So, last year, I got to return to a city I’ve loved for a long time, but hadn’t been to in decades: Toronto. I almost immediately lost my wallet, but managed to have a good time anyway, including actually enjoying and appreciating the conference I was attending.
The conference I attended was so worth-it that I really pushed my teammates back at work to go to one – they host several yearly in various cities in North America. No one took the bait for some reason, but I decided I might as well ask if I could go again and they said ‘yes’. Honestly, I was up for going to Boston or DC or Orlando (!!!) this year, but schedule-wise, only the Toronto one made sense. So off I went again.
Like last year, I went in a day early so I could have some sightseeing time. Unlike last year, I knew the whole drill – staying in the same hotel, attending the same conference in the same place, and (mostly) steering around the confusion of the 1 line on the subway, which runs north in two directions from Union Station.
Of course when you travel on business, you fly coach, but it’s a short flight and I’d discovered on my trip with Dad that despite my fat-assedness, coach is still OK. (Also, thanks to modern medicine, I’m getting slightly less fat-assed.) But! I’d gotten an email a week or so before, offering me an upgrade to business class (which I’d pay for myself), and it was not a ridiculous amount of money, so I went for it. No issues getting to LGA for my 1030 flight. I’d decided to skip breakfast, just hung out and knitted etc before boarding.
Weirdness – they of course are very determined that you should look at your ticket and board by whatever zone is listed. The front section of the plane had been billed (when I bought the upgrade) as ‘business class’ and that’s how it was listed on the ticket. But when they boarded, after boarding the families with babies and such, called “first class”. Oh, OK, maybe there is a first class that’s not what I have. And then they called ‘Zone 1’. Shit, OK, I guess I am first class and should have moved up. No big deal, but now I had to get in a line, which I did.
Got on the airplane and to my seat, a single seat on one side of the aisle, opposite two others (small plane). I settled my knapsack under the seat in front, leaned back and *boom* the back of the seat broke and fell backwards, practically into the lap of the stewardess. Well, what now? The seat was clearly unusable, but they’re boarding the (full) flight, and she asked me to just hang out hunched forward in the broken seat until they figured it out. I didn’t have to get to Toronto on that flight, but wasn’t looking forward to having to take a later one or whatever. Well, they did some shuffling around and a guy across the aisle, who I suspected had gotten a ‘free’ standby upgrade, got moved back to coach and I got his seat. Oops.
Flight was painless. I thought they might feed us for real, which is why I didn’t eat before, but we just got snacks. Landed, went through the very easy custom process, picked up the checked suitcase and off to the kinda-confusing transport process. The train to the city goes out of Terminal 1, I was in Terminal 3, and there’s a little train that shuttles you between terminals, but if you don’t know, you’re wondering if the little train is the one to the city and why no one has asked you for a ticket. Also, on this trip, I managed to get on a train going in the wrong direction, but that little train literally only has three stops, so I just waited and went back the other way.
Train to the city is quite easy, maybe 20 minutes, and leaves you at Union Station, which is two blocks from the hotel/convention center. Trundle down the street and check in.
OK, so I don’t remember this being an issue last year, but of course I was staying an extra night that wasn’t at the convention rate, and for some reason this time they made that into a separate reservation. And I guess there was always the possibility that they might have actually made me move rooms after night #1, because the chirpy receptionist thought it was quite wonderful that they were allowing me to check in 2 hours early, and I could stay in the same room all 3 nights.
She also pushed a (paid) upgrade on me, and honestly, I should have turned it down, but it didn’t seem like that much and I said ‘sure’. So I ended up on the highest-but-one floor, recently renovated, with a ‘great view of the CN tower’. As it turned out, the great view is of the base of the CN tower, but I really did enjoy the view, especially at night.
(The building to the left is the aquarium, and those neon things are sharks, I guess. The big blue dome on the other side is the Rogers Center, where the Blue Jays play.)
The room itself was quite nice. Because I’d signed up with the rewards program last time, I got various goodies, most of which were useless (discounts on spa services and such), but did include some free bottled water. They really carefully served that out – you got the free bottled water on checkin, not every day, but I got two shots at it because I had two different reservations. Honestly, how expensive is it to just give a couple of free bottles of water every day? #notinthehospitalityindustry
I wanted to go out and grab a late lunch, but first wanted to call local friend Rob and finalize plans for dinner. Got him right away, we had a great warm conversation, and set up the meeting (more on that in a bit).
I headed off down the street to a place called the Loose Moose, which turned out to be a sports bar. On the sidewalk coming in, and now, I found myself dodging lots and lots of people, crowds of families, clearly doing something sportsy. (Blue Jays game, I think, heading from Union Station to the Rogers Center). So the Loose Moose was quite crowded, but I got a seat at the bar, enjoyed the general view of bearded sports-loving Canadian men, and ordered a cider and ‘chicken pot pie wontons’, which were a nice little snacky meal.
Then walked to the waterfront, not that far away, but I hadn’t made it down there last year. I wanted to poke around, but also to see if it would be worthwhile booking a dinner cruise for the next night. The walk was a little skeevy, as you had to go under the highway, but not bad and I saw exactly where the dinner cruise ship was docked and it looked easy and I did end up booking it.
After some room chillout and changing, I headed up to the Toronto Village to meet Rob and his husband, Oscar, who I’d known for forever online, but had never met IRL (in real life) before. So, funny story. Back in the early days of Facebook, there was a little FB game called “do you like me” or such, which worked kind of like Tinder in that you looked at a picture of someone else (and it was either a gay app, or you could set it to ‘gay’, so you just saw gay guys) and either pass them on by or ‘like’ them. And that was it, except if you each ‘liked’ each other, an obvious next step was to friend each other. And that’s how I friended Rob, and also how I friended Aurelio, my friend from the gay a capella group, The Flirtations. (I’ve gotten together with Aurelio and his husband several times.) What’s cool, though, is that Rob and Oscar met each other with this same app/game, and even though Oscar lived in friggin’ Australia, Oscar eventually came out to meet and visit Rob and it worked out so well, Oscar moved to Toronto (again, from Australia) and now they’re married. Isn’t that cute?
So Rob and I had planned to meet outside the Wellesley subway station, which was fine, particularly since there’s only one entrance, but also laced with danger, since Rob and Oscar ‘don’t carry cell phones’. Recipe for disaster. But Rob showed up after I waited for a while, and looked exactly like I thought he would, and turned out to be exactly as he presents online, which is a big warm marshmellow of a person. We set off to meet up with Oscar, who works in the neighborhood, and found him right away (along with another friend, who I met, and then she left). We walked the block to the Village, which I’d been to last year (where I lost my wallet) and ended up having dinner at an Asian Fusion restaurant called Ginger. This was inexpensive and really good – I had a hot and sour noodle soup with chicken.
Then we headed to a bar/restauranty place for cocktails, which was a lot of fun.
Cosmo was excellent.
And then they took me to Unholy Donuts, where we got some really amazingly evil creations to go. I got a banana pudding one, which I ate in the room with some herbal tea when I got back.
Anyway Rob and Oscar are lovely and it’s nice to meet friends for real and I’ll certainly get together with them the next time I’m in town.
Coming up: a full day of solo touristing, two days of conferences, and another dinner with locals!
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