This past Thursday was Canada Day and I noticed that a popular thing to do is go to Ottawa to celebrate. I understand you B-Soc kids got Friday off (lucky slackers) which makes a beautiful four day weekend! Unfortunately, those of us on work term don’t automatically get Friday off, so traveling all the way to Ottawa wasn’t a (feasible) option. Not to mention Ottawa makes people do crazy things like lick each other in bars, or maybe that was another influence? Either way, my A-Soc friends and I considered traveling from the GTA to Waterloo for the day but also decided that was more trouble than it was worth. The final decision was to stay in Downtown Toronto and celebrate Canada’s 143rd birthday on the Harbourfront.
I’ve always been a fan of Toronto’s Harbourfront. Sure its pretty small, smells like garbage sometimes and is always really packed on weekends and holidays, but who doesn’t enjoy a good full contact speed walking game to get from one end to the other? With this in mind, my friends and I set out to enjoy a hot afternoon on Toronto’s historic harboufront area.
There were tonnes of free activities and shows going on all day aimed mostly at families. Our favourite was definite the Diablo juggling act that took place twice on the Redpath Stage. The performer (Veronique) used sticks attached with a string and this spinning yo-yo type contraption to do all sorts of tricks. My explanation of this art is really not so good so you should totally check it out on youtube. During her second act at night, she lit the spinning thing on fire which was super awesome (and slightly scary) to watch this flaming spinning contraption of doom flying all over the stage.
When it was time to eat, we ventured to the Queen’s Quay centre to check out the restaurants. As we found out, it was minimum a 1 hour wait to eat on a patio, but no wait to eat inside. As much as it would have been nice to east outside, waiting around for at least an hour just isn’t my idea of fun so we ate inside at the Watermark Irish Pub. I must recommend this place, its definitely one of the nicest Irish Pub’s I’ve ever been in and has a super awesome location (nothing against Molly’s, its lovely too).
Later in the evening, we got coffee at Williams and wandered down to the dock area so we could watch the fire works over Lake Ontario. If you are familiar with Toronto’s waterfront area, you’ll know that the fire works happen at Ontario Place which is a few kilometers away from the dock at Queen’s Quay and Spadina where many people (including my group) tend to watch. We could see most of the fire works but I think we were too far away to get the full effect. You know that lovely sonic boom you feel when you sit really close to fire works? Well, we were too far away to really feel it (a good 3 seconds away by Jeff’s count between flash and boom). Although the dock we were on was packed, I think if we were to do it again, we would try to get closer or even shell out the grounds admission fee and go to Ontario Place to watch the show up close the way it was designed to be seen.
Overall, Canada Day on Toronto’s Harbourfront is definitely worth experiencing despite the mass amount of people and crowds everywhere. If you ever make the journey to this national celebration in Toronto, make sure you stay for the half hour fire works show at 10:30pm which is pretty spectacular.
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