We have to eat what?
Trip Start
Jul 19, 2008
1
11
13
Trip End
Jul 19, 2008
Ottawa,
Ontario,
Canada
Saturday, July 19, 2008
We presented ourselves, out of breath as usual, in front of the table and we were given our instructions. First they provided us with a small piece of paper with a list. The list was made up of 6 lines and on each line there was the name of a restaurant or store as well as an item that one would commonly find on a restaurant menu.
Our task was to find the correct price for as many of the listed items as we could and then return to them the list with our answers filled in. We would then each have to eat something. What that something was depended on how many correct answers we had. We we assured that the more answers we got right, the better our dining experience would be. Enough said.
Away we went on our search. We were told that all of the places listed could be found in Chinatown so that limited our search area some what. But that was still a large area to cover. That is when we had the epiphany to phone a friend. In this case we were going to call Ron's wife Fiona.
I had told her in advance (and everyone else who volunteered to be of help over the phone) that we may sound stressed or under pressure whenever we called. But, as usual, she was very calm as we hurriedly gave her the instructions over the phone. The strong advantage that Fiona could give us was that she could find these place on the Internet and many of them would likely even have on-line menus.
After providing her with the intructions and ending the call, Ron and I looked at each other wondering the same thing. What do we do now? We figured we should do something that way Fiona wouldn't be doing all the work while we would simply stand there. So we went on our way to try and find some of these items ourselves.
The first place we found, that was on the list, was a bubble tea cafe right on Somerset. We walked in the door and before we could even open our mouths to ask about the menu item we were searching for the girl behind the counter stated: "$3.95". Well that was easy. All it took was for her to take one glance at our City Chase red shirts to know what we were after. She likely has had to put up with City Chase participants all day.
We weren't really having much luck finding many of these places on foot. But we did happen on a restaurant, at the corner of Somerset and Bronson, that was on our list. They fortunately had a menu posted outside so we perused that. We were specifically looking for "spicy ginger squid" but the closest we found was "ginger squid". Just to be safe we decided to ask one of the employees of the restaurant.
The door hadn't even closed behind us yet when the hostess took one look at our shirts and knew what we wanted. But instead of telling us a price she impatiently told us that they don't have "ginger squid" on their menu. She looked quite perplexed once we explained to her that it was listed on the menu outside. That led her to speak with one of the other restuarant employees but her conclusion at the end was still that they don't have any. No matter, we figured that we would use the price listed on the outside menu.
That was all we had time to search for as thankfully Fiona called us back quickly. I was very grateful to receive her call as I felt our search, on foot, was not going to be completely fruitful. She started listing the answers that she found and we were just estatic with what she discovered. Not only did she search every location on our list through the Internet but she even called many of those places as well. Because of her tenacity she found every answer that we needed. All six of them.
I thanked Fiona profusely and then Ron and I speedily made our way back to where this challenge first began at Booth and Somerset.
We presented our completed list to the volunteers there and they began verifying our answers. They were quite impressed but especially so that we even had the correct answer for the cost of a wash cycle at the laundromat.
All our answers were correct completely due to the work that Ron's wife did. And as a result we would get to eat the "easiest" item they had on the menu. And that item turned out to be chocolate covered pogo sticks. I was expecting this part to be easy but not quite THAT easy. We didn't stick around long enough to find out what other items people had to eat but the team beside us had to eat chili peppers for having got some answers wrong.
North we headed on Booth as we could not wait to complete the tenth and final challenge that awaited us.
