Epilogue: What's so great about Canada

Here are, looking back, 10 things that make Canada special, different and worth visiting and getting to know:

• In Vancouver, the taxi that took me from the airport to my hotel was a hybrid -- as are most taxis in Vancouver.
• Bearproof garbage cans in Whistler and Banff, and the widespread availability of trash receptacles that are also recyclables receptacles. Would this be too hard in the States? Canada seems to manage it. One woman I spoke to even told me that the social pressure to be green is so great that she would rather carry an empty plastic water bottle around than be seen tossing it into an ordinary garbage can and not a recycling bin.
• The bus in Vancouver with the electronic destination sign on its front that said, "NOT IN SERVICE," and then, "SORRY."
• A nude bicycle parade in Toronto (which I missed!) with police protection to stop traffic.
• The Opus Hotel in Vancouver, and possibly others, offers free parking for hybrid or other small-carbon-footprint vehicles.
• Tim Horton's. Everywhere.
• Loonies and Twonies. Not because they're one- and two-dollar coins and that's better than bills (I'm not sure that's true), but because the names are so cute and have caught on so universally.
• Beer. Lovely beer.
• The national sport isn't what you think. It's lacrosse. Despite that, the theme music to "Hockey Night in Canada" is considered a second national anthem.
• Joual. It's the French dialect spoken by the Quebecois, and if you learned textbook Parisian French, it's endlessly fascinating to identify all the ways pronunciation differs. Having almost every public sign written in two languages is also entertaining and educational.

I miss it already and can't wait to get back. But first, I need to go someplace dull and quiet to rest up for a while.

The Rule of Three dictates that you won't get any sense of closure until I tell you I had lunch with Joff the Wandering Kiwi in Toronto the day I left. He is still working his way eastward toward Halifax and was settling in in Toronto just as I was packing up.

I'm so jealous. I love the Maritimes ...

June 14: The play's the thing

I could have gone to Niagara Falls. It's only about an hour and a half from Toronto, and it is, I always tell people, one of very few famous tourist sights that truly does not disappoint. Stonehenge and the Statue of Liberty are smaller in person, lots of Washington is blocked off to thwart terrorists, the Sphinx had a very bad nose job. But two natural wonders, despite being cliche destinations and, admittedly, overrun with camera-wielding tourists in RVs, live up to the hype: the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls.

You can't die without seeing the Falls. Brave the crowds, pay for the parking, walk past the crap souvenir shops, find a good vantage point and just stare at that massive cascade. It beggars description. The sheer size of the hole in the ground, the height from which the water falls, and all that glassy, surging, foaming torrent ... it takes your breath away. The sheer volume of water is boggling to contemplate. And do the Maid of the Mist. Don the poncho and ride out there toward the rocks and into the spray, and hear the story of the little boy who went over and survived, and all the unfortunates who didn't.

I could also have gone to Niagara-on-the-Lake for the Shaw Festival. The only reason I didn't is that I've done it many times before. Why? Because it's terrific, that's why. The Shaw Festival serves up a varied menu of top-notch theater every summer, and there's a little bit of everything: Shaw plays, obviously, but also musicals, comedies, dramas, older, modern ... and the town just couldn't be more charming. If you go in high season you may have to crowd-surf a bit, but they're there because there's so much to see and do. If it's too crowded or touristy in NOTL for your tastes, you can taste wine at the many wineries around the Niagara region. The countryside is just gorgeous.

But it happens that on the particular day I had free to take in some theater, I was drawn instead to the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. (How lucky Torontonians are to be within two hours of both the Shaw and the Stratford!) They had a production of "Hamlet," and I'm a Shakespeare fan who'd never actually seen that play live. And although I'd been often to the Shaw, I'd never been to Stratford. Time to broaden my horizons!

Once you get out of the Greater Toronto Metropolitan Area, which takes nearly an hour in exhilarating traffic (I like a challenge), and you get out toward Kitchener, you are suddenly engulfed in delightful rolling farmland, green and cow-bedecked and beautiful. The drive into Stratford is very pretty, and the theater nestles among beautiful gardens full, at this time of year, of gently waving flowers of many kinds and colors.

I've been so sleep-deprived, I was terribly afraid I wouldn't make it through a three-hour play. Sitting in a plush chair, in the dark ... I dreaded nodding off sometime after "oh my prophetic soul" and waking up to see bodies all over the stage.

But I hardly needed all the coffee I slurped: The play was remarkable. All the principals were wonderful -- Ben Carlson as Hamlet, Scott Wentworth and Maria Ricossa as Claudius and Gertrude, Geraint Wyn Davies as Polonius, Adrienne Gould as a childlike and then animal Ophelia -- and I loved the 1910 Edwardian costumes, all browns and grays and whites to convey mourning and desolation and cold Scandinavian winter. The sets and effects were minimal but very evocative; in outdoor scenes it would occasionally snow, but instead of having buckets of fake flakes, just a sparse sprinkling would flutter down now and then, as on a day when an overcast sky can't make up its mind (hmmm ... just like a certain title character).

The most amazing thing to me was how conversational and natural Shakespeare's dialogue sounded. There were laughs! More than a few! Nobody ever gets Shakespeare's jokes anymore. But you know he leavened even his tragedies with some lighter moments. This production really let them come out, and I never realized how many funny lines there are in Hamlet -- granted, a lot of the comedy is in the delivery. The actors and director have the work and the credit. I've never seen a funnier, more real "Hamlet," and any actor or theater-goer who's been intimidated by Shakespeare or "Hamlet" would find this production a real eye-opener.

And so back to Toronto in the golden evening, back through the farms and the suburbs until the CN Tower was back in sight, and a night in the venerable and luxurious Fairmont Royal York Hotel. It's an oldie, but a goodie, smack in the middle of downtown and across from Union Station. For a long time, it was the tallest building in Toronto, and its massiveness still holds its own against the metal-and-glass towers that now surround it. The health club is surprisingly large for an older hotel, and it includes a pool and whirlpool, where I soaked away the chill of open graves in Elsinore and the tension of Toronto traffic.

It's hard to believe that a few scant hours after leaving the Royal York, I was landing in Pittsburgh. So we come to the end of this two-week odyssey. I'll close with an epilogue and the last batch of pictures soon.

The final thrilling chapters ...

The two weeks are up, but don't tune out just yet. There is more coming: a write-up of my last day, in which I leave Toronto and go see a play, and some final summing-up-type thoughts looking back on the whole experience. And more photos, of course, from the walking tour, the bike ride and the Distillery, freshly imported from my camera and hand-sized for you.

Friday the 13th: Boats, bikes and a distillery

The day started when I met Andrew, my guide from Sights on Bikes, who gave me a bike, lowered the seat for me and led me to the ferry dock right below my hotel-room window.

(I'm staying at the Westin, in a room that looks out across the lake at the Toronto Islands and the city airport, which I had the pleasure of flying in and out of in a single-engine plane in a previous life. Coming to Toronto, for me, is like going to a party and seeing old friends, some of whom are the kind you sort of cough and force a smile for.)

The day was turning into a splendid and sunny one as we got on a ferry to make the short trip across to the islands. The islands are a tight cluster in Lake Ontario just across from downtown Toronto, so close they were once a peninsula until the thin tether uniting them washed away in a particularly violent storm. They're a delicious place to bike, because the only cars allowed on the islands are service vehicles -- delivery, lawn care, home maintenance, etc. And there are homes. But more aboot that in a minute. (I'm going native.)

We had just barely coasted off the ferry when we came to a surprising historical marker: The site of Babe Ruth's first professional (and only minor-league) home run, hit in 1914. The islands were settled in the 19th century by people escaping the city's summer heat and mugginess, and by 1914 they were pretty well built up, with the Toronto Maple Leafs playing in a park where the airport is now.

By the '40s, Andrew told me, the islands were a populous city neighborhood. But in the '50s, the city decided to clear out all the housing and turn the islands into public parkland. This did not go particularly well, as you might expect. Whole communities were evicted, resettled and their neighborhoods burned to the ground. By the '70s, the last holdouts refused to go, had a faceoff with the sheriff and drove him out. So a compromise was reached, whereby an enclave of homes were allowed to remain, but the property cannot be owned outright. Homeowners sign a 99-year lease. (This happened in 1980, and no one is sure what will happen when the 99 years is up.) The homes are not owned and therefore cannot be sold to a third party, though they can be willed to immediate family. The homes can only be modified in certain ways. Prospective homeowners enter a complex lottery system, and Andrew told me he knew of a woman who has been on a waiting list for 15 years and has not yet had the option to buy an island home. The upsides of all this draconian control, though, are that (a) the house prices are kept at fair market value, not driven up to absurd heights by the desirability of the location and the limited number of homes; (b) if you buy a house, you have to live in it, so there's no buying it as an investment and then selling it to Japanese developers who want to put luxury lofts in its spot -- also, you know your neighbors and there's a real sense of community; so (c) the island remains charming and rustic instead of turning into a vile forest of multimillion-dollar ugly condos populated by vulgar snots, belching filth into the lake.

Having been to a lot of resorts spoiled by development, I think this is absolute genius.

Look at this castoffs drop-cart they have. You can put stuff you don't want but someone else might on this cart, and things are surprisingly neatly hung up or otherwise displayed.

Even if it's incredibly hard to live on the islands, despite the health of your bank account, anybody with ferry fare can whip over there and enjoy the old-fashioned amusement park for the kids, the fountains, the scenery, the beaches. There's even a clothing-optional beach! No, we didn't go, but Andrew told me about a woman from San Diego on one of his tours who absolutely insisted on going to the nude beach because she wanted to see it. So he indulged her, and when they got close, a naked man emerged from the trees and the curious woman was so startled she drove her bike straight into a fence, temporarily losing her purse containing her passport, etc.

We saw the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, which used to be on a point but is now, thanks to the lake's reshaping of the island over time, far inland. That sculpting process has been halted by a seawall that should retain the islands' current shape. There's a boardwalk along the wall, from which you can see that the lake is unbelievably clear for a Great Lake with a lot of shipping traffic and urban areas on it.

Andrew and I stopped for lunch at the Rectory Cafe, where I had an amazing mushroom and feta wrap in a setting so enchanting that I wasn't a bit surprised to see the staff setting up tables for a wedding reception. The restaurant looks down across a lawn, through a gate and out at the sparkling water of the lake. The breezes were gentle and the food was delicious.

Then we were off back to the ferry, so I could move on to the Distillery, one of Toronto's newer happening places to hang out. In 1877, the Gooderham and Worts distillery was the largest in the world; now its 40+ buildings are the biggest collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. The carefully renovated buildings are now home to art galleries, high-end home furnishings stores, specialty shops and funky places to eat and drink.

While the interiors at the Distillery are very modern and funky, the exteriors have been kept so true to their original industrial form that it's a popular place to shoot films, including "Chicago" and "Cinderella Man." Of course, the original dirt streets and floors had to be covered during the renovations, and I was amused to hear that the bricks to pave the streets came from Cleveland, when that city ripped up its old brick streets to replace them with asphalt.


Matthew Rosenblatt, one of the developers, explained the idea behind the overhaul: to create a place for locals, not tourists, with no chains, no overt historic emphasis (no costumed re-enactors, no docents), and find vendor/tenants who are passionate about what they do, not necessarily passionate about being canny businesspeople. At right is a coffee shop that is high-end, purveying reportedly some of the best coffee in Canada, but it's funky rather than pretentious. And then there's the former dessert chef who opened Soma without ever having owned a business before. Soma has fantastic gelato -- I tried both the Ontario blueberry sorbet and the Sicilian pistachio gelato, and they were both glorious, especially the richly nutty gelato -- and also handmakes chocolate truffles. You can watch them make chocolate through a glass wall. I also tried a drink there that was unlike anything I'd ever had before. The chocolate shot is pretty much hot melted chocolate, dark and rich and darn near pure, but when you drink it, after a moment you realize the heat in your mouth and down your throat is not just temperature. The chocolate has chili in it, and the heat and mild burn sliding over your tongue and down your throat, along with all the sweet richness of the chocolate, is overwhelmingly sensual. Then the other hints of flavor develop, the whiff of ginger, the whisper of orange peel ... they serve it in a very small cup, like an espresso cup, and it's still an outrageous sensory overload. I don't know if I can ever go back to Hershey's.

I had the privilege of meeting and chatting with former Bostonian Jane Corkin, who showed me her photography gallery. I can't say much about the art, because I don't know anything about art, but I found it interesting to look at, and Jane supplied colorful details about the artists. The gallery, like most spaces at the Distillery, is all original brickwork, adapted structure and reclaimed wood. The wood everywhere is worth noticing, because it tends to be very thick, having come from former shop floors and barrel racks. Jane is wry and passionate and smart, justly proud of her realm but friendly and down-to-earth. Meeting her is the kind of experience the Distillery was conceived to provide to people like me who don't generally hang around art galleries because we find them a bit intimidating.

Art appreciation being thirsty work, I sampled some of the wares at the Mill Street Brewery. A helpful beer geek who manned the taps ("Don't just try one or two -- try all of them") rattled off a long, long list of awards Mill Street concoctions have won, but I must endorse the very light and drinkable Organic Lager and, at the other end of the spectrum, the Coffee Porter. Wouldn't want a lot of it, but it's good stuff in a short glass.

I had dinner at Pure Spirits. I had to try the cold watermelon soup made with gin, and then I had some black cod that was melt-in-your-mouth sweet and tender. Van Morrison tunes competed with the live music ramping up outside as the shadows got longer.

Not bad for Friday the 13th.

June 12 for real: Toronto on foot

In the morning, I met Bruce Bell, who is, seriously, Mr. Toronto. He has had himself declared unpaid curator of so many historic hotels and other buildings that he has a different badge to put on every time he crosses a threshhold. Not to mention the plaques around town that have his name on them because he got them placed.

Why? What's so great about him? My God, Martha, he knows everything.

A walking tour of Toronto with Bruce is a kaleidoscope of history, architecture, pop culture, politics, folklore, survival skills, trivia, gossip, eulogy, design, esthetics and ice cream. He'll point out the biggies, like the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre next door, where I once watched a baseball game through the Rogers' open roof from the transparent floor of the CN's observation deck, but he'll make sure you see the whimsical sculpture and tell you the artist's name. He'll explain where the lake shore used to be before it was filled in, and where the train yards have been reclaimed for more amusing venues.

And he'll remind you when to look up. Anyone who's learned anything about urban architecture knows that most of the coolest stuff is way above eye level.

Like the Ontario College of Art & Design building that looks like some kind of weird gift package on stilts. It is, quite simply, a box (with windows) way up in the air, held up by brightly colored supports and reached by a sloping tunnel presumably containing stairs. It could only be an art school, am I right?

And then Bruce pops us into Malabar costume shop. It's truly overwhelming. You have never seen so many costumes in one place. They're grouped on racks with labels like a bookstore's or library's: Clowns, roaring '20s, can-can girls, military ... and on and on and on. Rent or buy. "This place is CRAZY at Halloween," Bruce confirms.

After taking in the grand twin arcs of the newest City Hall and the massive mall called Eaton Centre, we enter a former Toronto Dominion bank that's now a hotel, the Suites at One King West. It's grand and ornate (Bruce says, "They wanted you to look at all this and think, 'My money is SAFE here'") and still delightfully bank-y inside, with what was once the largest vault in Canada still staring sternly up at visitors from its showcase at the bottom of a flight of steps.




Another gorgeous and grand old edifice is nearby: the Bank of Commerce building, once referred to as Canada's Empire State building for its magnificence. It's opulent and gilded and massive, and Bruce says even Europeans crane their necks and goggle at the faraway, palatial ceiling.

It had an equally gorgeous sibling, but that one was knocked down to make way for Canada Trust Bank. It's hard to resent a sleek black skyscraper created by Mies van der Rohe, who also did the Seagram's building in New York. Whether you like the starkly clean lines and shiny surfaces or not, you have to concede that the effect is slick, sophisticated and heavy in the way expensive and well-made things are always heavy.

(Even lightweight top-end electronic gadgets will always hark back to that, when you close a compartment or press a button and get that solid, dense, satisfying click.)



It's also not without grace. Round glass bowls of yellow daisies sit at every corner of the ponderous marble teller counter. Bruce points them out and explains that that is not decoration -- it is design. Mies dictated their specific color and placement. ("Listen, the building's done, but only if you remember that every day you have to get bunches of daisies -- yellow daisies -- and put them in fishbowls at every corner of the counter." "I'm sorry, Hoskins, did our world-famous architect just demand that we bring the bank flowers every day? In fishbowls?" He did, and to this day, it gets them. The have a standing order with a grower. Maybe with fish, too.)

The old CEO's office, now used as a meeting space, is very "Mad Men," with its posh, '50s-looking furnishings (they're so good, no one dares change them), stunning view of the city and largest single-piece wooden table in the world (sez Bruce). It's a conference table so massive it had to be helicoptered into place and the roof of the building assembled over it. All I could think was that it must have come from one hell of a tree.



Bruce pointed out the King Edward Hotel, scene of many celebrity bivouacs. Windows in a suite at the top of the building were once looked out of by the Beatles on their first trip to Toronto, and what they saw below them was a surging mob of fans in the street. John Lennon returned there with Yoko years later for the famed Bed-In for Peace. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor scandalized the city by shacking up at the King Edward before they were married, though the far corner of the Sovereign dining room downstairs is where Burton popped the question and brought the ring bling to dazzle Liz.

OK, I'm starting to go all tabloid. It's truly frightening how easily that comes. I should also mention that we saw, I think, three out of four or possibly even four out of five Toronto city halls, only one of which is still used as City Hall (you can't fight it, but you can move it), many other distinguished old buildings and the St. Lawrence Market -- which incorporates the facade of the first city hall as an inward-facing wall. All the while, Bruce was dropping in tidbits like, "Queen Street is blocks and blocks of trendy shopping. It's well-known and an icon. If you say to friends, 'Let's do Queen Street tonight,' everyone knows what you're suggesting and what that'll be like. And it's descriptive too, in a way everyone immediately recognizes. As in, 'Oh, she's very Queen Street.'"

And, as we passed an unfortunate, ragged woman sitting against a building babbling to herself and banging two rocks together, "She's an heiress. Her family has a fortune, but they don't care, just let her sit here and bang her rocks."

There are a lot of ragged people in Toronto. The city has the same homelessness/panhandling/mental health issues most major American cities have. I find this both reassuring and profoundly depressing. If Toronto has this problem, we're not alone, and it must be a hard nut to crack. On the other hand, if Toronto has this problem, that means even the Canadians can't solve it, with their well-developed social saftey net and generally more inclusive, less Darwinian attitude toward the impaired. Maybe there is no way to solve it.

I also glimpsed the famed PATH, the network of passages and stairs that links most big downtown buildings to most others, so that Torontonians can get all over the place without having to go outside. You make your way down to big pedestrian concourses -- their retail makes them look like sunken shopping malls --and move from building to building to stay out of the cold and snow. The weather may be bad here in the winter, but Toronto has gone a long way toward making weather optional.

For dinner, I went right to the top: 360, the spinning (verrrrrry slowly) restaurant up the CN Tower. The food was good; the view was outstanding. You just sit there with your wine and your girlled salmon, and you watch Toronto rotate slowly beneath you. You can pick out your hotel or the theater you've gone to, admire the lake, watch planes take off and land at the little city airport and watch the sun sink and the lights come on. Unfortunately, my visit coincided with a train-wreck evening that left people standing and waiting for their tables for over half an hour. Getting into the tower is like getting into Ft. Knox, so it seemed a bit much for people with reservations to have to wait so long with nary a bench or chair to take a load off. The maitre d' assured the cranky that this was absolutely not normal.

But that view ... makes you forget ... and a little fruit crumble helps too ...

June 12: Toronto on foot

I arrived in Toronto and spent the afternoon on an absolutely fascinating walking tour with Bruce Bell, historian, author, plaque propagator, guide and fellow "South Park" fan. I hope to get time to write about it later today -- maybe if it rains, as promised. The one thing my schedule doesn't allow for is actually writing about what I've seen.

But I'll tease it now by telling you that Bruce knows Toronto inside-out, forwards and backwards, and if I can convey to you a tenth of what he showed me, you'll hardly be able to stand NOT being in Toronto for another minute. I always knew this city was cool, and now that is a much more educated judgment.

So for now I'm off to do some biking ... oh -- more photos coming soon too, as soon as I get some time ...

June 11: Freedom Canadians?

You think of French-Canadians as being in Quebec; that's their turf, and the rest of Canada is historically British in origin.

Wrong.

Think about the analogous territory and settlement of it farther south, when everything north and west of, say, Philadelphia was wild frontier, disputed, thinly populated, the land of Indians and fur traders, missionary priests and isolated forts. Think about the French and Indian War. I'll wait.
Winnipeg is pretty far from Quebec, but it has one of the largest francophone communities west of the Great Lakes. You drive out of town toward the east just a few miles, and you could swear you've leapfrogged Ontario and materialized in La Belle Province. In fact, cross the Esplanade Riel bridge in the middle of Winnipeg and you are in St. Boniface, where you will get a friendly "bonjour." It used to be a separate city, and not wildly keen on its big anglophone neighbor, until it was swallowed in the early '70s and became part of Winnipeg. (Not without a fair amount of grumbling.) Its magnificent former hotel de ville (city hall) is now the home of Tourisme Riel, the tourism and heritage organization for St. Boniface, final resting place of the (in)famous patriot/traitor and founder of Manitoba, Louis Riel.



The St. Boniface Museum, which houses a vast collection of Riel artifacts, is housed in the oldest building in Winnipeg and oldest log structure in North America, and St. Boniface Cathedral is actually a basilica. The wooden roof of the original building burned, but the stone walls remain next to a modern replacement next door. The skeleton reminded me of England's Coventry Cathedral, the stone ruins of which are now a kind of war memorial (it was bombed and burned during World War II) next to a modern replacement. My enthusiastic student tour guide, Michelle, told me that all the windows, including a huge rose window, exploded to smithereens in the blaze, so, unlike Coventry, St. Boniface doesn't have any evocative bits of colored glass clinging to the edges of the holes in its walls.

It does have a historic cemetery in which Riel and most of his immediate family are buried. He was hanged in Vancouver for essentially making a career out of fighting British hegemony in what was evolving into Canada and carving out a place and rights for those of French and Indian descent -- particularly mixed French and Indian descent, which is designated Metis and has special legal standing in Canada. Riel himself had a French father and Indian mother. It was quite common for French voyageurs -- 18th- and early 19th-century traders in furs and other goods between the frontier and Quebec -- to have a wife at home in, say, Montreal and an Indian "country wife" and kids in Manitoba. Boys will be boys, if they can get away with it.

Anyway, Riel is a very controversial figure, being a freedom-fighting hero in French and a pernicious rebel in English. They definitely dig him in St. Boniface. His name and likeness are everywhere. He's a big part of the francophone heritage here, along with the voyageurs. The Festival du Voyageur is Western Canada's biggest winter blowout, second only to the marquee Winter Carnival in Quebec.

Michelle also showed me some of St. Boniface's other treasures, like the firehouse and the train station -- Winnipeg's first and only for many years until Union Station was built. The firehouse is a particularly charming old building, with a couple of vintage fire engines displayed in it and a tower used for drying hoses in the old days. As with a lot of Winnipeg, St. Boniface's funky old structures have ducked the wrecking ball -- and a very good thing, too.

After lunch, I tried to find the Royal Canadian Mint and largely failed. It's on the outskirts of town and not overly signed. It's almost like they don't want too many people to know where it is, which is understandable. I didn't have time for a tour, so I just stared through the glass at the rows of machines stamping out jillions of Canadian coins and hefted the giant gold bar held in place by a chain and a security guard. It was fascinating -- I wish I'd had more time.


But I needed to get back to Fort Gibraltar, a reconstructed version of the fort at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers that kept trade safe for the North West Company, competitor of the Hudson's Bay Company. A boatload of voyageur re-enactors had landed earlier in the day, and the fort was full of men, women and children dressed as period fur traders, bourgeois company men, Indians and Metis. I was invited to share tea provided by a bourgeois gentleman, and it was a real treat and authentic as possible. There was tea in ceramic mugs or tin cups -- without the luxury of sugar -- wedges of scone with double cream and lemon curd, slices of cake, candied ginger, small dark squares of chocolate and crustless sandwiches. I joined a table of mostly rough characters in the men's quarters (I think they lured the kerchiefed Metis women in with the chocolate) and enjoyed the easy bilingual fluctuations of the conversation.

Afterward, there was an archery demonstration. In what had to be nearly a full gale. (It didn't rain till evening, but the wind was fierce.)

I had dinner at a cafe/bakery called Baked Expectations on trendy Osborne Street. Something for everyone: decadent pastry AND beer and wine. A place like this would be a truly dangerous addition to any neighborhood.


Tomorrow: Toronto. Let me remind you to scroll down now and then to look for new pictures in old posts. I'm catching up more every day.