Having had a lush-tasic weekend with Miette out at her folks in Oakville, we’re now hanging out at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. Very plush indeed and we’re staying in the Chinoiserie room which is beautful, if a little small (I keep slamming my shins into the bed corners). So in between working I’m doing the tourist thing, when the transit folks aren’t doing their random strike thing of course – perfect timing.
This is the first serious time I’ve spent in Toronto since my trip in ’94 – way back when I’d just finished my physics degree and was contemplating next steps. Working in Vancouver at that time I stumbled across a lot of west coast computer entrepreneurs and, rather than buy a few shares in Google & Microsoft, came back to England to do an MSc in Computer Science. Funny how things work out. Anyways, Toronto doesn’t seem to have changed so much in the downtown area, but in the outskirts there’s now a thriving art and design community along Queen Street which is a very vibrant and interesting. Plus there are a lot of cyclists, all struggling to avoid sticking in the tramlines as they cross them.
To be honest I’m not sure I could live here, it reminds me a lot of how I felt about Sydney – great town, but I preferred Melbourne. In this case Montreal seems more interesting to me at the moment, although like Melbourne it suffers from the worst of the weather. Unlike Melbourne neither of those Canadian cities is on the sea, something that I really love about New York (amongst many other things of course). Having wandered around the world a few times now you learn that wherever you are, you always have to make sacrifices – or buy your own private jet.