Good day sir or madam! So here we are again, in what shall be almost certainly the penultimate blog based around my year in the big shiny city of Toronto. Yeah, you 'eard. I am now all booked on a flight back to the motherland on July 30th. I was originally planning to go back a bit later, but due to being homeless in August if I stayed and not really being able to travel for a prolonged period during that time, I decided to cash my chips in and slip out of Canada before the final month of my working visa kicks in. But enough of that, what's happened in the last 37 days ya berk? Well a lot. So shut up.
Remember last time I told you it had been hot in May? Well, that was nothing at all compared to the crippling heatwave that engulfed the city (and a lot of North America) over the last few weeks. The tropical humidity made even sitting in my room without a fan glued to my face unbearable. I honestly believe during the worst of it, where temperatures were up to something like "feels like" 43 degrees celsius, a sauna or the surface of the sun would have been nicer places to hang out. Coming from a country which delivers perpetual drizzle is a bit of a change from the weather extremes that this city seems to throw up. And then on the hottest day of the year, the power decided to go out for an hour, because apparently too many people were using their air conditioning (I ONLY HAVE A SHITTING FAN!), which was marvellous, if you enjoy doggy-paddle-ing in your own sweat. Currently, the weather has cooled down a bit, but it's still perma-shorts weather, which is fine. But I still prefer Spring or Autumn (which last about a day and a half each here). Sorry.
Enough of the weather, there's been some pretty big events that have effected Toronto over the last month or so, firstly of course, being that football thing. The World Cup, despite being a bit of an average one and the matches being on way too early due to the time difference, was awesome. Even CBC's coverage wasn't too bad, although having one commentator and no summariser is kind of weird, but at least they know what they're talking about, i.e, they're not Canadian. On the flip side of course, England's performance was a total disgrace, but provided excellent opportunities to get smashed with fellow countrymen and women. And secondly, it's fucking annoying if you live in an area with a lot of fans of one country when they win and you don't care. When Portugal beat North Korea 7-0, I was trying to lie in. Nah. Barrage of car horns all morning and early afternoon. I was however, pleasantly surprised at how much this city embraced the tournament, probably thanks to the number of nationalities and the wide array of backgrounds people have. With SAWKER FEVVE RRRRRRR! hitting the city, I also managed to take part in a few kickabouts in the lovely (and massive) High Park with some buddies from work, which I had missed a lot. And no one ever mentioned hockey. Although the friggin' mosquitoes tore me to shreds more than any defender. GOAAAAAAAAAAAL.
G Whizz 20 fuck
The second big event that hit Toronto was totally horrendous, so I've dedicated a sub-heading to it, woah! The G20 conference was hosted here, downtown, over the weekend of the 25-27th of June and the world leaders got together and shit-chatted about important shit, y'know, etc, whatever. The city spent a lot on security and barricaded half of downtown off expecting shit to go down... and it did. Here's my secret diary, so secret, I'm going to put it in italics to make it look well cool.
I worked the Friday and nothing went down at all, but I found it kind of odd that they'd boarded up the book store next to work. Thinking nothing of it, I got up the next day for work and got onto the subway like any other day. That's when things got a bit weird. The announcer man told everyone that the subway services were all cancelled downtown; streetcar, bus and subway and said "Downtown is not the place you want to be right now". Ok I thought, he's probably being melodramatic. I live outside downtown so I got off where it ended and called work and told them I'd be late and started walking down there, because I'm a warrior after all.
There was a really, really uneasy silence walking down through the university and I could hear a lot of crowd shouts and some megaphones from a long way off, which kind of creeped me out. Everything was very quiet until I pretty much reached a block or two away from the theatre, where I met a woman who told me I should probably go home. Ok, I thought, but I used to walk home from work through Leeds city centre, completely sober, on a Friday and Saturday night love, no offence. She asked if I'd walk her to a nearby intersection where her husband was, who worked for a security service and she spoke to him on the phone as we walked. I was still slightly puzzled as to what was going on, as I just figured it'd be a few protesters with backpacks and pictures of Steven Harper with swastikas spray painted onto his head. But then we got to the block before work (Queen Street for those in the know) and well... I realised what the fuss was about.
A wave of hostile noise, frankly terrifying armies of black-clad riot police in gas masks and this lady telling me "they were going to use the gas" hit me as I watched groups of protesters walk along Queen Street. The ones at the front were clearly the bad bastards who I later saw smashing up windows and setting fire to police cars on the news (the so-called "black bloc"), whilst other pretty ordinary protesters followed behind. Despite all this insanity, I figured I should probably at least attempt to get to work if we were still open, which appeared to be blocked at every street by a line of black stormtroopers. I walked through the remains of the protesters as it cleared and saw the trail of destruction that the big boys had left, which included a lot of glass on the ground, smashed up banks, smashed up CTV and smashed up Starbucks (predictable).
I quickly realised there was no way I could get any further, so I stood on the corner looking confused like a lot of other onlookers; which was also bizarre, as there was no traffic on any of the roads and people were everywhere. I got a text from my mate Cam who informed me there was further shit going down and then a call from work who told me that they were closing. Therefore, I decided I should probably get out of there, so I walked up to Cam's to hang out and witness the madness on TV.
All in all, witnessing what I did literally round the corner from work and on the TV was totally horrible and the whole thing left a massive shit stain on this really quite nice city. It's obviously never going to be nice to be stuck in a scene from Half Life 2 with heavy handed, machine gun wielding riot police walking around looking menacing. But there's two sides to blame that weekend in my opinion. The police, firstly, clearly cocked up. Their main aim was to protect the big politician men and the security fence that they put up, but in doing so, it let the complete fucktard so-called "anarchists" run amok across the city, destroying property, wasting everyone's money, achieving nothing and ultimately taking the focus off any legitimate protests taking place.
The police also decided to screw up in the aftermath by arresting a lot of people for little or no reason (including a couple of people I knew who were just standing around), coming out after the riots and telling the public that they made up a law that would give powers to arrest anyone who went near the fence and generally being nasty with the batons and the clubbing and mm-hey! The old man in me does see the argument of "why are you standing around where there's trouble, of course you're gonna get boxed and shit on by by the police", but at the end of the day, this isn't private property, it's downtown Toronto. It's also equally fucked when you get poked in the ribs by a cop with a gun and violently asked what you're doing when you're trying to leave work, which was exactly what happened to one of my friends.
Ultimately, it was a total mistake to hold the G20 in downtown Toronto. It drew troublemakers from far and wide and showed Toronto in a horrendous light which it really doesn't deserve and I hope doesn't stick (because let's face it, this sort of thing always happens, it was just really sad seeing it in a place like this). I heard reports before saying that the G20 would bring great economic advantages to the city, which looking back is totally laughable. Nothing was gained apart from a hefty security bill and a massive clean up operation. A total waste of time then. But one that'll stick in my mind for a while. And you should look here to get a clearer picture of what actually happened.
Tell me nice things
Well, another slightly crazy thing that happened was an earthquake, which happened on the day England lost to Germany. I went to sleep after that abysmal match and was woken up thinking there was a load of mice under my bed (seriously, I'll cover that in a second), when actually we'd been hit by a whatever magnitude shit-quake (I've watched a lot of Trailer Park Boys recently if anyone gets that reference, I'll give you a kiss). If I'm honest, it didn't affect me that much, after all, I witnessed an earthquake of that scale in fucking Preston when I was at uni.
So yeah, the mice. After those weird smells and flies I talked about last time, two and two got together and squeezed out four in the form of real actual live rodents in my house, including one evil bastard that I saw in my bedroom a few times and another one downstairs, which I found dead on the floor when I came home from work one night. Not nice. I bought some traps to ease the paranoia of a mouse crawling inside me during the night, but if I'm honest, I've witnessed nasty animals in houses before. I had slugs in my kitchen during my second year of uni, and twice at home, birds have fallen down our chimney, been trapped in our fireplace, died, and then the subsequent maggots have turned to hundreds of flies which fly out and smash their heads into the window in my mum's lovely clean living room for a couple of days. But anyway, lately it's all been quiet on that front, despite the fact that the poison in the kitchen keeps disappearing. Shit.
Work lately has been very quiet with no big films at all, but that's all changing as we speak as Inception (which I loved) hits the theatre just in time for me to leave in a week, which I swear, is going to be sad, especially when you finally get to know people and then have to fuck off. Outside of work, also sad, is the fact that a lot of really, really, nice English people I've met over here have been leaving in the last few weeks. But of course, the UK draws close for me too, in just under two weeks. The reality totally hasn't kicked in yet. Neither has the job hunt, eek.
One of the reasons is probably because I finally pulled my finger out and booked a trip to Washington, where I'll be having a look around next week, as well as a quick stop off in the land of cheese spread, Philadelphia. For a insanely cheap price on the Megabus, it seemed a shame not to, so look forward to pictures of me sitting on Abraham Lincoln's lap like he was Santa with better facial hair. Due to the four day trip being so cheap, I'm also going to have a nice wad of cash when I come home, which will tide me over.. at least.. with Xbox games I've missed.. until I get a job. I'm also trying to pack in a few touristy things in Toronto I've missed before I go; me and Cam (RIP, he's gone) had a look round the AGO, the art gallery, a few weeks back which was alright and I'm hoping to finally hit the big theme park here in the next few days.
Other than that, I'll be crying inside a lot (and maybe a bit outside), cancelling things and saying goodbye in the next couple of weeks, and my next blog will be from bloody West Yorkshire. Christ. So yeah, watch out for my FINAL Canada blog next time, which will include a report on my second US trip. I'll be celebrating by murdering a random member of your family like that Raoul Moat guy, because he seems to be the in-thing at home. Get ready to laugh, then cry. Also, I'll probably do a movie one this week, as I've watched 18 films since the last one. I'm hard. Bye for now!
