August 2nd - Day 2 in the City

I was feeling ambitious the next morning so I decided to cook breakfast. I unpacked the coffee maker, made a pitcher of ginger iced green tea and put some bacon in a pan on the stove. That's when I realized I had no idea where the cutlery was, or the spatulas, or the bread knife, or the mugs, or the toaster (I still haven't found it) and that the microwave wasn't even in the kitchen let alone plugged in and ready to go. It was a mad scramble, but I managed to pull together some egg mcmuffins, coffee and OJ. I was pretty pleased with myself. We didn't have a table to eat it at, but at least we had the couch.

After breakfast, John turned to me and said "Well, we've got some extra space in the kitchen, and we have a big empty truck for two more days, I think we should hit up Ikea."

I love him.

Somehow he knew how to get there without a map, so off we went. We puttered through the displays, ate lunch in the cafeteria (it was actually pretty good, I had the quiche), rummaged through the accessories and picked heavy cardboard furniture boxes out of the warehouse. We came out with these:

along with some beer glasses, oven mitts (I burnt through my old ones from overuse if you can believe that) and $1.30 plants.

When we got out into the parking lot I looked at my watch. The afternoon had disappeared and it was 5 o'clock. Neither of us could figure out how that happened. We both had thought it was maybe 3 o'clock.

So we accidentally wasted the whole day and nothing got unpacked. John marveled that he actually enjoyed himself given that he generally gets bored of shopping inside ten minutes.

We picked up some Vietnamese food at the little restaurant in our building for supper. I was hoping it would be awesome since it's so close, but it was only so-so. Later that night we went for a walk around our neighbourhood. I really love this neighbourhood. There are literally hundreds of shops within about three blocks from our building. Some of them are big box stores like Sobeys, Futureshop and HMV, but most of them are wonderful little small businesses. I love the complexity of the window displays. Even the picture frame shop has over a hundred frames arranged neatly in the window, and there is a jewelry shop with what must be over five hundred pendants all individually positioned and carefully lined in the window.

And despite the huge number of businesses in the area, when I look out my window, almost all I see is green. There are so many trees and parks here. I will post pictures just as soon as I get the cameras unpacked.

We found a little gelato place and stopped for treats and then walked home by cutting through a really high end subdivision where everyone had beautiful gardens. When we got back to the apartment I noted that it felt like coming home. This little apartment already feels like home to me.