Day 25-27 - Toronto

Firstly, a comment - on Friday 20 August, I will have been away for one month. It seems like an eon ago that I left Perth, and even Auckland and Hawaii are quite distant memories. When I get back, Canada will not just be a place on the map - it will be an experience that I've had, and have shared with many people (not least of all Daniel). It's bizarre that, despite the many similarities between Canada and Australia, one rarely features on the news of the other, and only mutual visitors actually know much about the other's country. It's not for a lack of interest either - I find many Canadians actually are keen to know more about Australia and ask me plenty of questions, as there is this general understanding that Canada, Australia and NZ are the only members of a hard-to-define group with shared lifestyles, attitudes and sensibilities.

Onto the journal...

Friday 13 August 2004
Friday was a day pretty much spent travelling:
- 8am - enjoyed the rest of the bison and tomatoes.
- 9am - left the hostel via the Sky Shuttle (465-9515; $13)
- 10am - arrived and checked in at Edmonton International Airport, nearer to the next town, Leduc, than to Edmonton itself
- 11am - after some waiting, both of us had boarding passes but neither of us had seat numbers, and despite the fact boarding had apparently commenced, our names hadn't been called yet.

I got a business class seat! Yay! It even had massage features built into the base - I didn't even know about them but a somewhat more travelled person sitting next to me showed me how it all worked. The smoked chicken lunch went down well too. Unfortunately, Daniel was almost at the back of the plane.

The inflight movie, Mean Girls, compensated for 3.75 hours of boring scenery (endless squares of green farmland are not excitement plus). It was almost like flying Perth to Melbourne.

- 5:41pm EST - Arrived in Lester B. Pearson International Airport near Toronto. It is a HUGE airport, and I actually sort of got lost trying to find the baggage counter. Not that it mattered, as the baggage took half an hour to materialise.

An Airport Express Shuttle and a short taxi ride later, Daniel and I were at HI-Toronto at Church Street, Toronto. For the Toronto-aware, this isn't actually the gay part of the street - that's about 14 blocks further north at the intersection of Wellesley Street. This part is right over the road from St James Anglican Cathedral, and you can hear the quarter-hour chimes in the room. HI-Toronto is a little dingier than we have gotten used to in other cities (the paintwork has a decidedly artistic/alternative feel to it), but the service is very friendly.

Saturday 14 August 2004

We had tickets to the Vans Warped Tour in Barrie, 100km north of Toronto. Before I get to that, I'll mention the transport situation. I'm not sure if this classifies as a Torrid Tale(TM) as I haven't ratified the copyright with Lucas yet, and we did actually get there fairly easily in the end.

However, the ticket didn't include transport - we had to get a bus (see Parking and Transportation) from Yorkdale bus terminal, which is on the subway line. No problems, we thought, so we headed to Yorkdale, paid our $25 each, and then found out people had been waiting for 6 hours, there'd been a handful of buses, and the crowd of approximately 400 had concluded Greyhound (for whom PMCL is an agent) sucked. Two hours later, and two cancelled buses later (1:30pm and 3:00pm) and the crowd was about ready for a riot. The sight of a crowd of punk rockers and alternative people booing and hissing and mobbing any incoming bus was starting to scare arriving tourists and elderly people, and the security contingent of just four (who couldn't get in touch with any of their superiors) was hopelessly outmatched in the event a full riot did occur. It seems Greyhound did not even try to get other operators to pitch in with buses.

Groups of the quieter/more conservative people started banding together at the edges of the group and making collective arrangements for taxis - I ended up in a group of 12 which ended up in 3 taxis at a cost of $20 per person. The poor GO Transit people had to handle all the one-way ticket refunds ($10) for the taxi people - they were remarkably patient considering it wasn't even their company's problem and that they were dealing with hundreds of refunds.

I got to Barrie at 4pm and Daniel at 4:25pm in a separate group. Not knowing any of the bands bar about one or two (and having missed one of those), I hung around mostly the smaller stages and listened to a variety of bands including Alexis on Fire, Mêlée, International Noise Conspiracy, Army of Freshmen, Subb, Thursday, Taking Back Sunday, and of course Bad Religion. (There was also a session of Punk Rock-a-oke which was going on somewhere which was quite amusing) It was fun seeing some of the smaller bands and getting to talk to their members, who were very surprised to find someone from Australia at the gig and were keen to know more about my place of origin. I gave a few of them details about the Big Day Out annual concert series, and at least one is going to follow it up.

Transport on the way back ended up being by bus - evidently Greyhound were trying to make up for what we heard actually became a riot by about 4:30pm at Yorkdale, and were hiring buses (even the evil Gray Line empire) from just about everybody to get us all back. Our original group of 12, now down to 10, managed to meet up and hold together and we only had to wait 45 minutes for a bus back.

Sunday 15 August 2004

A quiet rest day. Almost nothing to report.