Day 3 - donuts 🍩 and art

Today’s first stop is meeting Eitan, our tour guide and a donut tour.

We met at Cops doughnut in the Kensington district - hailed as a rather trendy area. Cops is named after the fact that cops like doughnuts and coffee. It’s a tiny little shipping container with stairs up to it and is painted bright pink. Nice branding. Their doughnuts are small and freshly made to order. We has six cinnamon and six “dunkers”. The dunkers are based on a Canadian lunchbox favourite of biscuits and icing. They were delicious. Warm and melted in the mouth. A great start.

Our second stop was Bloomers. These specialise in vegan doughnuts and snacks. These doughnuts were huge. You could easily have one between four. We tried the chocolate dipped (a ring doughnut with chocolate icing) and a jam (jelly) filled one. Eitan proudly pulled a pair of scissors from his bag and snipped each doughnut into bite sized pieces. All delicious. Already feeling quite full.

On the way to the next stop, Ethan took us to see some street art, which we loved.

We started walking towards Kensington Market and past an old gasworks factory that has been transformed into a rather posh food court. Maybe it was the weather, a rather grey day, or maybe it was really the area, but we found it to be quite grungy. The streets were dirty and the houses a mush mash of boarded up or painted ‘artistically’.

Guide books say that Kensington Market is thriving and bustling. It was quite the opposite. It really did feel like a bit of a dump!

Eitan took us to our next stop - this wasn’t actually a doughnut stop, but rather a Jamaican patty shop. He told us a story of how when the shop was first established it confused locals, as Canadians use the word ‘patty’ to describe their burger meat. So the owners of the market made them rename their shop to ‘Golden Patty’ to differentiate them from their meat counterparts.

I had a veggie one, Oliver had jerk pork and Andrew had jerk beef. They were really tasty and a nice break from the sugar.

Finally we went to Dipped. The last shop on the tour. We had a Brown Butter sea salt and a chestnut chocolate filled to share. I wasn’t a fan of any of these. The boys thought they were ok. I am a sugar lover, but this was a bit too much even for me.

We did learn some things about the area, but it wasn’t the best tour we have ever done.

We went to the gas works place for a (savoury) lunch and then planned the rest of our day.

We decided to set off for AGO - the art gallery of Ontario. It’s in a beautiful building and it’s huge!

As with most galleries and museums outside of the UK, you have to pay to get in. The plus side of that is that all exhibitions are included so once you are in, you are in.

There were three really good exhibitions from artists we had not heard of - Joyce Wieland (who uses huge quilts to portray messages of patriotism and love), Naoko Matsubara(who uses wood blocks to print art) and David Blackwood (bases his work from his childhood in Newfoundland).

They were all absolutely brilliant.

We decided to get a tram back to the hotel. The trams are super easy and clean and quick.

For dinner we went back to the Kensington Market area and found a cute restaurant that had been a vehicle testing garage. The boys had pizza and I had pasta. So delicious.

We were so tired that we treated ourselves to a taxi back to the hotel and once again flopped into bed.