Just a couple of words about my day in Toronto. Of course, I didn't have enough time to see even the limited number of things I had planned, but I had a good. day. My smartphone pedometer says did I did over 20,000 steps and 9.5 miles! I checked out Roundhouse Park, which contains a number of static exibits of historical rail rolling stock, and got to tide the streetcars and the subway. I went to the old St. Lawrence Market and got a freshly baked Montreal style bagel with lox and cream cheese, a bargain at C$10. The Montreal bagel is a little skinnier and less bready than the New York variety. Then I went up to the Royal Ontario Musuem, mainly to see some slabs of rock from the Burgess Shale that contain the earliest known assemblage of complex fossil life. Some of the slabs looked very familiar to me, I think they're in all the introductory paleontology textbooks. They also had a good selection of dinosaur skeletons and fossil mammals, plus a really good American Indian display, which included a birchbark freighter canoe and one of Sitting Bull's war bonnets. (Sitting Bull apparently spent some time in Canada after the Battle of Little Big Horn, whcih explains the Canadian connections.) After that I walked through the campus of the University of Toronto and past the Ontario provincial assembly building. I ended the day with an early dinner at the Library Bar at the Royal York Hotel.
I found it a very interesting place in terms of urban planning. As we came through the far 'burbs while entering the city on the Maple Leaf, it seemed like there's the same ugly awful suburban sprawl that one sees all over North America. But the inner city itself looks like a textbook example of what all the New Urbanists are trying to get everyone to do. Al the glassy tower makes the place look like one of those future cities in Star Trek world, and you really have to look hard to find buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries. That's in contrast with the older cities on the east coast of the US, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc. They've got glassy Star Trek World towers, too, but a lot of the fabric of the older city is still intact. Of course, New York has both Star Trek world skyscrapers and lots of 19th and early 20th century buildings, but then again, New York actually built a lot of their skyscrpaers in the early 20th century, heck, they started building skyscrapers in the late 19th Century.
Oh, and Monday night I took care of my toiletry needs with a stop at Shopper's Drug Mart, Canada's answer to Walgreens and Rite Aid. In addition, I was able to get my Presto Card (The Toronto transit fare card) upgraded to get the Senior fare. Of course, it doesn't really matter because the discounted senior single ride fare is 10 cents more expensive than the regular fare when using a Presto Card. Anyway, another transit farecard for my collection.
About the subways and streetcars: The streetcars are definitely a unique thing for us North Americans, quite and extensive system, but they're about as slow as buses in street traffic. They have TVMs and a place to tap your presto Card (or phone of credit card) at each door. The subways (or at least Line 1, which is what I rode) were amazing. They were the quietest subway trains I've ever experienced, either inside while riding or outside when they come into a station. Who built these? Could they send some to New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, which all have some of the noisiest clattering trains around.
