Happy Anniversary: 10 year & 1 year

The weekend of August 29/30, we celebrated our anniversary: August 28th was 10 years together and August 30th was our 1 year wedding anniversary. Aleksy planned the weekend as a surprise weekend away: I knew nothing. Didn't know where we were going or what we were doing. I wasn't sure exactly when the moment was when we were driving that he should tell me, but it ended up when we got to Toronto, he told me we were staying downtown and that weekend was buskerfest and we also had tickets to a comedy show on the Saturday. Everything was planed and paid for by Aleksy... and I got him some nice bourbon as a gift... even trade off right?

We left on Saturday morning around 10am and for to the hotel around 12:30pm. It was packed in the lobby when we got there... the Chelsea Hotel. There were people all dressed up for weddings that were at the hotel and then lots of people that just seemed like tourists... like us.

This picture is from our hotel balcony... I think the only hotel we've stayed at with a balcony!

On Saturday, one we checked into our hotel, we headed out to the buskerfest which was on Young St. right behind our hotel. There were a bunch of guys like this guy performing for everyone. And also other buskers that were doing things like sidewalk art. It was hard to see a lot of the buskering because there were sooooo many people that would gather around, but when we got a good spot, it was pretty sweet. Our first stop when we got to buskerfest: lunch! Surprise! The pregnant lady really needed some lunch. But it seemed like when you are looking for awesome lunch food, its hard to find but when you're not looking, it's EVERYWHERE. We ended up settling for a gyro and Aleksy has Montreal smoked sandwich (we saw all the awesome fish taco and other kiosks later).

This was on Young at the buskerfest. As you can see in the picture, there were approximately a million people on the streets. And lots of booths along the sides selling things (food, clothes, and other random things) and the occasional buskerer...

And the Toronto sign from the Pan Am games! As well as walking down Young St. to the busketfest, we went by the Eaton Centre and to Queen St. for a little shopping... It all made good sense because we were heading closer to our final destination of the day: Second City where the comedy show was... but... I was dying of walking. Aleksy's phone said we walked 16km that day and carrying around a baby (I was 34 and a half weeks!) all day forced me to need sitting breaks! When we were on Queen St. and realizing it was only 5pm, we called to switch our 10pm time to a 7pm show, which worked better because we were still full from lunch but had a lot of time to kill. Lucky us they still had space for the 7pm!

To get good seats, we checked in early at Second City. The show was actually at 7:30 but we got there for 6:45pm and good thing we did because we got a nice private table for 2 that was not right beside the stage.

One of the best parts of the Second City was that they had pregnant friendly drinks... I even had options: a whole list of them! This one was a "smartini" with pineapple, cranberry and lime juice... made me feel like it was an adult drink unlike pop. We also had some sweet potato fries to tie us over until after the show.

And the show was hilarious. It was improv so a lot of it was made up right on the spot, and the scenes were pre-established. There were about 4 comedians that did the whole show and it was definitely a show worth seeing... different from the stand up comedy that we've gone to at Yuk Yuks.
After the show was over, we decided to grab some late night (yes... late night is 9:30pm for us now) pizza... and churros... and head in to the hotel for the night. We cabbed it back to the hotel because walking for the day was over.

Us at out hotel the next morning :)

The night that we stayed there, the fire alarm went off at 1:30am. It was sooo loud and disruptive. The PA announced that everyone on the first 2 levels was evacuating and everyone else was to stay in their rooms... a little anxiety provoking. It sucked... but I was thinking how much ore it would have sucked with a baby or children with us (there were lots of families at the hotel!).

Although we saw some buskering on the Saturday, we returned Sunday because we thought we could get more out of buskerfest! After grabbing a bagel ad eta at the Panera bread, we saw a few more performances (like a man who was a pro yo-yo er). We also saw these amazing dinosaurs just walkig down the street. We saw them preparing to go out earlier int he day and got this picture from inside the urban outfitters when we stopped for a little AC break.

We also took a little tour of Kensington market on Sunday. I wish we could eat more because the food looked so good at Kensington market. Lots of street vendors with tons of different ethnic foods. We were holding out because the next stop was chinatown and we really wanted dim sum.

Oh and a band playing on top of the store...
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We drove and parked in chinatown to avoid more walking than necessary. Plus, parking in chinatown is the cheapest. We tried to explore the stores to get some good knock off stuff for baby Darnell, but really couldn't find anything.

But we did find a pastry shop... my favourite! We left Toronto with about 4 buns of goodness.... Conveniently, the pastry shop was right beside the dim sum restaurant we went to.

People love their dim sum on weekends in Toronto. There was actually a line to get in. But we decided that we didn't want to wait in the line, and agreed to eat at a "shared table". So, you can see here that there were another 8 or so seats that other people could have been seated next to us, but we had it to ourselves most of the time. You know... keeping it romantic on our anniversary.


We headed back to London just shortly after dim sum and buying our pastries. Wanted to make it back to get some groceries for the work week. It was a pretty sweet anniversary weekend!