First Impressions: The Best Part Of Upstate New York Is Canada
Dec. 12, 2022 - A Journal Excerpt
Toronto is a winter wonderland, less cozily close-knit than Montreal, less European than Quebec, less distinctively Canadian, somehow, than Ottawa — but it feels like the most of everything. A miniature (free) ice rink extends the train station onto the street. Of course. Ice always finds me. As a skater, maybe I feel most grounded in the winter because there’s ice everywhere, because there’s something I know and understand that I not only identify but that identifies me in turn. Kind people, kinder, softer snow outweigh the harshness of Toronto’s temperature, and my thought is, the snow will ruin the ice but make the day. Maybe winter unsettles people because it’s a season of contradictions: contained, but with the danger of the elements, frigid, but with warm (supposed) spirits. Today is, apparently, the coldest day of the year. I sip hot chocolate and walk along the Lake. The things $2 at Tim Horton’s can do for the mood. Little pleasures add up, more than size and duration. When in Canada, after all.
Many foreign cities challenge, almost threaten, to see what and how much you can handle. When you endure enough, you feel energized, proud, grounded. Most foreign cities seem to achieve this affect by displacing you from your comfort zone; even American cities do that. The places I’m used to make you work for their approval in the form of their heart. They force you to dig past and through the noise — the restaurants and fanfare and crowds of locals and tourists like yourself — to find something, anything, that makes you stop and think “huh, I get it now.”
Toronto doesn’t pose a challenge. It lets you be, and I’m slipping forward with each dash of snow, seeing the city in seconds. Fragments between my drying skin. We visit a Christmas market that bursts with people and a designer tree (because such a thing exists). Dior ornaments create a gilded underground to an otherwise industrial-cool courtyard. gingerbread men guard alleyways, mulled wine warms beneath space heaters, frozen hands freeze in freezing gloves, frozen mouths thaw on the edge of spiced, cinnamon cider. Breath, against the cup, against pressed mouths, into the mid-afternoon air, transfers the cold. Are we receiving heat or doling out the cold? I’m not so sure they’re the same.
Korean barbecue for dinner. With a shellfish allergy, it’s the kind of meal that puts my life at risk and makes me savor every bite. It could, after all, be my last, so I search for hints of something sinister, something taboo like a food detective. Maybe allergies are a chef’s dream, because they force the customer to taste every subtle addition to every seemingly straightforward dish.
As a perpetually restless person, I always ask myself where I would be if I could be anywhere, and, on this weekend, all I want is to be here. I’ve been to Toronto twice now, once as a day trip from Buffalo, now as a weekend from Rochester, and it really only takes one blustery day, one special city, one long, winding meal, for a re-set. After dinner, I eat an expensive dessert and sip an expensive cocktail in the library bar of an expensive hotel Ian found on Hotwire. Playing the game to trick ourselves into thinking we know how to do luxury. (We do not.) Peanut pop rocks garnish my chocolate mousse, explode on the back of my tongue and it doesn’t taste like an eruption but it sounds like one, the fizzle and snap of tiny little beads. Peanut bursts beneath chocolate, crumbs of cake inform my sip of spritzed something. I think it’s made with rose, which blurs the night and blends into the plush hotel robe and flat-screen tv and window pane view of that train station, that ice rink. At least, that’s what would be out the window if we were any higher up. This hotel is, after all, from Hotwire.
How can a city of hockey, frigidity, rowdiness, and urbanity create this sense of delicacy? As a major city in the heart of winter, Toronto shouldn’t be an easy, light place, but this weekend was calm and soft as early snow, no blizzards on the horizon. Just the giddiness of those first moments when your feet hit the pavement of something they don’t recognize. The cold invigorates the mood. No, Toronto isn’t a challenge. It’s fresh December slush beneath croaking winter boots. It’s the pre-Christmas almost-rush, not of people so much as energy, the Great Lake sputtering about while we putter alongside it. It’s the Maple Leafs right before they hit overtime. Calm, but with bated breath, a luscious pause, the lift and drop and thrust of anticipation .
RECOMMENDATIONS
FOOD AND DRINK:
Korean barbecue at Daldongnae
Cocktails and dessert at The Fairmont Hotel
Egg sandwich at Egg Bae
Hot chocolate from Tim Horton’s. I’m always in favor of supporting local coffee shops, but sometimes you can’t beat cheap, easy, and reliable — and what’s more Canadian than Tim Horton’s?
SIGHTS:
Yo-Yo' Ma’s Music Garden
The CN Tower. It may be touristy, but it has the best view — and sections with glass floors so you can see directly below you.
St Lawrence Market — both an activity and a meal.