Catching up

I've been a bit lax lately with posting - we've been doing plenty of things, but I usually only take 1 or 2 photos which never seems like enough for a blog post.  So here's a bit about what we've been up to.

Summer is well and truly here - it's been hot and humid and muggy and generally pretty uncomfortable.  I can't wait for autumn - apparently that's the best time of year.  Summer, however, is fun for a few reasons:

Here's us playing Ticket to Ride in the Toronto Islands with our friend Garry.  Jax was chilling out under the table enjoying the sun.  (I won, by the way.)

We need to make sure Jax doesn't get sunburned...

 Summer is also baseball season, so we've headed out twice now to watch the local Toronto Blue Jays.  Baseball is actually a lot of fun to watch - there are a lot of crowd pleasing activities including scantily-clad women dancing and throwing Jays t-shirts into the crowd, plus the 7th inning rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" which is played every match.  It's pretty fun.

Our friend Adeline came from New York for the weekend, so I am going to shamelessly utilise her hot dog photo being as it's much better than mine :)  At the baseball, you get the biggest hot dogs evar.

A carving on a tree in High Park.  (Also Adeline's photo - it never turns out right on my phone camera!)

Stephen's Dad and his partner Anne visited from Australia, on their way to a 3 month drive around eastern Canada and the US.  They bought a car - more of a minivan really, so that they can sleep in the back of it.  Amazingly, Canadian insurance companies are absolute jerks - they ignore the 12 years of driving experience that we have in Australia, and will only accept us as having been licensed since we traded in our Aussie licenses for Canadian ones - so because they think we've only been driving for 7 months and have never held insurance, insuring one car costs $5,000 a year.  Ouch.  

New cuisines!

One really cool part of living in Toronto is discovering new foods that we didn't really get in Australia.  Here are some of our new faves:

Ethiopian food is kind of strange - it looks like various colors of mush, and comes with a cold flatbread called "injera", which has a spongy texture.  You eat it by tearing pieces off the bread, and using it to pick up the mush.  It takes a bit of getting used to but it's pretty tasty - although I am generally wishing that I had some crackers and a fork after about 5 minutes.

Roti is a West Indies food, which I've learned since I arrived here covers Jamaica and some other places nearby.  It is like a wrap, with things inside - chicken or chickpeas or goat, with potatoes in a curry sauce.  This is probably my favourite new food here - and makes up for the lack of decent Thai food.












Poutine!  We had some visitors recently who didn't seem really keen on the idea of poutine - this is totally unacceptable!  It is mandatory from now on that all visitors to our house try poutine (the national food of Canada).  :)

Canada Day Cottaging Part 2

With all of those lakes sitting around, we figured that we should make some use of the available nautical equipment, so we borrowed a canoe and went for a paddle on the lake.  Jax hates the water, but he got into the canoe with a bit of coaxing, and he seemed to be ok after a bit.  

Captain Jax, king of the lake!

We tried to get Jax to swim, but he wasn't really having much fun.  He would sooner be in the boat than the lake, methinks.  The lakes were actually pretty good for swimming - clear and cool but not too cold.

Canoeing is hard work.

We took a drive up to Algonquin Provincial Park, which is a protected park full of moose, beavers, and other native animals.  Amusingly, the side of the highway is full of dead porcupines - not quite kangaroos, but close enough.  We looked for moose which were supposed to be hanging out by the side of the road, but we didn't see any.

The park was beautiful - everything was so green, it was hard to imagine that it was all covered in snow 5 months ago.   Dogs are allowed in provincial parks too, so it was nice for Jax to have a good walk somewhere new.  He was rather interested in the beaver-eaten tree stumps, but we didn't see any beavers.  Apparently in summer they eat water-lilies, so they stay in their ponds - they only need to leave the safety of the pond in autumn (braving the prowling wolves).

This is a beaver lodge - these were dotted around little flat lakes everywhere throughout the park.  The beavers have created all of the lakes with their damming activities, creating the ecosystem where all sorts of creatures (like moose) can live.

Here's a beaver dam - it's hard to see, but they've dammed the entire river on the right, causing the lake on the right.  The water on the left is a trickle, so the plants have grown over it.

The whole park was bright green - in fact everywhere we drove was picturesque green trees and blue lakes.  You can even see a beaver lodge in the lake here.

All in all it was a fantastic first Canada Day for us, and for Jax too.  Hopefully we can get out into the lake country again sometime and find those elusive moose!

Canada Day Cottaging Part 1

Happy Canada Day everyone!  (Yes, that's a Tim Hortons Canada Day donut.)

For our first Canada Day, we decided to do as the locals do, so we rented a cottage for the weekend about 2.5 hours north and drove up into lake country.

Before I moved to Canada, I knew they had big lakes, but what I didn't get is that there are a lot of small lakes too, and I mean a lot.

Every one of those is a lake suitable for swimming, canoeing, maybe fishing.  So the enterprising Canadians build cottages around the lakes, and retreat to them over summer.

A lot of them look like this:

They have their own dock, and sometimes a tiny piece of sand, and usually an outdoor entertaining space of some type with some outdoor chairs and whatnot, and a BBQ.  The green covered area you see there is a mosquito-netted hut, because the entire area is home to the biggest and most bloodthirsty population of mosquitoes I have ever encountered.

So here was our Canada Day - having BBQs on the world's tiniest BBQ, and chilling out.  Here's Stephen and Jax cooking the BBQ.  It's about 8pm in this photo - we get a lot of daylight at the moment.

Steaks, potatoes and sausages!  They don't really seem to have the same type of sausages here as in Australia (or if they do, we can't find them) - they're all crazy smoked sausages instead.  Not so tasty.  BBQ baked potatoes are nice though.

Jax was getting into the Canada Day spirit :)

Kennedy Space Centre

The Kennedy Space Centre is about a 70km drive from Orlando, so we set off bright and early down the maze of toll-roads...

... with an important stop along the way for IHOP.  What would a trip to America be without IHOP?

We saw this in the parking lot next to the IHOP - I can't believe that it's legal to drive with a giant lobster on your car.  Imagine how little visibility that driver has?!

Luckily we didn't see the rest of his risk on the highway (yes, the collective noun for a group of lobsters is a risk), and we made pretty good time to...

The Kennedy Space Center.  

Maybe they will give us jobs?  Working for NASA would be almost as awesome as working for the company that makes the giant robotic arm rollercoasters.

Luckily for us, it was 33 days until the last space shuttle launch - so the Space Shuttle Atlantis wasn't in this building (the giant building where they put it together).

It was on the launch pad, getting ready for its final flight.  We couldn't get very close, but it was an awesome sight.

They had some interesting exhibits, including a couple of videos and a recording of the Apollo 8 launch - this room was apparently the control room for the launch, and the desks light up as you hear the occupant talking on the radio during the countdown.  The Apollo 8 was the first manned spaceflight to leave Earth orbit.

And here's a rocket - they were amazingly big.  The badges next to the rocket are the mission patches for each of the Apollo missions, with the one at the front being Apollo 8.

 This is one of the 5 exhausts for the rocket, to give an idea of scale.

One of the crew capsules from the Apollo missions - check out how burned it is from reentry.

This is one of the new design of Orion rockets that they're building to replace the existing space shuttles.  From what we could tell, rather than piggy-backing on the rocket boosters like the current space shuttles, this design would sit on top of the rocket, much like the old Apollo designs.

And here's a replica of the Explorer space shuttle, which you can walk inside.  Big cargo bay, not much living room.

Next to the Explorer is the stuff that gets it off the ground - fuel tank and rocket boosters.  Absolutely massive.

Memorials for the astronauts killed during missions.  It looks like a lot until you think about the fact that they were flying to the moon, using computers the size of houses that were less powerful than my mobile phone.  I'm surprised they didn't blow the entire earth up, to be honest.

It's not a laughing matter, but I find this memorial a little amusing because it's so much bigger than it needs to be for the names it currently contains - someone's planning for the future.  It seems a little heartless to leave a lot of empty space for the names of the next people to get killed... but I guess it's more efficient that way.

The rocket garden.  It's interesting how different all of the designs are.

There were a number of different capsule replicas here for the children (and Stephen) to play inside.  There really wasn't a whole lot of personal space in these things.

If you thought the last one was cramped, how about this one?  I hope the astronaut was shorter than Stephen, because he couldn't even sit down properly in this one.

We had a lot of fun in Orlando, and 3 days is a good amount of time to get away from work.  Now we just need to work out where to go next!

Universal Studios Part II - Harry Potter

I was most excited about visiting the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter part of Universal Studios - I had grand plans for buying all sorts of Ravenclaw stuff (you know I would have been in Ravenclaw), and generally having a grand old time pretending I could actually do magic and stuff.  Which would be cool if I could.  Damn you, real life!

Welcome to Hogsmeade!  The Harry Potter part of the park was by far the busiest part by probably about 5 to 1.  It was absolute mayhem.

This is overlooking the entrance to the Hogsmeade Village part - this is the quiet part.  Yes, I took this from a rollercoaster (albeit a tiny cat and mouse type one).  

The rollercoaster in question was called the Flight of the Hippogryph - it was great fun for a tiny coaster.  The front of the carriage was made into the shape of a hippogryph out of wicker, and Buckbeak watched on as you ascended the hill lift.

There was another rollercoaster as well, called the Dragon Challenge - two inverted rollercoasters (the ones where your seats are suspended under the track instead of sitting in a cart on top), which had a number of near-miss points in the track, including the dual loop above where the two cars ascend the loop together.  I am not a huge fan of inverted coasters due to my completely irrational but still completely inescapable fear of heights and particularly chairlifts - these are way too close to chairlifts for my liking.  After I had my eyes closed the entire first time we went on them, Stephen made me go on them twice more with my eyes open to try to cure me.  I did open my eyes and it wasn't so bad while we were moving fast, but somehow, I don't think my fear of slow-moving chairlifts will have been cured.

The best part of the park, however, was.... 

Hogwarts Castle.  It was really well done, and the Forbidden Journey ride inside it was by far the highlight of my trip.  They start telling the story as you are queueing for the ride (a great way to distract people from the fact that they're waiting) - Hogwarts is open to Muggles for an Open Day, and you are walking through the castle on a tour, through the main entry hall, and then through the Headmaster's Office, where a holographic video of Dumbledore tells you that the magical demonstration is cancelled and you will instead be going to listen to a lecture on the history of Hogwarts by the History of Magic teacher.  In the next room (the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom), you hear Harry, Ron and Hermione talking - they are eventually revealed to have been hiding under the invisibility cloak, and a holographic video of them tells you that they think the lecture will be boring, so they're going to make it so that you can fly down to the quidditch pitch to watch a match instead.  After this, you are loaded onto the ride - 4 chairs in a row in a bench format, with safety harnesses.

It's well-hidden during the ride, but this is effectively what you're sitting on:

Yes, a GIANT ROBOTIC ARM.  (This is the coolest thing I have ever seen.)  What's cool about the Harry Potter ride is that the giant robotic arms are on a track, so that you move through the ride along the track at the same time as being thrown around to avoid skeletons, dementors, and the Whomping Willow.  It gets better though - at various points in the ride, concave wrap-around video screens are placed in front of your chair displaying simulator-style video footage of you dodging dragons and flying around the castle, which your chair moves around perfectly with, making the ride a kind of hybrid between a traditional car-based ride and a simulator.  It is immersive, intense and brilliantly executed - I was absolutely blown-away by the ride and I highly recommend it to everyone.

(I'll stop ranting about how amazing that technology is now.)

Here's me with the Ravenclaw banner.  You can tell that I would be in Ravenclaw because I can't stop going on about how brilliant the technology powering that ride is.  I forgot to bring my scarf though - sadly, the items for sale in the shops there were all either Gryffindor or Slytherin - no love for the Ravenclaws (or the Hufflepuffs).

The Hogwarts Express was parked in the station, although sadly unable to take me to Hogwarts.  

The books are full of descriptions of unique food and drinks, and the theme park does its best to recreate some of them.  I bought a chocolate frog, which unfortunately melted before I got to eat it...

Although I did get a sweet collectible chocolate frog card!  They also had pumpkin juice, Bertie Bott's Every Flavour beans (and they do mean every flavour - ugh), and...

Butterbeer!  This is another example of brilliant user experience.  No one really knows what butterbeer would taste like, but people are expecting something that has a creamy kind of taste, with a head like beer, and that's a little bitter like beer underneath.

It was really tasty, and it matched the flavour that you would expect perfectly - it wasn't until later that we realised that it was actually just a generic soft drink (cola, but not as strong tasting) with melted ice cream on top, like an ice cream spider (or float if you're North American).  Once again, a brilliant execution, matching perfectly what people expect while using common ingredients.  Pretty tasty too!

All-in-all I highly recommend Universal Islands of Adventure - although I am concerned that they require your fingerprint to enter the park, which I find to be an invasion of privacy.  If you can get past that though, it's well worth the visit.