Toronto, Day Two

The show at Second City last night was hysterical. The show was a series of sketches, starting with Barack Obama's inauguration speech. Although political humor only made up a small portion of the evening, it was still fun to see to see a foreign perspective on the US political machine.



The standout sketch for me - which was the only one to incorporate improvisation - involved one of the two women in the company as a professional recruiter and the largest man in the company playing a man 18 inches tall. The guy is about my size, and watching him struggle with opening a door, climb down the stairs, get into a chair, etc., had me in physical pain from laughing.

Franca was exploring the possibility of staying an extra night or two with me in Toronto. Unfortunately, the cost of changing her ticket plus lost income from missing her shift at Marie's would have been too much.

The sad thing is that the weather in Toronto is pretty crappy today. We decided against going up into the CN Tower because the visibility is so low. For CAN$33 per person, I want to be able to see further than downtown. I don't think Franca was too disappointed about not going up into the tallest building in the world.

We also decided against going to see the closing of Evil Dead - The Musical tonight due to the ticket prices. We also decided against trying to get into any of the films showing as part of the Toronto International Film Festival which started yesterday. Tickets for the films we are most interested in seeing are almost sold out. Tickets are around CAN$20, and the only way to get in is to go to the venue and hope that rush tickets will be available 15 minutes before showtime. Since most of the TIFF films will be in wider release over the next few months, we'll wait.

Something I noticed today: Canadian coins will stick to a magnet. I have a magnetic money clip and they keep attaching themselves. It is very handy to kep them from jingling in my pocket.

We decided to take a walk around the city again today and headed toward the Distillery District. We followed our handy map to where it said we should go and found this...



Well, there wasn't a lot. Not at first glance anyway. Franca's initial reaction was

"We walked ten miles for a condominium presentation center?"*

What we did find was a lot of galleries, artsy shops and a few nice-looking, although pricey, cafes and restaurants. We also found Soma Chocolatier, which was pricey, but also offered the most delectable selection of chocolates of a much greater variety than I could have ever realized. We enjoyed some gelato (gelati?) and rested our extremely tired feet. Even with the discovery of this chocolate lover's paradise, it was an awful long way to walk for kitsch.

We were pretty much done walking by this point, so we took our first ride on Toronto's mass transit system to get back to our hotel. After a quick nap, we headed up to Absolute Comedy for a show. We took the street car around the corner from our hotel to get to the subway. About two blocks from the station, the streetcar operator told everyone that we had to get off the car because there was an accident on the tracks in front of us. The two cars which had scraped up against one another were parked in such a way that had they moved six inches to the right, we would have been able to keep going.

One of the openers was the new host of Toronto's version of Cash Cab. The headliner was a guy from Brooklyn. While the show was pretty funny, I forgot to write down anyone's name.

*She said it with an American accent, hence the -er rather than the -re.

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Our walking map for the day, mass transit not included

UPDATE 9/28 - Perhaps I was too hasty in my assessment of the Distillery District. Apparently, there is a lot going on there. The combination of the weather and being tired from all the walking should be taken into account. Someone who has been there many more times than I lists it as one of ten reasons to go to Toronto. Look at Hip Movie District, reason #2.