Toronto Wrap

Royal Ontario Museum
Image from Wikimedia Commons, see here for usage rights

While I am absolutely delighted to have been able to get into Canada, and plan to go back again soon, I have also been forcibly reminded that I do not cope well with eastbound jet lag. Next time I go, I need to allow a day or two to just rest after I get back. Hopefully that way I won’t lose so much time to exhaustion. Anyway, I am now in catch-up mode, and the first job is to tell you a little more about Toronto.

First up I should mention that I visited Chapters, which claims to be the biggest bookstore in the world. It is a long time since I was in Powells so I can’t really comment on how that claim stacks up, but I do know that the place is huge, and the SF&F section excellent. I’d love to see bookstores like that in the UK, but I guess that space is much cheaper in Canada.

Much of Sunday, however, was spent in the Royal Ontario Museum, which I rather like. Partly that’s because it took the challenge of extending a beautiful old building with a modern wing in a way that must give Prince Charles nightmares (see photo above), but it has good content too. I was pleased to see a large gallery devoted to First Nations people (and now know what a parka should be like). And they have a great dinosaur collection. Going around it, I kept experiencing flashbacks to books I read as kid because, poor old Brontosaurus apart, they seemed to have all of the well known creatures represented, including a T.Rex, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops and an impressive array of hadrosaur species. It cost CA$16 to get in, but I spent several hours there and could have stayed much longer.

5 thoughts on “Toronto Wrap

  1. First up I should mention that I visited Chapters, which claims to be the biggest bookstore in the world.

    It’s owned by Chapters-Indigo but the store itself is called The World’s Biggest Bookstore. Whether or not it is depends on how you measure “biggest”: the WBB would prefer by number of titles carried, in which case it is definitely in the running.

  2. Nalo put me on to dramamine. Along with dioralyte it’s shortened my recovery time drastically,

    1. I remember taking that for travel sickness as a kid. It would send me to sleep for hours. I guess that might help.

  3. and now know what a parka should be like

    Ooh, parkas made of gut? I saw those last year in the wonderful Fairbanks and Anchorage Museums. They were amazing – light, strong and waterproof. Modern “technical clothing” had absolutely nothing on them.

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