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Published: July 13th 2022
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Our shoddy but eye-wateringly expensive freeway-side apartment didn’t magically improve overnight. We learned during the small hours that Toronto freeway drivers are very fond of honking their horns and doing burnouts, and that the traffic on “our“ freeway is as heavy at 4am here as it is at peak hour anywhere in the rest of the world, or so it seemed. This may of course have something to do with the cardboard taped over the windows next to our bed not being a particularly effective noise barrier. … and as I lay awake watching the advertising signs flashing blindingly through the gaps in our near non-existent blinds and curtains, I began to wonder why these get left on late at night when everyone should be asleep. Oh wait on, of course, they’re not asleep, they’re all herbing up and down our apartment-side freeway in their hotted-up cars.
We’re all tired after yesterday’s Booking.com induced traumas so we sleep in, or at least whatever the equivalent of sleeping in is when it’s way too noisy to sleep. If the apartment’s owners are too frugal to get smashed windows fixed perhaps we shouldn’t have been too surprised that they decided to only
leave us one key between the four of us. We ring to see if it might be possible to get another one, and Issy bravely volunteers to wait behind for the Royal Key Delivery while Emma, Michael and I head off to a downtown sports bar for a bite of lunch.
There’s sport showing on multiple screens, but the focus seems to be on today’s baseball game between the Blue Jays and Tampa, which is happening live only a few hundred metres away. It’s Canada Day and we hear people wishing each other, what else, "Happy Canada Day". I think Canadians might be a bit more patriotic than us Aussies; I reckon you’d probably get some very strange looks if you ever tried to wish anyone a "Happy Australia Day" back home. As part of the pre-game celebrations a giant Canadian flag is draped across the entire field supported by members of the Canadian military. I can’t help but think that it could get a bit ugly if there was a sudden strong wind gust.
We find our way to the subway and head to the reportedly highly rated Royal Ontario Museum. We read that it was opened
in 1914 and is the largest and most visited museum in Canada. It’s gone the way of the Louvre with a modern facade on the original building, which apparently half the population loves and the other half hates. It’s all very big and impressive with displays on a diverse range of subjects - Egyptology, Roman Times, natural history, and my personal favourite, the dinosaurs, although apparently some of the skeletons aren’t actually dinosaurs, but rather something a bit more recent; well I thought they looked like dinosaurs.
We return to find that Issy has taken delivery of the Royal Key. … which is good, except that to get into the apartment you need both a key and a fob, and we’ve still only got one fob. Sigh.
Back downtown we take a quiet stroll along the waterfront, well perhaps not quite so quiet. Canada Day celebrations are in full swing, and it’s a regular party central down here - very crowded with a concert, buskers and guys juggling fire sticks. We decide to join the party, and dinner turns into a beer tasting festa - twelve glasses between us. I think we should be able to walk home,
but we might want to take it slowly - we can usually hear the cars that want to mow us down, but the trams…..
So a few observations about Toronto based on our first day here. I thought Melbourne was multicultural, but this place makes our home town look very white Anglo-Saxon by comparison. And as we suspected last night, we think we may have discovered the car horn honking capital of the universe…..
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