July 5, 2006
Sidewalk bike swap, Toronto ::
travel, narrative, personal — No Tags
6:29 am
Sidewalk bike swap
Originally uploaded by gjs.
So, the trip is over and I’m waiting on my flight back to Burlington. With the free time I now have (missed my flight—first time that’s happened), I’m going to describe for you a spontaneous trip Robin and I took up to Toronto on July third.
You will likely find this hard to believe, but I’ve never been to Toronto. Yes, my parents now live in Buffalo and I grew up visiting Buffalo at least twice a year, but I never made it up there. I don’t know why, really—I wish I had an explanation, or at least something more profound than never making the trip a priority. So, this weekend, with both my sister and I in Buffalo and with a little down time before the small get-together my parents threw on the Fourth (more on that later), I thought a trip up to that city would (finally!) be in order. I even called up a couple of my cousins to see if I could drum up some additional interest. No luck there, but that’s to be expected—people do have lives outside my semispontaneous trips to Canada.
So Robin and I get up there and hit Queen Street and just start walking toward downtown. The weather was beautiful and there were tons of people out. We found a nice Thai place to eat for dinner called Friendly Thai (I took a picture of it but didn’t post it, because I truncated the sign so it read “riendly hai”), and then continued on our walk, not really sure where we were going to end up.
We then stumbled across The Cameron House, a nice little bar/artspace that has a front and back room for bands to play. The owner was working the bar that night, and was quite talkative, first about all the beers he had on tap (of which he had ratherly astonishingly intimate knowledge) and then about the place. He could tell from our accents we were American, and once the news spread to the other four patrons, they erupted in cheers because, well, the Americans were there. It was mostly welcoming , though I did sense more than a tinge of good natured ribbing. That was fine. I told them I was from Vermont, and we all agreed that’s not really America anyway. A house band started playing at some point, and Robin and I sipped beers, not talking too much. I was surprised how quickly I felt at home there.
Other things worth noting about Toronto, which didn’t necessarily fit well in the above narrative:
- Everyone has a bicycle.
- Everyone is basically 30
- Restaurants are cheap, tasty, and diverse in their offerings
- The people are friendly, but not so friendly as to rouse your suspicions
- Public transportation comes in the form of a light rail that shares the road with car traffic (see here).
So overall, not bad. I figure now that if this whole attorney thing doesn’t work out for some reason, I could just chuck everything and move up there and do something. Who knows what that might be. In the meantime, I think just a trip up there in summer and with my bike (of course) for five days or so would be a lot of fun.
