Where Am I? Hint: Not in Kansas

I know most of you know me as the Wicked Witch of the East but I do love a broom ride to the west side. One of my “retirement” case scenarios is that I’m an old bat in a vintage Juicy Couture velour sweatsuit (it’s the future!) living with a barrel bodied, overfed chihuahua in a bedsit right in the heart of Kensington Market. I don’t really know what a bedsit is, I think I heard the word on Coronation Street but I am sure they have them in the KM. Everything is in Kensington Market, even forgotten time. I visit it every so often, like a tourist, and I am always surprised that the shops take Canadian currency. Architecturally, it’s a couple of blocks of crazy. It looks like my Grade 4 Project where I recreated an African village using shoe boxes, pipe cleaners, and plasticine. It seems like you could drop a match and the whole place would burn….but why would you? It is one the sweetest hoods in Toronto.

Yes, go home Frank Gehry and leave an old lady alone with her popsicles sticks and glue gun. Kensington Market should be its own little municipality like the Vatican. The shopping here is actually holy. Back in the early 1980s, my very first “serious” boyfriend (I use the word serious with curlicues on the side because I can laugh about it now but at the time it was as maudlin as anything Morrisey ever moaned about), took a trip to New York City with his buddy and we he came back, he trilled, gayly: “The shopping! You can get anything in New York!” My present was a five foot long fully functioning pencil. A giant pencil…no joke. He couldn’t get on that plane now because they would have held him in customs for being an asshole. Move on (he turned out to be a hoarder, amongst other things)….Blue Banana is a giant, two level store on Augusta where you can get anything as long as you’re not looking for it. Two levels of really cool, unique, stuff and not a giant pencil in sight:

Take that for loads of crap, Manhattan!

And after parusing this store (trust me, it could take hours, your butt cheeks will chafe for sure), trot across the street to Waterfalls for a pint and some Indian Tapas:

It’s a great place for people watching, Flying Monkeys on tap, and somosas and bajias. Don’t feel sad for me when I’m a batty old lady because I will the Queen Of Kensington! (feel free to perform an intervention if I become a hoarder)