teabowl

The Beet Organic Café & Market is housed in an old TD Bank building, its entrance behind a still-functional Green Machine ABM terminal. I’m not sure if this is an amazing coincidence or a subtle, “only in the Junction” political statement: on Queen West, the big brands are taking over the mom & pop restaurants and stores. In Toronto’s “up and coming” West End, it’s apparently the other way around.

The Beet is not vegetarian, but very vegetarian and vegan friendly. All of its food is organic and healthily prepared. The fact that it’s co-owned by a certified nutritionist and a homeopathic doctor is evident in everything we tried: the food is tasty, healthy and solid. Unlike the light-and-fluffy salads that pass for vegetarian fare elsewhere, things here are weighty and feel like they’re providing actual nutrition.

It’s all very earnest, but excellent and deserving of a vegan’s/vegetarian’s/locavore’s/eco-aware person’s patronage. The “market” is a thoughtful selection of healthy products, from organic toothpaste to healthy granola bars to tea (the selection could be a little better here, I think…) and coffee. The soundtrack was tasty and chilled roots reggae today, perhaps indicating the preferences of the fabulously friendly blonde dreadlocked server.

We ordered the soup of the day (cream of parsnip with apple), the frittata of the day (kale, broccoli, Emmenthal), a tofu and avocado wrap and a freshly juiced juice. Everything was delicious, the soup a particular standout for me. The sandwich/frittata plates are served with a substantial helping of well-dressed salad (a rare feat, finding a well-dressed salad in any restaurant) and solid multigrain bread with sundried tomato spread.

I ordered jasmine green tea which came in a Bodum coffee plunger - a good idea in principle, but the plunger was a little loose, so I had a few moments of, “Oh boy, I hope it holds up!” :) I did get a free top-up of hot water though (without asking!), which was great.

The bathroom is fabulous (I imagine it used to be the bank manager’s office - worth checking out for its sheer size alone, but also very clean and new, and furnished with non-scented hand soap, which is a rarity again).

Overall, highly recommended. You can tell that intelligent human beings are involved in planning and running this restaurant daily. It felt like a bit of an oasis, and I think I’ll return many times. And I sincerely hope it does well. Toronto needs more restaurants like this.

Closed Mondays, Open Tuesday through Sunday. Hours and location on the website.

The Don Valley Brick Works consists of 16 heritage buildings and an adjacent 16-hectaire public park that includes the Weston Quarry Garden, wetlands, hiking trails, and wildflower meadows. From 1889 to 1984, the site was one of Canada’s pre-eminent brickyards. The Don Valley Pressed Brick Works Company produced a wide variety of bricks and kiln-fired clay products that built much of Toronto’s heritage buildings and many of Canada’s national landmarks including Winnipeg’s T. Eaton Building, Toronto’s Massey Hall and Casa Loma, Montreal’s Acadia Apartments and Moncton’s T. Eaton Building. (From: http://www.evergreen.ca/rethinkspace/)

Pictures from a weekend outing. I had to shoot around all the Japanese tourists and their tripods. Clearly, it’s a hot tip for tourists.

French-trained master baker Marc Thobor of Celestin fame has recently taken over the restaurant’s bakery counter and renamed it Thobors Boulangerie. It offers mostly beautiful standard French breads - baguettes, boules, fancy savoury or sweet variations, some croissants and a small variety of danishes, pains au chocolat and the like.

As an immigrant, I’m constantly in search of great bread in Toronto. Being German, I feel drawn to solid, chewy, darker sourdough and/or rye breads. Which are hard to come by: the Russian/Polish rye loaves are too light and fluffy, the Jewish varieties often have caraway seeds. Nice, but not pleasing to the German palate.

Discovering Thobors comes hot on the heels of a recent trip to Germany where we ate great bread - all kinds: seed-covered buns that were light and substantial all at once, the densest, moistest, most smooth-crusted rye bread you can imagine, and lovely 3, 5 or 7 grain breads that easily blew anything Whole Foods Market has ever made out of the water. To date, Dimpflmeier’s packaged rye breads have been the most consistent option… but they pale a little when compared to Thobors’ crunchy, fresh goodness.

I’m particularly enjoying the seeded baguettes (sesame and poppy), which have a pully, chewy bite. I like my bread to put up a bit of a fight. Pair these with a nice and simple cheese - maybe something like a Morbier - and you’ve got a very European-style quick meal.

Highly recommended. It’s actually worth making a trip up Mount Pleasant for. You could easily combine it with a visit to Bayview Avenue and its little food boutiques. But while there are now at least four bakeries in a one-block radius near Bayview and Millwood, you won’t find break as good as Marc Thobors’. My recommendation on Bayview is tostick with Alex Farm Products for cheese and Passion Fruits for excellent produce.

There’s an interesting interview with T.K.V. Desikachar, one of the founding fathers of modern yoga practice, in the March 2008 edition of the Indian news magazine Civil Society. It contains a number of interesting points, and I think the humility, simplicity and practicality of many of his and his school’s views are great. Yoga in the West, I think, is often taught either as a type of spiritual practice (by people who, when you see their tv shows, seem like earnest charlatans) or as a ‘performance sport’ with little focus on the individual’s physical and psychological needs.

The piece in Civil Society touches on a number of aspects around this. A key passage for me was about yoga and Hinduism:

[…] teachers were mixing Hinduism and yoga, presenting them as one, implying that if people wanted to follow yoga they had to follow the Hindu religion. Desikachar knew from his studies with his father that none of these practices followed the guidelines of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. For instance, Patanjali saw religious affiliation as a student’s personal choice not the teacher’s. If yoga is tied with Hinduism, then it would have to exclude people who may not be comfortable with its religious content.

What also resonates is Desikachar’s emphasis of individual healing as part of the process of studying yoga. Students come to KYM (Desikachar’s yoga centre) for many reasons, but often because they struggle with specific health issues.

An assessment is made of each person in his or her entirety. The student and teacher then understand each other through an evolving personal relationship. A course is designed for the individual and adapted according to the progress made. The personal factor plays a vital role.[…] Therapy at KYM includes helping those afflicted by psychological and emotional suffering. Here, too, the course is designed for the individual and adapted according to the progress made under the guidance of a supervisor.

This sounds enticingly different from yoga studios and schools in the West. Still, the spirit of this type of yoga was carried into the world by students of Desikachar’s. For instance, Vanda Scaravelli, an Italian disciple, brought some of these more interegrated, gentler, secular principles to Europe and North America. In Toronto, the Esther Myers Yoga Studio carries on aspects of this tradition today.

There’s an incredible feature of Toronto that I’m only discovering now: ravines. Before I moved to Toronto, this wasn’t even part of my vocabulary. A ravine is a small valley, often with an active stream, found in urban areas. Turns out the Toronto ravine system is quite extensive and provides beautiful pockets of green woodland in the middle of the city.

This weekend, a brisk, restorative walk through David A. Balfour Park and the “Vale of Avoca” ravine (who names these things? :) yielded these pictures. Sadly, I didn’t have my regular camera with me, so the contrast is pretty bad in these over-exposed phonecam pics. I want to go back and take detailed pictures of the graffiti everywhere.

As you can see, it’s a strange, almost mystical place, unexpected in the middle of the city bustle. On a misty day, you half expect to encounter fairies dressed in camo pants, or a group of trolls smoking weed near the riverbed.

There are multiple undocumented but reasonably well-maintained paths, some further up the slopes, some right down in the middle near the stream. What’s particularly delightful about this ravine is that it’s mostly empty, even on a beautiful, warm spring Sunday like yesterday. I think the ‘urban grit’ puts off many of the more middle class leisure walkers (who might prefer the Kay Gardner Beltline Park, a long linear trail of about 5km that occupies an old commuter train track from the 1890s). But it’s quiet (the city’s hum seems far away) and the air is good.

When I left the park, a bicycle cop was writing up two young men at the exit. One, a twenty-something with a red nose, bike messenger clothes, a bike and slurred speech advised me not to drink “down there” because he just got a ticket. I didn’t quite know what to say and mumbled something about “just walking.”

I think this blend of trees, trails, graffiti, concrete and urban decay is fantastic. Wear solid shoes.

It feels like a bit of an old topic. It’s been discussed many times before, and the outcome is pretty much always: be cautious. Don’t steal someone else’s Internet access. Depending on where you live, it could be a criminal offense to just jump onto an unprotected home wi-fi router and connect to the ‘Net. And, since you’re using someone else’s resources - presumably without their knowledge and consent - we’re told it’s just plain not very nice.

The other piece of advice that always goes with this is for anyone who has high-speed Internet access and uses a wireless router/access point to distribute it to various laptops, desktops and devices around the home: protect your network. Most wireless routers these days are trivial to set up, and their manuals make it child’s play to enable WEP/WPA, so there’s really no excuse for not practicing safe wi-fi.

And there’s the rub: unless you don’t want to - or can’t be bothered. In which case, my personal opinion is that anyone can jump on your ‘public’ network because you’ve made it fair game to do so. Again - in my personal opinion - I think you’ve made your network into just another node in an increasingly accessible wireless infrastructure that’s pretty pervasive, especially in large cities, especially in North America.

Being in a public spot in downtown Toronto (as I am right now), somewhere where there are lots of high-rise condo and office buildings, you really shouldn’t have to pay for wireless Internet access. Your challenge is more about where you are located physically and whether you have a high-enough, open-enough vantage point so that you’re within range of unprotected networks (most of which are residential).

There’s a slight security concern about making your traffic go through someone else’s network, of course. My sense is that you have three primary factors in your favour:

1. 90% of the time, your ‘provider’ won’t know you’re using his or her network.
2. Home routers are notoriously poor at logging network activities or data packets moving through them (and those are are good at it are operated by people who really know what they’re doing, and those people wouldn’t not protect their wireless networks)
3. If someone isn’t protecting their wireless network, there’s about a 50% chance they’re okay with it being used by anonymous users.

Now for the question of what’s okay and what’s not. We don’t want to get our ‘provider’ in trouble, and we don’t want to get in trouble ourselves. So here are some suggestions of what not to do when leeching wi-fi access:

• Download or upload gratuitous quantities of software, music or movies
• Use weird peer-to-peer protocols
• Download/upload porn or other materials for which someone could (maybe) get in trouble with their own access provider.

I think that using ‘borrowed’ networking time for email, surfing, reading/writing blogs, etc. is perfectly fine (note that I’m not giving you advice here or telling you what to do; I’m just saying what I think). These activities generate very low impact traffic that can easily piggyback on someone’s network without affecting them. If it gets too much for them, they can turn your access off by simply protecting their network. Until then, I am silently thankful to be borrowing their connection and respectful of their privacy, ethics and risks.

While I can’t comment on other cities, here in Toronto, the alternatives are pretty bad. The only ‘pervasive’ wireless network provider (in other words, not hot-spot based) in the downtown core is One Zone by Toronto Hydro Telecom. And that’s just brutal. Unreliable. Works only half the time (if that). Doesn’t work high up. Doesn’t work low down. Doesn’t work in areas that its own map says should work. Doesn’t work when there are a lot of people on it. Doesn’t work with good equipment. Doesn’t work with so-so equipment. It’s just not worth the money they’re asking for it: something like $30 per month, or day rates of around $10.

Wireless Toronto, on the other hand, is very cool: free wireless, simple rules, lots of access points. Sadly, I’m not really a ‘coffee house’ kind of guy, so the idea of seeking out a specific location to do my surfing doesn’t always work for me. But conceptually, I’m there. If it were pervasive, I’d pay for it under some co-op agreement - its politics are solid and its technology works a lot better than One Zone’s.

The City of Toronto has launched a Zerofootprint co-branded CO2 calculator. Zerofootprint is a Canadian not-for-profit aiming to calculate and offset our individual and collective impact on the environment. Above is my own “quick calculator.” I don’t know if I’m supposed to be appalled or elated: being a vegetarian in a small apartment is obviously a good thing; flying around in air planes and driving a car are not.

Try it out at http://www.toronto.zerofootprint.net. Or read about Zerofootprint the organization here.

So here I was, early for my flight, as it turns out, at Toronto Pearson Airport, e-ticket in hand. You know the drill (well, if you’ve left Toronto by plane then you do):

• Use one of the little electronic kiosks to check in and get your boarding pass;
• Stand in line to get your luggage tagged if you have something to check;
• Stand at a little pod desk and fill in your US Customs form;
• Stand in line to go through US Immigration;
• Drop off your luggage on a conveyor belt;
• Stand in line to go through security…

And then… I realized that I was a bag short. My laptop bag had mysteriously gone missing! I felt naked, exposed, that moment of panic when you realize it’s not a bad dream but you actually left your bag standing in an airport somewhere and it’s probably been taken by now.

I go up to a cluster of Peel Regional Police people, and one of them kindly offers to take me all the way back along my track to see if it’s still there. I am certain I left it at the pod desk where I filled out my forms - it’s not there. I trace my steps back to the luggage tagging counter - it’s not there. Then, I see something green out of the corner of my eye… my bag! It’s still standing where I left it: at the electronic check-in kiosk.

I say to the Peel Policeman, “I guess this proves that Toronto is really a safe city. Or I’m just lucky.” He goes, “I’d go with option B on that one.”

He tells me that they’ve done ‘tests’ with phone books in laptop bags in this airport, and apparently people regularly just steal them. One woman walked all the way out of the terminal: past security, past police, into the parking garage. They nabbed her just as she threw the stolen ‘laptop’ into the backseat of her car. Her excuse? “I was going to turn it into the police when I got home!”

So… I hope this isn’t an omen for how this week will go. One week in Seattle filled with various Microsoft conferences. But I’m staying at a great hotel and the weather’s much warmer there than in Toronto :)

At the gate, I glance into the distance and see the billboard above. Treo seems to be encouraging this laptop-forgetting business :)

Now we know how those Subway sandwich maker people always remember to ask us whether we want soup with our sandwich! They have a sign behind the counter.

Only today, they had accidentally turned it the wrong way…

Seen today on Bloor Street.

Some things seem to invite sarcasm. The price tag on these bunnies - seen at a Toronto pharmacy today - bills them as ‘realistic.’

Because, you know, they’re not pink or blue, and they’re made by a company called EARTHRITE…

Valentine’s Day is over, Easter is almost here - and retailers all over the world are ushering in the springtime with realistic bunnies.

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else. (Emily Dickinson)