The first stop is a food market not far from where we stayed. The curry dish isn’t as spicy as it looks and is very flavourful. The beef noodles is pretty similar to pho, but with their Thai spin on it with the herbs that they use. I’d say it had a bit more umami than the typical pho. The Pad Thai I thought wasn’t as flavourful as I liked, and was actually kind of plain. The other two dishes are highly recommended though!

As far as fruit smoothies go, the fruit seemed to be so much more flavourful. I know that with bananas they are harvested before they’re riped so they can last for a few weeks as they are transported, so it’s possible the same thing is happening with these fruits. But since these fruits are local, they get to fully ripen on the tree.

I also saw them add a little bit of salt to enhance the existing sweetness and acidity of the smoothies. It made it perfectly sweet, without being overpowering.

Next is probably the most famous dish in northern Thailand: Khao Soi. It’s a noodle dish with soft noodles in the soup and deep fried noodles on top. The soup itself can vary in spiciness, but is made of a curry-like sauce with meat, chilis, lime, and coconut milk.

The main attraction about this dish for me is the spiciness of the soup. It isn’t just a big spicy attack on the senses, but rather it’s nuanced because it’s balanced by the coconut milk.

Last but not least, we had some tom yum, yellow curry, and morning glory. This place is an actual restaurant with western style ambience, so naturally there was a price premium to that.

It’s kind of difficult to comment on how the yellow curry and tom yum tasted because it was way too spicy for our senses. I definitely tasted the spiciness and sourness of the soup, but the spiciness overpowered me quickly. The best by far as the morning glory. I just really like leafy greens with crunchy stems. The chilis added gave it a slight zing.

As usual, Mike has made a video!

The food I miss most is definitely the fruit smoothies. When I came back home, I had constant cravings for those smoothies for weeks. To see the other parts of my trip in Chiang Mai, click here.

They had different sized crickets, grasshoppers, silkworm larvae, and water beetles. Having already tried the latter two, we got a bag of crickets and grasshoppers.

They honestly don’t taste like much. They’re crunchy and have a texture like a potato chip, but without the deep fried potato flavour. It’s got a pretty neutral taste. I can’t say I like it though since I really can’t ignore the fact that I’m eating a literal bug. My buddy Mike has summarized it really well in his video.

That’s about it for this post. See the rest of my trip to Chiang Mai here.

And now for the dish we came here for…

When the lid is opened, the shrimp immediately try to jump out, so the lid can’t be opened for very long. They’re hard to grab too because they keep wiggling.

They taste like eating small pieces of shrimp sashimi, but at the same time I had to chew through the shells. There’s a little bit of flavour from the spice and herbs that were added, but it’s subtle. We were given some chili sauce on the side to give it more flavour. The spicy sauce is what you’d expect from chilis and cilantro.

I have no idea how “clean” this dish was since it’s raw… I could only bring myself to eat a couple for fear of getting parasites or some other foodborne illness. My friends on the other hand were completely grossed out by this even though they initially wanted to eat it. To be fair, this is the first time I considered shrimps to be like bugs at all.

My buddy made a video summarizing the entire experience. See below.

Otherwise, that’s it for eating live shrimp!
See all the photos here

Before my trip, I had no clue what there was to see in Toronto except the CN Tower, and Niagara Falls, which I had already been to. Luckily, this reddit post helped me find few places less traveled.

Royal Ontario Museum

It’s a museum that displays different elements of world culture, art, and natural history. Think British Museum, but much much smaller. One thing the ROM has that a lot of museums don’t are dinosaur fossils! There other exhibits showing world history and culture as well.

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

Located on the University of Toronto campus, this library is Canada’s largest repository of publicly accessible rare books and manuscripts in Canada. Among its collection is a copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia from 1687.

Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada

This aquarium is exactly what you’d expect. Lots of different kinds of exotic sealife, sharks, manta rays, etc. The main exhibit is a giant water tank that contains these animals, and a giant conveyor belt takes guests all around. It’s a pretty good aquarium for those who are into that kind of thing

Casa Loma

This is one of the few “château”s in Canada. It was the largest private residence ever built in Canada and was the former residence of Sir Henry Pellatt, a former Major-General in the Canadian Forces. Now it has turned into a tourist attraction. The museum shows off similar things to what one would expect at a European castle: cool architecture, fancy decorations in just about every room, paintings and other art, antiques, and a garden.

And of course, a giant wine collection.

SkullStore Oddity Shop

This place is SUPER out there. This is a store that sells the skeletons of random animals, the skin of snakes, human remains (bones, preserved brain, etc.), taxidermy, preserved bugs, etc. All cruelty free and legally harvested apparently. Half of the store is an actual shop selling these strange items, and the other half is a free museum of even more weird things that aren’t for sale

The Half House

This half a house just sits on the side of the street like any other building. There isn’t a sign explaining why this is, what it’s doing there or anything like that. According to this site, it’s part of the remnants of the neighbourhood that once was here, where the owners at the time sold only half the house, and so the rest of the community developed around it.

St. Lawrence Market

This place felt similar to something like Granville Island in Vancouver, or Pike Place in Seattle – a farmer’s market positioning itself on selling fresh local meats, seafood, produce, etc. It’s a bit out of the way from the downtown core, and when I went, it was almost closing time, so it wasn’t very busy.

The one thing this place has over other farmer’s markets I’ve seen (at least in Seattle and Vancouver) is the variety. If you zoom in on that picture, below, you’ll see what I mean.

Restaurants

Toronto is Canada’s largest city, and therefore has a lot of offer in terms of food. Of all the places I ate at, these two places were definitely the best.

La Palette

This is a French style restaurant near the Kensington district of Toronto. It’s got an interesting selection of game meat, which was the reason why my buddy and I went. They’ve also got a good selection of wine and staff that are knowledgable about it.

For those wondering, horse doesn’t have a strong flavour like beef does, and it chews like super tender beef. Elk on the other hand, tastes kind of like steak with a bit of gaminess, and is actually quite hard to tell the difference unless you’re someone with really sensitive taste buds

Diana’s Seafood Delight

This place is known for their quality oysters and sea urchin, and also precisely the reason why we were there. They have a selection of different oysters from different areas, but if you gave me a blindfold and asked me which oyster was which, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.

Photo albums:

• Toronto
• Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada
• Casa Loma
• SkullStore Oddity Shop
• Royal Ontario Museum

Setup

I pretty much used the instructions here: http://www.visualsvn.com/server/trac/.  I didn’t do step 8 written in the instructions, and it still worked for me.  However, what’s not setup is the Trac administrator account.  After the setup, I was able to access the Trac webapp and was also able to view the SVN logs, revisions, etc.  I initially got a message about “no changesets”, but after a commit to the repo, everything showed up on the webapp.

Setting up the admin account

While the above instructions allow you to login to Trac using the existing SVN credentials, that user is not considered an admin user.  All I had to do was run this command:

trac-admin /path/to/projenv permission add bob TRAC_ADMIN

After restarting the server, the admin tab was available in Trac.  Now Trac is available for use for bug tracking with an existing SVN repo!