Commuting sucks part 1

The events in this blog post take place over the period of sunday through monday.

I was in Toronto Reference Library when I got a call from Doni. (What I was doing there is another blog post in itself) He said he was planning to go grocery shopping today. I told him I'd leave here and be in etobicoke by the time. As I was leaving from bloor station, I got a call from Rajat saying that he is on his way to toronto now and that he'll see me at my place. I guided him on how to get there and was on my way to kipling.

Transit disaster #1: 
There was a little incident around our locality.. some violence or maybe some bullets were fired as the worst case scenario. And the police had blocked the route not allowing the bus to pass through there. So the 112 bus was running off scheduled route and time. And it seemed as if there was only one such bus running. So I waited at the kipling station for about 20 minutes for the bus to take me to the cloverdale mall.

Rajat had arrived at kipling station by then, and he got the 112 bus so he was on his way to my place, while I was still finishing my shopping at Metro. After we were finished, we were waiting at the bus stop and Rajat called to say he was already there. GREAT! The damned 112 bus finally came and I met up with Rajat, showed him my place, and had something to eat.

Next we left for Rajat's friend Ankita's place around coxwell. She had just had a baby girl and Rajat had bought some kids clothes for the baby. She made tea and bhel for us. I don't generally drink tea.. well.. I didn't at all drink hot tea but she had made awesome tea! (And I was rather thirsty and too polite to say "no I don't drink tea!") Ankita was very nice. She was communicating very well, even with the canadian neighbour. She even invited us to stay for dinner, (I wouldn't have objected at all. Judging by the bhel, it would have been an awesome treat!) but Rajat said we should leave. And leave we did. At 8 pm, we waited to catch the streetcar that would take us to queen subway station.

Transit disaster#2
As we were approaching the queen station, I suggested we stay on the ttc and go with the streetcar all the way to long branch and catch the go train from there! We were sure we missed the 8:30 train from union, so we should be able to catch the 9:30 train at long branch if we reach there by 10. Rajat agreed and we thought now we just enjoy the ride.

But there was so much traffic on queen street that we were moving at snail's pace. As the clock sped closer to 10 and we inched ever so slowly towards long branch, we realized that we won't make the next train. And sure enough, I got to long branch only after the train had just passed. To make matters worse, the station had closed down, and both of us needed to take a leak! So we found a spot where the security cameras couldn't see us, and relieved ourselves.

Finally, after waiting for an hour in the surprisingly cold weather(for early may) we got on the bus and were in oakville in no time. And since the oakville transit buses had stopped running, we had to walk all the way to Rajat's house. Luckily, there was a 24 hour tim hortons about halfway there and we stopped to take a break, and get a drink and some snack to refuel ourselves.