Puleen Patel

Canada Day

Happy Canada Day to all Canadians throughout the world. Today was a very eventful day for me, there were a few interesting things that happened today. And since the day is not over yet, I will leave this entry unfinished until the end of the day and come back to finish it.

A couple of days ago, I agreed to go biking with my friend Adam. So we agreed the night before that we will leave around 10am this morning. Adam had biked on this trail which is about an hour away from Toronto. According to him it was a decent trail, not too hard and not too easy. We started the trail around noon and were done around 1:30 - 2:00pm. Time went by pretty easily and we had biked close to 15-16 kilometers. For Adam this was a piece of cake, but for me this was the first time that I had biked such distance. At the end of it, I really enjoyed the trail and biking there. The inner trails were nice and cool and not too hot, and there were a lot of bypasses that lead to narrow bushy paths which at times were scary to be on at 20-30km/h. One big stone in your path, and off you go tumbling down the path. Regardless this was an excellent experience and while summer is here I have made up my mind to go biking over the weekends. There is plenty of nature to be enjoyed and admired.

After biking we decided to get some food as both of us were starving. We had some greek food and caught the last 15 or so minutes of the world cup game between Brazil and France. Sadly Brazil lost and France won. Congratulations to France!

After Adam dropped me off at my building, I found out the elevators were not working because the fire alarm had sounded earlier and as a sresult the elevators were turned off. Initially I had hoped to take the bike upstairs to my place and put it out in the balcony but that wasn’t meant to be. I had thought maybe I could carry the bike up seventeen stories if the elevators aren’t back up and running in an hour. While trying to figure out what I should do with my bike, I meet a lady who just came back from doing grocery shopping and found out the elevators were not working. She lives on the 25th floor and wasn’t sure how she would take her groceries up the stairs. She was nice enough to offer to store the bike in her locker until the elevators are offline. Her exact words were “we need to help each other in situations like this”, and she was absolutely correct.

Considering that she had so many bags of groceries and a whole box full of mangoes, I helped her carry her stuff up to the ground floor, and met up with two of her friends and we decided to climb the stairs. At first I was shocked to see that she was willing to carry her groceries up to the 25th floor. As tired as I was from biking, I wasn’t sure if climbing 17 stories was a good idea. But I figured this was a good test to see how well I can make my body keep up with things. So we started climbing and on the 17th floor I told her I will knock on her door once the elevators are back to get the bike out of her storage.

At around 8:00pm I got the bike out and brought it up to my suite. I was standing outside and just recapturing the events that had happened throughout today and felt that this was a pretty good day. An otherwise uneventful saturday was different this time around.

Later in the evening I had made plans to watch Superman Returns with a couple of friends. We caught the 10:30pm show at the Paramount IMAX Theatres in downtown. Overall the movie was pretty good. The IMAX shots were incredible, I am glad that we saw it there and not anywhere else. The IMAX imagery enhanced the viewing pleasure and made things come alive in a way.

So after having recaptured all that happened today, I must put my tired self to sleep and get some rest. For tomorrow is a whole new ball game and I am hoping to make it just as exciting as today.

Cheers!