Tourist On The Waterfront

I spent a wonderful afternoon with Outrageous, now my bad influence, eating too much, smoking and wondering around the waterfront.

We ate at the renovated Gladstone Hotel and even managed a tour of the premises. The Gladstone is a quaint landmark, a reminder of Toronto's past. I've only ever known it as a scary, seedy dive where the homeless went to get drunk with their welfare money. It has been refurbished as an arts hotel, with much of its architecture, original features, and long-time staff and customers in tact. Last Call At The Gladstone, a documentary film, details the 2001 departure of the hotel's residents and transition of the hotel into its present form. We were served brunch by one of the waitresses featured in the film!

Outrageous and I walked through neighbourhoods I never knew about. We went into open houses of chic condos where I wanted us to pose as a lesbian couple.

On the Bathurst bridge in front of old Fort York, three bar stools perch on the sidewalk, glued to cement blocks. They could be an art installation, sitting in the sun, in the middle of nowhere. I can find no information about these stools on the internet, but there they were, offering respite to pilgrims of the bridge.

Beyond the industrial bridge and iron railings, we came upon the island airport dock. A ferry makes frequent crossings to the airport a skip and a hop across the water. This dock is clean and spanking new, and open to the public. It's really important to know where all the good washrooms are in the city.

A short walk down the dock is a small patch of grass. On it are five statues erected as the Irish Famine Memorial. The gaunt statues look yearningly out to the water in the direction where the ships would have come in. They haunt with the hunger and despair of displaced immigrants who cannot find home either in the promise land or in the country they left behind. Visitors have stuffed coins into the crevices of these statues for luck. This is an amazing little hideaway, more beautiful because you come upon it so unexpectedly. This is now my secret place.

Further down the walk, we came to the Toronto Music Garden, Yo-Yo Ma's visual interpretation of Bach's Unaccompanied Cello. It is a delightful garden of twists and turns and unexpected foliage. At the end of the garden, we sat on a bench in front of a docked yacht and listened to a parrot mimic a cell phone. Every time it trilled, passersby reached for their cell phones. The clever bird.

In the evening, I had dinner with Sis and friends at a tapas restaurant. They are the right people to go to an experimental restaurant with. Duck and lamb dumplings, frog legs, sea bream, they were all good.

After, we went to see Michael Moore's Sicko. Oh sure, his is a biased presentation full of irreverence, but it doesn't make the lack of universal health care in the U.S. any less serious an issue. It certainly made me appreciate our health care system more, troubled as it is, and I am thinking, we could model our system after France or Cuba...

All in all, a really great day of fun, beauty, and good company. I really needed it.