Global Village

Internet, my constant companion, help me please. Deb in the City is at the end of her nanny rope and not even these,

which are the Greek version of Timbits that I bought on the Danforth can soothe my frazzled constitution.

The Child has gone to a new level of internal combustion and her deadbeat dad is giving me no love in the parental guidance department. But, she is just a little girl and I am supposedly the responsible, mature adult. In an effort to bury the hatchet and smoke a peace pipe (which are probably both politically questionable euphemisms) I went out to find something to try and make her happy.

And I ended up over in Kensington Market at this amazing store, La Perola. They sell all necessary staples of life from Latin America and pretty quickly I found what I was looking for.

Fresh cactus paddles, 2.49 a pound. As gringa nanny I am unequipped to deal with the thorny issue, haha, but lucky for me safety cactus comes in a jar. I can’t take the kid to Mexico to see her dad but I can bring a little of Mexico to her. I hope it works.

Walking through Kensington is like waiting for someone at the international arrivals terminal at Pearson Airport. The stores sell products from many meridians of the globe and it’s possible to go from Portugal to Somalia to Jamaica in less than a city block.

Patty King called to the blood sugar spike I was negotiating after the last of the Greekbits and I went inside looking for a nice savory vegetable patty or maybe some doubles.

At the counter, I ordered a patty with cocoa bread from this lady

Her name is Ann and she’s been at the Patty King for about six months. She immigrated from Viet Nam to Canada a few years ago and she works with an efficient crew of Viet Namese ladies who own and operate the bakery, making traditional Caribbean foods. Ann says she missed Viet Nam when she first got here but now she doesn’t want to go back. Now, this is home.

This is Deb in the City, saying yassou, adios, goodbye and tam biet from Toronto, where home might have been someplace else but is here now.

Toronto The Good

Hello internet. I am still Deb and you have clicked once more upon my blog Deb in the City. I know this is technically speaking a vlog because it’s video but I can’t say the word vlog without feeling silly. It sounds like the brand name for the new ugly shoe of the season. As in: "dude, I know they look funny but my vlogs are soooo comfortable."

Deb in the City is my new coping mechanism since my friends did an intervention on me and took away all my scrapbooking stuff. See, I’ve had a little more stress than usual lately because I just moved, which according to the interweb is the third most stressful thing you can do after getting divorced and dying.

I can’t fully absorb it but I now live in Canada. Toronto, Ontario to be exact. It is fantastic here, truly but arriving and settling has been a workout. And the Canadians are nice about immigrants. Look, we have our own magazine.

Stress aside, Toronto is an amazing place. I get to live in a fantastic house:

OK, It’s not actually in Toronto proper but in the GTA. Richmond Hill, to be exact. Brand new house, where a bungalow once stood. The march of progress.

So, when I first got here I was really excited to go skating immediately at Nathan Philips Square with all the other new immigrants and I was shocked to discover that there is no ice in May. Contrary to my dumb Amercian notions about Canada, it is not perpetual winter here.

Slightly crestfallen, I decided to soothe my Yankee sensibility and went to go look for something to buy. I got on the wrong streetcar and got totally lost and ended up here:

Did I go inside? You bet I did! Honest Ed’s is an amazing discount-shopping parallel reality, with a fantastic show biz glitz design going on. Ed’s sells just about anything you would need to set up your life on a sturdy foundation of useful products at a deep discount. And sold in a unique florescent light slash neon and chaser light setting.

Groceries and sporting goods! Meat and furniture! Maple syrup in the adorable leaf-shaped bottle!

It’s incredibly tidy in Ed’s and as a nanny that deals with child-induced clutter on a pandemic basis, the neat rows of everything put a smile on my face. I spent ten bucks at Ed’s and left with a huge bag of useful discount joy.

This is Deb in the City saying so long from Toronto, Ontario, where the two official languages are French and English but if you have to call 911, the city can respond to you in over 150 languages.

Aw, Sugar, Aw, Honey Honey

Hi, Deb in the City here, coming at you from Ontarie-arie-arie-o. OK, I’ve been trying hard to get my Canadian on and I’ve signed up for curling lessons for the fall. Very exciting! But in the meantime, I found these:

These little hunks of friend dough heaven are what are called Timbits and they are one of Canada’s culinary gifts to humanity. Dangerously bite-sized and lethally delicious, it is possible to polish off a whole box of these suckers on Hockey Night in Canada before Don Cherry has given his first period intermission report.

Today I was over on Bloor west in Koreatown and found another amazing tasty haven. This gentleman is Kim

in front of the amazing machine that makes Korean walnut cakes which are like the unofficial snack cake of Korea. They are frighteningly delicious and I’m thankful that Kim’s bakery is far from home because they are deelish, reasonably priced, hot, fresh and plentiful:

Like a Timbit, Korean style, filled with a half a walnut and red bean paste or sweet potato. Kim’s machine makes 1500 cakes an hour. Kimbits!

I wandered back downtown on the subway, happily hands-free to devour my Tim-and-Kim bits. I got off at the King Street stop by mistake instead of St. Andrew but realized that I could just walk underground in the PATH system.

Now, I don’t want to sound like a spoiled American who needs a GPS device to get anywhere, but is that system confusing or what? It’s like an underground shopping labyrinth, where all the landmarks are nearly identical. There are several food courts with stalls named things like Mr. Wok, Mr. Sub and Mr. Sushi and I swear I went past this same lottery stand four times.

And yeah, I did buy a 649 ticket each pass. OK, I know I have poor impulse control when I’m unsupervised. I was lost in the PATH for so long, the jackpot went from 14 to 16 million dollars by the time I finally climbed back up to street level. I headed south to the foot of Jarvis at the lake.

Tracing my sugar binge to the source, I ended up at the Redpath Refinery where there is a most fantastic sugar museum in the administrative part of the factory. It traces the history of the sugar industry in Canada, covering sugar import, modern refinery and extinct sugars, like beet sugar.

The sugar hut is awe-inspiring, a huge unassuming steel structure on the lake from the outside but filled to the ceiling with 10,000 tonnes of raw sugar in the inside. The air was misty with sweetness and before my pancreas conked out entirely and stopped producing insulin, I booked it out of there.

This is Deb in the City, parting, which is such sweet sorrow, from Toronto, Upper Canada, the former beet sugar capital of North America.