12 hours, 3 cities, 4 people, 3 familiar faces in unfamiliar lands, 1 nemo, 2 dories, 1 nervous passport office, 9 plane tickets, 30 dumplings, 3 cups of bubble tea, a million mentions of McDonald's, 280.8 kilometres = one extra productive yet extremely tiring and stomach-torturing trip to Toronto. This is the first time that I ventured into Toronto downtown since last December, and this time wasn't too bad. Found free parking (though later I found out that it's for buses only). The passport office people are really nice, at least a lot nicer than the one in Vancouver. I had some nervous moments when they say they may not get it done by Dec 31, but then it all got sorted out somehow. Bumped into Aaron's mom and dad there, surprisingly enough. Visited Eaton Centre next, briefly. Not before we bumped into Jeison, though, which is yet another surprise. Then the travel agent. And two hours later, I got flights to Taiwan and back (though the return trip is a bit late...will work on getting earlier flights). Maybe that is my style of buying things: when I was buying a car, we went into a dealer and five hours later, we drove a car out... Then off to the mundane and boring Metro Square and PacMall for shopping and waiting and eating and then back home. Very exhausting experience, which is compounded by the fact that I didn't eat between 8AM and 7PM. Now I have 1 day to pack and get everything "taken care of" (not in a kingly sense) and I'll run away again the day after.

Schedule: I leave Dec 31, stay overnight in Vancouver, and get to Taiwan in the afternoon of Jan 2. I leave Taiwan Jan 13 (although I would have liked it to be earlier), and arrive in Toronto on the same day. So I spent around $2,600 in plane tickets this month.

There is this big 15-week tournament for Jeopardy. Apparently they are going to have some 100+ "great" contestants from the past to compete for the right to play against Ken Jennings. I really don't like this idea. It just seems that they are just trying to milk this Ken Jennings thing a bit too much. I mean, it's over, and they should just get over it. Besides, this makes Ken look like some kind of deity or something...which is not good.