Toronto

Natan and I said goodbye to Canada today and drive back to the states and into Philadelphia. Toronto was great. It is such a nice, clean, friendly city. The first night there we went to this bar/restaurant down the street from our hotel called the Spotted Dick. It was this old bar that had been kept up really nicely, but not in a hip sort of way. The food was delicious and I had Canadian beer called Steam Whistle (which it turns out is made in Toronto and the next day we went on a brewery tour there!) We were both pretty exhausted from traveling all day plus it was cold and raining. The next day we walked around town, stopped by the CN tower but didn't go up it because it was pretty expensive. Then we went to the Steam Whistle Brewery, which was great. I had never been on a brewery tour before and it was so much fun. Steam Whistle is a Canadian Pilsner and they are the second most renewable/earth friendly brewery in North America (the first is a brewery in Colorado). We then proceeded to walk a far distance to get to this sugar museum that ended up being closed which was disappointing mostly because we had walked so far out of the way to get there and there was nothing else good to do in that area so we had to turn around and walk again. We went to the Saint Lawrence market and bought some cheese and crackers and then went back to the hotel to rest. That night we went to the Royal Ontario Museum, they are open later on Fridays and admission is half price so it worked out. Except we got all turned around and got off on a subway stop that was much further away than we thought and we had to walk some more. The ROM was awesome. They had so much stuff from many different countries and cultures (Africa, Egypt, Middle Eastern and Muslim, Indian, South American, North American, Asian, European) and what I really liked was that they had a lot of "everyday" artifacts, things that people would use on a daily basis but that you don't often see in museums. For example they had makeup instruments from ancient Egypt and a Formica color sample book in a display about plastics. They also had Natural History and an amazing collection of crystals and gems.
Saturday we woke up and headed straight for the Science Center. It was a lot like the Museum of Discovery and Science in Ft. Lauderdale but bigger and more confusingly laid out and the most important difference was that this museum had a whole section about sexual reproduction and contraception that I don't think you would ever see in an American museum that is geared towards kids. It was really informative though and they even had different birth control through the ages. They had a lot of neat stuff but some of the things didn't work which was disappointing, like they had a camera that would age you fifty to sixty years but it stopped working as soon as I sat in front of it. After that we went back to the hostel to layer on more clothes because it had gotten colder, then we went to Kensington Market which is just an area of town with a bunch of international shops and market and restaurants. They also have a lot of vintage and used clothing stores,but unfortunately after we got there and ate all the stores were closing. We looked into a few of them and they seemed good though.
I'm too tired to upload pictures now but they will come soon!