Normally when we visit a large city, we are in constant motion from museum to restaurant, with the occasional trip to the theater thrown in. We have long lists of places to go and things to see.
We hit Toronto on Sunday night without that kind of a plan. We hadn’t seen a big city since Minneapolis six days earlier, and we were a little out of practice. Plus, it’s the second half of the trip, which we left a little more up in the air because we weren’t positive we’d be able to stick to our schedule.
So, it was Sunday night, and we were scanning the city’s free paper for things to do and discovering that all the cool local events that had happened over the weekend were now finished, and Mondays are kind of dead in Toronto. Eventually we picked out one museum, the Design Exchange, and a neighborhood to spend the afternoon in, Kensington Market, and set out to spend some time in a city without racing around like crazy.
It was hard to get used to. I think we both felt a little odd sitting down to relax in so many coffeeshops. We may actually have had more down time yesterday than we’ve had on any day so far.
In the evening, we found an art-house theater showing Dial M for Murder in 3-D and then stopped in the neighborhood for some extremely good ice cream and a little more time to sit and read.
This morning, after a peameal bacon breakfast sandwich at the St. Lawrence Market, we headed out. On another kind of trip to Toronto we might have done it differently: researched it more, planned more stops, seen more neighborhoods. But for this trip, I think we found a pretty good compromise.
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