went to niagara and saw the falls! it’s amazing how close you can get to them, actually… the water was *just* there!
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Category: in canada
libraries are nice places in principle… but a beautiful one, with a literary giftshop aaaaaand an arthur conan doyle room definitely takes the cake! :D
we read about the room on (where else?) atlas obscura and put it on our plans. then, on a day of walking around downtown toronto, we made a detour to the toronto reference library, to discover this room.
it looks like a place right out of baker street, with its carpet and bookshelves, where you can find not only books by doyle, but also books about doyle and his works, translations in many languages, pastiches (which are sort of fanfiction!) and more. some are rare books, but despite this, the nice librarian just let us have a look around and even read, if we wanted.
we had it all to ourselves for a while, snapping photos and taking our time admiring all the spines of books collected over the years, from collections, auctions or just donations.
for a fan, this was such a treat! :)
through atlas obscura, the boy found out about this hindu temple (or mandir) near where we were staying in toronto. it’s a special place because the whole thing was meticulously carved out of marble and other stones, and then put together here like a 3d puzzle, without any iron framework or nails even! just pieces of rock, stacked together with “glue”. it’s hard not to feel awe when looking at something like this.
given how the temple built, the scale of it was really impressive. it’s one thing to carve a couple of rocks… but to carve all these thousands of pieces (inside and out) to make a whole temple is a labour of love.
you can’t photograph inside, but the ceilings and walls in the main chamber were just amazing to look at. every bit of space was carved intricately, the light playing on its shapes and depth. flowers and patterns emerged from domes, covering everything in a canopy of beauty.
we’re not religious in the least, but i can’t help wonder if it helps, if people who pray here feel somehow different for having this physical proof of effort and devotion all around them. it was certainly inspiring to just walk around in our socks, eyes glued to the ceiling.
on our way out, a quick detour through the giftshop revealed a treasure of yummy vegetarian snacks! naturally, we tried some out and could barely contain ourselves from inhaling the whole thing on the ride home. :D
how many times have we seen people doing s’mores in movies, with sticks around a campfire? so naturally, this was on the list of things we wanted to try in toronto. :D
we got helpful tips from a friend’s teenager granddaughter on the proper way to do them, gathered the ingredients and off we went. the first step (if you don’t have a campfire nearby), is just to lay everything out in artistic piles, and then pop your creations in the oven to melt the chocolate + brown the marshmallows…
… which our oven did exceedingly well. :| sigh.
so after replacing all those burnt marshmallows, we tried again, this time keeping a careful eye on the whole thing. a minute or two was all it took for them to become golden, and then it was just a matter of topping them with another cracker to make a sandwich.
squishy goodness ensued! :D we discovered s’mores are delicious but extremely sweet, so we soon realized we’d been a bit ambitious with the quantity we made. oh well…
i’d still like to try them out in a campfire someday, but for now, i’m happy we succeeded at this quintessential north american experience.
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analogue wednesday #156
hiking a bit of the bruce trail with a postcrosser friend. ontario <3!