Toronto, Canada

Toronto, Canada
Arrived in Toronto Friday night after a 4am start. Thank goodness again for the Tomtom, although it does get a bit confused amongst the tall city buildings. Hotel is right on Lake Ontario and we have an awesome view from our window. Sat we walked along the beautiful harbour front and up to CN Tower. It’s a bit like Centrepoint in Sydney only the elevators are glass and go up on the outside of the building ! It is also the tallest freestanding building. Toronto is a very different city to anything I had ever seen before, Steve thinks it looks a lot like Chicago (I have never been there). It’s very flat and spread out yet it is full of buildings. About four blocks on the harbour front are reclaimed and used to be all industrial (imagine Soutbank x 20). In the early 70s the lake was so polluted that the government had to move all the industrial business to other locations and made it illegal to dump toxic waste into the waterways. As a result many of the old buildings have been torn down or are abandoned leaving quite a lot of open space which looks very strange. There is and has been much redevelopment with hotels, shops and condos being constructed but there really is so much space that after 30 years much of it is still empty.
We then did a boat cruise on the harbour and sailed around the small islands that surround it. There is lots of wildlife, parks and recreation grounds. Many locals catch the ferry over or take their own boats and enjoy picnics and bbqs.

We then went out to the movies and saw Spiderman 3, how the Sandman is created was cool but the storyline was very lame. It was nice to see Peter Parker finally get some gonads instead of being a simpering wimp. The movie complex is awesome, you can get any type of food you want and take it into the theatre, I have no idea how you eat it in the dark though. We then had (another) lovely seafood dinner, no photos of this as per numerous requests.

I am so proud of Steve, we came back from dinner tonight and the internet wasn’t working. He called tech support for help and they told him that he brought down the internet for the entire hotel, they detected a file sharing program and had to shut off his connection. No more downloading from bit torrent for this trouble maker !

Today we drove down to St Catharines and met up with Cathy and Jim. I was so great to see them. They took us through the gorgeous historic area with huge old homes and sites relating to the Canada/American war. We visited the historic house of a women who is a war heroine, apparently she infiltrated through enemy lines to get a message to help the Canadians and prevented many deaths, Cathy used to work here as a girl with her parents so it was interesting for her as well. We then drove onto Niagara Falls, what an awesome site. There is still ice built up on the rocks around the horseshoe falls and a huge amount of water flowing over them. We saw more of the hydro power infrastructure and the general surrounds. There are lots of hotels, restaurants and casinos, Jim drove around all the cheesy attractions, although some of it looks really cool. We had a fantastic dinner overlooking the falls. Cathy owns a cruise travel business and was off to San Diego to review a new cruise the next day, poor thing.

We spent the next couple of days having a good look around Toronto, we visited some great historic buildings and saw some very cool architecture in the new ones. Toronto is not afraid to embrace new building design and the city always looks interesting and beautiful. We drove around a lot too, saw lots of parks and recreation areas on the lake. We went the baseball at Rogers Stadium, the roof opens up and it has an amazing atmosphere. The Toronto Blue Jays played the Boston Red Socks and got their butts kicked. We had a great time and our seats were excellent. As the ground is so small, as opposed to AFL or League, you get quite close to the players and can see the ball and the plays really well. We walked through the Eaton Centre which is a huge underground mall in the city. We drove north up to Barrie which is on Lake Simcoe, there are huge and I mean huge houses on the lake, the kind of places you see in movies. We also had dinner at the CN Tower in the revolving restaurant. We have also come across a few Indian and Caribbean people who follow the cricket so it has been great talking with them and getting to brag a bit !