Happily, the trip to Toronto went fantastically. Hye-Sung, Marie, Fabian, and I stayed with Hye-Sung's roommate Esmeralda. Most of Saturday we also spent with Marie's friend Soloman (they interned together in curatorial at a museum in Paris). Fortunately for us, both Esmeralda and Soloman grew up in Toronto, so we had two excellent tour guides.
Here is a blurry Hye-Sung, giving the camera what she calls, 'a proud V'. This is opposed to a smaller version known as the 'shy V'. (The proud V is present because she's delighted to be in Toronto.)
It turns out that while I had originally thought that Fabian hated me because I'm American and that I was alone in my dislike of him and his North American Hating Ways, that he was driving everyone crazy! Hye-Sung told me that it was good that I don't speak French, because Fabian was always making her 'down' when she wanted to be happy. He apparently is terrible at social interaction, never wanted to come to North America (a shocker, I know), and hates everything including Paris.
Unless you are using a swipe-card, the metro in Toronto only excepts these little tokens. Esmeralda said that the metro recently made a switch from paper tickets to these little metal tokens. More environmentally friendly, I'm sure. And, also quite charming.
Marie, Hye-Sung, and Esmeralda on the metro.
Eaton Center interior.
The Art Gallery of Ontario: the building had just been completely remodeled and many major new acquisitions added to the collection. It's a Frank Gehry design.
The Ontario College of Art and Design.
Chinatown (photo from Marie).
We walked all over downtown Toronto and did lots of good eating, especially in Koreatown and Chinatown. The Koreatown had light-up blue outlines of Korea attached to every lamp-post. Fantastic.
An art supply store situated beneath part of the Ontario College of Art and Design.
4 comments:
I enjoyed reading about your trip to Toronto and also the photos. We went to see Phantom in Toronto a few years ago and spent a few nights there. It was a very exciting area to visit.
You mentioned the Art Gallery of Ontario with the design by Frank Gehry. He designed the Peter B. Lewis Building on the campus of Case Western. It houses the business school. It is a most unusual looking building with a curvy steel roof. It is composed of 1.2 million pounds of structural steel and over 2 miles of curvy 4-inch steel pipe.
Kelly says that it is very dangerous in the winter as the snow and ice slide off and could cause great injury. So they put a series of planters around the building so that people would not stand there. Kelly wasn't sure why people would stand there anyway. OK, I'm done.
Good to know that Fabian is just plain nasty to everyone and about everything. Now, he can easily be dismissed as a malcontent and ignored.I've never been to Toronot, but it looks great. I have a Frank Gehry book in the library-sorry, that's as close as I can come to something intellectual to say.
From everything I've read, Gehry designs look awesome but in practice involve problems such as leaking and ice-danger.
I saw a program on the construction of Guggenheim Museum in Spain several years ago.
My first thought was... all that titanium going to waste. I'm not intolerant of functionless style - but I think Gehry goes to the point of waste for mere "interesting" shapes.
If it weren't for the collapse of the Soviet economy - he wouldn't have been able to build that hideous thing out of titanium.
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