Soundtrack for the week: an American Sign Language version of Fort Minor – “Where’d You Go”.
Sorry for the lack of updates – I’ve just been beat from this last trip to Toronto, as well as beat up. I’ll briefly recap the past week.
Starting from last Wednesday night, I pulled an all-nighter packing for a 7:30 am flight from LaGuardia to Toronto. My mom was over the apartment so that we could leave together. It was her first flight on a plane since 9/11, so we had to educate her on what had to be done to get through security.
We arrived on time at about 10:00 in Toronto, and took a taxi to the Sheraton Centre, in Downtown Toronto. The room is available when we get there so we slept in. We jumped into a Zipcar (yes they’re in Toronto, and it was the best choice we made – where gas is $4/gallon, something that has gas included has to be a deal) in the afternoon to get to my uncle’s apartment in Scarborough. The rehearsal was at St. Rose of Lima Church, followed by a nice steak dinner at the Blackhorn Dining Room where we got to meet the in-laws to be.
Friday, we spent an easy day exploring the PATH – the underground shopping mall underneath downtown. Lunch at Akco – a Japanese/Korean restaurant. P got her nails done. That night, the rest of the family came in and we had a family dinner at my uncle’s favorite dim sum restaurant, Dragon Dynasty, which was to be one of the best dim sum restaurants in Toronto. Our set menu was very well done. Afterwards, P and I went to the lakefront to see the Luminato festival which was loads of fun, and some nice quality time for just the two of us.
Saturday, the wedding day, P got me out of bed early to get coffee. We only made it 50 feet out of the hotel where I suddenly found myself on the ground splayed over the curb. A Mountie was actually coming down the street and asked if I was all right, and I waved him off. After making it to the Tim Horton’s I could see that it was swelling up quite a bit. Getting back to the hotel room, P put some ice packs on the injury. After some pain killers, we all hobbled to the Zipcar and drove to the church.
The ceremony was nice and relatively simple, hewing to the traditional Catholic playbook. Then we drove to the reception hall, the Shangri-la Convention Centre . The meal was a traditional Chinese banquet, with the substitution of salmon fillet for whole fish for the groom’s party, premium shark fin soup (very obviously the real thing), and cake and pastries table at the end. Despite the “No Shooters” sign, the cousins all did anyway. The cake had custom-made bobble head figurines of my cousin and her husband which were really funny. The party ended at 1 am. P got to drive back.
The next day, we check out and go shopping at the Eaton Centre. We have Greek food that was quite nice, and made a few choice purchases. We didn’t need to rush to the airport, as the flight was delayed one hour, and then ground stopped for 2 and a half more hours as the remnants of a tropical storm was crossing New York. We got at about 10:30 pm.
The next day, Monday, was alma mater’s graduation, and exactly 10 years to the day of my law school graduation. The honoree was a supreme court justice from Canada who was a Holocaust survivor. The saddest event of the proceedings was the awarding of a posthumous JD to U.S. Army Staff Sergent Kyu Chay, a Korean-American who was killed by a road bomb while deployed in Afghanistan. He had only 3 credits left. His father and brother accepted the diploma for him.