How I visited Tim Hortons-Canada’s Starbucks- in a roundabout way

I took a three-hour bus ride one way to sit and drink chai tea at Tim Hortons and guess what? It was worth my time and 40 bucks both ways.

My Sunday started out pretty uneventful. I was planning to take my time waking up, before getting ready to head to Mississauga to meet up with a friend of a friend. As it’s coming up to two weeks since I have been living with my hosts, I thought it would be a good idea to begin to look at apartments and rooms to rent for the longer term. I was introduced to my hosts by a friend in Nigeria and he has been quite concerned about me overstaying my welcome with my hosts. I hear typically in Yankee, once it’s two weeks that you have been living with someone, then time’s up and all the niceties come to an end.

Now in order to find a place to stay in Ontario, I called up a friend in British Columbia, who then gave me the number of his friend here who would help me find a place, or so I thought. I called up this guy- S and S and I agreed to meet up on Sunday afternoon. My host – Z had promised to drive me 40 minutes from Stouffville to catch the bus but she found an earlier bus route straight from Stouffville that would leave two hours earlier than planned and that’s how I found myself scrambling to get ready to head to the bus station.

The bus trip to Brampton to meet with S was such a sufferhead trip. First I headed into town, to Union station. As this was a bus, there was a stop every 15 minutes, so it took me two hours to get to town. There was a 40 minute wait time, then I took another 45-minute bus to Brampton, hoping S will drive me to Mississauga to check out the rooms. Only for me to understand that we needed to have made appointments at least a day before and S forgot to inform me.

In a bid to placate me, he took me to an Afro-Asian restaurant where they were serving… Wait for it… Hot, ready-to-eat Jollof rice and Suya. The Suya was so bam- with the right level of peppery and spicy- that I didn’t realize when I started to pray for S. I began to prophesy into his life ????. Then my ex-colleague- D who also lives in Brampton came to join us at the restaurant and we spent Sunday afternoon together chatting about Nigerian cuisine and how tons of Nigerians are moving to Canada.

When we were done eating, we then headed to Tim Hortons for tea. To be honest, it was like any other cafe in the world I have been in. The chai tea I ordered was sweet and creamy, but there wasn’t anything special about the place. Appaz, one of the requirements to being fully Canadian is sitting in a Tim Hortons. So,✔✔ done and dusted.

On the three hours combined bus ride back home, I almost began to think about how I hadn’t really achieved my aim of finding an apartment, but then I thought about the new friend I had made and also reconnecting with my ex-colleague; and I shrugged off the 40 CAD dollars (11,600 Nigerian Naira) for the return bus ticket ?????