![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Nov. 21st, 2004
I suppose text is also a medium ...
Nov. 21st, 2004 09:05 pmI visited just at the end of fall, and got to catch a few beautifully clear days. Apart from a lack of fruit-bats and mynah-birds, and a less convoluted shoreline, Toronto reminded me of Sydney; and my readers will remember how much I enthused about Sydney.
It's a big, visibly successful city; the pavements are full of people even at 10pm on a Wednesday. There are, of course, skyscrapers; nothing amazing (though the concert hall, a glass-clad hyperboloid, is pretty good), but lots of shiny steel and glass, lots of municipal sculpture. Lots of planters, mostly filled with purple and white decorative cabbages.
A Disneyland castle built on the escarpment that used to be the edge of Glacial Lake Iroquois, with an interior reminding me of Belvoir Castle but without the subtlety. At least three impressive museums, of which I only visited two, both of which were substantially closed for renovation.
Niagara Falls is a comfortable two-hour train ride away, and really is as impressive as advertised; the town is remarkably tacky, but basically if you restrict yourself to looking left, you don't see it. As you walk in from the train station, about four kilometres from the falls, you hear a constant background noise as of a motorway, before the falls emerge out of the distance.
They are unique; there are only a couple of places that they could have formed, and the last few ice ages didn't affect Asia in the right way. They're moving at a geological gallop, though abstraction of water for hydro-electric power means the falls are no longer eating away rock at a metre a year; they've moved a long way since the first European explorers saw them, and would have looked very different (and been in an entirely different place along the gorge) when Stonehenge was built.
It's a big, visibly successful city; the pavements are full of people even at 10pm on a Wednesday. There are, of course, skyscrapers; nothing amazing (though the concert hall, a glass-clad hyperboloid, is pretty good), but lots of shiny steel and glass, lots of municipal sculpture. Lots of planters, mostly filled with purple and white decorative cabbages.
A Disneyland castle built on the escarpment that used to be the edge of Glacial Lake Iroquois, with an interior reminding me of Belvoir Castle but without the subtlety. At least three impressive museums, of which I only visited two, both of which were substantially closed for renovation.
Niagara Falls is a comfortable two-hour train ride away, and really is as impressive as advertised; the town is remarkably tacky, but basically if you restrict yourself to looking left, you don't see it. As you walk in from the train station, about four kilometres from the falls, you hear a constant background noise as of a motorway, before the falls emerge out of the distance.
They are unique; there are only a couple of places that they could have formed, and the last few ice ages didn't affect Asia in the right way. They're moving at a geological gallop, though abstraction of water for hydro-electric power means the falls are no longer eating away rock at a metre a year; they've moved a long way since the first European explorers saw them, and would have looked very different (and been in an entirely different place along the gorge) when Stonehenge was built.