We started our first full day in Toronto by meeting our friend Catherine. Coincidentally, she was in Canada visiting her friend Shelley at the same time as us, so we got together for some delicious breakfast at Cafe Crepes. It was great to catch up and swap stories of our respective trips. After we said our goodbyes to Catherine and Shelley, Jenn showed us her favourite designer second hand store and we did a bit of spending, before going for a wander around Kensington Market. Never before have I seen such a place as the specialist cheese shop - full of every cheese you can imagine from all over the world, and other deli delicacies including an awesome variety of olives. We headed back to the apartment and met up with Elliott who had been at work, dressed in a Tin Man costume for the release of a new anniversary edition of Wizard of Oz (he works at HMV). We hung out at the apartment with Jennifer, Elliott, Jenn's room mate Marissa and friend Megan, had a bunch of tasty nibbles and cocktails, talked and laughed A LOT.
Then we headed out into the city for Nuit Blanche. This is an annual free arts festival held in the city (something originally started in Paris), which runs from dusk til dawn. Loads of one-off street art and performance pieces were dotted around public areas across the city, and the streets were heaving with a huge volume of people going good-naturedly from place to place. We liked the sound of Battle Royale so headed to the bus station. Somehow we walked right in, only realising afterwards that there were a few thousand people waiting outside, hoping to get in! The piece took the form of a wrestling match between 20 blindfolded men in a big cage. The build up went on a long while as each competitor was announced and made his entrance into the ring, dressed in a variety of camp/cliche costumes. Once they were all finally in, the fight was underway and was... well... kinda disappointing. While we knew it would be pretty staged and clearly wouldn't be an actual fight to the death, we hadn't expected it to be quite so lame. We watched for a few minutes and then headed off to find something different.
We headed to the Eaton shopping centre where we saw a strange Iceberg dress (ice queen - glacial retreat dress tent by Lasser/Pao/Spooner). There was meant to be a woman wearing the dress and a bunch of dancers animating it but they must have been on a break! Hey ho, we went over to 'Rabbit Balloon', a giant silver bunny balloon anchored inside the mall, by artist Jeff Koons. Not bad. Everywhere was still full of people and lots of queues to get into many of the attractions, so we decided to return to the apartment to rest and regroup. On our way we passed '4-letter word machine' at City Hall.
We had a few more drinks at Jenn's and all agreed we were too tired to go back out and see more, as we'd done a lot of walking that day and some of us had work (or sightseeing) to do on Sunday. We went off to bed pretty late - about 3.45am I think.
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