Friday 25 June 2010

Who Stole Toronto?



And replaced it with Saskatoon? (I spent the longest day of the year -- and my life -- in Saskatoon.)

It's downright eerie here. There's more traffic in the dead of night.

I just walked from College and Spadina to Dundas and Yonge and back. I've never seen my city like this.

Lunch-time. Gorgeous day.

Vacant restaurant patios. Closed up businesses. Empty streetcars. A few taxis roaming around.

There is a fuck of a lot of money not being made today. By regular people, I mean: waiters and taxi-drivers and hot-dog vendors and restaurant owners. You know, the people who need every dime to get by.

And what an impression to make on such visitors as do manage to escape from the Red Zone. It looks like an unaccountably huge hick town out there.

This bloody shindig can't be over soon enough.

6 comments:

deBeauxOs said...

C'mon, fern hill. Saskatoon isn't a ghost town. It has some pretty cool boho places - you need to hang out with a resident to know where to find them, though.

fern hill said...

If you say so, dBO. All I know is that after going out for dinner, seeing a movie (I remember it was 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid'), sticking our noses into a couple of unsavory looking bars and still the bloody sun wouldn't set, we hailed a cab to ask the nice young man what Saskatoonians did of an evening. He looked startled and said: 'You mean like a nightclub?' Yeah, like that, music, people. He said he knew a nice nightclub so we piled in and he took us to a nearby hotel and told us the name of the venue -- which I've forgotten. We found it. And stuck our heads in to find a singalong western hootenany going on. With about 10 people and a piano player.

Or maybe that was the standard Saskatoonian joke to play on eastern visitors.

Actually, I kinda liked Saskatoon. Gorgeous park in the middle of it.

Alison said...

The Owelympics were the same thing. You remember Denman Street, dBOs? Walked down the middle of it for a block at midday on the same day a mile away some kid was throwing a paperbox through the window of Hudson's Bay.
You might own the 'Living Wall' at the end of this thing but at least you won't be underwriting a 737 unit Olympic condo building with only a third of them sold.

Christian said...

Hmm, one would think the waiters and taxi-drivers and hot-dog vendors and restaurant owners, would be part of the "Tim Horton's crowd" steve is looking out for.

Then again, it is Toronto, so, they are most likely radicals who prefer lattes. They must be punished! :)

the regina mom said...

You were in Saskatoon and didn't call me to drive up and take you out on the town? Hmph!

fern hill said...

It was about 30 years ago, TRM.

Post a Comment