Out and About in Toronto

(Toronto) Well, after all the excitement of the Creative Places + Spaces conference over the last couple of days, today is my day off in Toronto, and I've used it to wander all over town. Toronto is an extremely easy place to get around in, and it's impossible to get lost - the city is neatly divided into a western and an eastern half by Yonge Street, which runs from the lakeshore all the way through town, and on, all up for around 1900km in total! Other than that, the place feels like a bit of a mixed bag to me - big modern shopping centres, office buildings, and hotels are interspersed with dingy strips of shops and a lot of building sites, with little sense of a real centre; the city is also somewhat disconnected from its lakeshore by the rail line and Gardiner Expressway, as well as a large number of parking lots around the baseball and hockey stadiums. And even on Yonge St, as soon as you get just slightly away from the big shopping centres almost every other shop seems to be a sex shop - Torontonians must be a randy lot...

Happily, we're also still experiencing unusually warm weather, so earlier today I had a bit of a lie-down on the lawn by the lakeshore. Right now I'm sitting in the middle of Dundas square amidst the early stages of an outdoor music event celebrating the end of Arts Week 2005, and enjoying what appears to be a free wireless connection (if this is someone's private connection and was simply left unsecured by accident, I apologise...). An early flight tomorrow will bring me back to the U.S. for the AoIR conference in Chicago - and then it's on to New York.