Day 29-31 - Toronto

Tuesday to Thursday have all been fairly quiet days. These entries sound very brief because we basically went somewhere, looked around for a short period of time, did basically nothing, then came back.

Tuesday 17th August 2004, ET

Very quiet day due to lingering weak-knee syndrome after our day at Niagara Falls. We went up to North York and took a few photos, then came back via Yonge Street and Church/Wellesley, known here as the gay district. That was pretty much all.

Wednesday 18th August 2004, ET

Decided to explore the subway system a bit, so went firstly to Yorkville, allegedly Toronto's upmarket suburb (but it looked pretty rundown), then all the way out to Scarborough, an eastern residential/commercial suburb (about 12km E) and spent a while in the local mall, as neither of us had spent time in a Wal-Mart before. :P After getting bored with this, we came back via Danforth, India Bazaar and Chinatown.

Thursday 19th August 2004, ET

Daniel decided he didn't really want to explore Toronto any more, not helped by the not-so-fine weather - but I managed to persuade him to come out as we're here for just a few more days (we depart on Sunday morning). He agreed, on the condition we spent one of the days away from Toronto. So London was decided upon for tomorrow, and we spent all afternoon around the Front St and Bay St areas (basically the financial district and the more blatantly touristy bits). We walked around the base of the CN tower but the size of the queue put us off until another day. One odd feature of Front Street is the sheer number of hot dog vendors operating from vans parked at the side of the road - there's about 2 or 3 per block and some have been there since 1984!

We then went on a tour of CBC's Broadcasting Centre, where we got to see the sets for some Canadian news, comedy and variety shows, and were able to appreciate the finer aspects of this one-block-wide, 10-storey-tall building from the inside.

After that, we went through bits of the underground city and the Eaton Centre, only coming up to see thousands of old people on walking frames and in wheelchairs herding out into masses of accumulated buses covering two lanes on an entire block outside Roy Thomson Theatre.

Then it was off to buy the Greyhound tickets and that was pretty much the end of the night.