Lucky Billie: First Days In Toronto

On September 1st we flew to Toronto to spend a month there.

Why Toronto? Because I wanted to go somewhere else than the USA. I'm going every single year to the USA and I wanted a change. Ok Canada is not very far and not very different but I thought I should start somewhere.

Another reason why I picked this city was that 17 years ago I had been there for a couple of days with a Canadian penpal who lived in Mississauga a town next to Toronto.

I enjoyed my stay immensely and thought it would be nice to see again it and a little more in depth.

Our first impression of the city on the way from the airport to our AirBnB apartment was that it was quite shabby and kind of kinky, in a good way.

We got to our rental basement apartment and found it cute. At least for a few days. Living in a basement apartment is not pleasant. No sunlight, noise from the landlords above. Plus this place was very cold. I think the place we picked to stay ended up making our stay way less enjoyable than it should have been. Lesson learned.

We had a gorgeous weather thoughout our stay,except for lat couple of days at the end and managed to get a tan.

I made a list of goals we should reach during our stay and I'm very happy to say that we reached most of them.

We went to Niagara Falls, we went up the CN Tower, we swam in Lake Ontario, I shopped in tons of bookshops, we strolled around Toronto by night I brought my tripod and took a bunch of pics, and finally, something that was not on the list but ended up being a highlight: I brought back stuff from the curb! Yeah, that sounds silly... But curb finds are always exciting, especially when they are books and a watering can in the shape of a ducky.

Things we didn't do that were on the list were: visit center Islands and go to Mississauga, where my penpal used to live. I wanted to find the house I stayed at but we didn't have the adress... The truth is, we didn't even try, and that's OK.

For this trip, I brought along two cameras. The Olympus OM2, with which I took most of the pictures.

And the Canonet QL17, which will have its own posts for its own pictures.

I ran through a couple of problems. The Olympus ran out of batteries(easy fix) and the Canonet stopped working altogether. I'll probably talk about that later on.

We walked so much during this trip. An average of 10 miles a day. We wanted to get out of the apartment as much as we could. We never took a bus or a trolley.