…and leave the party in the back.
In the similar vein as Where the Hell Is Matt video, Christoph Rehage took pictures of his walk across China and made a stop motion “Amazing Race on Acid” style video. I love how he incorporated some of his travel buddies in the flow of images. Enjoy!
The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.
So you’ve decided to visit Toronto and enjoy it’s #2 outdoor attraction (second only to The Beaches Jazz Festival, according to their site). Regardless of who tells you their numbers are numero uno, Toronto Pride reels in a crapload of cash for the city (The Gay Community has it’s own subsection on Toronto’s tourism website – take THAT Caribana!). It’s a good idea to research your options before opening your wallet and organize your fun before hitting the street.
That’s where I come in! Hello tourist! So glad I could help!
You may recall my article last year: Pride Tips for Out of Towners. I’m bitter happy to report that not much has changed. The bar you are drinking in will have a draconian liquor inspector grumpily wander through to see if they can make some money in fines. And some circuit party will try to seduce you with their glossy posters of near-naked men, but there will be a chance that you choose incorrectly and spend $95 to find you’re not at the “A-List” bash and wind up with a crowd that looks more at home at a Phish concert. The Parade tips still hold true (early, sunblock, elbows), as do the street crowd crush. Don’t forget that “bagging and bedding a Torontonian” is still a bit like coaxing a snipe out of the bushes. We seem to have tightened our shy little cocoons around ourselves during this long, cool spring! All I reported last year are still valid tips. Take heed!
At this time I need to reiterate my number one peeve about Pride: You should NOT, repeat NOT eat at any restaurant on Church Street during Pride. Eat from a hot dog cart (blarg!), bring your own food, starve, devour your travel companion or gnaw on your own foot. Do not eat at any Church Street restaurant.
Wait… I think I need to nail that home:
Got it? Just want to let you know. All restaurants will take you in their arms, whisper sweet nothings in your ear, thrust a pre-set menu in your hands and then jizz in your face while rifling through your wallet for your cash. And not in a good way.
Here’s a list of restaurants that are off the strip and worth your money:
Daybreak – This place is popular, pricey but has big portions. At the corner of Carlton and Church, just outside the Village.
Studio – When Daybreak is full, two doors south is this crumbly greasy spoon. Cheap alternative great for breakfast.
The Coachhouse – Same as The Studio, but over on Yonge and Wellesley. Greek twist on a diner.
Chew Chews, Johnny G’s and Gourmet Burger – Three Cabbagetown options that are a little walk away from the Village.
Sizzler – Late Late night burger place with baby sized meat patties at Yonge and College. Not much to look at but BABY SIZED BURGERS!! Late at night!!!
Olympic Pizza – Been in the village forever. Consistently good but unremarkable Italian food the recipe for a great restaurant!
Tokyo Grill / Okanomi House – uncommon Japanese food (read: NOT sushi).
Ginger – Not the one on Church, but over at Yonge and Bloor, there’s an outlet that will most likely not fuck you for cash. Great non-restauranty hot and sour soup.
Oja Noodle House – Right beside a pricey “EggRoll” restaurant. Dishes more authentic and way cheaper. Charles and Yonge.
That’s a good start. Yonge at Bloor has had an explosion of Asian Fusion dining places. All seem “good” if not a bit dollar-y.
New tips? Got a couple!
In some cases it’s polite to ask if you can take pictures of random hot guys/gals/gender-fucks, but in most cases it doesn’t matter – cameras are everywhere during Pride and if you’re shy, stay the fuck home! But asking for a photo is not only as polite as a Canadian in a foreign land, it’s an excellent way to break the ice. So if you do go this route, may I suggest little business cards with your Twitter/Flickr/Facebook page URL on it so you can ensure your subject can view your work later when they’re at home slathering on the aloe vera. And for those people you were jokingly taking a picture of (“Good lord that outfit!! I must ridicule it online tonight!“) and get caught doing so, may I suggest a separate card with www dot lemonparty dot org on it.
I failed to mention last year that to avoid the crush that is the uncomfortably crowded street in front of Woodys and the parking lot Beer Tent (Church and Maitland), the Pride Committee has smartly enshrined the alleyways behind these two venues open for easier access past this bottle neck. There are similar North-South routes between East-West streets if you need to dash up Church Street. Any Pride volunteer will gladly point them out.
Keep your cell phone charged. The crowds are so large you will want to know where your friends are. Twittering may not be such a good idea since it goes down more often than a career drag queen 2 days before rent is due. Thankfully iPhone users will have MMS texting by then and you can send your friends your location (or trick’s face) for group approval.
And lastly:
Please take some time to consider what you will wear. Feather boas are for straight boys who were dragged to Pride by their girlfriends. Outrageous drag is fine, but consider it will be hot and you may be outside for some time. Melty creatures does not equal funny drag. You’ll scare children. May I recommend something clever yet not too noticable…
Whatever you do, enjoy your Pride. If you see me, say Hi!
Things blind you in the World. You lose site of your behaviour at 100%, 60%, 40% levels of excitement relavite to the heart-racing thing you’re exposed to, while discovering things in the Parks. You come around the corner and there’s Goofy in a cowboy hat! Goofy! OMFG! HI! Then you notice he’s not noticing you. Then you notice the line for photographs. 100, 60, 40. Just like the forced perspective of all the buildings along Main Street.
In this fete of excitement you discover things about people you love. Things that may make you either love them more or question the whole foundation of your relationship.
Case in point: Lunch at T-Rex Restaurant. We’re stuffed to the gills on massive burgers and nachos and we’re walking it off in the gift shop. A section in the back is a Build-a-Bear outlet that had been modified into “build a Dino” in keeping with the whole restaurant theme. Nice. I’ve never been in one and wandered in for a browse. I’m looking at the different “breeds” of dinos you can get when I hear a manly girl scream.
“Look at these cute shorts!!”
Yes. It’s SharkBoy and he’s holding up a pair of cargo pants, sized for a baby or a baby dino or someone with serious medical problems. He’s gushing like a prom queen stuck in the football team’s locker room. The only other time I’ve seen him excited like this was when we bought lightsabers at our first trip to Disney. He immediately picks out an orange Raptor and thrusts it into my hand to get the attendant to stuff it while he wanders the isles looking for cuter outfits.
Not sure if you’ve ever done the “Build A Bear/Dino” experience. The stuffing machine attendant gives you a cloth heart that you have to rub, blow on, give a kiss, make a wish and CRAM into the centre of your creation. Yeah, I had to do that part. I wished nobody was watching.
At the end of the whole process (including making a birth certificate – say hello to Kiki2, newly adopted by yours truly, Libido Suiddlygoot), SharkBoy discovers a tiny pair of cammo tighty whiteys that illicit a final peal of delight and an extra reach for his wallet. Now, those were cute. I admit it.
Did this experience soil our relationship? Hardly. It made me love him more. It’s a rare moment to see this kind of behaviour from him and it also makes me love Disney even more.
No, not the act of getting tired of Disney, but the actual drive to continue wandering the parks despite your feet or legs or eyes complaining otherwise.
Fatigue is the number one cause of most family meltdowns, which I took great glee in watching. I spied a mother try unsuccessfully keep her son standing still beside his baby sister in a stroller, 4 feet from her as she ordered drinks for them all. The son kept on making belly farts on his sister to which she would waffle between screams of delight and dissatisfaction. Screams, nonetheless. Mother would turn and ask the son to stop while fishing round for money in her purse. More belly farts, more screams, more frustrated mom. Then the dreaded “public torso shake” happened: grip both arms of the child and shake while the parent… Accentuates. Their. Point. Through. Clenched. Teeth. All the while the poor child’s brain was being scrambled like it was in a Magic Bullet. The poor kid was wrenched away from the stroller and quizzed as to why he couldn’t just stay still for two god damned minutes? Mom’s fatigue got the best of her.
When kids hit that wall, they either crash outright (see Transportation post and the last bus back to the resort), or take on the characteristics of a 1940s air raid siren in heat. “Whhhyyyyyyyy can’t weeeeee goooooo back to the Whiiiiinieeee The Poooooooh Riiiiiiide?” I swear they become a parody of themselves the longer they do this. Shame on the parents who have learned to ignore this type of noise pollution… people like me don’t live with this kind of behaviour and your ignorance of it is jangling my nerves.
When two adults crash, they either melt down like a Fox reality TV show or go introvert and just stare off into the silent distance. SharkBoy and I instinctively know when we’re at this point: we look at each other and say: “Done.” Then make our way back to our hotel room to pack to go home. Though next time I think we need to factor in rest points during the day. Lunches and breaks sort of got swept aside for wait times for rides or mad dashes to opposite ends of parks to meet FastPass times.
I liken a Disney trip to sex. You need stanima and drive and hope to god you don’t get your Disney Miracle moment too soon in the vacation or you’ll be wandering around looking for another miracle to happen again – and may be sorrily dissapointed when it doesn’t happen. Or you can have several small miracles laid out over the week, which we did: the weather was good, the ride waits weren’t that long, the food was fantastic, way-laid plans were meneded on the fly for equally good experiences… no complaints at all, really.
I can confidently say the only way I have not arrived at a Disney theme park is by jet pack. Every other imaginable way has been done.
On foot? Walk it out! Bus? Yup. Rental car? Yup. Train? Woo woo! Monorail from the future? Por favor mantengase alejado de las puertas! On the back of a white tiger?
Don’t let’s be silly, now.
This is my second time renting a car for the week at Disney and I thought this time we could save some money by just using the bus system but I was quickly reminded that the car offers a freedom from bus-exhaustion, or, if you will, not having embarrassing pictures of yourself put up to Flickr of you asleep rubber necked, slack jawed and drooling. Plus it was a perk since the resort price included free parking at all Disney properties, meaning we could hop from park to park for free.
While driving isn’t as enviromentally sound as Uncle Walt would like, it beats having to experience “the Crush” – the scrum that happens every night when each park closes. Even though the busses run every two minutes, two minutes with a grumpy sleepy child, arm loads of souvenirs and an empty stomach stretches out to eternity. Still, it’s fun to see a child’s face after a day of experiencing a park: worn out, over stimulated and content.
I’ve always loved the Monorail system at WDW and this time we tried every ride to sit in the front. All the drivers were gracious, chatty and friendly but one stood out. Missed his name but he had such a memorable southern drawl that we couldn’t hear 99% of what he said:
Me: “Did it take long for you to train to be a Monorail pilot?”
Pilot: “Habamemnrm… wermmsh ahslib. Ha! Ha hahaha! Mummminy mouse!”
All of us: Blank Stares.
He let us sit in the command chair for photos before leaving the cockpit as long as “we didnmrnt touchmna stick, k?” Sharkboy is NOT touchmna stick, k? But his face says otherwise.
Like this picture? It’s basically what Luke saw when he climbed up the underside of an AT-AT walker. We were asked if there were any “rides” at Disney Hollywood Studio, but that’s going to be a SharkBoy post. Keep your eyes peeled.
The largest ride at Magic Kingdom in terms of showy-ness and “fake” transportation would have to be the paddle boat. I say “fake” because it only goes forward, constrained to a submerged track in the “lake”. Discovering this after riding it for the first time was a bit disappointing because I always fantasized about the River Boat Captain going mental after a day of looping the Lands and ramming the boat into Tom Sawyer’s Island for kicks.
Ironically for this post, the WDW Tomorrowland Transit Authority People Mover was closed during our stay. It’s one of my favorite decompression rides: it doesn’t offer any thrill other than a calming view, much like Carosel of Progress is my favorite “nap ride”.
I have nothing new to report about Disney, per se. Yes it’s still the pinnacle of customer service. Yes the rides were just as fun. Yes, Stacey was the first person you saw when you turned on the hotel TV. It was all the same yet the familiarity was like going to a friend’s house who has 1000% better home electronics than you do.
Not much has changed since my last vacation there, except for a few tweaks (for the better) to their services and a couple new rides. I won’t repeat myself for the sake of old time readers. Know that while there wasn’t any bed-jumping videos of excitement, the emotion of being there was just as strong.
Collectively between three cameras (not including the Photopass service Disney provides), I estimate we took close to 2500 pictures. I’ll be posting some here but the brunt of them from my camera will be on Flickr for your perusal. Don’t expect captions for all!
Now, on to the subject at hand: Food!
Know that we had absolutely NO bad meals on any of the Disney properties (including third party chain eateries). That isn’t to say all our meals were perfect: when we discovered that Oh Boys! on Colonial Drive in Orlando had been closed for a while (update your website you dicks! That includes you, Google Earth!), we motored back to Downtown Disney and still managed to have a great meal – at twice the price, unfortunately. My only complaint is that all manner of food at Disney World is shockingly expensive. While we were eating in moderate to “classy” places like Coral Reef Restaurant at EPCOT (blackened catfish!) or The Crystal Palace (Character Breakfast with Eyore!) at Magic Kingdom, I still dreaded the bill at the end of the meal.
The only time I noticed a staff, err… Cast Member not entirely in tune with a high level of good service output was at the Beaches And Cream Ice Cream Parlour. See video below. I think this was her one thousand time serving up this kind of sundae just on this day, to screaming over-sugared children, made evident by the robotic delivery of the room-stopping announcement (but she does save herself at the end with the “young” comment, blessherheart):
The most surreal meal we had was at The Grand Floridian – Afternoon Tea in the Garden View Room. The room was Mary Poppins Perfect: vaulted ceilings, Victorian styling and proper china tea pots. No fart jokes here. I found the atmosphere a bit intimidating, like walking into a $100/plate restaurant wearing Old Navy. Actually, that’s exactly what I did. But the waitress never made me felt like I had. Her timing was infallible and her service top notch.
The other patrons made me think of bored, rich housewives having to actually socially interact with their immaculately dressed children while the husbands were off avoiding their kids playing golf and the nanny had the day off. Oh no, no rides for these tykes! They had to enjoy liver sandwiches with no crusts and were ordered to sit on their hands until the meal was finished.
At least that’s what I imagined going on at the table beside us.
At one point Sharkboy decided to let loose with a bawdy, off colour joke and proceeded to laugh heartily. Suddenly he stops and says in his best educated voice: “Pardon me. Ha. Ha. Ha.” We all snickered like kids in school.
Our last meal was a pizza on our hotel bed, tired out of our minds from 9 days of walking, riding, laughing and just having fun. It was the perfect last meal for all the sensory overloading.
I find the return from Disney (especially a Disney resort) so unsettling. Leaving my house this morning I see that not everyone is smiling! Not everyone has a song in their heart! Some people actually don’t want to be doing their jobs! There are no bunnies on my front lawn when I wake up!
Not that our time within the Disney bubble of un-reality was completely sheltered from the outside world: as we dressed for the parks, the morning TV news showed us reports of stupid people doing stupid things with guns in the warm Florida nights. And we did see a few “child vs parent” melt downs that shattered the happy go lucky atmosphere inside the parks, like a fart in a bakery. For the most part though, we happily posed with fairies and bears and queens, though not all during Gay Days, with content smiles on our faces.
Expect pictures and stories soon.
Limo arrived early and clean. But white. Seriously! Who takes a white limo and NOT live in Miami?
Customs and security was effortless (I kept my belt on, shoes off, no bag inspection, three questions at the customs agent stamp stamp bye)
Now the three hour wait because Its better to be early and bored than frazzled.
My huge cardboard paper cut on the pad of my pointer finger (yes, it was as painful as it sounds) is nearly healed!
SharkBoy’s wart is gone!
The dollar is at $0.91 and rising!
I got all the clothes and crap I want and still made it under the 40lbs limit WestJet has sanctioned!
We found our $10 rain ponchos with Mickey on the back from 2007!
The buff on my manicured nails is still there!
I can feel the light! Amen! Allelujah! Yehova! Klaatu Barada Nicto!
I’m pleased to say that I hit my target weight of 211lbs a full 22 hours before my deadline this morning, even after cheating with a pizza for dinner. Why “211”? Why not a nice fingers and toes base ten “210lbs”? It has to do with the Wii Fit and it’s anal desire to keep you focused on BMI and not your weight. I couldn’t get it to squeeze out that extra pound when I set up my last goal on it because it would not be ‘realistic’ to lose that much BMI in such a short time. Or so my Wii Fit says. And I trust it.
I love you Wii Fit. Please, never leave me.
Strange thing is, after losing 36lbs since March, I don’t think I look different. Expect blog posts about finger banging my uvula in a little while as I try to come to terms with a dysmorphic body image.
