Toronto, Monday, 18-Jul-2022
Melody's first conference day, so I walked around a bit. Since she didn't have anything in the afternoon, we went down to the Financial District to do a walking tour.
Morning
After having breakfast, Melody went off to her conference. Since we had reached the halfway point of our trip, I started a load of laundry. Fortunately, washers and dryers are in the basement, and we had collected coins and I had gotten detergent, so everything was all set. It went faster than I expected; in a bit more than 90 minutes, I was all done.
Since I didn't know how much time laundry would take, I had left my day pretty open. Since I had some time before lunch, I walked a bit through Queen's Park. I did see the statue of King Edward VII but didn't go all the way south to the Ontario Legislative Building, however.
Next, I wandered up to the Toronto Reference Library (Melody had walked by there the day before). It's very interesting inside, with sweeping mezzanines and looping staircases. Photography isn't allowed without registering a personal project, so you'll need to take my word for it that it was very interesting architecturally.
I grabbed some lunch on the way back to the room and hung around until Melody returned.
Financial district walking tour
After Melody returned, I mentioned that I was considering doing a financial district walking tour, and she thought she had enough time to go along with me. We hopped onto the subway, and it should be no surprise that we went to Union Station.
The tour started at the CN Tower, but we had been up there before, and we weren't sure we would be able to finish the whole tour even without going up. We took a pedestrian bridge across the train tracks and continued our walk.
We went by a couple of theatres, including one which had part of Canada's Walk of Fame in front of it. It's a bit different than the Hollywood Walk of Fame since there are stars for people not related to entertainment. In fact, 2021 introduced a new category, National Hero.
Next up was the Roy Thomson Hall, which is unmistakable with its reflective, circular exterior. After looking at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, we walked into the financial district.
Just like many other financial districts, Toronto has a mixture of the new and the old, various colors, and many architectural styles. We went into some of the buildings and saw animal figures around doorways and fancy highly-decorated elevator doors. By the time our necks were ready for us to not be looking up all the time, we started heading towards Old City Hall.
Toronto's Old City Hall dates back to 1899, and is still in use today, containing the provincial criminal courts. Across the street is New City Hall, which is very striking and has a large public square in front with a pool.
After a few more blocks, our walking tour was done. The timing was good because we finished at the right time for Melody to go to a welcome reception and then dinner. I wandered around to find some dinner, ending up with fish tacos.
Evening
We've been keeping a pretty close watch on the weather, mostly so we know when to avoid hot or wet conditions. Since we knew it was supposed to rain Sunday night/Monday morning, as well as get hot on Monday, we made sure that a lot of the still-cool air was flowing into the room overnight.
One side-effect of having the windows wide open was that we could hear all of the people arriving and reconnecting with friends. We could hear them outside for quite a while, but we eventually fall asleep. We heard rain start In the middle of the night, but the outside talking had stopped. We like to think there was a correlation between the two events.
