china town wandering

today i found myself in chinatown in search of cheap tees for my silkscreening on fabric class that starts tomorrow. stopped into the kim moon bakery on dundas for a late lunch and ended up sharing a table with this elderly chinese man, both of us absorbed in our reading materials and absentmindedly filling our mouths with dim sum. for a moment, i thought he was going to offer me one of his three mini egg tarts. not this time!

bizarrely all the t-shirt places seemed to be in a cluster on the West side of Spadina just north of Dundas, near the gates to Kensington. on the Spadina car home, i ended up sitting next to a woman reading No Logo by Naomi Klein. We laughed at the coincidence - me with my bags full of no logo t-shirts and her with the book. the first chapter references spadina so we felt oddly connected to each other, the street, and naomi.

dN came home with maps from the late 1800s of our new street, we laughed at all the little oddities like Asylum lane which has since been renamed to Massey Street. Ossington used to be named Dundas! As it turns out our house was close to both a prison and lunatic asylum! our house grew up at the edge of civilization among the wild rough crowd.

note: our latest work.in.progress is a 125 year old house. :)