Toronto day 3
2011/08/27
Spent the day with Navtej today. It has been 19 years since we last saw each other, not counting a trip he made to Vancouver last year where he was too busy to really visit. It was good to catch up. I got to see his new house, and we did a little shoreline touring.
First stop was the Scarborough Bluffs, but it was too foggy to see much. I ended up getting more of a jungle style picture:
We then got snacks and walked around the Leslie Spit a bit. My father used to take me fishing out on the spit, and I wanted to try and repro this picture from that era:
Back then the spit was a bit of an industrial wasteland, though I believe part of it was defined as parkland even back then. Now it’s mostly parkland and preserved historic industrial buildings. I didn’t have time to go far enough out to reach the same spot as that picture, so this will have to do:
Found a crab apple tree near here and ate one. Too sweet, but it was still a nice touch – I loved crab apples as a kid and haven’t had any in that long either.
Then we attended:
Cirque du Soleil. I’ve never done this before, nor had Nav. It was pretty steep – cheapest tickets were $65, but we sprung $95 for slightly better seats.
It was a pretty good show – I’d say it is definitely worth seeing once.
I moved out of the Westin hotel today and am now staying with my cousin Tanya and her husband Ralph, in their spare room. Very generous of them, and it gives me a bit more freedom to do take my time and do my stuff here.
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Toronto Memories part 1
2011/08/25
Today I revisited three of the four places I lived in Toronto, rode the subway a bit, (delightful!) walked through the Underground, revisited one of my college campuses and met up with some relatives I’ve not seen in ages (and some I’ve not met before).
First stop: 11 Newton Drive. This was actually the third place we occupied in Toronto between our two stints at the farm in Manitoba.
I don’t have a “before” picture handy for this one. It was a small two-bedroom house with a decent-sized yard. We had a garden beside the house and the back yard was all surrounded by tall hedge which gave decent privacy and some quiet.
We adopted our most recent cat (Dude) here. He was a feral kitten who kept coming into our yard looking for food. My father started feeding him and since there was no sign of anyone considering him missing, we soon adopted and attempted to tame him. He was a surprising find for a stray – a Burmese Blue. Silvery dark grey fur, with sky-blue skin underneath. He adapted well to the house overlord lifestyle and stayed with us until his death of pneumonia sometime around 1998.
Anyway, this place has since been torn down, along with the neighboring house, and reincarnated as this:
Is that a house or a storefront? I can’t tell.
Here’s some nearby rephotography though. Yonge Street looking south from the end of Newton Drive then:
And now:
Not much difference is immediately evident from the photo, but there are a lot more high-rise buildings in the distance down between Finch and Sheppard, and most of the businesses in this area have some Arabic language on the signs now.
And looking north then:
And now:
Very little change there. Even the mall just up the street from here is the same as it was 19+ years ago, when last we were here.
I walked south on Yonge for a while, passing this strip mall on the way:
If you notice right near the middle of the photo, there is a bowling alley sign. I often used to stop off there to play games, as they had an arcade. It was actually mostly pinball – they had an impressive row of pinball machines, and since the best video game they had was the fairly crappy Simpsons side-scroller, I played pinball more than video games.
The North York town hall area has been built up, but the library where I did most of my research when I was taking electronics at George Brown is still there, in the back of this building:
And the fourth and final house we occupied, 93 Hillcrest Avenue, has also been razed and replaced.
With this:
This is where we lived when I completed my training at GBC, and when we bought our first Intel-based PC, a ‘386 with a whole 4MB of memory and a 128MB hard drive – and Super VGA graphics, all for under $2,000!
I had a huge upper-floor bedroom that I really liked, and I was sad when we had to pack up and leave this place to return to Manitoba.
Moving on, our second residence in Toronto was in this crappy little apartment building:
It was noisy, we paid a ridiculous sum per week rent, rode the elevator with drug dealers, and they didn’t allow pets so we had to keep our dogs cooped up in the truck in the parking lot – that really sucked because we could easily have got into trouble with animal control authorities for that, and it was awful for the dogs too. Thankfully we weren’t there very long.
Here’s me on the balcony, from when I was starting to look for work. This was before I started at GBC, and I felt the need to earn some money. You’re not likely to see me in duds like this again.
This area is still a slum despite the shiny new buildings going up.
Also still present is the sub shop across the street:
I used to hang out here for hours at a time. This is where I learned to master Shinobi, getting every possible point and finishing the game without dying once. There were a crowd of kids about my age who also hung out and took turns at the game. One of them wore a felt trenchcoat and had a pet rat living on his person – the coat was easy for the rat to climb around in and on. He smelled. The proprietors yelled at me once for having a persistent cough that was annoying the paying customers – and they had a point. I had a particularly bad cold that year and I had a frequent dry cough that didn’t go away for two months.
Next I went downtown to walk around a bit. First stop, Union Station. very nice train station, and this somewhat obscure spot in the lower level:
used to be home to a pretty decent arcade. Great place to stash kids between connecting trains. This is where I played most of my Moon Patrol, and where I mastered Wardner.
Obligatory shot of the gold building:
Interesting bit of trivia: Management of some other office buildings nearby sued when this thing was built, on the grounds that the reflected sunlight was raising their air conditioning costs in summer. They lost, on the grounds that there is a complementary season.
I then walked north through the Underground, which is a series of connected below-ground mini-malls that together comprise one giant mall. You can walk all the way from Union Station to the Eaton Center without going outside, with shopping all the way. I found that my favorite Underground cookie store, Treats, is still in business but their cookies are no longer as good as I remember.
City Hall:
And looking in the other direction, First Canadian Place (the white building at center):
My mother worked there as an office temp for a while. Remember I mentioned earlier that I was looking for work at the time? I also signed on with the same temp agency, and my first assignment was in another office building down here. Sorting paper files. It didn’t work out well – I was paired with another teenage temp, and all he wanted to do was loaf around in the file storage room playing cards. My first professional dilemma. I turned him in, and then also quit myself because I didn’t like the office environment.
Interesting digital display I encountered on Bay Street. Dynamic wall displays are coming closer to reality:
Oh, and I’m sure that five gigadollars will totally solve all the banking problems.
Moseyed over to the St. James campus of George Brown College, where I started my electronics training. Then:
Now:
This building had a cavernous enclosed courtyard inside it, with games. I mastered Black Tiger here, and also played a lot of Cyclone – the machine that taught me to appreciate pinball. That courtyard is now filled in by hallways and classrooms. The rest of the maze-like interior is roughly the same as before though. Too many stories associated with this place to go into now.
This monster nearby:
sits mostly in the parking lot of what used to be a Goodwill store – a notable one because they had a huge basement department for electronics, and had a weekly computer auction. I got my first Apple II kit here, as well as an Osborne portable and an Apple III (which I foolishly stripped for parts instead of waiting for eBay to be invented).
And just around the corner from that:
The basement of that red brick building used to house an Active Components store, which was a very convenient source of parts for those of us in the electronics program at GBC. Now empty.
After all that, I took a spin through the St. Lawrence Market and then went to the new Distillery district for dinner. I met up with my aunt Winnie and cousin Tanya, whom I haven’t seen for about 22 years, as well as Tanya’s husband Ralph and my second cousin Ayla (daughter of Tanya’s sister Angela Rose). I had never met Ralph or Ayla before, both having come on the scene long after I last saw anyone from this branch of my family. It was a good evening of much conversation.
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Sudbury and onward to Toronto
2011/08/24
Didn’t get enough sleep last night. Good room, but the jerks next door kept going in and out with much knocking and slamming of doors, starting at 5am. Grr.
Sudbury is an interesting patchwork of town. Neighborhoods, as defined by areas of similar building style and degree of upkeep, are small and jumbled together randomly. You can have nice modern homes next to ancient slums next to middling high-rise apartments. As for commercial zoning you can really tell the old city from the new city – the older commercial zones are rotting badly, with decaying buildings and bumpy streets, whereas the new shopping areas on the edges of town seem to be doing really well – instead of replacing the old, they’re just growing outward.
First stop was the Dynamic Earth tourist trap (where the big nickel is) as I wanted to take in the mine tour. I arrived just in time to join a tour.
It was disappointingly short and shallow. I mean, it was interesting – they talked about the formation of the rich ore deposits, and showed examples of mine drift working conditions from the 1900s, 1950s and modern times. But we didn’t go very deep underground – I wanted to see huge underground vistas with big machines, dammit. These mines go down 2.2km – there must be some interesting things to see down there!
Breakfasted and hit the road. Stopped for a break at the French River crossing, which almost looks like a canal at this point:
Major important canoe route in the pre-railway, pre-Trans-Canada days, yadda yadda.
Stopped in Parry Sound to get some lunch. Nice town. No pictures because I couldn’t find the particular sites, but I have two important memories of this town. One is that this is the home of Tim Horton’s, or something like that, and we once made a point of stopping here for supplemental bread torii. The other was that near the Timmy’s there was a basement arcade where I first played Roc’n’Rope, a game I had scrutinized screenshots of in video game magazines but never dreamed of actually finding in Canada. I really liked that game and wish it was more common.
Continued on, but had to leave the highway at Barrie because the traffic suddenly became way too intense for me. The 400-series highways here should have a sign saying, “You must be at least Mario Andretti to ride this road.” I was afraid to use my brakes for fear of causing a pileup. So I switched over to Yonge Street – in my mind, Toronto’s spine – which runs all the way to Barrie where it has addresses in the 20,000 range. Much slower road – cost me an extra hour – but better to arrive late than late.
My route down Yonge toward my hotel took me past two of my previous residences. North York at least has changed in that there are lots of new high-rise buildings, but there was also much that was still familiar. North of Steeles was way more developed than I remember – it’s pretty much city all the way to Aurora now.
This hotel (the Westin Prince) is probably the fanciest place I’ve ever stayed at. It seems really nice – I picked it because it looked like it might have a quiet location, and it does. First place I’ve ever had to contend with a bellhop insisting on helping me with my luggage – I had no idea how much to tip him, but Google tells me I wasn’t far off the mark with my guess.
Was treated to another nice lightning storm from the balcony windows of my room. Today was hot and humid, and as I was entering the city some dark clouds started brewing. Shortly after I checked in the lightning started. The concierge tells me there are tornado warnings for the area tonight (first time I’ve ever heard of that in this area) and that one actually touched down somewhere near Sudbury after I left.
I’ll be at this hotel for three nights, but probably in Toronto longer than that – starting Saturday I’m supposed to stay with my cousin Tanya for a while. I have much more than three days worth of stuff to do here anyway.
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Onward to Ontario
2011/08/19
Stopped off at the Mint in Winnipeg and took the tour – I had done this once as a kid but couldn’t remember anything about it. It was moderately interesting. I didn’t know that this mint produces only circulation coins (including coins for many countries other than Canada) and the one in Ottawa produces the fancier commemorative type coins. Also didn’t know what the core material of our coins is these days – for most, it’s steel, including pennies. Pennies are steel with a microns-thick copper coating. Cheaper than solid copper. Even so, about half the pennies made disappear from circulation.
They have this nice display out front of the flags of the countries they do business with:
I bought a nice coin set from the gift shop for my collection.
Then, onward.
Final impressions of Winnipeg: It has nice parks, some nice old buildings and is nicely treed, and has a great dessert place. It has a weirdly high concentration of Tim Hortons franchises and also a high number of small burger joints. Other than that, it’s about as attractive as a cinder block. I do not want to live here.
Drove to Dryden today – not a long haul. Northern Ontario has weird town spacing, if like me you prefer to stay at upscale sleep establishments. I could do it in ~700km hops or in ~400km hops. I prefer the latter, since it gives me time to stop and see the sights along the way, so the next few days will be short drives. And then I’ll be in Toronto for several days.
Dryden is a sad place. Its skyline consists of one thing: an enormous pulp mill. Nothing else is more than tree height. It has a road, a railway, a tiny commercial section and that’s about it.
I have a bad history with this town too. I’ve been through northern Ontario four times before – twice by rail and twice by road. One of those road occasions, weather was poor and hotels were more full than usual, and we had a really hard time finding a place to stay. It was late at night when we finally found a room here in Dryden, and it was crappy. Not a good night. We did take in a movie at a nice old theater they have downtown – with original wooden seating and all. It’s still there, but it wasn’t open today. I went to the town’s faux Chinoise restaurant for supper and had Combo #5 – sweet & sour chicken balls, rice and steamed veggies. The chicken balls were good, the rest not so much.
I passed the longitudinal center of Canada today – it’s about an hour east of Winnipeg. My west-to-east trip isn’t quite at the halfway point though, since I’ll be detouring down to Niagara falls and will also be spending multiple nights in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.
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Winnipeg
2011/08/18
Spent a full day in Winnipeg today, partly for memory rehashing and partly for new-stuff tourism.
I don’t have very many memories of Winnipeg, actually. I’ve been through a number of times and we lived here for a month or so one winter when my father was trying to find work. It was not a terribly happy time.
First order of the day was to try and relocate the happy places, so I went for a walk downtown. Tried a burger from VJ’s – unique flavor but overall I didn’t like it. Then spotted some kind of wall-crawling contest going on near the corner of Portage and Main:
There were two obviously inexperienced people rappelling down the face of this building while an announcer across the street egged them on. Not sure what that was all about, but at least someone found a use for the Mountain Equipment Co-Op store that mysteriously exists here.
The first location I was looking for was the former storefront of Doug Sulipa’s Comic World. I mentioned in a previous post that while we lived on the farm I discovered and got addicted to The New Mutants comic series, while it was still in its late teen issue numbers. Comic World had a huge storefront on Portage Avenue at the time – if I remember right he claimed to have 100,000 back-issues in the store, and I believe it. Comic nerd heaven! Thanks to Doug, I back-filled every missing issue. Even better, he had arcade games in the store. The only one I remember playing was Argus, which I still really like for its music. If I ever collect the musician powerup I’ve always wanted, Argus and Black Tiger will be tied for the first video games I remix the music of.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the old storefront is gone, now replaced by part of this new mall:
And right across the street, this fancy new building:
stands where I believe the other notable location was: Mother’s Arcade. I always thought of Mother’s as the most famous and professional arcade in Canada, probably because it’s the only Canadian arcade I ever read a magazine review of (I have since gone through all my old video game magazines trying to find that review, with no luck).
I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time in Mother’s, but it was a nice place. The front was all fancy stonework with columns and looked like it had once been a bank. Inside was nicely decorated in sleek futuristic lines like you’d expect from an arcade. The game selection wasn’t really to my taste though – they had Dragon’s Lair, which was debuting to much fanfare at the time. They even had a secondary screen on top of the cabinet so a larger crowd could watch. I played it once and decided it was little more than an interactive slideshow, and thus not really a game. They also had some uncommon games like Bubbles and Joust 2, but I mostly ended up playing Xevious.
There was another arcade not far away, off the wrong (ie north) side of Portage, but I can’t recall where it was. My mother was nervous about leaving me there, but they had a better game selection. There was a vertical-scrolling helicopter game that I no longer remember the name of, but played because it had an enormous screen. But the real star of that arcade was Altered Beast, which I couldn’t get enough of to the point of making my mother angry by staying in there past the appointed hour. It had such good graphics! And sampled voices!
Next destination was the Western Canadian Aviation Museum, which I’ve never been to before. It was somewhat interesting and I took a lot of photos which will mostly have to be sorted out some other time. It is a little cramped though – they need more space to properly display their collection. The biggest surprise was seeing an Avrocar there – also known as the Flying Pancake, though due to budget overrun it never flew more than a meter off the ground:
I then went on to Bird’s Hill Park, which I’ve only visited a few times before but had fond memories of. It has a network of paved bicycle paths going through a variety of fields and forests, like this:
If you’re a kid on a bike, this is a really neat place to camp. There’s also a shallow lake with a wide beach that is great for wading and building sand castles. The park is also home to an annual music festival, though I don’t remember if we ever attended that.
One of my most notable nightmares is associated with this place too. When I was a kid I watched all sorts of science fiction television series, including Space: 1999. One episode though, titled Dragon’s Domain, scared the snot out of me. Here was a large, man-eating tentacular horror with a single giant eyeball with a glowing brain behind it, and it could appear at will in any open doorway with almost no warning. Anyway, somehow that monster got associated with this park and for two years I had a recurring nightmare that I was fleeing several of these creatures in a (non-extant) convenience store located in this park. I got so used to the dream recurring that I eventually dreamed myself up an axe and fought back against the monsters, and the nightmares stopped.
Back to the present. After noodling around the park a bit it was supper time, so I went back into town and had a burger at Baked Expectations. It was good, but not outstanding as burgers go. But I did get another dessert, this time the carrot cake:
It was very good as carrot cakes go, but I liked last night’s chocolate cake better.
Returned to my room to offload the day’s pictures, and was pleasantly surprised by an intense lightning storm. I managed to get a few exposures from my window:
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