Night walks

It rained most of the afternoon yesterday, so I’m pretty impressed with myself for managing to hit my goals.

I started by skipping the streetcar in favour of walking down Broadview. Broadview is a main street, but the portion between Bloor and Gerrard is actually pretty nice; for most of the way, one side is lined with big, old Victorians, while the other side borders Riverdale Park East. Like many large parks in Toronto, Riverdale is mostly below street level, with the ground dropping away to give a great view of the park and of the rest of the Don Valley beyond it, with Toronto’s downtown visible in the distance.

Sadly, the bad weather means this view of Riverdale Park East isn’t as spectacular as it normally would be.

The southern portion of Riverdale Park East has plenty of trees showing off their fall foliage.

I walked back up to Bloor an hour later. I had to get up to St Clair and Christie, but I had some time to kill, so I hopped off the subway at Yonge and Bloor and ended up wandering into the Toronto Reference Library. I’ve never seen it so empty before. It felt like we—the few patrons inside—were the last stragglers before the lights were turned out, never mind that it was several hours before closing time.

It was really bright inside the Reference Library, but somehow I still had the impression of being in a dimy-lit shop that was about to close for the night.

Outside the library, the streets were still wet and the sky was grey and gloomy, but it had finally stopped raining.

I hopped back on the subway and took it north to St Clair, then took the streetcar west to Bathurst, where I still had time to get off and walk the last 20 minutes to my next student.

Some people in this residential neighbourhood are ready for Halloween.

I was home most of the day today, but after work I wanted to pick up some ingredients for a soup recipe my aunt recommended on the phone this morning. I also had a long way to go in my daily walking goals. I was about 5 minutes from my local No Frills (Canada’s best budget supermarket chain), but instead I walked to No Frills’s fancier sister chain, Loblaws, about 20 minutes farther from my house, to give myself a longer walk home. Loblaws has just about everything I needed, at its usual exhorbitant prices.

Loblaws is always a nice place to shop and it was virtually empty tonight at 9pm.

Afterward, I detoured to walk past Casa Loma. The walk took me down a street of very expensive houses. Rich neighbourhoods are great for nighttime walks, since many of the houses and gardens are spotlit, making the streets brighter and giving pedestrians something to look at.

Standing on the dark sidewalk gave me the odd feeling of being in the audience of a play, with the each brightly-lit front yard as the stage.

If you’ve never been to Toronto, you might not know that Casa Loma, a large mansion built to look like a miniature castle, sits in the middle of the city. It was built as a single family home but now belongs to the city and is open to the public for tours and events. It took me an embarrassingly long time tonight to figure out why it was lit up such an eerie blue colour—it’s set up as a haunted house for Halloween.

The blue light on Casa Loma makes it look even more out of place than it normally does, somehow managing to seem both incredibly real and incredibly fake simultaneously.

I didn’t actually meet my 10,000-step daily goal, though I was only 900 steps short. By the time I got to Bathurst and Davenport, I was tired from carrying groceries and the bus was just a few minutes away, so I hopped on and was home in 5 minutes.