Toronto

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Toronto

After the bus from New York dropped me off, I stumbled, sleepless towards my hostel. My first impressions were good. The air seemed cleaner and brighter, it feel crisper, cleaner and more spacious than New York had been. Having arrived at my hostel though, my heart sank to see that the office only opened from 9:00am - one and a half hours to wait, with a heavy bag and no canadian money as yet. I killed the time by walking to check out the location of the bus stop i'd be leaving Toronto from, which was in hindsight a mistake as the heavy backback was killing me by the time i returned to the hostel, only be told that I could come back at 2 O'clock.

By this time I was feeling sufficiently tired that I just sat in the reception and killed several hours on the internet until, by 1pm I could feel myself physical falling asleep. I then begged to be allowed to check in. Luckily the hostel had made an error with the booking, so had to upgrade me for free to a private room for the first night. This turned out to be not too much of an advantage. The hostel itself was in a nice area just outside chinatown with countless bars and places to eat spilling out onto the quiet street to give it a very sociable feeling. The downside. Well the hostel felt a little like a soviet era bunker. The outside, drab concrete. The inside had corridors painted dark blue and green to compliment the green lino that covered the floor. Only half the showers worked and instead of the New York style air conditioning I had a fan that had to be propped up or it'll fall over (as it did on the second day with an almighty crash when I was leaving the six bed dorm room early in the morning....)

I went for a little wander in the afternoon, but nothing was too impressive. My initial positive reaction had faded a bit as I realised that there was actually precious little to do and Toronto was quite small. Therefore I got myself a ticket for a baseball game between two fairly major teams for the next day, came back to the hostel and collapsed.

It was impressive, so i thought, that this ticket only cost me $9. Yet when I went along the next day my seat was in a fairly reasonable position, I could see everything I needed to see and had plenty of space to myself. If I'd wanted to, I *could* have paid $210 dollars for a better seat. Why isn't it like this in England? Baseball players even get paid more than footballers I believe.

The game itself lasted about three hours, and was fairly entertaining, then I went back to the hostel and collapsed for a second night in a row- thus the short blog posting.

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