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Published: June 23rd 2017
VIA Canada
What we looked at for 5 hours. The seats were comfy enough, though
Geo: 43.6485, -79.3854
Thursday 24th
Back in Toronto and felt a bit warmer. After Montréal, Toronto seems so much more familiar. We're staying at the University Club of Toronto, which is very welcoming and comfortable. We didn't do a lot this afternoon; we walked around, ate cheesecake and rested before dinner. We were a bit tired. Who knew sitting on the train for 5 hours could be soooo tiring.
We had Korean food for dinner, at the same place Alan went to last time. It's still here 5 years on, so it must be doing something right.
Friday 25th
The weather forecast for today was rain, rain, rain. But luckily we didn't feel a drop.
After a wonderful breakfast in the Club we walked up University Avenue to the Legislature of the Province of Ontario, a very imposing edifice in 'Romanesque Revival' style completed in 1893. We had a guided tour, with a very knowledgeable guide and a slightly bemused Korean man who must have found it odd to be in a country where politicians don't routinely get impeached for fraud! So much of the organisation and ceremonies of the Ontario legislature are based on the Westminster model that it felt very familiar.
Back to Toronto
CN Tower in the distance. As it was Friday the house wasn't sitting - given the size of the province (larger then France and Spain combined!) the MPPs get an extra day to travel to their constituencies.I wonder if there is much 'house-flipping' like in the UK....
Next stop the Gardiner Museum, Canada's only museum dedicated to ceramics. Fantastic collection of Chinese, Japanese and European pieces but the most fascinating were the pre-Columbian items from South America - the forms are so unfamiliar and the significance of many things is unknown.
On our way to meet friends for our farewell dinner, we stopped by at Loblaws, a temple of food. It's a lovely supermarket and the array of products was mind-bogglingly vast. We put a couple of boxes of biscuits in the basket but when we saw how long the queues were, we put them back.
Dinner at a Japanese izakaya was lovely. Nice company and delicious food. Three of us shared a bottle of sake. It slipped down very easily until we saw that it was 16% proof. We needed to have frozen yogurts to soak up the alcohol.
Here ends the blog for this trip. We had fun and it was good to meet up with our
Canadian friends and friends who live in Canada. We enjoyed our visit to Montréal, a very interesting city with a complex past. We "enjoyed" the snowy scenes and we won't forget walking around in sub-zero temperatures in a hurry.
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