This week, rather than stretching the limits of Toronto's public transit system, I opted instead to stretch the limits of my comfort zone by asking the question, How many different dead animals can one purchase and eat in this city?

Being a first world urbanite I am afforded the opportunity to waffle over my meal choices. Born into an age of PETA, lifestyle choices as statements (or fashion statements) and those funny "EATING ANIMALS" stickers on stop signs, eating meat is something that I've had to come to terms with. After a not-so-storied existential journey that included going veggie for five months in grade seven to impress a girl, I've ended up somewhere around here: cow in cellophane, yes; baby harp seal in paper bag, no. But just the same, navigating the precarious waters of ethics, cute-associated guilt and the eww! factor can be hazardous...

"North Korea" is what the funnier members of the local Korean student population call Toronto's second and newer Koreatown. Like you, I'd love this to be a report about a trip to Pyongyang where I played beach volleyball with Kim Jong Il and his homeboys, but unfortunately the mysterious state lies outside the stretches of Toronto's public transit system and thus beyond the scope of this column. But not to fear, "North Korea" with the quotation marks is almost as boss.

Located at Yonge and Finch, the neighbourhood is interesting to GTA Trippers primarily because it offers a much more authentic Korean experience versus the older Koreatown located south at Christie Station ("South Korea," get it?).

At the very end of the Eastbound Queen Street streetcar line in Toronto my friends and I found the Water Castle. The place is famous in Toronto pop-lore for being stupidly beautiful and a reliable shock for first-time visitors. It's a water filtration plant - an industrial complex supplying the greater portion of our drinking water - in the form of a commanding fortress.

A Michael Ondaatje character threatens to blow the place up in the critically lauded book In the Skin of a Lion. Dave Chappell visits to this place as a jail in the stonerly smoked-to movie Half Baked.

It was at a bar last week that I first became interested in learning about the cherry blossom, or sakura. I was with a new Japanese friend who was wrestling with her limited English, attempting to explain a certain emotion. It was brought on, she said, when she saw the sakura at night. Eventually she described the feeling as "awful."

And then, "Fear. But beautiful."

She was trying so hard to get her meaning across. I was humbled and flattered at her effort. This sweet feeling, in combination with that beguiling description, compelled me to dig deeper.

Hanami, I learned, was the Japanese pastime of "flower watching," an important part of spring and something she'd done and loved every year of her life. This year is her first year abroad, and though she feigned nonchalance, it looked as though she was a little homesick talking about it.

Which is when I accidentally summoned my inner hero and remembered hearing that Tokyo had given a gift of sakura trees to Toronto in the 1950s; a gesture of goodwill, apparently.

When I mentioned it the clouds on her face parted and she beamed brightly. It would be perfect: she wouldn't be denied a special tradition, and I'd have the chance to do something quintessentially Japanese with the perfect guide. High Park hanami, here we come...

It seems like kitsch is often appreciated only superficially, in a spirit of "irony" or semi-contemptuous amusement. But for many others and often for myself, kitsch is a serious thing; a fine and powerful substance, a key to unlocking nostalgia.

So for us, what could be better than buying Slim Whitman records, VHS tapes, long-forgotten Happy Meal toys, Pez dispensers and weird S&P shakers from a fellow who reminds one of Fred Savage?

Not too dang much, that's what. Or so it seemed to my travel partner and I as we hung out with Matthew, the proprietor of Matthew's Finds (formerly Bob's Antiques and Bygones, or so says the neon sign), a booth at the Fantastic Flea Market in the basement of the Dixie Outlet Mall.

Many Torontonians are already familiar with what is colloquially known as the Leslie Street Spit - and they ought to be - they've fought long and hard to make it what it is and keep it that way.

My travel partner and I recently learned about the Spit, which is home to 400 species of plants, 300+ species of birds as well as fox, coyotes, rabbits, reptiles, amphibians and a wide variety of butterflies. Thing is, the whole place was just a pile of rubble sitting in the lake 50 years ago, and today, situated at the bottom of Leslie Street, it offers a dramatic green wilderness in the middle of our city. Allons-y!