Emily and Linda’s Travel Blog

We took our first Toronto subway ride today - to the Royal Ontario Museum. Very different feeling from a NYC subway. For one thing, no doors between cars so it's like one long corrodor inside

Here's how you know you've arrived at the Museum Station

We wanted to see the Chihuly glass installation, but first we had to check out the building. Here are the old and new entrances. Anyone who knows Linda will see that I was well asvised to find myself a nice spot in the shade because she and her camera would be busy for a while

Happily I had some entertainment 

Linda picked our destination for today, but I got to choose the lunch spot. We went to Banu, an Iranian restaurant which was spectacular. We started with sour cherry juice and pomegranate juice, mast o khiar (a yogurt dish with cucumber, rose petals, walnuts,and raisins) and salad e sekanjebin (grilled romaine hearts with pomegranate seeds, fried mint, sheep's milk cheese, and sekanjebin-  sweetened syrup with vinegar and mint).  The main couse was zereshk polo va morgh (turmeric and saffron braised chicken with barberry saffron rice). We took pictures of all the dishes except the last which we were enjoying so much that we were halfway through before we realized that we had failed to capture its beauty. The rice part is called wedding rice because its so beautiful and "jewel-like” and therefore suitable for a wedding party. So the last picture is cribbed from the internet, but ours looked very similar, though a smaller plate.  The service was very good and our waiter took a lot of time to explain the dishes to us. She seemed to really enjoy sharing her culture's cuisine with us even though she must have answered the same questions many times.

Today was Linda's pick - the West Queen West neighborhood which feels a little like the old Soho or the old Dumbo in NYC with a dash of San Francisco's Mission District. The further west you go, the more edgy and scrambled the shops and galleries are. As you move east, closer to Bathurst St, the chichier stores predominate, but few chain stores and a lot of very different points of view. Along the way we encountered a place that sells crocheted "plants you can't kill", a store that has everything you could possibly want for a bar (who knew there were sooo many varieties of bitters?), a doorway that invites you to shake hands,and a whole lot of other stuff.  There's a brand new Shinola store we popped into (I was surprised to see a Shinola bocce set - or was it lawn bowling?).  Then there was the place that will turn your selfie into an action figure (selftraits).  [I still haven't figured out how to control the order of the photos so they're a little scrambled- the last one is the action-figure selfies].

We also stopped for a while at the Stephen Bulger Gallery which has a show  of about 40 of Vivian Maier's photos.  For those who don't know the story, she grew up in NYC, was a nanny employed in the suburbs of Chicago, and made one trip around the world in 1959.  No one knew she was a street photographer until a fellow named Maloof and two other fellows came across negatives of her photos at about the same time and one of them posted some the photos on his blog in 2008-2009.  Suddenly she was a sensation posthumously. We spent some time looking at books of her photos as well as the ones in the gallery. Photos were forbidden, but you can see some at this link. http://vivianmaier.blogspot.ca/.  They're black and white, mostly street scenes and people. Fascinating story and interesting show. 

The boat left us off right at the old Power Plant, now an art gallery. We had a great time at an installation of interactive work by Franz Erhard Walter it was a little high concept for me. You walk into a room with a lot of folded canvas cloth in piles. The idea is that you open the piled fabric out and then interact with it, creating new shapes that change and occupy spce in different new ways. Four kids did a better job of letting go and enjoying it than the adults:

Next we headed West to the Toronto Music Garden, designed by Yo-Yo Ma and Julie Moir Messervy.  It has six sections, each one a reflection of a movement in the Bach Cello Suite no. 1. A really lovely refuge.  We sat for a while on a comfy bench and listened to the Suite on Linda's iPhone.  Ah yes, vacation mode definitely kicking in now.....

There are several tour bus companies in Toronto, but we chose the City Sightseeing bus because it also included a boat trip out onto Lake Ontario and around the Toronto Islands. This morning we made our way down to the Harborfront which is quite the scene. Boats of many kinds including canoes and kayaks, an outdoor theater with free concerts, restaurants, ice cream booths, and the Power Plant Gallery which has rotating shows. We started with the boat ride.  Here is how Canadians line up - so much less stressed than in NYC

The trip was a great cool way to pass the morning and the islands are lovely. So close to the City and yet seemingly another world

Next stop was the Power Plant Gallery, but more about that in the next post. And finally lunch at the Amsterdam Brewhouse, supposedly voted the best patio in all of Toronto. It is a great location right on the water  plus they even had gluten free beer (though from Milwaukee) which was perfect with my fish tacos  

The exhibit we wanted to see at the AGO was The Idea of North, which was mostly Lawren Harris' paintings And also some paintings and photographs by some of his contemporaries to offer contrast or parallels. His early paintings were largely of working class Toronto neghborhoods and people. One thing that inerested me was that in the early 20th century he was including black and Jewish people in his paintings with the same tone as pictures of white people. There was no casting minorities as exotic or heroic or different at all - at least not in tthe paintings we saw. Later he moved toward a much more idealized style where the "idea of north" was more evident. Linda noted that his later work reminded her of Georgia O'Keefe. 

The notes for this one said it was typical of his early work where the factory looms up behind the homes of the people working in it

Here are a few more early ones

And a sample of later paintings

After breakfast, we headed out to the Frank Gehry redesigned Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). We had an exhibit in mind, but went as much to experience the building as to see the paintings.  We particularly loved the Galleria Italia which houses the espresso bar with soaring wood beams and glass.  Good coffee too.  Linda had a great time with all the angles and reflections.

Today we woke up to a gray rainy day and I could hear Eileen Garcia's voice in my head saying, "You know what would make this better? Pancakes!"  Only this gluten intolerant girl can't usually eat them. So what a treat to discover that Cora restaurant, right across the street (named for its founder, Cora Tsouflidou) had pancakes and gluten free crepes! So pancakes after all.  

After our Vietnamese lunch, we made our way to the adjacent neighborhood, Kensington Market which was strangely fascinating. Reminiscent of the old Haight Ashbury of the early 70s with indian clothes, head shops, the smell of incense and patchouli, vans covered in bumper stickers and decals and hippie looking folk who are too young to be the originals. Interspersed are some lovely cheese, fish, vegetable, and dried fruit stores and a men's clothier shop that dates back to the 1960s. Add a few Mexican and Jamaican eateries, some vintage record shops, a medical marijuana dispensary and a place with a bubble machine. Wild to say the least.