Last weekend was Toronto’s annual Doors Open festival. I’ve gone in 2002, where if memory serves me correctly I went to CBC, old City Hall, and Osgoode Hall and last year as well. For some reason, I didn’t blog about it last year, but based on my photos it looks like I visited old City Hall (again), Canada Life Building, some bank (Scotia?), Design Exchange, Commerce Gate, TD Centre, the Gooderham Building and 1 King St West. This year, we weren’t able to see as many buildings since I had Mandarin class on Saturday morning.

Victor, Pauline and I went to Finch station after class and met up with Peter; picking up some street meat on the way. Our first stop was Lower Bay, but Joe called me when we were still at Finch saying that there was already a huge line. By the time we got down there, Joe had made it to the front of the line and entered the exhibit so we weren’t able to cut in. We met them afterwards and decided to skip Lower Bay since we had to meet up with Rishi, Horace and Janet. It was unfortunate because Lower Bay had seemed really interesting; it was a subway station built below the existing Bay station, but not used by the TTC. However, based on Joe’s review, it seemed to be the same as (upper) Bay station and we wouldn’t be missing anything if we skipped it.

We continued down Bay St to the Elgin/Winter Garden Theatre. Along the way I ran into Josephine, who kind of ignored me? We met up with Rishi, Horace and Janet in the huge line outside the Elgin/Winter Garden, but after 15-20 minutes were let in. Fortunately, they let in enough people to fill the theatre, and proceeded to talk about its history. The Elgin Theatre was very nice and grand, but a little too dark to take pictures in. We then went upstairs to the Winter Garden Theatre, which again was very nice. Its distinguishin characteristic was its ceiling which were made of branches and made it seem like you were watching theatre in a forest.

After that, it was already 4PM and most of the exhibits were closing down. The last thing on my agenda was the Tridel Eco-suite, but Kitty called me and said that they had to close up early. Our backup was CBC but apparently it closed at 4PM. So we decided to goto the Queen’s Wharf Lighthouse. We split up and several of us took transit while the remaining drove. I was part of the transit group and we got stuck at Union station because 4 Spadina streetcars arrived before an Exhibition one; we almost decided to ditch the rest of the group and just go eat in Chinatown. We did lose Peter because he was tired and decided to go home and nap.

No one really had an idea of where the lighthouse was, the driving people went over to Fort York because they thought it was there. We asked the streetcar driver, and she said that there was a stop for the lighthouse. So we got to the lighthouse and were surprised by what we saw. It was only 2 stories tall, and not even near the lake! We were fortunately able to take a peek inside just before they closed up, and it was pretty much lame. After laughing awhile about this, we walked up to Fort York to meet up with the rest of the people. Richard had also made it down by then and we sat around for a bit while Horace unsuccessfully attempted to blow a dandilion.

We then went up to Little Italy for dinner, at some place with a wood-burning oven (although most places in that area had that). Nothing to write home about, and I can’t even remember the name. BUT there was FREE BEER! There were two girls giving out free pints of Keith’s Amber. It wasn’t bad, but I still prefer the IPA over it. Nelson also called me and said he was going to drop by after his softball game, and Victor arrived after finishing up his language classes.

We walked around for a bit and had some gelato, then decided to go back to Horace’s place. By this time, Nelson and Kitty were halfway there, but we were able to divert them and most went to Horace’s; Richard and Joe decided to head home. At Horace’s we did some exercise ball balancing, and played some Settlers.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: diary, doorsopen, toronto