Well, CN Tower isn’t very exciting when you don’t ride the elevator to the top. It is rather impressively tall and everything, but I didn’t feel like paying the $30 to ride up to the top with no Michelle. (Cue “awwww” sound here.) Ditto for visiting Niagara falls: I’m really quite keen to go there, but I’ll bide my time until I’m there with the Better Half. (It’ll make my experience there more rewarding: yeaaaah, that’s right!) So, instead of sightseeing, I mixed with the locals: walked around Toronto a bit more and explored the city during the day, and went to the pub and played pool with some of Dom and Zoe’s mates. (I actually lost to Dom at pool, which was apparently quite an effort — I blame the excellent beer.) Since we were all feeling a little bit knackered by the end of the night but not quite ready for sleep yet, we sat down to watch The Lion King (the movie, not the play), which was absolutely excellent. If you haven’t seen it, ‘tis highly recommended: definitely one of Disney’s finer creations.

I visited Herr Wolfgang Thaller the next day in Hamilton, Ontario, which is about an hour away from Toronto via bus. I found Hamilton to actually be a little bit more seedy than Toronto, which was odd considering that Hamilton’s population is much smaller, but it was still felt reasonably friendly and safe. After a long lunch and coffee (as in, coffee took the entire afternoon), over which much Haskell discussion took place, Wolfgang and I headed back to Toronto to grab some dinner and do some GHC hacking. More accurately, I introduced Wolfgang to Vietnamese Beef Noodle Soup (possibly one of the greatest creations known to humankind), and then encouraged him to do GHC hacking while I surfed the web and reaped the fruits of his labours. What can I say? Distributed code development is excellent when you’re a lazy sod. We ended up staying up until a respectably late hour (~2am), and the next day, did the geek thing and went gadget shopping. All I have to say about gadget shopping is: how on earth do those little dozen or so Yum Cha Asian computer sweatshops within about 10 metres of each other manage to stay in business?

And so, that was Toronto. Cheap, awesome food, got to catch up with Dom, Zoe and Wolfgang, meet some dudes who worked on Lord of the Rings (“Dudette, do you know who I am?! I worked on Lord of the Rings!” works quite well as a pick up line), explore a great city, and generally had myself a ball. Next stop: Boston!