getting hit. It looked like a good time and as Rachel said “If only I was younger” she would have jumped in there and beat down someone. You can check out the few pictures we took (my camera died so there isn’t many) on flickr as usual. The best guys were the ones with bow and arrows:
Followed by the guys that got completely dressed up for this event:
I also recorded a 1 minute video of one round of fighting. I put up on youtube if you want to check it out.
We hung out with Chris and Kaeleigh for the next couple days. We hit up The Keg Mansion (photo), toured around downtown, and went to some Italian festival thing that was going on. Toronto is much to big for me. Getting stuck in traffic was such a horrible experience I don’t know how people can handle doing that every day. A 10-15 minute commute is about all I can handle. Our last day in Toronto we were meeting up with The Bendell Clan from London for a day at the Toronto Zoo.
You can check out all the pictures we took on flickr if you haven’t seen them already. We were at the zoo for about 7 hours and we weren’t close to seeing everything there. I think you would need 2 days to cover everything. We decided to skip the non-Canadian/American animals and focus on more important animals, like elephants. Elephants peeing.
Remind you of anything? Niagara Falls? We saw some camels that just sat still. I tried to order a camel to come closer for a good picture but instead of posing for me, it fell on it’s side and started a chain of farts. Seriously.
We also saw a tree kangaroo. I imagined this full sized kangaroo jumping around in trees beating flying squirrels and reeking havoc. Instead this is what I got:
Not a killing machine at all. The giraffes took up quite a bit of our time. My favorite picture is the giraffe sticking out his tongue.
At the end of the day we spent 30 minutes in the “Kid Zone”. Avery seemed to have a blast in there but really, Rachel may have won this one.
The important part of the zoo was the jumping competition between me and Colin.
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Both Colin and I qualify as frogs. That’s useful information to know. Our jumps were pretty much the same distance so I don’t think there was a clear winner.
On the way out of the zoo we got to the front of the parking exit only to discover that the girl at the admission booth (who was absolutely horrible) never gave us our parking pass to exit the zoo. I even asked her multiple times making sure we had everything to exit the zoo. Well, I had to backup the RAV with all the cars behind me. Not a good time. After walking all the way back into the zoo to get a parking pass and complain about the girl who helped us in the morning we got back in line to leave the zoo again. Hopefully this will never happen again to us.
That’s it for our Toronto stop. Now you get to hear me talk about Montreal for 3 months.
Rach and I had a day to ourselves in Toronto while Chris and Kaeleigh (the couple we were staying with) were at work. We bought some Toronto CityPass’s so we could get into all the big attractions for cheap (you can save even more if you buy them from costco.ca). Our first stop was Casa Loma (our pictures on flickr).
The first thing I discovered is that “Casa Loma” was the name of the area before the castle was ever built. “Casa Loma” is Spanish for “House on the Hill”. Pretty much this Sir Henry guy wanted to build a castle for himself so he designed it and had it built. After a lot of bad luck he lost most of his money and the castle was seized for $27k in back taxes. You can read more about Casa Loma on wikipedia if you care. We did the audio tour around the castle, went through some tunnels and secret passages, and that was pretty much it. In the basement of the castle is a little (likely over-priced) restaurant that we avoided. Oh, and a bunch of movies (X-men) were filmed here like .
Our next stop for the day was the CN Tower. We wanted to eat lunch in the spinning restaurant but after we waited in line for 20 minutes to get half way up the tower we realized we were suppose to make reservations at the bottom of the tower. We waited another 20 minutes to get to the top of the tower where we took a bunch of pictures. Instead of hitting up the fancy spinning restaurant we went to the cheaper restaurant which was not crazy priced and really, I can just walk around the floor. The best part of the CN Tower is the glass floor area where, you guessed it, you walk on glass. This is me standing on the glass looking down:
It took quite a bit of coaxing to get Rach to step onto the glass. She eventually gave in but it was only long enough for me to take a picture:
Our last stop of the day was to the Royal Ontario Museum (our pictures). It was a pretty cool for a museum, I guess. They had some big paperweight exhibit setup. Exciting! I don’t really have much to say about the museum so I’m just going to end this post with the prized paper Weight on display.
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On our way to Montreal Rach and I made some time to stop in Niagara Falls. Our original plan was to just drive in, take some pictures, and then leave. We ended up allotting about 4 hours to Niagara which was plenty. The town is packed with tourists everywhere. Did you ever watch the show Wonderfalls? The people who work in this town must hate their lives (I swear most of the people who helped us were robots.) Here is a picture of the Canadian falls.
Since we had extra time we decided to take the Maid of the Mist boat ride down by the falls. You can see the boat in the picture above. We used the old camera while we were getting drenched to take some pictures. They give everyone this blue plastic to cover yourself with so you don’t get wet. Really, I don’t think it helps that much when you are standing at the edge of the boat so close to the falls.
After touring the falls we headed back to our car through some kind of bizzaro world. There was Dracula’s house, Marvel super heroes tour thing, lego brick buildings, wax museums and so much more. Ya, WTF! We got about half a block in and Rach saw a place that had in big letters “F U D G E” so we bought a big slice of fudge, paid $15 for parking and left for Toronto.
I guess the casino is a big attraction in Niagara as well. Rach and I used their washrooms and that was about it. That’s how we roll. If you ever plan on visiting this place I suggest only staying a day or less. 4 hours was more than enough for me.
