Fire, fire, toil and fire.

So, Wednesday 20th February. A cold day, -10 or so most of the day. I started the day waiting for the streetcar in a massive cloud of smoke. The entire downtown area was covered in a thick black smoke from a fire along my route to work.

On Queen Street between Bathurst and Portland a fire broke out in the small hours of the morning in a shop unit. By the time most people were leaving for work the fire had spread to fourteen separate buildings and had turned into what they call a six alarm fire. Fires over here are rated on a scale which determines what units are deployed to deal with it. It starts at one and only goes to seven. According to reports at its height it involved 30 firetrucks, fire helicopters, dozens of police cars and over 150 members of the fire department. By the end of the day most of the city block had been affected by the fire, some buildings had just collapsed and several others are likely to have to be demolished.

Due to the cold the firefighters visors were freezing up with the spray, icicles were hanging from the hoses, the area around had turned into a skating rink and rescue ladders were frozen solid to the walls. The city had closed off the area for three blocks around. Streetcars were being diverted down any other road that could take them which resulted in my route to work, along King Street, becoming rather congested especially since Queen Street is the major east-west artery in the centre of the city.

The affected buildings were mainly three and four storey structures which included both businesses and apartments in an area just designated of great historical value. The oldest building destroyed was 150 years old, which in North America is very old. Many of the businesses were family businesses one of which had been operating in the same location for 90 years and been owned and staffed by four generations of the same family who also lived above the shop. Theirs was the building that completely collapsed despite the fact the fire started four doors down.

It's a bit brisk out.

So, on the last post I mentioned that it was the night before a major storm was supposed to arrive. Well yes it did. And then another. And then a cold spell. And then another. All in all over the last three weeks we've had about two foot of snow and some really cold temperatures. Last Monday was a mild -18 degrees with a wind chill of -32. There were snow drifts in places of around four to six feet. Roads turn to ice rinks, cars turn to mobile snow transportation devices as people happily drive around with a foot and a half of ice encrusted compacted snow on their roofs.

The city council gets criticised for now ploughing enough, for ploughing too much, for creating barriers around the sidewalks with ploughed snow, for poorly ploughing the sidewalks, for bothering to plough the sidewalks, for burying people's cars in ploughed snow on smaller streets, for not ploughing side streets due to cars being parked there. The list goes on and the city cannot win.

Since the snow has, by and large, stayed around the city has launched an operation to remove the snow instead of letting it thaw off. This mainly consists of getting diggers out to lift the accumulated banks of snow into trucks so they can dispose of it somewhere else. When they clear the mounds of snow they find all sorts of things. People's cars that they haven't seen in weeks, bicycles, benches. In one case up in North York they found a body. A woman had been missing for a week and was found inside a snow bank at the end of a parking lot. No one is sure what happened as yet.

Even the lake has been freezing over. For several days it was more or less solid ice the entire way across the harbour to the islands. Walking down for a look some of it was strong enough to walk on, but some definitely not. That has mostly cleared now after the rain and milder weather at the weekend but it's still only -11 this morning. Mind you yesterday the cold weather made for interesting times for an incident in the city, but I'll talk about that in a separate post.

Top of the world ma!!! Top of the world.

So on Friday of this week (the 1st Feb) we had a major dumping of snow. My work office closed down early so people could get home. Schools had snow days and a reasonable amount of snow fell and it is still falling lightly. However the night immediately before that (31st January) was an incredibly clear night. A good job really as we had the best view on the continent.

On the Thursday night we decided to go out to celebrate my getting a job, getting my first paycheck, and a generally feel good night out. So we went to 360, the revolving restaurant at the top of the CN Tower. Can't beat the view. I challenge any restaurant anywhere else on the continent to produce a better view while you're sat at the dinner table.


They didn't hurry us and we were there nearly three hours, and sat through two full revolutions getting to see all the city and over the lake. It is truly beautiful at night and gives you a good impression for how large Toronto actually is.


Eating in a revolving restaurant does have its own peculiar problems though. The main one is if you get up to go to the washroom, when you return your table isn't where you left it. Also figuring out where the exit is afterwards takes a bit of a wander as things obviously move. Only the main dining area revolves, the kitchens and main amenities are in the centre and that bit stays still.

Get ready for mayhem Mayhem MAYHEM!!

So, last week instead of going to see American Football we instead saw, in the same stadium, Monster Jam. A three hour event of monster trucks, quad biking, monster trucks and demolition derby.

A silly afternoon spent with very loud engines and lots of expensive looking monster trucks smashing themselves up to the delight of the crowds. Seems everyone was only there to see the crashes, I know I was. They flip. They roll. They land on their roofs. They break. They smash. They have to get towed off the arena by a digger. Still it was entertaining.

Lets play some FOOTBALL!!!!

So on Saturday last week we went to our first (American) football game over here. It was an American College Football game being held at the Rogers Centre for some reason or another. Anyway we'd never been to one, and since it's only about 150m from out front door it seemed rude not to. So we went.

Rutgers University was playing Ball State University (personally I didn't know the US had a Ball State, I'm pretty sure it's not one of the 50 I've learned about, I'll look it up and get back to you.) Due to the joys of random ticket allocated we were just off the centre line on the Ball State side, so I guess we were cheering for Ball State then. Note to self, don't sit on one teams side and cheer for the other, it just gets messy.

The universities certainly put on a large show. Each side has their own marching band and several sets of cheerleaders (spares I suppose in case they break one) plus their mascots running around the field (or at least freshman students dressed up as mascots in some kind of weird hazing initiation.) Probably about 200 people officially involved on each side due to that, plus all the fans that followed them up to the Great White North from the Land of the Free.


Anyway it was a fun enough game to watch, even though Ball State didn't know what to do with the ball most of the time. Either their quarterback forgot he should really get rid of the ball before five burly armoured mean people jump on him, or the receivers he was throwing to were scared of trying to catch it. Whichever happened Ball State lost 52-30.


It was a good day out anyway. We'd never been to a major sporting event before so it was a new experience every way.

Ice, Snow and Mount Sinai

So on Wednesday of last week I went for a walk to the west of downtown, towards the Exhibition area by the lake. It had snowed the day or two before, it was icy and cold. Bit windy as well. As you can see in the photo below, the temperature board reads as cold.

A fun walk, even if when I took my gloves off to change lenses on the camera it felt like a wind chill of -25 degrees C (which it was.) Still it was a good walk. Stretch the old legs, explore somewhere I've never been. I decided to go for the walk as I had an interview in the area the next day and wanted to find where the place I was going beforehand, just to ensure I knew how long it would take to get there.

I came across this Inukshuk as well. Inukshuk are markers left by the Inuit and other first people in the western and arctic regions of Canada to act as navigational markers and meeting places. Apparently it is very hard to orientate yourself when all you can see is ice and snow, or rolling plains. Obviously this Inukshuk isn't authentic and has just been made to look nice in a park, but there are still hundreds or thousands of real ones around Canada.

And what about the Mount Sinai section of the title you ask? Mount Sinai is the name of the closest hospital emergency room to us (we think.) It is where we had the joy of spending Friday night last week. Nothing terribly serious though. While at Ikea earlier in the day and loading a friends car I managed to somehow (I don't know how, I don't recall doing it) taking the top right off one of my knuckles. Anyway four and a half hours of pressure and ice later when it won't stop bleeding we decide it would be best to go to the emergency room (as told to by a nurse on a telehphone helpline.) So the ER on a Friday night, the usual assortment of people there under police escort, security guards with other people, and lots of genuinely sick people (which just made me hide my pathetic wound under my coat.) Still for a Friday night I was reasonably impressed that such a non-threatening injury got me seen in three hours, even if they did give me a tetanus shot as well. Aw well, such is life.

ROMmania

The Royal Ontario Museum (locally known as the ROM) is one of my favourite buildings in Toronto, a bold combination of old and modern. It is the largest museum in Canada and houses around six million items. Most of its recent attention has been due to it architectural additions however rather than the exhibits.
Since we've been coming to Toronto they've been wanting an extension to the building to give them more exhibit space. They also wanted something new and modern to dress up the older looking building. So what they now have is known as the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. They haven't just added an extension to the building, they've turned it into a piece of modern art. Not everyone likes it however, in fact many hate it, but I like the combination of the old and the new.

If you look closely at it it appears that the new addition is just haphazardly added to it. Windows are partially covered by the new structure, there are gaps here and there that look like they should have been avoided. From the inside you can see areas where it joins the old building where it cuts across large doorways and creates small rooms of weird angels that don't appear to be of any use. While in the museum the other day we noticed a window that has been blocked over by the crystal but leaving a foot gap to the outside world that was full of snow.
The addition has just been completed, and when we went on Thursday it was to see the dinosaur exhibition that's just re-opened inside the crystal. Lots of dinosaurs.

Last month an art group got several hundred people together outside the building and staged a mass light sabre fight up and down the street. In one newspaper a writer said it was probably a suitable location since it looks like a star destroyer has crashed into the building.

Worst storm in recent history

Or so they tell us at least. If this is the worst that Toronto gets, then it's fine with us.

So Saturday/Sunday we had a major storm front come across north east North America. It dumped a lot of snow across north easter United States and eastern Canada. Generally in Toronto it amounts to about 25-30 cm, but due to the strong winds it is generally in drifts much deeper.

They do a decent job of keeping the main roads plowed, but all the plows do is push the snow to the side of the road. This is great for cars, but pedestrians have to break out of their fort of snow and push through or climb over the 4 foot piles of snow to cross the road. I should have bought some rope and crampons. The drifts mean some places there is only a couple of cm of snow, which makes it easy enough to get around on the major routes, but it can be many feet deep in some places as we found out on our little walk about. Incidentally in the photo below our building is the one in the middle of the photo, to the left of the Rogers Centre.
The quays by the lake are starting to freeze over now with large bits of ice making its way into the harbour area. The ducks love it as it gives them somewhere to sit while on the water, but I don't think the local sailing club is going anywhere. In the second photo below that is one the Toronto Marine Fire Stations in the background with the fire boat moored alongside (not the little one, but the larger one behind it.)

One the lakefront there is a large outdoor ice-skating rink, though I may have mentioned that before. Anyway, they had to clear off a lot of snow to get access to the benches.

Land of the Mole People: Part II

The PATH system is mainly maintained by the management of the buildings it goes under, as technically it is mainly retail space in their towers. By and large though the system is very well maintained and in some places becomes quite rich looking as the large companies try to show their wealth. For example below is an example of the food court and a bit of the retail area below BCE Place in the Financial District.

And another area below the Scotiabank Plaza building where they carry on the red stone construction of their main tower.

It does seem quite strange down there sometimes, especially coming from the UK. When I took these photos it was a Saturday afternoon, but most retail outlets in the PATH system were closed. Under the Financial District they mainly cater for the banks and associated office tower and as a result the area is extremely busy weekday lunchtimes, and dead the rest of the time. As you can see from the photo there aren't even shutters on most of the areas, anyone could clamber into the stores at any time, but they don't.

Another example of this odd openness on the PATH system is this bank that is within it. It's a branch of the TD bank, that anyone could walk into at any time. It's completely open, and while I'm sure there are security cameras around, you don't see many guards except in the main foyers of the buildings. Also note that the banking staff aren't behind glass panels separated from the public.

Land of the Mole People: Part I

So as it's colder now (it's currently a rare day if it reaches 0 degrees), people tend to spend a bit more time indoors while travelling around. Thankfully in Toronto you can do this. It is possible to travel a long way around downtown via the PATH system, a network of underground tunnels in the downtown core. 27 km of tunnels connect the major buildings of downtown with pedestrian access throughout the area.

Our closest entrance is just beside the CN Tower and from there we can get to the Atrium on Bay north of Dundas Street on Yonge just over a kilometre away in a straight line. This works out to be about two kilometres by foot through the PATH system.

It's not just a series of bland tunnels though, every km of the system has shops, dental surgeries, food courts, post offices and all manner of services. In fact it qualifies as the largest underground shopping complex in the world. The majority of it is open 24 hours a day (the section through The Bay closes late at night due to the fact it goes right through the heart of the department store.) There are six subways stations, one mainline station, two concert halls, a convention centre, sports stadium, at least four major hotels, the headquarters of all of Canada's major banks and the City Hall connected to the system. You walk through office buildings that you wouldn't normally consider entering, though that is quite commonplace in Canada as most office buildings have public access facilities on the ground floor (and sometimes elsewhere.)

It's a really strange place, a little tricky to find your way around, but we're getting there. Just on Thursday night we were trying to find a restaurant connected to the system in BCE Place, and ended up walking about a kilometer and a half when if we'd taken a different turning straight out of Union Station it was only a block away. It's all part of the learning process.