Blog - Canada 2007 #3: Toronto
Canada 2007 #3: Toronto
Time to get back to summing up the Canada trip, it's been like a month! Now I just spent the week in the countryside, and my Kakuro addiction hasn't been helping my productivity.
Our short stay of 2 nights in Toronto was quite pleasant. We stayed at Gladstone Hotel all the way west on Queen West, the trendy art district where can be found several galleries and some interesting shops. A bit further east are a bunch of restaurants too, such as Terroni (720 Queen W) where we had some delicious pizza on the first night.
The Gladstone Hotel is unique in many ways, mainly being the oldest continuously operating hotel in Toronto, and also having one of the few remaining manual elevators in the city. This one operated by the proud Gladstone Cowboy, a friendly old man named Hank who recently debuted as a country singer (not surprisingly considering his looks).
The hotel was completely restored a few years ago and each room was designed by different designers. We occupied #411, "Offset" which has a concept of wooden "lines" that run through the ceiling and walls, and are part of the original bed frame and desk, with a bright white neon bar running around the room. By the way, there's even a room where the designers used an image of Hank for wallpaper (#414, "The walls are speaking").
The next day saw a lot of walking. In the morning we went down to St. Lawrence Market where we got some great cranberry and pumpkin seed bread at Stonemill Bakehouse, among other stuff. Then we walked down a bit to the east, past The Sun newspaper, to 55 Mill St. aka The Distillery District.
At this one address is an old district full of old industrial-style buildings, most of which now host galleries and cool shops of all kinds. There we checked out Soma Chocolate, a chocolate factory which makes some confectionary chocolate of many flavors and also sorbets. We found out while there that one chocolate maker is a Japanese girl.
After some tram and bus rides and some mall shopping at the Eaton Center, outside of which we got free smoothies part of a promotion, we got to Kensington Market where we had some jumbo empanadas at Jumbo Empanadas.
I didn't go up the CN Tower, but I did take some photos of it whenever it showed up in the landscape.
That night was the Chromeo show after which we headed right back to the hotel until our departure the next morning. It was a short but nice stay!
Larger sizes and a few more photos at Flickr: 1, 2
Posted on August 18, 2007 at 00:48 | Tweet
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