Skydome with Ritzy Harbourfront Condos, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, originally uploaded by Bencito the Traveller.
I have been thinking a lot this week about the differences between where I came from and where I live in East Texas, 100 miles from Houston.
I chose this picture this time because it shows a place Hubby and I have gone to walk, have lunch and browse shops. It is at Lake Ontario and has been built since I was an adult. If it were panned a little further, it would include the CN Tower which is a communications tower, sometimes claimed by some to be the world's tallest building. (Surely, some taller buildings have risen since.) This area is for pedestrians and helps Toronto keep it's nickname of "People City".
The Skydome was built to house the Toronto Blue Jays Baseball Club and was home to the Toronto Argonaut Football Club. It is now called Rogers Centre (Canadian spelling there).
Toronto has a population of about 5.5 million in the Greater Metropolitan Area (GTA) which is a little more than the 500,000 people living there when I was kid living in central North Toronto, near Eglinton and Avenue Road. I used to be able to walk down two blocks or across one block to catch a bus to the subway (underground train) which was originally built in the early 50s. The subway part of the transportation system now has many routes going in every direction. Cars are best left home when going to work or college.
Transportation is one major difference where I live now. My neighbour had a wreck (Canadian: accident) two weeks ago and she really had to rely on her friends to give her lifts to anywhere she went.
Our Community College sure could use a parking garage and one is being built in the next town at the University. If you have lots of cars, Toronto likes to "stack" them and there are many, many parking garages.
There are also some parking lots with attendants so they can get the optimum number of cars into the smallest amount of space.
The land is premium in Toronto because that is where everyone wants to live because that is where the jobs are. So, a forty foot lot across the frontage of a residential house is considered pretty good. (All due respect to Vancouver which is now a hub for jobs in Canada as well.)
The house I grew up in had a 29 foot frontage and today is still considered a nice house in a nice and convenient area. Virtually all houses have basements and are more than one storey. If there is enough land, in the outlying areas, there are split level layouts and some bungalows (one storey). (In East Texas, most houses are one storey and have no basement.)
Torontonians are pretty much tidy people who are known for not littering. People in all of Ontario do a lot of recycling. Some have compost piles in their backyards and most people have larger amounts of recycle than trash at curb on pick-up day.
A Torontonian parks his car on the street or in a driveway and can expect a ticket for parking on the lawn.
The Canadian population - especially in Toronto - is very diverse now. But when I was a kid, Canada was still a British Colony. Even as a youngster, I studied French in School which was what you would hear in Paris, France not Montreal, Quebec.
Because we were a British Colony, our ways were a little stiffer and we grew up having stricter ways of doing things. East Texas is a very laid-back area which sometimes reminds me of our beautiful Muskoka Cottage Country where we used to vacation.
Today, Toronto is ethnically diverse with many languages being spoken with foods available to many different groups as well as mosques and temples and special groups. Toronto just "grew up" as it were.
Toronto is a great place to visit and in fact, has a lot of similarities to Houston, if you forget weather! Shopping, theaters and restaurants are plentiful.
Tied in with the subway transportation which is mostly underground are shops and theaters and restaurants: an underground community as it were.
After 14 years, you would think I would no longer tack "eh?" on the ends of sentences, but actually, what has happened is that Hubby does that now also.
I would tell you to book a vacation in Toronto but would caution you that it is a pretty expensive place to visit, although not quite as costly as to live there.
Just a few differences . . .
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