Toronto Diary #1

I went to Toronto in summer 2001 on my medical student elective and have wanted to go back ever since.

Finally I found a mate who wanted to come too & we booked. It was only after everything was sorted that I realised that, unlike last time, I was going in the height of winter. Canada's lovely in summer. But in winter it's fucking freezing.

Oh well, wrap up warm, stay indoors, it'll be great...

Another New Year's resolution this year was to go back to being my old, highly-organised self (having lapsed big-time over the last few years).

And so we fast forward to the night before the flight. Of course, I hadn't packed yet.

But it only took me a few minutes to load the case up (I knew where most of my travel stuff was post-African trip). I left out clothes to wear the next day, booked a cab, checked in online and went to bed.

4 hours later we were at the airport, ready to fly, 3 hours early, and wishing we'd got a couple of extra hours kip. Oh well.

On the plane there was a small creche of children around us taking it in turns to do shifts of crying, running around & being snotty. It was 8 hours of pure, migrainous joy...

The cab from Toronto Pearson Airport took us to our flash-looking hotel downtown and we checked in, tired & skanky, wearing hoodies & jeans.

The first thing I did, OK, second thing - first I switched on the TV; 64 channels, nothing good on. Though I saw on the news that a plane had to crash-land at Heathrow a few hours after we'd taken off. So then I had to ring home to say I'd flown safe otherwise my parents would assume the worst.
And throw away all my stuff.

Third thing I did was ring up a place I knew and booked a nice meal for our first night. It was lunchtime in Toronto but we'd been up for 14 hours eating only plane snacks, so dinner at 4.30pm was perfect.

I can't recommend The 360° Revolving Restaurant at the CN Tower highly enough.

More than 500 feet up in the world's tallest building, the restaurant rotates once every 72 minutes with the most spectacular view of all of Toronto. At sunset it's even better; you can watch the city light up as it gets dark.

And it's not expensive. It normally costs £12 each just to visit the viewing galleries - for less than £30 we had a 3-course meal and a better view as well.
Could've been a nice end to a fairly long day.

But then came the walk home.

On the way there, I was fine with just a shirt and jumper. But now it had started to snow. And my warm coat was where I had left it so that I could not possibly forget to bring it with me... by my front door... nearly 6000 miles away in London.

It was cold.
Bloody cold.
Bloodlessly cold in fact. I could not feel my fingers. Then I couldn't feel my nose. And when I couldn't feel a certain something else, I insisted we went into a shop!
I bought the warmest looking coat in the whole wide world ever. And I would've worn it for the whole of the snowy walk home but I was too hot.

In the hotel I slept really well but woke up every few hours, my confused body clock trying to deal with the new time zone.

This morning, my reliably inaccurate in-built sense of direction found us "Fran's diner", the amazing 24-hour place that I often frequented last time I was in Toronto after a night's clubbing.

I had corned beef hash, 2 eggs, homefries, toast, pancakes & a chocolate milkshake (um... the other New Year's resolution is on hold this week). Actually, I've only seen one fat Canadian so far, and it's possible that she could've been:
a) just carrying a grey armchair, or
b) American.

Anyway, I'm typing this on the coach to Niagara Falls, on my new phone (there will be blogs aplenty about the phone another time). It costs an absolute fortune for me to go online with it here - I even got a text from Orange in the UK telling me that, which, seeing as they usually want my money, surely can't be a good sign...

I'll probably type more & blog it next week when I get back*.
Enjoy the (relatively) warm weather wherever you are.
- Suman -


*unless I drop the phone into the Falls...