Kindness of Strangers 2026

 Toronto was sunny and hot on a Saturday when I decided to take some visitors from the Netherlands on one of my special “Toronto Walking Tours”. One of their requests was to visit Toronto’s  St. Lawrence Market, so after walking around the our neighbouthood, we took a bus ride downtown and  arrived to a VERY busy market with six thirsty tourists. Getting something to quench their thirst was not a problem, but finding someplace to sit and enjoy it was simply impossible.

However as an experienced ‘tour guide’ I knew that a short walk down a side street would find us a place with both drinks and seating. And sure enough we found a little  cafe with empty seats. As a bonus, there was a jazz band setting up in the venue. Perfect!

It was an odd spot, and we discovered that is was a summer “Pop-up” that made use of an unused parking lot, and always featured jazz music all summer. However, although we could see that there were lots of unoccupied chairs , finding enough for all of us out of the hot August sun took some doing. Finally, seeing an elderly gentleman sitting at a large table by himself we asked him if we could join him. 

“Of course, I only need one chair for my granddaughter who will be joining me.”

He told us that the band that was setting up was a regular at this venue and that although it was only a “summer event”, it had been operating in the same spot for 35 years. Waiting for our drinks we chatted with him about many things, and he had us looking forward to hearing the band. 

The band started playing and his granddaughter arrived, and the band was every bit as good as he said, so we stayed longer than we had expected to enjoy the music. 

Then as the band leader singled out our table host we discovered that indeed he had been attending the event for 35 years and had started bringing his granddaughter to enjoy it since she was five years old. It was so nice to share the table with him and sing along with the special song the band played just for him. Just another example of the kindness of strangers; thanks for sharing your special table with us. 

One Shoe?

What do you do with Just one shoe? I see many odd things as I explore the streets here in Toronto, but one of the things that always intrigues me is when I find single shoes sitting somewhere. One lonely shoe all by itself, it’s matching one no where to be seen. How does that happen? Someone is walking down the street and a shoe falls off but they don’t notice and continue on without it. I suppose it might have been a pair of shoes in a backpack that was left open and only one fell out undetected. Possibly that one shoe was just hurting the foot it was supposed to be cradling comfortably and the wearer got mad and took it off and threw it away and hobbled home on one single shoe. 

It does make one wonder? What happened that one single shoe got left on the streets of Toronto all by itself?

Well yes there is one actual pair here.

A long Walk for Wine

Although there seems to be a LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) store on any corner here in Toronto, I have a favoured one. The branch at Summerhill is in a restored Train station and is one of the “Flagship” stores, so given a choice I like to shop at this location. They have a excellent selection of wines and their “Vintages” section is huge. As well I have found the staff are friendly and helpful. They got a charge out of my two shopping methods when I visit the store. I like to get the latest LCBO vintages magazine and browse the new selections featured. I highlight ones I might like to try and then go and search them out in the store, so I often ask for help. Then on my next visit I shop in the regular section and only pick wines that look interesting and are on sale. Works for me!

I wonder where that bridge leads

On a lovely May day with warm temperatures and sunshine I decided to take a walk. Now one nice feature in Toronto is the lovely network of trails running through the city’s ravines. A walk through the neighbourhood and you can find a trailhead that drops down into the ravine and in minutes the high-rises disappear and you are walking trails alongside streams through woodland. 

Today I chose a route through a neighbourhood I had never explored before ended up down following Yellow Creek through the ravine. You literally can not see the city at all when enjoying these trails but I knew that the Summerhill LCBO was on a railway line; it is in an old train station, so when I found myself under the railway

No concrete to be seen

bridge I made my way back up to the city and after a nice eight kilometres walk I was shopping for wine. I did not really need wine, but there were a few empty spaces in my wine rack and I can always find some interesting bottles here. 

One other nice thing about this LCBO is that it is half a block from a subway stop so I did not have to carry my two new bottles of wine the eight km back down through the ravine,  I just hopped on the train and finished my outing in comfort with the subway carrying me home. 

Time to head back up to the city

More Toronto Sculpture

 Recent posts have told you about my looking for doors and street art during my walks around Toronto, and the other thing I am constantly on the lookout for are sculptures. A couple of months after we “moved” here I posted about a Toronto Sculpture walk, and did the same in China, and in Florida. There are lots of statues and sculptures all over Toronto and I find something new on most walks. Here are a few of the most recent ones I have found.

This one is in what is called a "Sculpture Garden", and the art featured changes regularly. This one looks like the Loch Ness Monster, but is in fact the wave lengths of various local sounds, a Streetcar, a church bell, etc. Very interesting. 

This sculpture shows how everyone is equal before the law - thus the lion on one end and the small cat on the other, but the scale is level. 

This is three cube shapes balanced together in a little park but I have no idea what it represented.

A fireman rescuing a child from a fire is at Queen's Park and honours Toronto's fire service.

This one is a mystery. It is a huge metal stop watch but has no hands on the face. It is fastened to a large rock and is facing away from the street, so you can only see it when walking between two large office building. And behind the watch is a little sculpture of a sleeping cat. 

This is one of my favourite statues. It is huge and extends up and becomes part of the building behind it. It looks like an animal with four legs, but also like a tree with branches, but what looks like leaves from a distance are actually hundreds of metal birds. I could find no plaque explaining what it was, but it is an amazing piece of art.

Graffiti Alley

 Toronto has lots of amazing street art, and as I walk around the city I am always looking for examples to photograph. I wrote a while ago about the great work done to decorate one of the many highway underpasses, and the other day I finally found my way to the actual “Graffiti Alley”. I had read about this street art location, but I was never completely sure where it was; downtown off Queen St. Somewhere I knew, but Queen St. is long and very interesting on its own, so I had never actually found it. 

But, on a mission to visit one of the many Bead Stores in the area, I noticed some interesting looking street art down an alley and detouring to take a picture, I accidentally found my way to graffiti alley. It really was one of the best displays of Toronto’s amazing street art culture. Here are some of the photos I took.

This was the art that drew me down the alley.

Three Stories of street art; the entire building was painted.

Can you find your garage door?

And bonus . . . Another door for my collection.

I don't think the phone still works . . . .

Knitting and Skateboards.

Amazing artwork!

I especially like when windows and doors and backgrounds are integrated into the artwork.

Winter In Toronto

This is my third winter in Toronto and 2023, 2024 were not really that wintery, in 2023 there was hardly any snow at all and last year we got only one bad snowfall. But it appears that Toronto was just lulling me into a false sense of calm, because this year the city really got a winter! The snowstorm on January 25th dumped enough snow to break records for not only the single day’s snowfall but also for the entire winter. And we still have a few days left in the season. 

Now I am not new to winter; I grew up in Moncton New Brunswick and we regularly got snowdrifts of over 6 feet, and I recall digging snow tunnels through them that lasted for weeks. One year when we lived on a farm outside of Moncton we got so much snow in one storm that they were unable to plow our long driveway with a regular truck, and we had to wait days until a farmer down the road came with a new-fangled thing called a snow-blower on the front of his large tractor, and even with this he had to dig into the drift, back out and let the snow collapse and run at it again. So although I did know how to deal with lots of snow, years living in Nova Scotia I got used to snow that fell, froze, melted and then repeated, never really amounting to much. 

But as I get older, I have discovered that I do not really like winter; I have definitely become a summer, hot weather person, so the move to a 9th floor Toronto condo where snow became someone else’s problem, and, I could just ignore it and stay inside while I waited for spring to arrive once more. I do not own a snow shovel, all 10 of them in various sizes and configurations were left behind in Nova Scotia. My car does not have snow tires, because it is a little convertible that sleeps all winter in the warm underground garage and does not emerge from hibernation until all traces of salt are washed away by spring rain. 

But of course I can’t completely ignore winter, as I do have to go out for groceries and wine, so I have winter boots and warm clothes, and if you dress appropriately winter can be weathered.

Now with the heavy snowfall of the latest winter storm, I watched from the comfortable warmth of my condo as the roof next door got piled with snow and even my balcony developed drifts of the white stuff. Of course the newscasts were making a big thing of how bad the conditions were, so when the snowstorm stopped the next morning and the city’s crews had started cleaning up, I found I wanted to go out and see just what Toronto was like after a serious hit of Winter, so I dressed warmly, put on my L.L. Bean Slush boots and decided to go for a short walk to have a look about. 

Well, that short walk turned into a long 8 km hike through the city. I found I was really enjoying walking and experiencing the city as it dug itself out from the 60 Cm of snow. As I walked the streets I glanced around and saw things differently covered in snow. Long Icicles hung from building, and everything looked cleaner covered in a blanket of white.  I ended up walking not only my neighbourhood, but right down to the Waterfront. 

I discovered some streets were cleared nicely but others were a complete mess and had not been plowed yet, and sidewalks were every possible configuration. If there was a responsible business on the sidewalk it was likely shovelled, and sprinkled with ice-melt so was completely clear, Neighbourhood sidewalks in front of ordinary houses were a mix of careful cleaning to minimal pathways and on occasion when I came upon deserted or abandoned building I was required to walk through deep snow, actually breaking ground to create a new pathway for others to follow. 

Back in Nova Scotia if it snows, all vehicles have to be removed from the streets to allow cleaning, but here in Toronto, they sell street parking passes and some cars sit incased in ice and snow until everything melts in the spring. I saw whole streets solidly lined with snow covered cars. Their owners must have decided that Public transit was a better option than digging their own cars out. 

When I got to the waterfront I discovered that the lake was completely frozen over and looking from Sugar Beach I wondered what those folks who actually live on the island do when this happens, but a walk down to the ferry terminal showed that somehow they had broken a pathway through the ice and the ferry with struggling through heavy packed ice towards the island probably delivering those needed groceries and wine. Even the subway ride home was different with warnings about sections where trains had been cancelled because in places the subway was not submerged the snow buildup had not been cleared yet so buses were the only option. 

So I did have an interesting walk through Toronto’s  winter, but seriously . . . bring on spring!

A Moving Forest

When I first visited Toronto 50 years ago, I was impressed that it was easy to drop down into one of the Ravine Parks and the city disappeared to be hidden by trees, and now that I am actually sort of living in Toronto I am impressed with the amount of trees in the city. Most streets except the very major ones have trees along them and there are parks full of trees scattered around the city. The condo we live in has a little forest of trees beside one of the buildings and when we look in every direction from our balcony there are patches of green. 

50 Trees waiting to move

But any city can always use more trees to provide shade and clean the air. So, when we got an e-mail announcing a moving forest it certainly peeked our interest. On a nice sunny, warm Saturday afternoon fifty trees comfortably planted in shopping carts were going to be wheeled through the downtown from an inner-city park down to the waterfront.

Volunteers waiting to move the forest

So, we bowed out of helping a niece unpack from a recent move to Toronto and took Public Transit down to find this event. Sure enough, we found fifty shopping carts with a variety of tall 10 foot trees waiting outside a community centre with volunteers in bright Yellow shirts eager to transport them through the city. 

We probably could have volunteered to actually be the chauffeur for one of the trees, but we did not find out about the event in time, so we just followed along on the forest’s journey. This moving forest travelled slowly through the city and stopped at locations along the way to provide needed shade to areas of the city that needed it. The forest spent some time exploring the Bentway, the concrete park under the elevated Gardner Expressway which certainly could be improved with a few trees. Finally two hours later the trees ended up on the Toronto waterfront where I believe they will be planted in locations around Toronto where a bit more green will improve the neighbourhoods. 

Everyone ready to go

I was surprised to hear about a moving forest, but in Toronto almost anything can be expected and this was a fun and interesting event. 

The story of the Moving Forest

Greening the Bentway

End of the route; the Toronto waterfront

Lego and Rare Books

You might wonder what those little plastic interconnecting blocks have to do with rare books. It all started with a nice sunny warm spring day here in Toronto and me not wanting to waste the good weather. I had found an interesting article about Easter Eggs on an Internet site about Toronto, and it mentioned that one of the “eggs” was a Lego Tower in the west end of downtown. Now it wasn’t a real “Easter” egg even though it was around the season, it was one of the easter eggs that are little hidden gems in something. Apparently designers and engineers like to hide little indications (easter eggs) that they designed something and as a challenge for people to find. Common in computer games and software, I recently read about them in cars and trucks. This list of Easter Eggs were of little interesting things to see in the city of Toronto and they are always a good excuse for an outing so we decided to set out on a walk to see if we could find this Lego Tower Easter Egg.

It was a bit of a walk, but the day was warm and sunny, and we set out down Church Street to Queen’s Square and on to Hobart St where the Lego Tower was supposed to be located. 

This tower of  Lego was apparently a project started by a local resident who decided to decorate one of the city’s lamp poles outside his house by building lego around it and as it grew it got slightly out off control until it became a “tower”; sounded interesting.

What is that odd tower?

Now when exploring Toronto, you always find unexpected interesting things, and on this walk we came upon the huge slightly ugly building housing the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Situated on a bend in the road, the building really sticks out as you walk down Hobart Street. It is a large concrete building with an imposing tall concrete tower that when you see it you can’t help wondering what it’s function is. We had seen this building from a distance on another walk and wondered what it was. The Internet tells me that it opened in 1972, and is built in the Brutalist architectural style giving it a rather industrial look. Walking by we discovered that it was a rare book library, and then rounding the corner, looking up at the tall concrete tower, we found a sign indicating that we had arrived during an open house. Two retired folk out for a walk, our time was flexible so we decided to stop in to see what it was all about. 

Come in and see!

Turned out to be a interesting stop. There was a room all set for the open house with a selection of the rare books housed here. The friendly helpful staff told us all about the services the library provides. It holds around 700,000 rare books that are accessible to the public. You can go in and search their catalogue and they will bring you any volume you wish to research. Some of the books on display were fascinating so I can only imagine some of the interesting information you could find if you wished. Oh, and that odd tower on the front of the building actually serves absolutely no useful purpose. It was intended to house a clock in the original design, but as it became a reality, everyone agreed that the clock in the tower looked silly, so it is now just an empty tower. 

And after our detour to explore the rare books we did find the other tower, the lego one and although like the unused clock tower it serves no useful purpose other than decorating one of Toronto’s light poles. Smaller than I expected it is basically one layer of Lego bricks in a square around the pole with windows, doors, stairs and lego people all the way up high enough that if you wished to add to it, you would need to bring a ladder. And not an actual egg in sight.

A pretty impressive collection

Just one of the rare books

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

Yup . . . a tower of lego

And it is a serious tower!