A Few More Toronto Days

The rest of my days in Toronto were extremely relaxing, consisting basically of lots and lots of walking, checking out the sights, taking many opportunities to sit and read in out of the way spots, and getting the occasional picture.

I had breakfast at the residence a couple of times; it was a buffet style, and if the food wasn’t particularly fantastic (those waffles on Monday certainly didn’t compare to what I had on the weekend), at least it I could have as much as I wanted for a mere $7.

On Monday, I took the subway out to High Park and spent the day there and along the boardwalk & paths of the Humber Bay area. Although certain areas of the park were full of kids, most of the paths were practically deserted and made for nice, quiet walking. I took advantage of a couple of nice spots for reading breaks, but I could have easily staked out a place and spent a whole afternoon reading on a day like this. If I lived in the city and the park was regularly this peaceful, I could see myself visiting often.

The boardwalk area was certainly much busier, but in no way really crowded or crazy. Again, another good place for walking around, or just finding a place to sit and watch the activity around you. On my return trip to the TTC station, I took a path through a couple of nice neighborhoods and included a stretch through a wooded area where I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere. Although relatively well-worn, parts of it were pretty overgrown and really pressed in against you.

I should mention that I learned of these walking paths through a neat Toronto tourism program, the link to which I’ll look up again. Maps of many different destinations are available for printout, and I followed a few of them to check out touristy sites, interesting neighborhoods, parks, and walking trails.

That night, after eating dinner at a great little Thai place on Yonge, I walked north on that street checking out more stores along the way. I ended up walking quite far up; I’m not sure what neighborhood I ended up in, but I hit another sort of business district and not much was going on at that time of night. I walked back down along some other streets, and found myself passing some pretty swanky places in Yorkville. The funniest moment was seeing some cops on bike patrol doing some window shopping at the Ferrari dealership.

I spent the early part of Tuesday in the Uptown Toronto area, basically spreading out into neighboring areas of where I was staying. In these places especially, I was impressed at the number of small little parks to be found. Sights of note included more of Yorkville, the gay district, Allan Gardens Conservatory, Ryerson University, and the Ontario Legislature. I also ended up near Eaton Centre again, so I pressed my luck and went looking for some new shoes, which I ended up finding with minimal difficulty at an Athlete’s World.

After changing shoes back in my room so I wasn’t carrying around extra weight, I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening at the Harbourfront area. It was a nice walk, with a good close-up view of the downtown skyline, but the actual area by the lake wasn’t as impressive as I was expecting. I found the walk along the boardwalk the day before to be much more interesting. The highlight of the Harbourfront was a visit to The Power Plant art gallery. Now, I’m certainly no artsie or have much of an eye for the stuff, but I was interested in checking out the John Körmeling exhibit. The description at the gallery’s site caught my attention, “His interdisciplinary strategies investigate how many people negotiate the complexities of public/private life to ultimately expand the range of creative solutions through art, architecture, design and city planning.” There were some pretty weird items (I’ll get around to posting some of the pics I took), but the style really appealed to me.

Another neat exhibit was called Forty-Part Motet. A piece of music, “Spem in Alium”, was recorded as forty separate voices, and each is played back on its own speaker. Physical dimensionality comes into play during playback … if you’re in the center of the set up, all the voices are mixed to provide one audio experience. But you can also walk around the room to better hear only certain sections of singers, or even just individual voices. Pretty neat.

Oh, and my day also included my first ever streetcar ride, as I took it from Union to Spadina station.

On Wednesday, I spent a lot of time in the core downtown area. As I’ve mentioned before, I love big cities, so the soaring buildings all around me are a wonderful site. I saw a number of Toronto landmarks, such as new and old City Halls, Nathan Philips Square, CN Tower, and more. At one point I started hearing really loud cheering, and it went on for so long that I thought there must be something going on at SkyDome or something. Rather, it turned out to be over-excited teenage girls mindlessly screaming at the arrival of Canadian Idol contestants. Sigh. Anyway, even in the middle of the huge buildings, there were a number of green spaces perfect for reading pit stops.

Well, those are pretty much the highlights from those few days. Really, it was just a very relaxing time, even though it took me through the weekend activities to get used to walking that much. Although I did this weekday exploring on my own, that’s probably better since I could go at my own pace, stop and read whenever I felt like it, and didn’t have to worry about boring anyone else with these long excursions.

I’ll wrap up my Toronto experiences in my next entry.