21:00 Saturday, December 12 2006

day in the city

We spent the day in the city today. Before lunch we wandered around the botanical gardens, with David holding a handful of peanuts to throw at squirels. At one point two bluejays were actually grabbing the nuts off the ground before the squrels could grab them, and David was highly amused.
For lunch we went to Park Chalet. I had been nagging Denise to go there for dinner for months, and I regretted it today. We arrived at 11AM, and they took our order shortly thereafter. I ordered onion soup & quiche, david got a cheeseburger, and Denise got fish & chips. My soup came out after about 15 minutes, which felt longer than neccesary for a bowl of soup. Then we sat and waited. And waited. And waited another 45 minutes. We had been sitting there an hour and still no food. David was miserable & whiney after waiting that long, and I can't blame him. Denise tracked down the manager to ask wtf was going on with our food and it turns out that our waiter *forgot* to place our order. Then he placed the order, and somehow left off David's food. How someone can remember to place the order for my soup, yet forget the rest, and then forget part of the order again just boggles my mind. After screwing up that badly, and making a customer wait over an hour for food, any half way decent restaurant would have comped at least part of the order. These clowns thought that they could appease us by giving us free dessert. WTF? If that wasn't bad enough we shouldn't have had to go to the manager. Clearly they knew that they screwed up, and apparently they were just hoping that we didn't mind waiting over an hour for food that should have taken no more than 25 minutes to prepare from scratch. So one would hope that after all that time the food would have been awesome. No, it was mediocre. It was jjust barely above Denny's quality. What a complete disapointment.
After lunch we watched the buffalo in their paddocks for a bit, and then walked around Stowe lake. Following that David spent an hour playing with this rambunctuous 3 year old boy in a playground. It was actually kinda cute. It was the clash of the tiny tyrants. Each of them trying to order the other around, yet having fun all the way.
For dinner we went to RNM which was thankfully a pretty good meal.