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Home » Snapshots

Toronto's Chinatown

Written by on January 4, 2010 – 11:20 am18 Comments

No mat­ter where I travel, I always drop by Chi­na­town. It tells a lot about a city, because Chi­na­towns are not just about China — many other com­mu­ni­ties also find a home here. For instance, in Ottawa, Chi­na­town is also Lit­tle Saigon and in France, many tra­di­tional Asian shops sell Caribbean products.

Toronto’s Chi­na­town didn’t dis­ap­point me. It was col­or­ful, messy and it smelled of exotic and spicy food. I observed the peo­ple attend­ing their daily busi­ness: bik­ing around, shop­ping, cook­ing and chat­ting. Chi­na­towns are invari­ably lit­tle enclaves with local busi­nesses, not fran­chises. It’s refresh­ing to walk more than a block with­out spot­ting a Tim Hor­tons or a Starbucks.

At noon, we stopped to have lunch in the tini­est restau­rant ever. The woman at the front was mak­ing dumplings and boil­ing them in huge pots right past the restaurant’s door. We squeezed in and had a huge plate of boiled and fried 饺子 (chives and pork dumplings) with soya, vine­gar and sesame sauce.

Stores and Signs

Stores and Signs

Trinkets and People

Trin­kets and People

Array of Herbs

Array of Herbs

Picking The Best Fruits

Pick­ing The Best Fruits

Making Noodles

Mak­ing Noodles

Picking Oranges

Pick­ing Oranges

Post No Bills

Post No Bills

Making Soup

Mak­ing Soup

Making Dumplings

Mak­ing Dumplings

Bracelets

Bracelets

Boiling Dumplings

Boil­ing Dumplings

Fried Dumplings

Fried Dumplings

Cutting Meat

Cut­ting Meat

Selling Fruits

Sell­ing Fruits

Related posts:

  1. Chi­na­town In Ottawa
  2. Night And Day In Toronto’s Chinatown
  3. Montreal’s Chi­na­town
  4. Toronto, Here We Are Again
  5. Beach Bum­ming In Uruguay

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18 Comments »

  • Seb says:

    Awe­some, my friend was just telling me about a chris­t­ian chi­nese church in Phoenix. I won­der if we have a sort of china town here?
    .-= Seb´s last blog ..Bear and I Visit The Lou­vre =-.

  • barbara says:

    Hi Zhu,

    I think that in most larger cities, there will always be a Chi­na­town.
    There’s & very spe­cial mix to these places that can only be appre­cited by walk­ing slowly & using all your senses.

    I’ve known Honolulu’s ( the orig­i­nal Chi­na­town had to be burned down in the early 20th cen­tury because of a plague out­break), where the early Chi­nese pop­u­la­tion was brought over for hard labor in the sugar cane fields/ other jobs.

    Yes, the best part of Chi­na­town is the food :) I looove dim sum and any­thing with noodles.

    Bises xx

  • coupons says:

    this is a very infor­ma­tive post…it pro­vided me with some great insights on how to get the most value from my coupons…thank you for that

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