Email from Caro: Toronto

Toronto
The fashion statement: girly/trampy vs urban funky

After the madness that was Las Vegas, Toronto was a great change of pace -a place to just drink lattes and chill out.  Which is what we did for much of our time there.  We shopped, we saw "Cats & Dogs" (don’t bother), we found an internet café that charged $1.50 per hour (Hurrah!) Symon lost his Diesel cap that I had attacked a aeroplane for on Catalina Island, I got propositioned for a threesome by a French couple, Louis and Lucy, in the hotel lift. 

I declined.

As usual, streetfreaks were everywhere and one woman in particular, kept me entertained for about 20 minutes as I sat on the patio in the sun at Starbucks.  

She was shrieking and running in and out of the traffic, hassling passers-by and motorists for money in a mean-spirited, aggressive way.  Having no luck, she then proceeded to beat up 3 public telephones with such vigour and abandon, that people actually veered off the footpath to avoid her and openly stared at her wondering whether to call the police.  Luckily, she didn’t have a gun because I reckon she’d have shot a few people that day.

That was the day that Stone Temple Pilots had a free concert in a parking lot on Queen St (which is the funky part of town where all the ‘hip’, ‘cool’, ‘gothic’, ‘pierced’ and ‘bizarre’ hang out and the fashions and the hairstyles and the shoes and the shopfronts just beg to be viewed by people-watchers).  We hit the shops and made a few purchases.  Symon found this great T shirt for my sister, Feona, mainly because we spent over half and hour in the shop talking to the girl behind the counter. 

She was very curious about music in the UK, and could we name a Canadian "great" band (I had a brainfade at that point), she wanted to know where we’d been, what did we think of Canada, and then she announced she just "luuuurved" Symon’s T shirt. 

Ever the polite Englishman, he said "Thanks, it’s ‘Gap’". 

She screwed her face up and said he should get a different T shirt and the T shirt he was wearing now was cool, but not if it’s ‘Gap’ cos really ‘Gap’ isn’t cool and who knew ‘Gap’ could have such great T shirts. 
Actually, Canadians spend a lot of time reminding the world that they’re cool, that they wear cool clothes, that the shops are cool, that the weather is cool, their bands are cool, they say cool things, they have a TV channel like MTV which is ‘way cooler’, Canada is a cool holiday destination, flying the maple leaf from every tall building and/or rooftops of houses, T shirt shops feature all manner of Canadian T shirts which are meant for the discerning Canadian local ‘I’m perfect and I’m Canadian’, and different to the Tourist T shirt shops which have cartoon mooses and logos like ‘Canada 2001’. 

My immediate impression: Try-hards and Patriots. 

Oh, you should have seen the devastation on the faces of the locals when it was announced that Beijing got the 2008 Olympics and not Toronto.  Tragic.  All through the week, they’d had talkback radio shows devoted to the pros and cons of holding the Olympics, cars had bumper stickers, there was chatter in cafes, there were T shirts, there were newspaper articles…it was all such a big build-up, only to be sadly, snatched away for a few mere political reasons.  There was nearly weeping in the streets.