Eeek! Malls!

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So, yesterday we did a tour of Mississagua & Streetsville; I’m not sure what to say about that – see I’m lousy writing about having a good time. Good at prolonged whining, or telling you about what I’ve repaired on my car, sucky at describing places. I’d make one heck of a lousy travel writer.

Yeah, so we headed on the bus-tour of Mississauga and Streetsville; it’s interesting both how similar and how different to the UK the suburbia is. And indeed, how terrifyingly similar some of it is, and how shockingly different other bits are. The use of brick in the GTA seems to accentuate the similarities; but also means that there’s these subtle differences; like someone being in a parallel universe; so you get housing that looks very similar to that in the UK, but just *slightly* different. It’s just not quite the way you’d expect. It’s interesting; at least to me. But then I’m weird like that.

We also landed up at the Square One mall; malls, oddly are not the same the world over; but this one looked a lot like Cribbs in Bristol, which *was* odd.

Anyway, it was a fairly relaxed day, but shockingly tiring. That and my body still refuses to acknowledge that I’m not going to work in the morning and so persists in waking me up at 6 and going “ohmygodyou’regoingtobelate” followed by “oh, no, sorry, holiday. Um, we’re awake now, have you considered how you’ll decorate the bathroom enough”. Silly brain / body. Anyway, yeah, se we kicked back in the evening with Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (Mitchell (wacka-wacka-wacka-wacka)). Which was… well… it was Mystery Science Theatre; need I say more? Yeah, so we had that and Chinese. Well, everyone else had chinese, I had a A Mountain Of Food. Note to self: portions bigger, even than the portions I’d got used to in the UK. Order less. So that was my chilled out and relaxed holiday-day.

I’ve spent this morning in battle with vodaphone – my phone is *meant* to work over here. And it does, I can receive incoming calls, send and receive texts… only one Teensy Tinsy hitch. I can’t make outgoing calls, and I can’t top up my phone. I’ve run out of credit (messaging is a trifle more expensive when you’re roaming) and all my phone will do is say in a nice polite voice ‘Your service provider has not authorised us to provide service’. It says ‘ROGERS’ on it, in place of Vodaphone. But that’s all I can do. Which is, as they say, less than useful.

So I tried to register online to do top-ups, and it seems to be stuffed there too; ‘cos it tells me my phone is already registered for online services, but if I try to use them it says it’s not. Bah. So, yeah, hopefully they’ll get back to me…

Today, iirc, is Kensington Market / West End of Toronto day. So if you live here, wave to the cheerful canadiophile brit who’s wandering around going ‘ooooh. Shiny. Clean. Mmmm.’

KateWE

Kate's allegedly a human (although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise). She's definitely not a vampire, despite what some other people claim. She's also mostly built out of spite and overcoming oppositional-sexism, racism, and other random bullshit. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, she's here to reassure that it's all fine.