#and the tickets on wednesday either crashed or sold out while i was trying to buy them | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

coreytravelogue · 6 years

Text

Toronto, Ont. - April 2, 2018

Toronto, the city I always passed by but never really stayed very long in. As I have said before the only real memories I have of this cit was always passing through in Pearson or when I was a kid when my dad and uncle took me to the zoo and I apparently got lost for much of the day till they found me at a playground there. All I remember is the playground.

I was stranded here in January for a night and spent 90 minutes downtown feeling like wow there are lots of stuff I would like to explore here if only had more time. Thankfully I knew I had a 5 day super long weekend coming during Easterand felt this was a good time to explore my home country’s biggest and most well known city; Toronto.

So the trip is over and I am back in Pearson at the same bar I wrote my last entry waiting for the same plane to take me out.

The title of this entry should be “The Good and Bad Mistakes of Toronto” but making mistakes and learning about how a city rolls is part of the education of life that I like going through but there are times where I feel some things are needlessly confusing, like Pearson but I have come t o realize Pearson and the city it inhabits are similar. Both are the biggest and both are confusing to navigate.

Let’s start from the top, in the last episode you listen to me ramble on as I just got to the airport from a great concert but was drunk, sleep but also on a sugar high the beer was giving me so I was crashing and burning from too much beer and not sleeping.

I finally got on the plane and purposely shut my eyes hoping to sleep. Whether I did or not I have no idea because I don’t feel like I did but I do know by the time I touched Pearson I was awake enough to function.

I took the train to Weston where my airbnb home was and got there within 5 min which was impressive. In fact walking from Weston station to the house took longer and it was starting to rain worse. I met my host and she was nice, the room was nice too. It was everything I needed; clean, warm and quiet. Aft er saying my hellos and dropping off my stuff I walked back to the train station. Or what I thought was the right train station. This is where the education in Toronto’s transit system began.

I went to the ticket station in hopes of buying a presto pass. For those who d not know what that is it is a card you use to use transit. Think London’s card which I can’t remember (clam card? Don’t know why I think clam) or the compass card in Vancouver where you basically put money into that card and where you go and how you use it takes money out of that card unless. You have a month pass or whatever.

They did not have a presto card dispenser which was annoying to me but then it asked me for my destination and that confused me because I didn’t think that mattered. I just wanted a day pass so I could go anywhere and not have to worry about it for the day but they wanted the destination first so I did Weston to union day pass for 11.50, a bit pricey but I felt given the price if I fucked up I could use its price to argue I have paid more than enough for to it. Either way this was my second mistake.

So I went to the train track and went I looked up I thought it said union train arriving and it did though the train looked different from the last, regardless I got on it. That was my third mistake.

I got on the train and started to notice that it was going further west than east which was where I wanted to go so I thought I better get off then take a train back to try again, mistake number four.

I get off in Ebocoke North or whatever noticing that the train track only goes one way and not east…….fuck. With the help of the inconsistent trip planner from two websites I took another train to Milton where there was going to be a bus that takes on straight downtown. Thankfully I checked with someone at the ticket counter or I would have been stranded in Milton. apparently I bought the wrong kind of ticket and took the wrong train but using my tourist card she gave me a free ticket to downtown because in all honesty I did pay to go downtown I just went the wrong way about it.

I got on that bus and it took a full hour to get there. By the time I got there the weather was the kind of weather I hate the most; cold rain and hard wind. Plus it was pitch black out and 7pm so everything was closed but I didn’t care I wanted to make the most of the two hours it took to get downtown. I wound up going to the Easton’s Center.

Eatons Center is a place I always heard of but never been to, I even watched a movie that was set there not to long ago and it was funky seeing it now in 2018 after seeing how it was in 1978. I spent the next hour looking for something cheap but healthy to eat and was thwarted as the vegan area was closed. I started to realize how expensive everything was and came to realize everything was expensive, even the beer which was basically 7 bucks and up a ‘pint’. I decided to screw trying to f Indus one thing good to eat and went to shopper’s drug mart and bought two boxes of biscuits and 1 box of crackers for the same price and ate them on my way to Union station where I spent another hour trying to find the UP Express because by that point I realized that there was a difference between UP and Go.

Go seemed to be the train system that connected much of greater Toronto together while UP express was a express train from Pearson to downtown. That being said I assumed I already paid to have a day pass from Weston to Union they should respect the ticket g ping back. That became my final mistake.

Thankfully l Ike then and many times during my trip the ticket people were more than understanding of my confusion of the train system and let me go but told me no there is a d ifferent between UP and GO and if I want o use UP I need a UP ticket unless I have a presto card. I got back to my home base soaked from rain and bitter from my experience with the transit. I fell asleep pretty easily since I hadn’t had a full head of sleep since 5am Wednesday.

Friday I woke up to a beautiful day and completely refreshed and decided to take the city on. I bought another overpriced ticket to downtown and when I got to Union station I bought a presto pass and put 50 bucks on it assuming that it should be enough to last me for the rest of the trip only to find out it would only last me for the next three days and I barely ever used the fucking card.

Anyways I walked all around downtown Jayne hatting my way through downtown realizing there was enough statues to Jayne hat to last my monthly fb profile pictures for the next year or so. I then went to the hockey hall of fame which was fun and affordable which surprised me because everything else about this city was overpriced. I explored the rest of downtown before I went to the Air Canada Center to see my first lacrosse game. Paid 20 dollars for beer which I immediately regretted but did not regret seeing the game. I never played the game before and I know as a kid I would not have liked it but I definitely like it now and will definitely look into watching more games now when I go back to Vancouver.

Saturday was a bit more of a mixed bag, I traveled to downtown and got to see Maple Leaf Gardens or what was left of it and went on to do what I normally do in a city I want to explore and that is to see the vegan eats and vinyls stores because that is usually where the non tourists and rich people are. That is where one often sees the real character of the city in or at least how I have noticed it and is was right. My review of a Toronto as people is that they are nice people, much more open and social than Vancouverites but their sense of cleanliness is lacking. In Weston and downtown the city has lots of trash, particularly in recycleable stuff. I wonder if people recycle here because given the amount of bottles and cans I seen laying all over the place in the city I don’t think they do.

Saturday was for full on exploration the way I like to explore it; vegan restaurants and record stores. I stopped off at this place called The Grasshopper and had mushroom soup and a mushroom bowl (yes I like mushrooms). Then I tried to hit every record shop in the area. Queen Street was supposed to be Toronto’s Commercial Drive but I wound up figuring out or at least believing in my mind that Spadina Ave is was Toronto’s Commercial Drive. On that street I found a kick ass classic video game store and two record stores, one being Sonic Boom.

Sonic Boom was a store I probably could have spent an entire day in, basically a hipster HMV. They sold CDs, DVDs, vinyl and all sorts of stuff that suit my fancy. I did wind up spending and hour there looking for stuff but not quite as hard as I wanted to. The day was getting long and there were two more places I wanted to go.

I went down to Queen Street and felt it was time to use the transit again and took the street car/light rail to go to the last record store I wanted to called Stained Class. Apparently it was a record store with just metal music because the city barely had much metal stores and I would have to agree I went to 4 record stores downtown and their metal selection was fairly weak. This store was supposed to be at the end of the street. I assumed that the transit would save me 15 minutes but that is when I realized that this is Toronto and this city is huge. That trip I thought would be 10 min wound up being 30 minutes till I wound up where it was to be. The problem was it no longer was there anymore, google lied again. I did find an old action figure store there and the 10 year old in me was beyond tempted to buy back some of the action figures I beloved as a child they didn’t last my childhood but the 33 year old me pulled me back and asked what would I do with a Ricktor from X Force or Colossus from X Men now? 33 year old Corey was right and as soon as I got outside it started pissing down rain. I thought well I guess there is only one more place left to go.

On my way there I decided to stop off at the liquor store to see the beer selection as I was coming to realize that there wasn’t many breweries in the city and none of the are easy to go to so I assumed well these government stores should sell Ontario beer should they?

Not really maybe 3 breweries then breweries from other places, it was pretty pathetic. Mind you I know I got to set my expectations back, I know Vancouver is the hot bed for beer in Canada but my god this liquor store had next to nothing I wanted to try. I left with a can from Side Launch which wound up not being half bad honestly.

However I was saving that beer for later because there was a brewery in the neighbourhood that had at least 3 wheat beers on tap from what i heard. The place was called Duggan’s Brewery. On their website it said it was open at 4 pm and I got there at 4:30. I discovered they were renovating but their basement bar was still open so I went down there. Felt very weird, felt like I was going into a shady crack dealers room. I opened the door and no one but one guy was there who immediate kicked me out telling me they were open at 5pm. I apologized and thought ok I will come back in 30 min. There was a vegan restaurant across the street named Doomie’s. That was a very interesting place, they said they were vegan but all the food looked exactly like it wasn’t. I had a chicken burger and when I looked at it it looked like a chicken burger. I ate it and it takes for the most part like a chicken burger. I wanted to ask the stupid question as to whether it was actual chicken or not but I took their word for their sign saying they are a vegan place. If so compliments to the shelf for making a vegan chicken burger taste better than an actual chicken burger. I had the same beer I bought a can of and by the time I was done it was 5:30 so I felt well Duggan’s has to be open now. I went there and the door was locked. That pissed me off.

Only reason why I went down Queens was for Stained Class and Duggan’s only to find one didn’t exist and they other didn’t want to be open. So I went into the Electic Mud BBQ behind them and had my beer there. It was very over priced but I came to expect that from Toronto that their beers are 7 bucks and up. I had their home brewed beer and the others they had and none of them really suited my fancy. The staff were nice though, I felt like I should have just gone here first. After having one of everything and been very disappointed with all of them except the service I left for the road to it raining even worse. Got on the light rail and decided to head home bummed. When I got off at Spadina I remembered that I saw a theatre int he are and relaxed the Ready Player One came out recently and decided to go see it and I am glad I did because it was a good movie. Or at least a good movie to cheer one up. By the time I got out i was much sober and much happier and funny enough the rain ended. Came to realize that the weather and my mood do seem to match with this city. While the weather was good I had had a good time, shitty weather meant shitty time. I got back and had the can of beer then fell asleep.

Sunday was going to be my last full day in Toronto. I had a few plans for that day, first was to go see my first baseball game at the Skydome, then maybe check out another record store and then end the day at the CN Tower. I arrived at the Skydome and decided to eat a veggie dog which tasted very much like a hot dog so......that weirded me out I really hope they weren’t fucking with me there. I am not a hard core vegetarian but if they and Doomie’s fucked me there that just further supplants why I would never want to come back to Toronto again. I went into the SkyDome and it was trip. I always wanted to go be in the SkyDome. It’s called Roger Centre but fuck that lame ass name it will always be the SkyDome to me.

youtube

There was a time when wrestling was the most important thing in my life. More important than movies, music, travel, doniars, everything outside of my parents of course. From age 6 till around 18 or 19 years old if you asked me what I really wanted to be it was to be a pro wrestler. What inspired a kid to want to be a wrestler?

Me and my dad every Tuesday would go to our video store to rent movies. My dad would pick up new movies while I often scoured the big almost warehouse sized (to a kid) building full of VHS tapes looking for something that interested me. I often stuck to the kids section but I decided to venture off till I found the sports section and noticed all the wrestling tapes. I was drawn to the Ultimate Warrior, he looked completely different from everyone else and he was going against Hulk whom I vaguely knew but not well enough, I always liked going against the grain or people who did. I picked up Wrestlemania 6 and watched that PPV, it just so happened to be set at SkyDome. The entire show was fun and I liked most of the matches but it was the main even that got this 6 year old. Everyone either walked or took a mini tram to the ring, Ultimate Warrior ran. It may not seem like much but to a kid like me I loved it because again it set him apart from everyone else. Then he beat Hulk (yes I know it is ‘fake’ and matches are predetermined) and that is when I became a wrestling fan. Seeing how all those people cheering Warrior, how he reacted and all the pageantry and all that stuff. I remember the big video screen showing him shaking the ropes. When I got to see that big screen I immediately thought of Warrior (RIP).

So from 6 to 19 I strived to that as best as I could which was feeble with a terrible diet.....I will save you the excuse ridden story but lets just say if I was in the shape at 18 that I am now I probably would have actually went to Calgary to be a wrestler or try my hand in it. Wrestlemania 18 is my favourite Wrestlemania and where was that one? I am sure you guessed right, watching that show extended my desire to be a pro wrestler for at least another year till wrestling itself bore me and I came to realize even though I had alot of muscle I didn’t have the pain threshold and I was a pretty fat kid. When I watch that video from above as much as it hypes me it does sort of depress me that I never tried but in the end I know I would not have survived, at least that version of me.

The game itself was boring as fuck. I never cared for baseball at any point in my life. Whenever I saw a bit of it on TV it always looked boring as hell but many people who love the game told me to see it live so I decided to and found it to be even more boring. The only thing exciting about the game was the grand slam at the end.

youtube

After the game I decided to have another vegan lunch and needed to charge my phone. So I went to this place called Fresh on Spadina which had no place for me to charge my phone. I had carrot soup and a bean burrito. That is when I got a call from WestJet. Given my recent experience with Westjet this year if you could see my face it was one of dread. Last time they called me it was to tell me my flight was cancelled and pushed back 2 days. This time it wasn’t quite like that, it was cancelled but pushed back 5 hours. That wasn’t going to do for me because I really didn’t want to get back to Vancouver at midnight and only have 3 hours of sleep before waking up. I called to be on the 2 pm flight. So the thought of going to a museum in the morning before leaving was out of the question. Being it was Easter Sunday and everything was practically closed there was only one place still open for me to go to; CN Tower.

CN Tower is probably one of the things many people associate with Canada, as a child I did too when I vaguely knew of my own country. It seems so strange that I got to see the Eiffel Tower before I got to see the CN Tower. I will say though the Eiffel Tower felt more ominous (in a good way) than CN Tower. When in Paris it felt like no matter where you were you could always spot it while in Toronto not so much. Mind you Toronto has more sky scrappers and is far more modern than Paris is but still, it doesn’t look as big as Eiffel is. Whether it is or not I am too lazy to check the internet for. However going up it made it feel a hell of a lot more taller.

I doubled stepped up Effiel, this I think would have killed me. The look down made my stomach twist. I don’t think the whole trip up was worth 50 dollars, it is clearly a tourist money grab but I feel that was my Toronto trip. It was an excuse to burn money.

On my way back to Union station that I finally figured out how to get to I got some late food and a breakfast for the next day and said my goodbyes to downtown. I probably wont see it from ground level again for a long time.

So that was my trip, as you can tell I started writing this on he 2nd but here it is 8 days later and I just finished it. I had alot of work to do, a bike to get fixed, groceries and all sorts of shit. A week after the trip my thoughts are more or less the same. I regret going but in the end I would not have known it would have been if I never went so I rack it up to a educational experience. I dont need to go to Toronto anymore outside of being in Pearson which in of itself is enough for me and I dont like Pearson.

What is next on my trip taking? Well Australia and Newfoundland (of course) will happen this year. I can only hope to find affordable flights to Whitehorse and Yellowknife between now and fall. I wont have 5 days to spend in Whitehorse or Yellowknife but given the size of those cities (compared to Vancouver or Toronto I dont know if one could call them cities)it should only take me a weekend to see them. It is a matte of sucking it up dishing 600 dollars a shot to see it. is 600 dollars really worth Jayne hatting it’s statues. I would like to meet more people here but then that is where doing couch surfing comes in. Something to think about. Till next time happy travels, shazbot nano nano.

0 notes