Saturday, October 13, 2012

Searching for Barbie

Sunday October 14, 1:10 a.m.

Well, after the nice haircut at Monsieur, I decided to fulfill the 2nd reason I was downtown on Friday....find a Nintendo DS game for my niece who will be celebrating a birthday on Monday. My brother told me that she's been hankering for something connected with Barbie or that movie "Tangled", a re-telling of the Rapunzel story. Anything I can do to keep the only child member of our family happy.
It was a cold day...I think it only got as high as 6 degrees C so it was rather bracing, but that's the type of weather I enjoy so it was nice walking down over to U of T. The Fall Colours were coming out quite nicely.

One of the other reasons for me to head down to U of T was that I wanted to have lunch from one of the trucks. Could barely graduate a quarter-century ago but I knew my trucks. There was the Sam Ho red truck for Chinese, and there was the brown truck in front of Sidney Smith that I went for my burgers and fries. Pure comfort food for me. I chose a jumbo hot dog with fries & gravy. Ironically, my drink of choice was a V8 in a forlorn hope of having something remotely healthy. Ended up having my lunch outside in front of Sid Smith. The pigeons were out there on food-collecting patrol as usual.


I noticed a lot of white trailers all lined up along Hoskin Ave, just east of St. George. Of course, that meant filming was taking place somewhere at U of T. The St. George Campus has been a location magnet for Hollywood productions for years and years...including the last attempt at a successful "Hulk"flick. At the time I was crossing the street, I didn't know what the project was, but found out later that the re-booted "Robocop"was being filmed there.





My search for Barbie would take me further east away from U of T. On the way across via College St., I saw that ol' Fran's was still hanging in there. I used to go to the culinary institution a number of times for some good ol' diner grub. Really enjoyed their Meat Loaf and Gravy with Mashed Potatoes. I should take any of my old Japanese students there if they should ever come and visit.

I ended up searching through The Eaton Centre and The Bay for that elusive Nintendo DS software, to no avail. After talking it over with my brother on Friday night, I decided to send over an E-Gift Card from Toys R Us instead this morning. Still, it was a worthwhile day to walk around downtown.