Parental Visit: concluded

[da]

My folks were visiting yesterday and today, after they spent two nights in Toronto. We had three meals together- dan cooked salmon for them last night, we had fairly so-so takeout Vietnamese/Thai from Pho Dau Bo this afternoon (but we ate it in Victoria park, which was great) and we got takeout Ethiopian from AM Africa tonight. I will say I'm proud of my folks- this was their first exposure to Ethiopian food, and they liked it. Mom also counted off all the cuisines she had in the last five days. (Thai, Indian, the above... I can't remember the rest). They did a barnstorm walking tour of Toronto in two days; St. Lawrence Market, the Distillery District, past OCAD and the ROM crystal, they saw an African Evangelical church revival at City Hall, and Mom saw the AGO Andy Warhol exhibit that d. and I are hoping to see soon. And Dad walked around Chinatown.

The funniest thing is this was their first vacation trip together, just the two of them, since a one-night trip to a cousin's wedding, in 1986 or so. The prior vacation alone was their honeymoon. Long and the short of it is, dad doesn't like travel; despite doing it every month for business for 30 years (to NYC, to sell his maple syrup). I did visit NYC frequently as a kid. But they took few trips that weren't partly syrup deliveries.

At this point they have enough money and relatively flexible schedules that they can travel. If they want to. I hope my mom does, even if dad decides he'd rather not.

By this point I've gotten a little tour worked out for guests. My office... OK. The machine-room... better. The blinky lights are crowd-pleasers. But the thing that people really like in the machine room is when I take the toilet-plunger to the raised floor and demonstrate how it lifts up for cable access.

One fun part of the visit was when we sat around the table after dinner trading Unitarian Universalist jokes (my folks are both part of the Watertown NY UU Church). Yeah. I like my parents, especially in a two-day chunk.

Comments

[metalana.livejournal.com]

you are very lucky to enjoy visits with your folks. And to have introduced Ethiopian food successfully - so many people don't like it!

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree, I'm lucky that it can sometimes work out well. I think we got lucky this visit. It helped that they were visiting us; my mom was less stressed about it than when she's hosting/planningn meals.

The big test will be whether they will ever have Ethiopian again... ;)

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear that the visit went well. And i agree that parents in small doses is one of the little joys reliefs in life.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Until about a year ago, both sets of parents were roughly 500 km from here (then my parents moved to Long Island, and are now more like 1000 km away). I'm quite convinced that that's about the perfect distance: they can't visit often, but it's not an incredible expense of time and energy for them to come (or us to go there).

I hope now that D.'s grandma is no longer alive and his parents are thus much more mobile, we can see them more often.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Not such a little relief, for me. Based on past visits to them, it can be just on the border between relief and joy, and either teeter off into awfulness or stay up near relief. :)

Saves a lot of trauma, I think. And my folks seem OK with it, though my mom would be happier if I visited them more frequently.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Have you been to the distillery district yourself? I keep meaning to go but then never making it out there.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yep; it's worth it. D and I have been a few times; to look at art; and once for lunch with metalana. The most recent time, there was a douglas coupland exhibit at one of the galleries, which was cool.