toronto

Dates traveled: April 23-24, 2017; June 3-4, 2017; many, many others before then

If I had a smart phone as a kid or even if I liked taking pictures, I would have a lot more photos of Toronto. Growing up, we would drive to the GTA (greater Toronto area for the non-Ontarians) to visit relatives, and most my experience of Toronto was stressed-out parents in 401 traffic and getting to know the rest stops.

I went downtown more as an adult.

I can pinpoint the two or three years of my life when I talked myself into enjoying Toronto. It was when I first started to walk around alone, exploring the parts without the hi-rise condos – the parts of the city that looked like it might contain a community. For awhile I thought about moving there to get close to the action – when I moved back from BC, I wanted Toronto so it wouldn’t feel like a step back – but I quickly got too irritable for how busy my life would be and how I’d have to have roommates and fully commit to most of my days feeling like a party without time to reflect.

My friend recently reiterated something she heard to me, that you can’t pay so much money to live in a city that’s so cold. I don’t know when precisely housing became primarily an investment commodity, like a bank placed out in space, or if it’s always been that way. It’s annoying that things we need to live – what I would call human rights – cost so much they fuck up the rest of our lives.

It must be tough to maintain a business in Toronto, though not for want of trying. I appreciate the honesty of the people who know what coffee’s all about. I wonder if they had deluxe bathrooms.

I haven’t been to many cities as big as Toronto. The only other ones in the same realm would be New York and Chicago, I think. I wonder, when you get to a certain size, how hard it is to hold onto an identity. And how important is a civic identity, and how specific does it need to be?

I think most cities would have a hard time pinpointing self-definitions or pointing to parts of themselves that are core to their existence. And those defining characteristics would change based on who’s doing the describing and to whom. For most Canadians, Toronto is the big navel-gazing city too obsessed with its own importance to know about anywhere else. For people outside of Canada, it might mean the must-see city in Canada to visit, or where Drake’s from.

To be clear, I have nothing but love for all the Toronto residents, sticking up for their city while acknowledging and pushing for resolutions to its issues. I even forgive them for their tired and uninformed jokes about Ottawa because they don’t know better.

As for the substance: the Toronto downtown is made up of a number of small, distinct neighbourhoods, more or less all adjacent to each other. I would recommend staying south of St Clair West, west of the Don Valley Parkway, and east of the train tracks. In particular I like the hipster (and I’m sure by now turning yuppy) Kensington, Trinity-Bellwoods and Queen West, which are all close to each other.

No longer single with endless loneliness to fill, I don’t have much reason to make the 4-6 hour trip these days. I could spend the same amount of money and go somewhere much more interesting and different to me. But I’ve seen the hyper-urban, I’ve pushed through crowds, I’ve swiped endlessly on tinder to the millions of people I would never meet nor have much interest in meeting if it came down to it.

I guess what I’m saying is that Toronto is attractive because of its association with things, which, at this part of my life, are no longer as attractive. And the negatives that come along with a new settler to the city aren’t overshadowed by the positives.

I’ve had some good times – seeing Broken Social Scene on their first reunion show in a long time, in front of a home crowd, was something that couldn’t have been experienced anywhere else (and I’d know – I saw them shortly after both in Montreal and Ottawa, and it was nowhere close to as powerful) – and I don’t doubt I’ll have more.

If you’re travelling to Canada, and you’re trying to figure out what cities or areas to check out, I would say that there are three general regions you could land on: east coast, west coast, and central Canada. No disrespect to the prairies, but it’s not exactly the most interesting area to explore if you’re coming from across the world.

If you choose central Canada, absolutely Toronto is somewhere worth spending a couple days. You could do Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City in an eight hour drive total. That would give you lots of content in terms of culture, history, architecture, and ‘going out’. If you’re interested in the Canadian landscape and doing outdoor things, you’re much better off on one of the coasts.

As the housing crisis gets worse, partly facilitated by the boom in short-term rentals, I’m not so sure that Torontonians even want you to visit, though. You’d have to ask.