Day 16 - Random Breakfast, Chinatown, Kensington Market, Downtown and Baseball

We wake up fashionably late for a relaxing morning and head down to the local cafe which has some pretty good coffee. On arriving back home Warren's next door neighbour Alex is also arriving and we meet. He invites us in for a home cooked Canadian breakfast and it doesn't take much convincing to accept!

After the delicious breakfast we head down to Chinatown to look around and checkout Baldwin Village. With Warren as my own personal walking tour guide I'm getting a ground up view of the city!

We trek down to Kensington Market which is a street market with a rather eclectic and multi-cultural mix of things to look at and buy. I'm picking up on quite a bit of a counter-culture vibe.

After sitting down at a cafe in the Market, we then head downtown to look around.

We stop at a square between old and new City Halls and spot a row of street vendors. Lunch menu today is a local tradition called Poutine which is Chips/French Fries with cheese and gravy. Comfort food of all comfort foods, could be considered 'a heart attack on a plate'...

It was delicious of course, all bad foods are. Why isn't it that vegetables can't taste like chocolate? I digress. Anyway, after doing some talent scouting and general relaxing taking in the bustling city atmosphere around us we walk over to Rogers Stadium where we are going to see the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team get smashed by the top of the ladder New York Yankees.

We arrive at the stadium a little early and walk across the road to an old railway yard which has been converted into a brewery and furniture shop.

Knowing our luck, just as we are about to walk across back to the baseball one of the biggest storms I've seen in a while comes sweeping through and it pours down. It doesn't look to be easing anytime soon so we make a mad 100m dash through what feels like a torrent of water.

Arriving in the (thankfully) enclosed stadium it's even more of a spectacle than I expected with video screens and entertainment.

The game gets started and Warren and I both quickly compare it to Cricket. Not quite as long but it has the slow factor, it's only so often that a batsman gets onto base from a hit as you seem to be fairly easily struck out, caught or walked. There is though a seriously large amount of foul hits outside the diamond and any balls that go into the crowd they can keep so I'm thinking the suppliers of the baseballs will be a very rich man as it wouldn't surprise me if they went through like 50 in a game. I booked pretty good seats on the infield second deck which meant we had a great view but unfortunately it was a slim chance of getting a foul ball hit our way.

Rogers Stadium has a retractable roof and not long into the game after the storm passed they opened the roof to which I watched in amazement. It's retractable and slides back to the outfield side where I thought it would finish, but the opposite end then proceeded to slide itself around the stadium and fit in between the roof pieces on the outfield end. I'm calling engineering marvel. What was left was 3/4 of the field open air for a stadium that 'has a roof'.

Closed:

Cover slid back:

The entire roof piece on the left then proceeds to swivel around to the other end.

Finished:

And the other end is now completely open air.

Then to make things even better, the Blue Jays beat the New York Yankees, 6-3 and the crowd went nuts.