Toronto
When I'm LJing from a plane, I put the flight number in the location field. If you're wondering what airline 'ZW' is, it's Air Wisconsin. I hadn't heard of it either, and even the rental car shuttle driver didn't know. It turns out they codeshare with U.S. Airways.
This cute little 12-row plane is packed like a peak hour bus, and I expect it's big compared to the flight I'll be taking into Botswana next week. It's taking me from Buffalo to Boston, where I catch a flight to London. I look forward to meeting characters like twangman, nitoda, a_musing_amazon and skibbley, hopefully seeing ailbhe, and of course catching up with reddragdiva and redcountess.
I've visited Toronto a few times before, and there's some fun tourist crap that I still enjoy doing, most notably the CN tower-standing on a glass floor 342m above the ground never gets old. I'm not sure if the photos people take while lying on the floor turn out very well, though.
My usual reminder: if you click photos in my LJ, they'll take you to my flickr page, which has many more photos. I always welcome comments there, and the GPS unit I bought off CraigsList last week should provide more accurate geotagging, too.
Anyhow, now that I have friends in Toronto who I met in places like San Francisco and Black Rock City, I've had the opportunity to see more interesting parts of the city.
danaeris took me on a driving tour for a couple of hours last night, after we had dinner at Zelda's, a really nice restaurant on Church Street, the queerest street in town. We had outdoor seating and waitstaff that danaeris says dress quite provocatively on Saturdays-a queer Hooters, perhaps? We also went to a poly pub social, but found nobody had turned up. A poly community small enough for that to happen would frustrate me very quickly, and the number of places that historic buildings had been cleared to make way for characterless redevelopment would do so even more. But I was charmed by one the bohemian neighbourhood where townhouses had been converted into small shops that sell the kind of stuff you'd find on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The front yards were intact, so shoppers pass gayly-lit trees and creative signage before they get too bombarded with invitations to treat.
I saw aussie_libby the night before, whose house is soothingly vibrated whenever a metro train passes underneath. Visiting her gave me an up-close look at the huge apartment buildings that I kept seeing on the side of various freeways. I was expecting them to be concrete, monotonous and unpleasant, but it actually looked rather nice, like one of the better neighbourhoods of its kind in Amsterdam. aussie_libby, however, lives in a cosily-lit terrace house, made festive with Burning Man memorabilia and lively Australian music, some of which I hadn't heard for a very long time.
Toronto's metro network is small but it also has a respectable fleet of trams, and public transport in general works pretty well. I still did a fair bit of driving, though, and really appreciated Radio Q, part of the CBC (which is like the ABC or BBC or vaguely similar to NPR). It grilled public officials the way radio just doesn't do in the U.S, and I was delighted by hearing politicians and the CBC's own spokespeople squirm as they tried to explain why the Green Party leader wasn't being allowed to take part in the same televised debates as the four other major political parties. There was an awesome hour-long analysis of copyright laws and music piracy last night (just as entertaining as this), and today's other other big news was a shooting on the side of the 401 freeway, causing a quarter of its 16 lanes to be shut down. I sympathised with all involved, but it was intriguing hearing the story unfold as I drove back to the border.
If you do decide to come to Toronto, you might save some money by flying into the dinky little airport at Buffalo, New York, as I did-it saved me $400. It's the friendliest airport I've been to in years, and I say that even despite having to clean sniffer dog slobber off my backpack.