What’s it like, living in Toronto?

Almost ten years ago I, a young and relatively innocent music student, came to this city from a smaller and infinitely less exciting place, London, Ontario. London may only be a 2 hour drive from here but spiritually it is in a different universe.

I don’t intend to spend a lot of time talking about my place of birth, but if you imagine a relatively prosperous suburb of a major city, then move it two hours down the highway, you won’t be far off. Some nice Victorian houses in the old part of town, skeletal public transit, a moribund (moribund then, now pretty much dead) downtown, some nice parks, cookie-cutter tract housing, McMansions, enormous shopping malls, a corrupt police chief. People move there because the houses are fairly cheap and “it’s a good place to raise children”. Once those children turn 14, they start to have drunken parties in the basement and make desperate calculations about how soon they can possibly get the hell away. I myself left for Toronto the day after my 19th birthday.

It seemed like paradise.

You could leave the house and get on public transit without doing calculus and ju-jitsu with a stack of bus schedules. You could buy sushi and exotic vegetables in regular grocery stores. You could walk for twenty minutes and pass through three distinct neighbourhoods. You could go out and get drunk and on the way home you could hail a taxi. Seriously, I think this impressed me the most. Getting a taxi in London required major planning, especially on weekends. (Forget about New Year’s Eve.)

My first year in Toronto I cut off my hair and started dying it (well, tinting it – I was justly worried about what bleach would do to my hair, but that’s another story) purple. Purplish. My friend Carley Mellan would give me punky uneven haircuts in the lobby of the music school. I went out and drank a lot of vodka and generally went nuts.

Making a long story short, the charm eventually wore off. Not that I don’t like it here – don’t get me wrong – I do. Considering that I live in Canada, it’s probably the best I can do. Montreal may be a bit cooler (culturally speaking), but its climate sucks. Vancouver doesn’t get as cold, but it’s full of hippies. And it rains all the time. While I enjoyed visiting Winnipeg this year, I don’t think I’d want to live there or any of the other prairie cities. I can’t drive and the thought of living through a winter with regular temperatures of -40 or lower fills me with dread. It’s hard enough to get out of the house and do stuff AS IT IS.

So gearing up to my point: what’s it like?

Toronto is what I imagine the larger Scandinavian cities must be like. We have all the stuff “real” cities are supposed to have – subways, experimental theatre, “old money”, respectable universities, hipsters, ethnic neighbourhoods, gay people – but the “real citiness” that New York and London have somehow eludes us. Maybe it’s the climate. Maybe it’s our restrained and stoic culture. Maybe it’s a function of population – Canada has a population of 30 million and Toronto and the surrounding area has around 4 million; you do the math – or maybe it’s the fact that the city has more or less doubled in size in the past sixty years. Because we developed in the era of suburbs and car culture, the transition from backwater to major urban centre fizzled a bit.

As a result of this, Toronto has a slight aura of fail. It’s also desperate to convince everyone in the world (and, by extension, itself) that it’s a WORLD CITY. We have faux double-decker red buses for the tourists. We have a film festival, not that anyone who lives here goes. (Correction: not that I’VE ever gone.) We get the big Broadway musicals a year or two after they go huge. We have homeless people (far too many) and political scandals and tabloids. And the biggest opera company in Canada. (Not that they’ve ever hired me for anything, the bastards. Yet.)

Personally I think the big problem is liquor. All booze stores are government-owned and operated, and they are thin on the ground and all close at 10 PM AT THE LATEST. More commonly 9 or even 8. This gives bars a monopoly over the sale of alcohol in the evenings. So they overcharge for beer – $6-8 per pint is pretty much what you can expect – and undercharge on food. So going out is expensive, which sucks for live music.

Also it sucks for me, since I like drinking, though the IShape Ipod touch app is currently *controlling my life*, and if I want another drink tonight I will somehow or other have to burn 75 more calories (don’t ask). Alcohol isn’t everything, of course, but it is something.

Urban planning and the economy might have something to do with it, I suppose.

Maybe.