Toronto Sightseeing - March 2005.

I took my family to Toronto, Ontario, for a vacation towards the end of March. On our first day in Toronto, we saw the famous CN Tower, which dominates the skyline of Toronto. The day was fairly clear and we could see all the way across Lake Ontario.

Big Zoo
The second day we saw the Toronto Zoo, which is possibly the largest zoo I have ever seen. We couldn't see the whole zoo in one day, just two-thirds of it. It is not only big, but a lovely zoo as well. Worth a visit for any zoology lovers visiting the city.

Massive Propaganda
We spent the first part of the next day in the Art Gallery of Ontario, a rather small art museum. They had a special exhibit going on called "Massive Change" which was massively advertised around the city, but which we weren't really wild about. The concept had to do with how designers are dealing with the problems of global change. Okay in concept, and interesting in execution, but for my taste it showed much too much of the point of view of the corporate sponsors of the show. The message was that there are all these world problems that just happen to be out there, and these wonderful corporations were inventing ways to deal with them. There was no sense that the corporate economic and political system is itself a big source of the problems. (For a contrary point of view, see one of my favorite documentaries, "The Corporation", which I think is now available on DVD.) We liked the permanent exhibits of European and Canadian art in the Art Gallery better.

More Interesting Than It Sounds
We also saw the Bata Shoe Museum. A museum dedicated to shoes actually turns out to be more interesting than it sounds. Its interesting how this one subject, shoes, which I didn’t think I had any interest in, can touch on so many things which I am interested in: anthropology, history, even religion.

Rich Guy's Digs
The following morning we saw one of the better known tourist spots in Toronto: Casa Loma. This was a huge castle-like mansion built in the early 1900's by a wealthy industrialist who then proceeded to lose all his money on bad investments after World War I. It was interesting for people who like extravagant architecture. In the afternoon we saw the Science Center of Toronto. This is a hands-on museum aimed at children about my son’s age, and he really enjoyed it. It turned out to be another thing which was too big to see in one day, and it was kind of crowded due to it being a holiday.

Feathered Dinosaurs
On our last full day there, we spent most of it at the Royal Ontario Museum. This would have been another thing which would have been too big to see in a day, but much of it was closed for renovations. Even what was opened was quite a variety of thing. It had natural history, art, and archaeology exhibits. It had a fascinating special exhibit called "Feathered Dinosaurs" about some recent discoveries in paleontology. If you have ever seen "Jurassic Park", you might be interested to know that the Velocaraptors, the scaly bad guys in that movie, should probably have had feathers, because they were actually flightless birds, and fossils of some of their close relatives have feathers.

Speechifying
After the museum we stopped at the Ontario Parliament building, but we were too late for the last tour. They did let us into the visitor's chamber where we could watch the politicians speechifying. They sounded not too different from US politicians.