A hot day in Toronto was forecast and came true - about 32 degrees C with high humidity. We had booked a Free "Heart of Toronto" Walking Tour to get some history and outline of Toronto before we explore further during this week.
This is the morning view from our 15th floor room. If you lean slightly and look between the 2 church steeples to the left you can catch a glimpse of the water's edge of Lake Ontario. We wondered what a sharp real estate agent could do of that.
As we don't have free wifi, our morning routine this week will likely be like today drinking coffee in a Starbucks for an hour uploading yesterday's blog and checking emails etc.
This is looking north from the Queen St intersection. It still looks quiet on the streets - traffic can not have been in full swing.
We needed a quick bathroom break before our 10am walking tour so we headed into the huge local shopping mall known as the Eaton Centre - imagine Sydney's Pitt Street Mall but multiple levels high and a big roof over the top. Di was taking it all in. We did like this flying geese sculpture though, but the rest... Nice air con and free wifi is good though.
The Eaton Centre has a huge food court and it looked like a good value dinner options for less than $10 each. The Apple Store was THE place to be, probably because you could access their free wifi from seats outside. Perfect for us.
Hans enjoying his apple outside the Apple store. Di's apple juice was also in tune with the corporation... how sad...
While sitting outside the Apple store, we noticed this old hippie dude looking guy whizzing along the floor wiping the glass bannisters. Great idea - a low bench on wheels and a small push with a foot sends him shooting along. He never stands up nor bends over and he told us it meant he could now walk at the end of a shift rather than hobble.
We started the "Heart of Toronto" walking tour outside Old City Hall on Queen Street which is a fabulously ornate stone building at the top of Bay Street. A new city hall replaced this in 1965 (more on this later) and nowadays Old City Hall is used as a court. They don't really want tourists roaming around inside so we focused on the external stone features.
The front face of Old City Hall.
The architect was a guy called E.J. Lennox and he underestimated the cost and time to build due to his perfectionism. This City Hall eventually cost the council about 6 times his cost estimate and took twice as long to build. The council was annoyed with E.J. and at one stage locked him out of the building site and also told him he could not have his name on their building.
E.J. Lennox paid them back...his name is carved in sporadic letters around the roof line and at the front entry he had councillor faces carved with cross eyes and grimaces, with his own in between looking serene. He's the 5th face top row that looks normal, with the mustache. Compare it with Mike's picture that he is holding up. Also note the 3rd face from the right, top row... Hmm...
The tour then took us to the current city hall. The Finnish architect won this worldwide search with this design and it was built exactly as designed. Frank Lloyd Wright said it was a masterpiece but among the locals it has mixed favor. We thought that it was architecturally interesting as most buildings in downtown Toronto are not and we quite liked it. The centre "spaceship" is the council's meeting chamber. The plaza out the front is used for exhibitions, concerts and protests.
Us and Toronto city hall.
In the plaza is a small reflecting pool which is frozen in winter for skating. The Freedom Arches were added over the pool in 1989 when the city got a piece of the actual Berlin Wall. It is embedded in one of the arches, see below.
We then wandered to the Holy Trinity Church, which is a plain small old church surrounded by Eaton Centre.
About 90 minutes later we finished up just outside Eaton Centre at this marker about Yonge Street (pronounced Young Street) which for a while was in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's longest street - stretching 1,896km to Rainy Bay, just past Thunder Bay. The record was taken away when part of the street was converted to Highway 11.
We finished our walking tour and thought that it was OK but not great. We can't decide whether that's because Toronto is not as interesting as the other cities we've done similar walking tours in (we need to explore more) or whether Tour Guys don't put the best stuff in their free tours but save it for the tours that cost.
Mike gave us one bum steer - he suggested some local specialties for lunch at St Lawrence Market. We wandered down there to find it all closed both on Sundays and Mondays. We headed back into downtown area looking for lunch.
A quick ATM stop for cash was of some interest as for the first time the ATM did a conversion to AUD on the screen for us. Not happy with the exchange rate though...
Heading back towards Yonge Street we stumbled onto Toronto's own FlatIron building - the little old red building in this photo. So many old buildings have gone due to "urban renewal" in the 1960's and 70's where lovely sandstone buildings were torn down and replaced with boring skyscrapers. Same mistakes Sydney and a lot of other cities made.
This Vodka House attracted Hans's attention. Pravda was an old USSR newspaper that was known (or infamous) for communist propaganda and untruths back when we lived in Sweden. Brought back memories...
We were told you can walk quite a long way underground in Toronto, similar to Houston, due to the winter weather. The labyrinth is referred to as PATH and we had already tried it once and got lost. We tried it again with success! We found ourselves following the crowd and zig zagging through below ground level of Department Stores and offices. There was a map, with blue locks being buildings, but it was not always clear with signage whether we were heading north or west etc. Toronto could learn from Houston on this.
The good news was that like Houston there is a parallel world underground. We found a cheap Indian lunch place with lots of Indian people dining in so we joined them. A meat curry, a veggie, rice and a fabulous fresh naan bread for $6.99 plus tax. Bargain.
Hans was keen to find some beer given the hot weather so we headed to a location that the hotel had marked as having a beer barn. On the way we went through the Ryerson University grounds and loved these bike racks. Particularly the instructions which include "Step 3 - Admire your work".
Good idea. Made us laugh.
An incident that aroused our curiosity on Gerrard Street - we don't know the facts as we arrived after it happened but the scene looked like bad news for the black dude. A grey haired older man had been down on his side on the footpath, a wheelchair overturned and the black dude being interviewed (to the left of the picture). The paramedics got the older man onto a trolley while we watched. Hmmm...
No luck finding the Beer Barn but we found a bottle shop / liquor store upstairs from the grocery story where we shopped yesterday. 12 beers, 2 ciders and some white wine should keep us going a while in this hot weather, which is due to continue tomorrow and Wednesday.
After a siesta (isn't that great?), we are out again around 5pm. This is Dundas Square and our hotel, Bond Place, can be seen in the background.
This seems to be a Toronto busking "profession". We have seen several blokes playing drums from a full drumset on the streets in a few places. This guy had no music but in his ears so all we heard was... Drums.
We wander towards the waterfront to find yet another Starbucks for wifi purposes and pass Donald Trump's Toronto tower. Perhaps his NYC tower looks a bit more impressive than this somewhat ordinary building.
On Wellington Street, we see numerous red trams... Or Strassenbahn as we call them as they look very similar to the trams in Vienna.
We wander towards the CN Tower and this "bird art" looked good against the high rised buildings in the background.
The CN Tower was the tallest building in the world for a while back in the 70s.
Yet another self portrait...
As with all prominent buildings in the main cities of North America, security to get in is pretty tight. CN Tower was a bit different as we could keep all our belongings on us, but had to go through a "wind tunnel" of sorts; air was blown on us from the top to the bottom. Not exactly sure how this worked, but we were free to go in. The bags had to be held in front of us and they did a very rudimentary look inside.
This is the small airport on Toronto Island.
Looking right down on Toronto Blue Jays baseball home arena, which is literally next door to the CN Tower.
Gosh how small they all look...
Looking northeast...
And a little bit further to the north from the previous photo.
The second way to experience the CN Tower is to go outside observation deck one floor down.
This was extremely disappointing. A chicken wire style fence had been erected on top of the bars so that decent viewing and photography was almost impossible. We made the inevitable comparison with Empire State Building in NYC where there are bars only that allows for great views and decent photography in all directions. Of course, that building is also right in the centre of town while the CN Tower is on its own piece of land. Bad! Could have been done a lot better.
After a bit of wiggling the camera, Hans was able to take a photo right down onto the Union Station refurbishment, but that was not really that exciting.
The third way of experiencing the CN Tower is via the glass floor in a corner of the inside viewing area. This was a circus as people lie down and move around to have their photo taken in a variety of positions.
Our feet...
Di too.
We leave CN Tower feeling that we had been seriously short changed. The experience had to be done in Toronto, but there is no way that it was worth the C$32 + tax per person. We may even stretch it so far as to call it a bit of a rip off.
We wander straight north and across the bridge over the train tracks where a lonely guitarist is saving the world via rock. He was pretty good. Looking back to where we came from. CN Tower to the left but out of the picture.
Looking north on John Street through the Entertainment District.
We stumbled onto this very interesting building which of course is part of an educational institution, OACD which stands for Ontario College of Art and Design.
We turn east on Dundas Street and pass the site for Toronto's finest. It all looked a bit 1970s; the building, the sign, the logo on the ground. In fact the glass bricks make the station look like a detention centre. Poor cops.
At 9pm we pick up a pizza for a late dinner at Pizza Pizza (yep, that's the name of a pizza joint almost next door to where we stay on Dundas Street East) which we bring to and eat in our hotel room together with the now suffiently chilled drinks that we purchased earlier today.
Bond's GoldenEye is on TV and we get fed and just a tiny little bit tipsy. All good. Good night from us.
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