The Land Of The Maple Leaf
Our accommodation in Toronto is great! As our friendly train driver told us: “you can’t get more Downtown than that!” We are right in the centre of the city and just outside our window we can see the flashing lights, giant billboards and TV screens of Dundas Square - the Times Square of Toronto. Everything we could possibly need is right at our fingertips and it’s a short walk to restaurants, cafés and one of the biggest shopping centres in a city centre, anywhere in the world! We are staying in a “studio apartment” which is code for “tiny little flat” but it has all the mod cons, including a full laundry, a coffee maker and most importantly, free wi-fi. We’re on the 13th floor so the view is great!
We did have a bit of a lazy morning and had a pretty hefty sleep-in (let’s just blame it on the 2 hour time difference) so we didn’t emerge from the building, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, until lunchtime. Not knowing a thing about Toronto, we grabbed a map and navigated our way to the nearest camera shop so Sam could replace his lens cap that was now residing at the bottom of Booth Falls in Colorado. In hindsight we may have been a street or two closer to the wrong side of the tracks than we should have been and we encountered a few dodgy characters along the way. We managed to find the camera shop and then took a slightly less seedy path back to town. To get a better idea of where we were, we thought we might grab some seats on the open-roofed hop-on-hop-off-bus, to get the run down on this big slice of Canada and get our bearings. We just had time for a quick coffee and snack before our adventure on the big, red bus took flight.
In general, we’ve found Canadians to be either over-the-top friendly or just really grumpy and there doesn’t seem to be much in between. Sebastian, our tour guide on the bus, was oozing personality and fell into the former category for sure. He was cracking jokes and keeping us all entertained, especially the woman from Missouri siting behind us who was by far his biggest fan, cackling maniacally at his every humorous remark and even offering up a snort or two. She was as funny as he was!
We learnt so much about ‘Toronno’ (the second T is for ‘tourist’ because they’re the only ones that pronounce it ToronTo) including the fact that it had, not one, but two great fires, only 50 odd years apart. After the first fire wiped out most of the city, and they’d had to run down to Lake Ontario to grab buckets of water to put it out, they came up with a plan. They rebuilt the whole city, all in timber, and instituted the “2 Bucket Rule”, where each home had to have a couple of buckets of H2O on hand at all times. They weren’t going to get caught out again. The only problem was, the city caught fire for a second time but this time in winter and all the buckets of water were frozen solid! Oh well, seemed like a good plan at the time. Consequently, there are absolutely no timber buildings in the city now and everything is relatively new, built post-1904.
The Canadians sure do love their baseball and ice hockey. They have a huge stadium- the Rogers Centre – right in the middle of town, where their beloved Toronto Blue Jays test their might against all the other Major League Baseball teams. They were up against the Boston Red Sox today and came out triumphant with an 8 – nil victory. The throng of blue teeming out of the stadium at the conclusion of the final innings was pretty happy with that. They were grinning from ear to ear and were ecstatic. There’s an impressive ice hockey museum here too, paying homage to all those skilful with a puck. The Toronto Ice Hockey team, the Maple Leafs is the most expensive in the league (over a billion dollars!) but they are on a bit of a losing streak and haven’t clocked up a win in the coveted Stanley Cup since 1967!
We’ve noticed an eclectic bunch of Canadians mingling in this city and Toronto is similar to Sydney in its multiculturalness. It’s actually the most multicultural city in North America, with the 2nd most common language being spoken here, Chinese (both Cantonese & Mandarin), closely followed by Italian, Portuguese and Punjabi. So just like home, there’s a great variety of restaurants and offerings from their diverse cultural mix. We saw a couple of busloads of kids on vacation care and they were all different colours and nationalities, with turbans, veils and all sorts of other culturally distinguishing and fancy headwear. It was great!
Although we did have the option of getting off the bus, we decided to stay on and just make a note of where we’d like to explore in more detail later in the week. We were both intrigued by the Shoe Museum and are keen to take a closer look. Boasting 12,000 pairs of shoes, including footwear from Elton John and Napoleon Bonaparte (although they only had his socks), it sounds like one not to miss! We’d also like to glide to the top of the famous CN Tower, that looks like an alien spaceship sticking up above the Toronto skyline. There’s the harbour front to explore, a castle to investigate and plenty of other sights to keep us busy in the next few days.
We did some washing this afternoon and it was so nice to have the luxury of not having to trek to a coin laundry! Sam was making the most of his mum doing his washing for him, knowing that pretty soon, he’ll be on his own in that regard.
Tonight, after a great long chat with Rossco, we took the lift downstairs and walked literally only metres to the Hard Rock Cafe where we partook in their excessive portions and ate way too much (though it really was the only proper meal we’d had all day!) We did enjoy meeting and chatting to our Aussie waiter Tom. There was a busker out in Dundas Square who looked like he’d just stepped right out of the Jungle and hadn’t seen civilisation or the light of day for quite some time. Well this is my recollection anyway! In my mind he looked like he’d just crawled out of the Amazon and was wearing nothing but a loin cloth but Sam assures me he was fully dressed in a t-shirt and jeans (if I hadn’t seen the photographic evidence I wouldn’t have believed it.) The power of the music, eh? I was there in the jungle with him. He was piping up a storm on his pan pipes and pan flute, with bells up his arms and the voice of an angel! His music was filling the square and he had captured the eyes and ears of everyone around. It was all we could do not to sit in the lotus position and close our eyes, being transported back to the Amazon. Of course Sam talked me into buying the CD, trying to convince me it would be great study music but I’m not too sure. Judging from how relaxed everyone was just listening tonight, I reckon it’ll only be one or two songs in and he’ll be snoozing!
With a big day planned for tomorrow, we returned to our little urban oasis and turned in for an early night.
