Our day was another success for serendipity. We called in at a Travel Agency at 8am and made tentative plans for cruising in the Alaskan Passage on September 16. We had learned that Toronto was hosting a buskers' festival from today until Sunday, so it seemed there might be plenty to see in the nearby Yonge St (pronounced Young). We were given a 3-day pass for the Hop-on Hop-off bus, so we found the nearest stop and had a tour of the old part of town. The best building we saw was the old stone city hall with a tall clock tower.
We arrived at the festival site at 10am. The official starting time was 9:30am but as we walked the four blocks of town blocked off for the event, all we saw were people setting up market stalls for food and bling. We saw a climbing wall on a trailer waiting to be erected. Not one busker. It was just like the Tour de Rance in Dinan where we turned up at the starting time and no one else turned up till an hour later.
We had morning tea at McDonalds to use the "washrooms" and rested in the hotel room for an hour.
At noon we "hopped on " again where we had hopped off and completed the two hour bus circuit. The most popular attraction for tourists seems to be the Casa Loma, which looked to be quite a nice castle, which is a rarity in Canada. Our young bus guide told us it was built by a man who used Thomas Edison's electricity company to make his fortune in Toronto. The castle has 99 rooms including 30 bathrooms and his wife had one child. This did not inspire us to buy a ticket to explore it.
Back at the festival the street was crowded and the stalls were doing good business, but the buskers were still thin on the ground. About ten stalls to each busker. We did see musicians, drummers, comedians, magicians, mimers and acrobats, so we had an enjoyable two hours wandering.
Our favourite acts were a man playing the piano on a bicycle frame, a Japanese couple hamming it up on unicycles, two men and a woman jumping off a wall onto a trampoline and landing back on top of the wall, and two women sharing a trapeze bar. We did get a good number of video segments for our collection.
Cheap dinner at Subway and relaxing evening at the hotel. Big day at Niagara tomorrow.
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