We took the 9-hour drive through Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and southern Ontario, and we got to Kerri & Ryan's place around dinnertime. They live on the top floor of a cute Victorian-looking house and are right around the corner from tons of restaurants and nightlife. We had dinner at a delicious Thai restaurant and then went to a rooftop bar for a few local beers. We spent the evening just catching up... and boy does time fly in Toronto! We'd gone back to their apartment after a few drinks, but before we knew it, it was three in the morning.
The next day, we got up late and grilled out for lunch before Ryan had to leave for a gig. We happened to get to Toronto during the city's summer jazz festival, and Ryan was in a group playing on the main stage that night. We walked downtown with Kerri in the early evening to catch the gig. Neither of them drive, but like New York, you can get by without a car here. There are some really cool neighborhoods in this city, and we enjoyed the walk through them all. Ryan's band sounded great and drew a good crowd, and it was fun to see him perform. Kerri is a musician, too - she organized a big band that debuted last month and will have a regular gig at a big jazz club in the city.
After the gig, we joined some of their musician friends for drinks and then dinner at their favorite Chinatown restaurant. It was a more low-key evening because they both had to work the next day, but we still somehow found ourselves up past midnight.
Tuesday, we slept in and then headed to a nearby Starbucks with our laptops since Ryan was teaching music lessons out of their apartment. We went back and had lunch with Ryan in-between students. He loves to cook (and he's good at it, too), and he made a pizza basically from scratch (he bought a ball of dough to make crust and also made his pizza sauce). It was really delicious, and we were feeling quite spoiled. To assuage our guilt at having him cook for us for a second time in as many days, we did the dishes. Since he had students coming in the afternoon, we decided to head downtown on our own and check out the CN Tower.
The CN Tower used to be the tallest structure in the world and has only recently been surpassed by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It was declared one of the modern seven wonders of the world in the 1990s. It stands 1,814 feet tall (equivalent of 181 building stories). For comparison, the World Trade Centers were 110 stories tall. We took an elevator ride up to the observation level and got some amazing views of the city... we'd been up in the Seattle Space Needle a few days before, and the height of this structure just blew that away.
CN Tower vs. the Space Needle (in meters):
The observation deck also has a section of glass floor that you can stand on. I thought it wouldn't affect me, but the first time I stood on it, I felt a sense of panic coming over me. It was swarming with people - surely the weight of 25 humans was enough to break the glass and send us falling to our deaths. We both warmed up to it enough to get a few photos, though.
From here, we stopped by a a local brewery called Steam Whistle. It's housed in the old train station in downtown. They give you a free beer just for walking in the door. Pretty cool.
After the brewery, we went back to Kerri & Ryan's for a cookout. They had a few other friends over (the couple whose house we went to for Canadian Thanksgiving in '09), and once again, we had a great time and stayed up too late.
The Canadians have been trying to get us to try on of their country's delicacies for years now... and Tom and I have ardently refused and managed to avoid it for four years. Tonight, however, we succumbed to the poutine. Poutine is fries covered in gravy and cheese curds (the cheese is sort of like melted fresh mozzarella). It sounds gross. It looks gross. It tastes salty and terribly delicious. A poutinerie recently opened just around the corner from their apartment, and with Tom's New Year's resolution to try new foods, we knew our fate was sealed. Between the six of us, we polished it off in under five minutes.
The next morning, we got up early to have cinnamon rolls from Cobb's Bread (best ever) and coffee at Aroma. Then, we said our goodbyes, lamented how quickly the time had gone by, and started the drive south.
Up next: Niagara on the Lake and Niagara Falls!
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