It's Only Chinatown

As some of you may know I work in one of the most interesting neighborhoods in all of Toronto. Spadina and College.

To the Northwest: We have the Scott Mission, the Silver Dollar Room a legendary Blues bar, the Comfort Zone a now notorious youth hangout that was in the news when a kid od'd last year on GHB and several arrests of employees dealing rave drugs. You have the Waverly hotel where they write the room numbers on the doors home to prostitutes and the destitute.

To the Norththeast: We have the UofT campus and the Centre for Addiction and Mental health.

To the Southwest we have Kensington market a great place to buy cheap groceries, grab some lunch or do some shopping for used CDs, clothing, furniture or military surplus items. Actually one of my favourite stores right now is a sort of local merchant collective called the Blue Banana market, I haven't actually bought anything but I love the wide mix of stuff you get in there. My favourite booths are the beanbag furniture store and the 'kitschy' knockoff Soviet Surplus store. Lots of great Soviet leader nesting dolls on sale.

To the Immediate South: Everyones favourite place Chinatown. Once you get down near Dundas on a warm spring-fall day you can really smell it. Empty produce boxes on the curb stacked about 6 feet high, merchants selling mangos and dvds. The sidewalk has a pemanent black grease stain and mountains of coconut beverages line the street. Up and down the Spadina and along Dundas there are probably over a hundred different Chinese resturants. So many you wonder how they all manage to exist. I won't say favourites but the Chinese restaurants I will sometimes frequent include: Kom Jug Yuen (BBQ Pork), Swawtow (I once saw Woody Harrelson there drunk etc. out of his mind late one Saturday night also have this unique 'strangers' table), a place I don't even know the name of on the south side of Dundas a bit east of Spadina I don't even know the name of but I'll call it the Welsh Dragon, King's Noodle (I'm told a HK style restaurant with terrible service which is what defines it as HK style, you literally have to scream at the server to get service). Besides the huge number of Chinese restaurants there are a few Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. Today looking to try something different I tried a relatively new place called Laksa on Spadina just south of Dundas on the West side pretty close to Goldstone. They have a mix of Thai and Malaysian foods and I ordered the Spicy noodles, not a lunch special very good, perhaps not as filling as I'd like for $12 but really great flavouring. OK not really sure where this entry is going but I observed quite a few funny things in the half hour or so I wandered around Chinatown.

• Dairy Queen: There's a Dairy Queen in the Dragon City shopping mall at Spadina and Dundas. The reason I find this strange is that Asians generally are not too much into Dairy products. As I mentioned not quite full I decided to have a skor blizzard a rare treat. My first real job was working Brazier at a Dairy Queen. This Dairy Queen did not have a Brazier but it did have one of those rotating hot dog things they have at snackbars at small town arenas and drive in movie theatres. The only reason I noticed this is I saw three white people who I'm guessing were Americans eating this thing. I just have this image of these Americans out to absorb all this culture wandering out of their hotel and ending up in Chinatown starved, they decide to go get a hot dog at Dairy Queen. I suppose not much worse than the meat you'd get elsewhere in Chinatown but still weird. Waiting to order a Chinese woman starts speaking Chinese, the DQ employee looks obviously Asian just kind of looks at her with bewilderment and then says "I don't understand Chinese". I was thinking about that and laughing man that must really suck for him, because few people in Chinatown actually speak English, I'm sure many understand at least a bit but almost no one speaks English, luckily for him he mostly just gets Americans ordering hotdogs.
• Bank Machines: Maybe it's a small sample size but going to use the bank machine at CIBC in Chinatown I noticed a large lineup inside for the 2 machines but nobody lining up outside to use that machine except us white people. Maybe we are just dumb and that machine is some kind of card skimming operation or maybe the Chinese are afraid to get robbed, I thought that wasn't completely irrational but weird.
• Buskers: Walking up Spadina back towards work I notice guy playing an Irish jig on a fiddle. I'm like weird location weird music to be playing, generally I've found the Chinese to not be too sympathetic to panhandlers, the Spadina Business Asssociation even went so far as to hire security guards this summer to keep panhandlers out of the area. OK busking is different from panhandling but people weren't stopping and his hat was pretty much empty.
• Confrontations: I've seen this a few times before with merchants, but the people in Chinatown aren't afraid to stand up for themselves. I've seen little old ladies follow shoplifters for blocks tugging on the stolen item, yelling and screaming it may only be worth a few dollars and you may very well be exposing yourself to a beating but the business owners don't care. Today I saw a man say something rude to a woman in the middle of the intesection she turned around and went right at him screaming. He kept walking and didn't look back, I saw him giggle and smile about it after, whatever he said it certainly wasn't nice but no fear whatsoever.

It's a fascinating dirty smelly little place.