Between the heat and the noise it was not a great night’s sleep. In the morning we drove to get some quick pictures of the big Toronto sign before heading to St. Lawrence Market, once again finding parking right on the street. Once again, we were thankful that Rover was so small. Any larger and we would not dare venture right into the middle of a large city like Toronto.
St. Lawrence Market is a large 2-story building with many small food shops and food stalls. Unlike the Mercados in Mexico, this place was high end with beautifully displayed meats, cheese, vegetables and seafood. None of it was cheap but it all looked like quality food. There were huge king crab legs, many types of smoked salmon, Waygu beef, Prime cuts of 28 day aged beef, perfect red strawberries, anything you would find at a fancy high-end restaurant. We had lunch at the Buster’s Sea Cove seafood stand, ordering grilled Octopus, grilled sashimi grade swordfish and on site handmade ravioli. It was all quite good but the portions were small for the price.
After lunch, we drove 30 minutes to the suburbs of Toronto to the Pacific Mall. This is a Chinese mall subdivided into hundreds of small stalls rented out to small businesses such as stores, hair salons, and most importantly for us, food stalls! Good thing we had a light lunch. We arrived at the mall and spent a couple of hours in the parking lot, just resting and doing homeschooling before venturing out around dinnertime. Like everywhere else we have been in Canada, Covid precautions were still being implemented with masks being mandatory inside and seats blocked off to limit seating.
As soon as we entered the mall, we knew we were in the right place because pretty much all everyone we could see was Chinese. We went upstairs to the food court area to find about a dozen food stalls serving all sorts of Chinese foods. I got a bunch of Chinese meatballs on a stick while Holly got a bowl of noodles. It tasted of China and it would have been easy to imagine that we were in a mall in China eating dinner.
One problem we encountered was that we still had not gotten any Canadian money so in one stall that did not take credit cards we had to pay $4 US instead of CAD $4. This was kind of funny since normally the first thing we would do when getting to a foreign country is to change or get from the ATM some local currency. However, Canada felt so much like the US and credit cards are so commonly accepted that we just had not bothered to get any local money.
After dinner we drove to a nearby Walmart for the night and the next day we just couldn’t leave without going to the Pacific Mall again for lunch. Holly had another bowl of the same noodles she ate the previous dinner it was just that good while I got an order of seafood on crispy noodles.
After lunch, Holly and Olivia wanted to get hair cuts so that took while and by the time that was done it was getting close to dinnertime so we went to a restaurant next to the mall and had some Chinese BBQ on a stick.
It was time we moved along so we finally headed out of Toronto. We stopped by the gas station to fill up on the way out of the city and we discovered that gas is quite expensive in Canada. It was hard to figure out since we had to convert liters into gallons and then Canadian money to US dollars but it was almost $4 a gallon. It was going to cost us well over US$100 for every fill up. We drove an hour out of town to the Walmart in Trenton before turning in for the night.