Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Toronto
Fantastic day yesterday. I wandered around Toronto, and saw a city without passion. There is nothing exciting, rebellious, avant-garde, arty or even cool about this city. When you walk through Berlin, you can feel the history, you can read the murals. The streets can be wide or narrow, curved or parallel, and all this only means one thing: Character. Loved in person and in place, we need it in the city to feed and nurture our own. None of the renaissance artists could have accomplished in Livingston.
In Europe, we are spoiled. Apart from having the most cutting edge and diverse arts scenes, a cultural history and diversity so extreme, yet spanning such short mileage, we have the highest salaries for anywhere in the world, allowing us to pay for a seven hour flight across the North America and sneer at how bland life can be. I see no reason to move here.
And salad bowl is, indeed an appropriate term to describe the diversity of Canada - Toronto is rumoured to be the world’s most ethnically heterogeneous city. And everywhere you go, you see it. Unlike America, and very much like mainland Europe, mixed race couples or social groups are not commonplace. In fact, the only interesting part of Toronto I saw was Chinatown. Ironic that the Chinese, reputed to have been the first deliverers of the grid road layout would be the only saving grace to a city so crippled in charisma by it.
Despite all, I spent a small fortune on clothing, mainly at that wonderful Swedish store, and headed back to the flat for a kip. Anthea got home, and we headed out for dinner. Steak, but of course. A refreshingly honest and non-judgemental conversation shows how we have grown up so much, yet in a way that we feel we should have done years ago. The truth is, of course, that each person grows in a different way, at a different age, and requires a different stimulus in their life to bring about each change. It will happen, and the least important thing is when.
Right now, I sitting in the departure lounge enroute to Chicago. There is an amazing amount of security at the airport, and I feel quite certain that I would not have been allowed to bring a large meat hook with me onboard the plane this time. The man at American immigration (right here in Toronto) asks me a bunch of questions about who I am going to see, scans my fingers and face. It dawns upon me that he could be American, so I say to him “Are you American?”; “Yes”; “And you have to work here, in Canada?”; “Well, I don’t _have_ to work here”; “ok”. “Here you go, have a good ‘un!”; I reply thanks, and flick the passport, flight pass and immigration leaflet onto the floor, his side of the counter. He then sighs, and begrudgingly hauls his enormous self out of the stool, bends over, collects my paperwork, and tries handing it back one more time. I should write a book on how to irritate customs officials.
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