At the start of the month, I went to Toronto with my friends KamiCreed, NekoDiv, sayaka, Ves, Jeff, and zumanity. We stayed at the Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson) dormitories, which were open for booking to the general public during the summer. We hung out and explored the area. This post is just my running thoughts.
Transit
There’s some nice things about transit in Toronto. First, it appears they’ve unified the transit card across multiple networks: I can use the same card to ride the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) subway, the Union-Pearson (UP) Express and GO regional trains, just to name a few. This card can be physical or a virtual card. I chose the latter, which lives on my Google Wallet. I can tap to use it via NFC. It is definitely slower compared with my Compass card or a Suica card: Suica is almost instantaneous, Compass was around a second, and the PRESTO felt like 2-3 seconds.
The one thing I found really weird on the TTC was there is no tap out system like there is in Vancouver or Japan: you just walk out. The consequence is that the fare is a flat $3.30 (for better or for worse). For the short trips we’ve been doing, it hasn’t really been worth it. For long trips in and out of the downtown core, it seem like a huge win though.
The GO trains are like the commuter-style trains, similar to the West Coast Express in Vancouver or the regional express trains on the JR lines in Japan. Frequency depends on the route. In our case, we were doing a round trip from Union Station in downtown Toronto to Niagara Falls, and there appeared to be 3 trains that took this direct route, while others were a one transfer of train to bus (and vice versa on the way back). My phone recorded speeds of up to 120km/h, so the trains are definitely fast, but not as fast as something like a shinkansen. I do wish we had trains like this back home in Vancouver.
For group return trips, the eTicket group passed are a value pick. In our group of 7, we bought a 3 and 4 passenger group pass totalling $90, which covered our round trip, but theoretically you could do unlimited travel between two stations of your choosing for that price. The cost averaged out to a little less than $13 per person, whereas if it was bought individually, it would’ve costed $18 one way using a discounted fare on the PRESTO card.
The local WEGO bus in Niagara Falls is definitely not worth it for a group. From what I could gather on the day of, you could only get a day pass at $13/person, and you can’t even get it on the bus itself. Fortunately, the ride down to Niagara Falls from the train station was free. We ended up taking Uber, which was $10 per car (rented two) and significantly cheaper!
Food
We had some nice food around Toronto. Breakfast-wise, we visited the Egg Club, which, as it name implies, served egg-related things, like egg sandwiches. There was also a HK-style cafe that my co-worker showed me on my last day called Marathon Cafe. The one that we went to was a smaller location in the downtown area, which still had some great milk tea but it was more just like a takeout location with only galley seating. My coworker mentioned he’ll take me to another one in Scarborough the next time I come visit.
For dinner, we also went to an Izakaya for food, here were some plates we ended up sharing:
In the morning, I found a nice Japanese bakery called Hitotoki Bakery nearby and managed to buy a couple of mango tarts! They were really fresh in the morning: was glad I went by at around 10am to get some 😀
There was also an H-Mart nearby, so we bought some snacks and drinks, along with water: the tap water in Toronto didn’t taste the same back home.
We also went to this cafe called Poop Cafe (lol), which was pretty much poop-themed everything: the seats were toilets, and hot drinks came in a toilet shaped cup. We had some good laughs cause one of us was stuck in the toilet where there was (ironically) no toilet paper. Luckily, we got that sorted out 🙂 . We pretty much went for the memes: if we came back to the area, we probably wouldn’t go again.
Exploration
As I kind of touched on earlier, we went to Niagara Falls. This was my second time going there, but it was my first time going to the US side of the falls. We didn’t go on the boats that went up close the the falls. Overall, I still think the Canadian side is a bit better: the US side only got a glimpse from the side of the falls.
I also went to the Toronto Central Island with NekoDiv, and we did a nice bike ride around the area. Since it was a nice sunny Sunday, it was jam-packed with people. Still a nice hour and a half casual ride with a couple of stops in between to take photos. Here’s one I took with my Nino plushie with the Toronto skyline in the background.
Aside from that, one day, we went to Casa Loma and the Royal Ontario Museum, or REM for short. Casa Loma was alright: it was some guy’s house that was preserved and turned into a museum. It was super stuffy inside. REM had a lot more stuff to see: I think I could’ve spent an entire day there. It felt a bit rushed as we went at around 14:30-15:00, and the museum itself closed at 17:30.
Shopping
I bought a couple of things from this trip. I got a small little pin of Niagara Falls from the US side. I don’t have a photo of it on me, but it was okay: would’ve preferred if they had a magnet of the same thing but the shop unfortunately ran out of them when we were there.
I did manage to get some anime stuff back in Toronto. The first was an Oshi no Ko T-shirt at Uniqlo (albeit I could’ve bought it back at home in Vancouver), and the other one was a small Torii gate diorama base at this market shop called Sparetime.market. This base was actually made by one of the figure photographers I follow called Gale XV, who just so happened to post about it on social media while I was there. This was the base on display:
The base is perfect for chibi sized figures like Nendoroids! Here’s one I took with Syaro’s face in the Nendoroid Face Part holder:
Anyways, Sparetime.market had a bunch of goodies from other artists, too, so I would definitely recommend checking it out at Union Station.
Closing
It was a nice trip with squad. Toronto is the furthest we’ve gone as an entire group, and our first international trip, too (yes, walking to the US and back is still international!). We had some good evening IRL group chats as usual, touching on relationships and catching up on everyone’s lives. At the end of it all, we began planning the next trip!
Anyways, that’s all I got this time around. I think we took quite a number of photos this trip as a group, so I’m in the process of setting up Immich for photo sharing. I’ll have my thoughts on that once I have it ready.
Until next time!
~Lui
