On this day I'd decided I wanted to go check out a smaller city in the area. After all, I was paying for a rental car, so may as well use it for something. I wanted to check out Kitchener and London, but only had time for one. I decided to go with Kitchener, since it was known for having German heritage (it was originally named Berlin and changed during the first World War), and I naturally assumed I could go to a Biergarten and get a nice frothy mug of German lager. Big mistake that was. You know what they say happens when you assume...
Friday, September 8, 2017
It took almost an hour to get to Kitchener. I did drive past a couple of the German heritage societies which have big festivals in October, but other than that, couldn't find anything German-themed. I asked someone at an information desk if there were any restaurants or bars with any German heritage here, and he said it was all gone these days, and that the only time you see anything German in Kitchener is in October when the German clubs do their Oktoberfest celebrations.
I did find a nice restaurant--J & B Family Restaurant--that was not German but some kind of Eastern European, they weren't really focused on a specific country. I had a pretty good stew there which made up for the total lack of wurst in this city. I also went searching for a heavy metal record store that WikiTravel said had an enormous amount of metal bands' shirts on sale. Apparently that place had closed down because I found an empty building at the address.
Last stop was a bar called Crabby Joe's, at King & Benton. I liked that. I did have a beer or two (not German) and ended up talking with someone else at the bar for awhile.
So Kitchener wasn't a total disappointment, it actually looks like a nice place to live, just not someplace with much reason to visit outside of October. In hindsight, I should've gone to London, where a huge annual fair was going on.
Looking back, I note that Kitchener, like London, has a VIA Rail station. If I were doing this trip today, I might have taken one of those trains there and back instead of driven (you know me and trains). It would've saved me from the rush hour gridlock I got stuck in driving back to Toronto.
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