Stories From Toronto.

The first story was my friend and I seeing Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander at Metro Airport in Detroit on Thursday. We checked into our hotel in Toronto at 1:00. We then quickly headed out to see downtown Toronto. We ended up at the Hockey Hall of Fame. We followed that up by grabbing a bite to eat at this restaurant called "Grace O'Malley's". It was 3:00 in the afternoon, so it wasn't very busy. I had something different for my dinner, I had chicken pot pie. After eating, we hit more shops, including the Eaton Centre. The Eaton Centre is a 4 story mall. Yeah, it's big! That was where Michael Buble was to sign autographs on Saturday afternoon. But, after reading all the rules regarding the Michael Buble appearance: Time limit...no guarantee of even getting an autograph...I decided to skip the event. We hit a couple more places and then we headed back to our hotel. The thing I noticed was that people in Toronto walk fast. They even walk when on escalators. So, I got into the habit of walking fast. Which caused me to get way ahead of my friend who was with me. So, I had to stop and wait a few times and slow down my walking pace. When we got back to the hotel, the jazz band was playing in the lounge. There were women headed to the lounge. They were wearing little black cocktail dresses. Looking very good, but it made my friend and I look very underdressed, so we just headed to our room. We fell asleep quite early.

When I woke up on Friday morning it was raining. It rained the entire day. We headed down to breakfast, which was a glorious buffet in our hotel. Best thing about our stay there! We walked around in the rain for a few hours and then had lunch at Lone Star Grill, which was directly across from our hotel. After lunch, we headed to the Steam Whistle Brewery. We got there shortly after 1:00 p.m. They offered us a free sample of their beer (a 10 oz glass, I believe). After we finished our beers, we signed up for a brewery tour. They said, "You also get a free sample of our beer." They poured each of us another beer. That was beer #2 for us. I didn't finish mine before our tour started, but my friend did. We weren't allowed to take beer along on our tour. After the 30 minute tour, we were given another free beer. That made 3 free beers each! Thank God I drank pop at lunch! We had 2 couples from Ireland and 1 woman from France on our brewery tour with us.

Our next stop was a tour of the Rogers Centre (where the Blue Jays play). It was your typical tour. The tour guide talked about the awesomeness of Rogers Centre. All I could think of was the scene in the Beavis and Butthead movie where they toured the Hoover Dam and constantly made remarks to the tour guide. Making his statements about the dam seem not very impressive. The tour lasted about an hour. I left my umbrella in one of seating areas and I had to force the tour guide to go fetch it for me. I felt bad about that because he constantly reminded us not to forget anything whenever we left to visit another part of the stadium. After the tour, we headed back to our hotel room to get ready for our big evening.

On Friday night, we had dinner at a restaurant called Baton Rouge. It was a nice place. I had a entree of grilled chicken and grilled shrimp. Very good, but too much food. We then headed to the Kylie concert at the Air Canada Centre. This was the most interesting part of the trip. We were seated in the 23rd row in the floor seating area. Most of the people seated near us were men....gay men. It seemed as if the entire gay male community of Toronto was at the concert. There seemed to be more men than women at this concert. We were fully immersed in the gay culture of Toronto. The whole thing was kinda funny. As for the show, it was great! Kylie does cater to her male and female audience. Several times, the male dancers jumped up and wrapped their legs around the waist of the other male dancers. This made the crowd happy. Kylie took a request for a song to be played during her encore. The crowd's request was "DISCO!" So, Kylie sang "Your Disco Needs You". From what I've heard that song is a big favorite in the clubs. The show lasted for 2 hours. Great show!

On Saturday morning we toured the CN Tower. The funny thing was that while in line for the tower tour we saw the same 2 Irish couples from the brewery tour on Friday. They said, "Doing all the tourist stuff, too?!" After the tour, we headed to Union Station to inquire about how to get to the Toronto Zoo. This involved taking the subway and then taking 2 buses. We encountered a young Asian man while on the subway. He had some mental troubles. He was making some incoherent noises, then shaking his head and laughing. He would then finish off by snapping his fingers. So, that got stuck in our heads. Especially the finger snapping part. It was something we did the rest of our trip. The zoo was nice. Very big. We did a lot of walking while there. We then went back to downtown.

We were eager to eat dinner at this place near our hotel called "Jack Astors". We saw the waitresses there on Thursday night. Attractive with short black skirts and cleavege-baring tops. So, we were pretty excited. We got seated and the next thing we heard was "Hi, I'm Andrew. I'll be your waiter tonight." Nooooooo! Talk about an evening of wasted potential! We ate dinner and then ended the night with a beer at the "Loose Moose" bar and grill that was next door to Jack Astors. We went back to the hotel and went to sleep early. We got up early and ate breakfast and finished packing and then headed to the airport. At the airport, my friend got randomly picked for a thorough search. He wan't too happy about that! He got a lot of special attention! LOL! The best thing about our trip home was the very cute flight attendant named Jodi who we had on our flight from Toronto to Detroit. She was cute and very nice. Too bad our flight was only 45 minutes long. Anyway, that's the long story of my trip!