I was in Toronto last week. I left early Saturday morning and returned late Thursday evening. I am still exhausted, and still missing photos from the trip, so what follows is about 1/2 of my trip day-by-day and illustrated.

Saturday -- Day 1:
The husband drove me to the airport for 6:30 am. I was surprisingly awake as I only allowed myself 4 hours of sleep the night before. Solid REM sleep is overrated. After a turbulent-filled flight and a landing that made me understand why barf bags exist, I managed to get on the downtown shuttle (which is a rip-off, but public transit info is nowhere at Pearson), meet an English gal travelling solo, and walk to my B&B without getting lost. First impression of Toronto: it's big and hot, but not scary.

I was checked in by 5:30ish and had a rest in my pink and floral room (gah) before evening festivites began. I walked to the Annex area and didn't get lost. Toronto is surprisingly easy to navigate on foot. I really can't do justice to how incredibly stupidly fun Saturday was -- Foxy narrates it best on her blog: Doctor T Comes to Town a la Foxy.

(I have no photos as my camera died the moment I tried to turn it on in my room. Toronto kills cameras, as I would soon learn.)

Sunday -- Day 2

I didn't make it to breakfast on Sunday morning.

After a good sleep, and a lot of water, I phoned up my friend Karen at her hotel and made plans to meet up in their lobby at 6:30. I walked downtown as I had to stop at the mall to figure out what was wrong with my camera. (I tried an independent camera store because that's the Victoria gal in me, always wanting to shop at the little guy -- but they were utterly useless, unfortunately. So many thanks to the Sony guys in the Eaton Centre for the camera battery -- apparently they do die after about 2.5 years -- the lithium batteries, not the Sony guys.) I also bought toothpaste because not-so-sneaky cigarettes the night before made me realize that forgetting your toothpaste in BC really is gross.

Along the way, I had some time to kill (Toronto is really easy to navigate on foot) so I popped into an air-conditioned glassy building, BCE Place.

There was a big model display of Toronto-in-progress down the middle of the aisle and a turn-of-the-century stone building facade recreated inside the modern glassiness. Very cool. It was like an updated Parisian arcade -- the sense of movement was amazing. Further down there was a glass installation outside of a restaurant that seemed to have no entrance. That's a sign the restaurant is probably out of grad student price range. Har.


I met up with Karen and Phil on time and we made OUR (you have a sick, sick mind, Weldon) way to the distillerary district, which is very cool -- but they thought we were poor and so a certain oyster bar didn't treat us very well. Piss on them, I say. But I did manage to snag a great pic of a pillar -- Toronto is just full of phallic imagery! After dinner we did a couple bars (I don't think the waitress at Hemingway's was happy to see me again) and some deep-fried appies before calling it a night at about 2am. Do you see a pattern in terms of my visit to Toronto?

More to come....

3 Comments:

Add a comment