Toronto :: Canada
Food, clothing and shelter.
Places: Toronto
Coolest thing I did: Found a pretty interesting part of town to settle in.
(Un) Coolest thing I didn´t know: The old distillery does not contain anything that needs to be distilled. Instead it’s all artsy shops. Deceptive buggers.
There are three competing backpacker joints in downtown Toronto and anyone thinking of coming out this way would be best to check ahead as to what kind of experience they want:
- YHI: Expect grumpy arse staff, a layout that discourages interaction with other humans at every turn and to want to spend as much time as possible away from your room.
- Global Villiage: What your Mum thinks backpacker hostels are like. Bar onsite and a location in the heart of club land doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for sleep. Good for a short trip.
- Canadiana: The place people come to live, literally. There were people here who'd been in the hostel longer than we'd been in Canada.
We lucked out and went with option one to start with and after we got through our 4 pre-paid nights we were out of there as fast as we could lug our masses of luggage down the street. Canadiana was our home for the next couple of weeks and it was good to us. It seems to attract the stayers and while the nightlife was a big part of it, people also have to go to work during the day so the fun is not constant. Perhaps I can't keep up seven days a week like I used to too.
Our initial attempts to look for somewhere to live were not so successful. We found that everyone seems to work on a month by month cycle, so by starting to look in the second week of April we were looking to move after another 4 weeks in the hostel, which we really couldn't afford. So we had to turn down a few good places and a whole load of complete dumps (one woman wanted us to live on her balcony) just because we needed something sooner. We also found being a couple and wanting to share hard. Most of the student places wanted someone their own age (cheeky little bastards!) and people our age apparently don’t share. However one of the girls at the hostel, Mary of Northern Ireland found a floor of a house with three rooms that just been renovated and would take a couple. So it was with little pain that we moved in with Mary and a bloke from Holland named Rolf.
So the place we live in is a family home which has been chopped up into little rentable pieces. Our landlord and his young family live upstairs, then our three rooms take up the middle of the house and there about 5 students living the basement, though we've not managed to meet them as they tend to scatter like roaches when someone opens the door down there.
We're having some teething issues with our landlord. As the renovations are so recent he can't quite seem to let go and is always finding reasons to come down and fix something or change something which can be a bit unnerving as he sees it still being part of his house. There have been no unexpected visits at awkward times but I can't imagine it will be too long before his inability to knock causes an embarrassing situation. Still, it's new and cheap and I don't mind too much. He is currently getting us more furniture and pots and pans one cheap auction at a time so every week we get another job lot of old cutlery to go through and see what we can use. It's been good in that way as we don't want to buy much if possible.
As I've mentioned before, due to Torontos extremely logical grid system everyone finds their way around by giving directions and locations in intersections. Our new place would be classed as Dufferin and College, even though its on neither street. It's an interesting area wedged between the Koreans on Bloor Street, the Portuguese on College, the Italians on Dundas West and the Bangladeshis and Poles a bit further West. Everyone tells us we should see summer around here, so we're now hanging out for that.
The other news on my end is my conquest of the IT contracting game here. Two weeks of looking and I found some very keen agents who managed to get me a contract with one of the big banks here in a space of 48 hours and 2 interviews (including a written Unix test...I don’t understand some people). So the plan at this point is to see these next 6 months out here and move back west to Vancouver or surrounds when the winter starts getting bitterly cold.
Less banal stuff next time, I promise.