Thanks to Patrick, Molly and Paul I realized this evening that I'd skipped a day in my diary. I'd actually written it down, but forgot to copy it up to the Internet when I got to Helsinki. I've now posted it, but backdated it correctly to the right day. For your convenience, then, is the link to the missing day in Tallinn.

I'm back now and have almost got over jet lag. I've fallen easily into my normal at home laziness, playing a lot on the computer (Warcraft III at the moment, which came out while I was away). I did get some important errands done yesterday and played tennis with Dave this morning, so I'm not feeling like too much of a slug.

The big news in Toronto this week is the Pope's visit to town, along with 250,000 youths from around the world. A lot of the downtown streets were more or less closed yesterday for a staged version of the Stations of the Cross, which started at City Hall, went along Queen to University Avenue, and went up University to Queen's Park for the finale. Quite aside from the traffic disruption (which I have to say was actually pretty nice for a pedestrian living downtown) the most visible sign of the World Youth Day conference are the hordes to youth not actually in Exhibition Place but wandering the streets. They're all pretty clean cut and I haven't heard of any kind of incidents, but it's pretty weird to run into hundreds of people wearing exactly the same one-shoulder backpacks. It's a pity the weather hasn't been better for them: it's been humid and rained a couple of times in the last couple of days. Still, I guess that beats 35 degrees and smog warnings.

We had a Riesling tasting at Molly's last night, which was fun and had interesting results. We weren't all unanimous in our opinions, but the general feeling was that the Ontario wines hold their own with the best, and are at the very least very pleasant and very useful wines, which would go well with food. In fact we pretty much all thought that the best wine overall came from the tiny 13th Street Winery in southern Ontario. I really liked the German wines the best after that, though the Ontario Cave Springs wine was nice, too. The Alsace Riesling was very disappointing and we ranked it clearly last.

This evening Joyce and Ian had a little party to celebrate their engagement. Joyce's ring, an elegant thin gold band with a nice single chunk of diamond, was on display. Paul and Kelly came, though tomorrow Kelly's off to Vancouver for a couple of weeks and Paul's back to NYC (via a bus to Buffalo, the poor guy).
posted by Tom at 11:56 PM | link |