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It’s my birthday.

I’m amazed that before I got to the office (I was sick yesterday) the feedback began coming in. Some of the attendees told their colleagues on the other side of the globe and those folks asked for copies of the material and want to know when I would present it to them. On the other hand, we saw a couple of the people who attended, who are experienced and should know better, go off half-cocked in email today. I might have been informative, and even entertaining, but if it is not translated into practice it was a waste of eight weeks development time and a week of teaching.

Finished up yesterday and flew back to New York. I still have a head cold. That made for a painful descent and I probably annoyed the other passengers as I coughed and snorted. Despite that, the last few days of the training seems to have gone well. I’ll see how the formal feedback turns out. I am a little irritated that the IT Training people were unaware I was giving the course until I asked about feedback forms. Someone dropped the ball. I have some material to add and lab questions to revise, but I don’t foresee big changes in it when I run the course again later this summer for another team.

I’m up in the Toronto area for my employer. I walked around Chinatown and tried the dim sum at Bright Pearl on Spadina. The place struck me as Toronto’s equivalent to New York’s Golden Unicorn. Good, cheap and easy to find. Being by myself there was a limit to how many dishes I could sample: pork shumai topped with fish eggs, steamed bbq pork bun, baked pork bun, fried shrimp wonton, beef in sticky rice and spring rolls. I would have liked to try the mussels, beef and rice steamed in a leaf, and bbq ribs and bbq chicken but by the time those carts came through I was full. Everything I ate was fresh, hot and tasty. Flavors tended toward the sweet which surprised me a little.

I walked around the city. I stopped to take in the exhibits at the R.O.M. The Egyptian antiquities that I missed when they showed at Brooklyn were on display and then walked back toward Chinatown and Kensington market. Along the way I had coffee at one of the Second Cup cafes that dot the city. I prefer the coffee at Second Cup but the local favorite Tim Horton’s has better sweets.

Kensington market was not what I expected. The groceries, second hand shops, dried fish and barrels of dry goods are cheek to jowl with way too much new stuff and army-navy and the whole over crowded by trendy lonely planet types. Maybe it’s better at night. I tried a Jamaican beef patty from a busy shop, but I’m spoiled by the patties sold by Christy’s on Flatbush in Brooklyn, and only finished my ginger beer.

This evening, I went looking for a place recommended by a colleague and not finding it, found a Dim Sum and Seafood restaurant in a strip mall in Mississauga off Dixie Road near Dundas named Happy Jade. The number of Asian families crowding the place and enjoying their meals was a good sign. I had the soup with chicken, mushroom and vegetable which was hot but not particularly flavorful and the fried seafood with XO sauce which was very good. Shrimp, scallops and squid were stir fried with pea pods, celery, green onions and ginger. The thin, mostly clear, spicy sauce is made with oil infused with chilies, pork fat (and maybe rind), garlic and, I think from the taste, ground dried fish. Nothing was over or under done and sauce was delicious. The waiter was engaging and when I mentioned I was visiting for work noted that they are open seven days a week and have dim sum in the morning (I’ve gone back for dinner again and the hot and sour soup and fried noodles were very good).