Toronto Tour

Our hotel was located right in the middle of Midtown Toronto. The city looked huge, coming in from the North, and it took us almost an hour to drive to our hotel. I mean, you get in Toronto, signs welcome you, and then you still have to drive an hour. It remined me of LA. There are not that many skyscrapers and all the houses in the residential areas are only two storeys high. The boulevards are very wide and the whole city looks like a network of highways.

The first impression was a good one though. We did a walk around the hotel and although it was a bit of a rundown area with the usual peep show clubs and drug dealers on the street, we felt very safe. We were also located quite close to the gay village, which is the party district of the town. Right on!

We started the next day with a visit to the CN Tower. I mean, you have to go on this one, the hightest single standing tower in the world. The view is amazing (providing good weather) although) the city doesn't really look like Prague if you know what i mean. It's expensive, but it's just the thing to do. They have a glass path from which you can look down more than 300 meter. SOme people find it scary. I liked it. And you can just walk around and do a 360° spin. I'll post a videoclip on either YouTube.com or Myspace.com. We'll see.

After the CN Tower, we walked around the harbour front, which was nicer than the one in Montreal. Lake Ontario looks like a sea, so you don't really feel like you are at a lake. Whereas in Montreal you really see that you are at a river. We were also lucky to get tickets for a boat trip to the islands that lie in front of Toronto. It's the kind of place where people go to in the weekends, lots of yachts and nice walk paths. THe islands look nice from the top of the CN tower.

After that we walked in the shopping district. Like in Montreal they have a huge subterranean network of shopping malls, the biggest of which is called the Eaton Centre. They totally have my kind of clothes stores and my sister couldn't believe i didn't buy more stuff. SHe however didn't find anything to her liking.

The next day we went to visit the Bata Shoe museum first, as my dad once contributed stuff to the museum and wanted us to go there. It's a girl thing of course, especially the temporary exhibits on roccoco shoes (think of the movie Marie ANtoinette), but the temporary exhibition is interesting. It has replica of the oldest shoe found and also the baby shoes of our king Leopold II, in case you wonder...

Next up was Chinatown, where there was a festival. It pretty much looked like Chinatown in San Francisco although in Toronto you had two huge chinese shopping malls as well. The very strange thing was that in Toronto, more than half of the population looked asian. Toronto is known to be a very multicultural city and although white folk are still in charge of politics and the media, you don't really see that many caucasians on the street. Honestly, it really felt like an Asian city. But we survived. We didn't get any Sars.

Toronto has several neighbourhoods, all of which have their own atmoshere. The old Distillery District has turned into an arty farty collection of galleries and boutiques. There was a junior dance festival going on as well. You can do courses there and see performances. It's like the place i would go to from time to time if i lived in toronto. Another distric was Greek Town, where there was also a street festival going on. We wanted to eat Greek and headed up there but there were just too many people and we ended up going to one of the richest shopping districts, Yorkville. Again, totally different.

The gay village was a bit of a bore though. I recognised places from the series Queer as Folk and the house music was good (compared to for instance in San Francisco), but the crowd was very young and there were too many drag queens performing everywhere. I went in and out in almost every establishment there and only found one place i kinda liked, a three storey building that had several rooms all spinning different music.

All in all, both me and my sister really liked Toronto. it's the kind of city i could live in. And it's not that expensive. I talked to this person who lived nearby our hotel and only paid 650 can dollar (not even 450 euro) for a big appartment.