144 hours later.

It’s fair to say that a lot has been happening. Knots Tied In Strings is very much still the happening entity, it’s just… well… we’ve been busy. In the week that you’ve been going without you’re couple-times-a-weekly dose of news from America North, we’ve been like beavers. Carving wood. Making plans. Building damns.

You know?

We’re not just walking down the idle path of holiday any more. No longer do we stretch out like kittens next to our bowls of milk in the sun. We’ve entered Canada. Phase two. Now we live. Work. Build lives. To fill you in, here’s where we’re at:

Acquired: Bank account, cellular telephone, social insurance number, general understanding of Canadian subway system, place to live.

Still to find: Suitably fun set of Canadian friends for entertainment, gainful employment.

The CN Tower. Accross the road from our hostel. Toronto, Ontario.

Travel time is over. And sometimes it’s easy to miss the endless leisure of it all. But in a lot of ways, I’m sick of spending. I want inflows to match my outflows. I want a house. I want a place to call my own. For four months I’ve lived out of my much loved Kathmandu backpack, and say what you will about the beauty of overly romanticised intransience but here’s a list of geeky things I’m currently excited about:

*Owning a chest of draws, and having an ordered home for my clothes. I’m rathered tired of the clothes pile, a delicate system where clothes are kept in a pile on the floor of whatever is your current abode, dirty clothes kept at the bottom, clean at the top.

*Buying IKEA kitset furniture. I plan to live in minimalist Swedish bliss.

*Not having my sleeping patterns depend on the snoring patterns of my five other male roommates.

*A future without bunk beds.

*The working week.

*Mail order DVD rental schemes. No store visits. No due dates. No late fees. No angry video store owners refusing to rent me DVDs and telling me that I break their heart.

We’re here. It’s surreal. And it’s been exhausting. This may seem like a simple thing to say, but Toronto is really big. Looking at three or four apartments was a day trip. Thanks to the fact that Toronto has an excellent public transport system of interlinked streetcars, buses and subways, it was slightly manageable – but still required a hell of a lot of walking. We haven’t been apartment hunting for a day or so, and my legs still feel like two pegs of concrete.

It was hard. The first day we looked in some genuinely bad neighbourhoods, at genuinely bad houses. Discouraged, the next day we looked at better houses, in better neighbourhoods. And so on. And the flat that we are moving into, we looked at on our second day. Toronto has a wealth of accommodation, it just overwhelms in geographical size. Island Bay is considered a slightly distant suburb to reside in in Wellingtonian terms, but would easily fit inside the central region of Toronto. And then some.

The waterfront by Fall. Toronto, Ontario.

Jon and I can’t complain. We found a lovely French man, who is possibly Italian, who is going to let us move into a two bedroom apartment on Saturday. The house is situated right on a streetcar line that goes bang into the middle of town, and walking distance to Queen Street, referred to by my Rough Guide to Toronto as the hippest street in Toronto. Which seems roughly correct (I can’t really speak for all of the city yet) and we did see a well dressed hipster riding on an old fashioned bike that was obviously serving a far more decorative purpose than providing a reliable means of cross city transportation. There’s bars, cafes, boutique stores, art galleries and second hand music stores run by gruff men. Brilliant.

To quote my Rough Guide again (I’m new in town, get over it), “Toronto is like New York, run by the Swedish”.

It’s kind of true. The city is great. Many times I have caught myself genuinely enjoying it, and not just making myself think fondly of it because it’s my home for the next year. It’s got a big city feel, but it’s well thought out. City space mixes with green space to lighten things up. You never feel hemmed into a concrete jungle. And the English influence on the architecture, mixes nicely with the whole East Coast brick thing that you’ve probably seen enough in the movies. There’s a peaceful lakefront, and a building that looks like the Sky Tower, but is actually the world’s largest free standing building.

And apparently when it’s really cold there’s a system of underground tunnels that mean you never have to go outside. But it hasn’t been cold yet, and real Canadians talk about how unseasonably warm it is.

Can I get a hell yeah?

(I’m sorry. That was awkward white boy painful.)

Canada is a friendly place. My immigration officer upon entry gave me a biscuit. You only have to pull a map out before you get seized upon by eager helpers. One woman offered us to take us there, and got quite clingy, and Jon and I had to give her the slip. One helper took out the record for longest time taken to describe to me how to get somewhere that was essentially five blocks up the road.

There’s an honest streak in there somewhere I think too. The guy at the Apple store told me not to get the repairs done on my computer there, and to go elsewhere, even offering to print off directions to the other place on Google Maps. A teller at the movie theatre told me that going to see Transformers on the I-Max screen was a waste of money and that I really shouldn’t do it.

Loonies are one dollar coins. Toonies are two dollar coins. Which took me a while to get used to. Trying to change a five on my first day and being asked if I wanted a combination of “loonies and toonies” confused the hell out of me. Which continued into the next day when a shop attendant said if I had a “couple loonies or a toonie” he could give me ten dollars change.

Loonies, Toonies and Mickey Rooneys.

So you’ll hear a lot more about Toronto. It’s kind of the third character I guess in the blog from now on. I know there’s hard bits ahead of us, neither of us have jobs. We’re entering the holiday season miles away from friends and family. But there’s so many new challenges.

There’s a certain beauty at the clean slate we have with Toronto. We have no local stories that involve me getting escorted out of Philosophy parties in my underwear by the head of department. But then how many times can you get the same impatient look from the streetcar driver as you grasp your mind around the transport system before frustration sets in?

We’re new in town. In the country. But we’re not tourists any more. This is where we live. And while I’m fairly confident that Jon and I will come out on top, there will be fairly interesting forces at work as we settle in. It’s a big time for the both of us.

It’s different enough. Which I like. Hell, it’s a North American city, I know this. But it feels different enough to America.

It was sad to leave America, Lauren, holiday. (I had a great birthday. Air Canada provided me with my own TV screen. The terror alert in San Francisco was elevated. A few highlights from my final days in the U.S.A.) But we’re pretty in the thick of things here.

There’s a challenge underway, and it needs to be embraced.

Posted by James

Tags: life