[ July 2019 ] I continue talking about the walking tour in Toronto in Canada.
We went down to the underground walkway from the beautiful Allen Lambert Galleria.
Apparently every time they build a new building, they connect it to the other buildings with subways.
People can get to their office from the station without getting wet or in summer without becoming too hot.
On the other hand, because the plan of the subways are differnt from the over ground streets which are laid out in a grid pattern, people could get lost, too.
There was an elegant building at the place where we went up to the ground level.
This is the building of Bank of Nova Scotia which was planned to be built in 1929 which happened to be the year of Great Depression, but they did not give up and completed in 1931.
Our guide said “The inside is really gorgeous.Only in Europe you can see this kind of interior”.
That way of describing made me think that for the north American people, Europe is somewhere far away they wish to visit once in their life.
This area is the financial district just like City of London, so there are so many banks.
The next place we went was Old City Hall situated in this district.
This Old City Hall was completed in 1899 after spending much more time and money than expected.
When we arrived there, the people of the Hare Krishna movement were chanting loudly, so it was even more difficult for me to hear our guide, but I understood that one of the faces carved on the pillars was the architect’s face and he is surrounded by the funny faces of the councillors.
This building was used as the city hall until 1966 and now it houses a court.
The last place we visited was the newer current City Hall.
A large square was in front of if, which was apparently the main feature.
Within the building there was a big mural made of countless nails and our tour finished in front of it.
According to her, this mural is showing the ideal city.
Here as usual, we gave the guide some money as a tip, though the tour itself was free and after giving mony, my husband asked her “Why are there so many homeless people in the town, although Toronto is a rich city?”, but she said something like “Because it is summer, they came out to sleep in the streets”, which was not proper answer at all.
In fact, because of the homeless people, the downtown did not look nice and we felt a bit uneasy.
According to the information my husband read online, the income of the people in this city is high, but the real estate prices are low, so generally people are wealthy and there are not many crimes here.
I felt the contradiction.
By the way, it was the 1st of July which was the Canada Day, the national foundation day of Canada.
On this day in 1867, Canada started autonomy as one confederation.
So Canada is 152 years old, a young country.
Probably they would have liked to wear some traditional costumes, but they do not have one, so a lot of people were wearing red T-shirts with a maple leaf.
