Day 12 take me out to the ball game....

Today was a day off the booze, thank god, its been a long weekend, with me working weekends pretty much the whole of my adult life such long weekends on the sauce aren’t any sort of norm for me, it was planned that I would maybe have a wee beer today but I decided against it.

Natalie and I kitted out ready to go out in our Monday best.

The reason I was going to have one was because today we went to our first Blue Jays game since we got here and so I thought a beer to commemorate that event would be good but a combination of things led me to stay off it for the day. 1. On Saturday I forgot my id and didn’t get served at the TFC game, I never had any id again today and didn’t want to risk embarrassment by asking and then getting hunted. 2. It cost 10 bucks for a beer! that’s more than six quid if you don’t know all of which leads me to 3. I didn’t want one! So the upshot is that I didn’t have one. Enough boring crap about my decisions to have a beer, here’s how the baseball went. We took the street car into town and got off at John Street (oddly enough) which looks right down onto the CN Tower and since the Skydome is right beside it, it seemed like a decent enough place to get off. We walked down John Street and passed a Hooters restaurant, Natalie commented that she would love to go there at some point in the future, this may seem like wishful thinking on my part but she actually did say it and hopefully we will get to go!

The view from our seats. Objects may seem further away than they really are due to the power of the camera!

We queued up for our tickets after blanking the touts and got ourselves seats in the outfield low down but far away form the pitchers, cheap seats but not the cheapest. we took out tickets, bought near gate three and saw that it was gate eleven. Assuming the Skydome has loads of gates as it is a massive stadium we walked clockwise around the stadium following the numbers upward to get to our gate, turns out there isn’t that many gates, in fact there is only 15 and the 25 minutes it took us to walk all the way round could easily have been cut to around five if we had went the other way. Easy mistake to make though. So we got in but missed the national anthems, we saw first pitch and also our first win! We actually won a slice of pizza each too! This is because the jays starting pitcher struck out 7 guys from the other team (Chicago White Sox) and so our ticket stub entitled us to a slice of either cheese or pepperoni pizza from the nearest Pizza Pizza outlet tomorrow. What if Brownings did a similar offer at Rugby Park, free roll and sausage for everyone if say five different players score for Killie on any given Saturday, crowds would go up I guarantee. So we watched the game from our actually pretty decent spot, Natalie disappeared away to the toilet at some point in the fifth inning and came back with a wee pot of ice cream, except this was no ordinary pot, more a upturned plastic baseball helmet, anyone who knows me will realise this may be the best thing I have ever seen, in fact it could become a a staple of our baseball experience, ice cream in a baseball helmet, collect them all! Hey, and it was a decent amount of ice cream too, five bucks well spent!

This is a view in the other direction, i suppose it also shows where gate 3 is which would be roughly centre of the picture and thus show what a long way we took for a short cut today!

After the game we walked round the concourse toward the exit, there was speed guns set up and guys taking a few bucks for three shots at throwing a pitch to see how fast they could sling it. I personally never tried it but we watched for a bit. We saw a guy throw 66 which was pretty impressive, then saw another guy throw 33 which was pants, we and the guy that threw 33 then saw a kid around eleven throw 35 at which mr 33 walked away in embarrassment. I shouldn’t talk mind you, I am pretty confident I would suck as bad as mr 33. Natalie doesn’t think she could trouble the gun much either. For the record, MLB pitchers generally throw between 90 and 100mph.

Check out baseball Barbie! and if you look closely check out me!

Ok, ball game over and its not even four. So we decided to walk back along the Queen Street West the route in which our Street car takes to and from the city centre from our bit. Generally we just look at it on our way in and out and we could see some ads in the windows for potential jobs so we spend a good few hours wandering along and taking up email addresses and websites. When we got to University avenue a cop stopped his car and asked us the score, it was kinda obvious where we had been as we were bedecked in Blue Jays attire, we told him and our eyes followed the car up the street, it was then we noticed loads and loads of police cars lined up the length of that block of University Avenue, the reason was that the Tamil Tigers were out again protesting! So far we have only seen these guys and gals on the news doing there thing, but today we saw it live and in colour. temptation was there to maybe get a bit closer and possibly take a photo or something but them, why give their cause any sort of interest and add to anything going on. At the very least it was kind of cool to see in person what has been dominating the news over here basically since we arrived.

Then we got back on the street car and headed home.