The first half of my second Toronto day was taken up by the Royal Ontario Museum. This is a huge museum that covers just about every time period there is, showcasing artifacts from Precambrian fossils to 1700s porcelain and pretty much everything in between. Here's just a smattering of it...

Thursday, September 7, 2017


Jurassic sea life


Obligatory T-Rex skeleton


From an exhibit on ancient China. Really! Ever heard of the Kaifeng Jews? This is one of their Torah scrolls.


Medieval European armor


This sage but poignant advice I found outside a presentation concerning Auschwitz. Not too far from here they had recreated (temporarily?) a portion of the notorious death camp, including a gas chamber's door, and a tour guide discussing the libel lawsuit filed by Holocaust denier David Irving against author Deborah Lipstadt, since she in one of her books had accused him of distorting historical evidence. This trial had become a public review of historical evidence, especially for the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, and Irving, being a denier, lost his case since the facts were not on his side. It was this evidence, and how it refuted denier claims, that the tour guide was walking us through.


Sumerian and Babylonian documents written in the cuneiform script in ancient Mesopotamia, today's Iraq.

That's covered more historical ground than any other single museum I've ever seen. The last thing I did there was stop for lunch at their cafeteria.

After the museum I found myself in Toronto's big, bustling rail terminal, Union Station. Here I was trying to decide what to do the next day, whether to take a day trip to London or to Kitchener. I checked the VIA Rail (Canada's national rail company) schedules for London and lazily decided I didn't want to get up early enough to catch the morning train. I didn't yet decide which town to go to, but later I settled on driving to Kitchener. This was a mistake as we'll see in the next day's blog.

While I was there I also picked up a program for TIFF which contained schedules and summaries for all the movies they were showing, so I flipped through this a bit to decide which films I wanted to see on Sunday.


Toronto Union Station. Not quite as impressive as New York Grand Central, but it's close.


While downtown I stumbled onto something I didn't know existed: the Canadian Walk of Fame. Kind of like the one in Hollywood, but exclusively dedicated to Canadian stars. And quite a lot of the people immortalized here are famous in the States, like the two you see here. There were also stars for Leslie Nielsen, Rush (one star for all three of them), The Kids in the Hall (one star for all five of them!), Lorne Michaels, Mike Myers, and many others.

There was one last thing I needed to do that day, and that was go for a swim in a public pool. Just over a year earlier, not long after returning from Québec in fact, I had started taking swimming lessons. By the time I was in Toronto I was regularly doing laps of breaststroke, backstroke, and freestyle/front crawl every week and didn't want to fall behind during this trip, so I made sure to pack a swimsuit and goggles when I traveled up here.

The pool I went to was called Regent Park Aquatic Centre, which has since been renamed Pam McConnell Aquatic Centre according to Google Maps. It was a pretty standard 25-meter pool, and they had a rule I haven't encountered anywhere else: the pool was divided into three sections, each for swimmers of a certain speed. I thought "I'm not that good, I just started a year ago, I should get in the slow lane." After passing too many people in the slow lane I was kindly asked to move into one of the faster lanes.

Other articles in this series: