TO

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, December 7, 2005

You got to be careful if you don't know where you are going because you might not get there
- Yogi Berra

New York, Canada style
Onto Canada's biggest city and the 5th biggest in North America, Toronto. And no, it's not the nation's capital. That title goes to Ottawa but more on that city when I manage to get there. Spending any time at all in Toronto and it's not hard to see that the city is entrenched as the nations financial, communications and business hub. Home to 2.5 million people, it has the busiest Canadian port on the Great Lakes and is a major centre for banking, manufacturing and publishing.

The Korean Visa headache
Myself and Muz, a friend I met a few years ago during my first visit to Korea and who happens to be in Kingston at the moment, made our way into Toronto (a 2 hour drive from Kingston west along lake Ontario) on a dull, windy, cold December day. We were going into the city to visit the Korean consulate to secure the required visas for our upcoming return to Korea (yep, I'm leaving Canada soon but more on that later). The drive into the city was uneventful, thanks mainly to Muz's map reading abilities, but the visit to the swanky Korean consulate was less so. The Korean government are trying to stamp down on illegal workers in the country and this means more hoops to jump through and thus more headaches for folks like us trying to secure visas. We were asked to produce a letter from our respective universities verifying the validity of the degrees we proudly displayed to the consulate official. Add to that the fact that we didn't have in our possession the required contract of employment; a basic form that was e-mailed to both of us and that we simply forgot to print out the night before! This procedure was so much easier at home! But all was not lost, frustrations aside. We were told that a faxed letter from our universities would be sufficient to prove our degrees were genuine. Issue one fixed. We then headed off to find an internet cafe to print the aforementioned contracts. We spent the next while walking down Yonge Street, Toronto's main north-south artery, towards downtown proper with a stop off in a local library to print the contracts. That turned out to be more fun than it should have been. It was then back to the consulate to submit the application for the visa which would be issued once our universities come through with the goods.

TO

01 Skaters at Nathan Philips Square

But enough of that. How about Toronto. Well, the 3 things the immediately struck me was 1) how cold it is here in December, 2) how diverse the city is (more on that later) and, without sounding silly, 3) it is as close to a big North American city as I've seen in Canada. Even Montreal feels small and intimate in comparison. Close your eyes and you could be in New York and its little wonder it's commonly used as a backdrop for that city in many Hollywood movies. And I've been told that it's for this reason that visitors who happen

02 CN Tower

to dislike Toronto do so. But getting back to the diversity thing. Since World War II the city has been melted by successive waves of Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Latin-American, Chinese, Indian, Caribbean and South-East Asian immigrants. 1 out of every 4 Canadian immigrants settles in Toronto, and there are a lot of them. Seemingly tolerance is a reigning virtue in the city.

Thanks to the hurdles put in our way by the Korean consulate we only had a few hours to have a look around. That turned out to be plenty of time to see the couple of sights I had wanted to see; mainly the CN Tower, the technically awe-inspiring SkyDome (now renamed Rogers Centre) and City Hall. See the photos posted here for more. To avoid the outside temperatures we also took advantage of the city's 5km PATH system, an accidental labyrinth of mostly underground corridors connecting many downtown sights and department stores. It was good to have Muz with me in Toronto as he had knowledge, albeit rusty knowledge, of the city having lived here some years ago. But there is still so much more to see in Toronto and I guess the more welcoming temperatures of the summer months will lure me back for a proper look around. Watch this space.