Here's a hint.....



Did you get it?  That's right -- Toronto!!  This is the slightly-less-iconic-than-the-CN Tower, Toronto City Hall.  My sister and I went to Toronto for the weekend.  Wait, note that last sentence because contained therein are a number of firsts.  It was the first time I had been away from my kids for 2 nights.  It was the first time my DDS (Dear, dear sister) and I had traveled together as adults just for relaxation and enjoyment.  If you ever get a chance to travel with my sister, take it!  She is lovely, smart, funny (I mean a witty, makes you laugh kind of way), adventurous, well-informed, curious and an excellent conversationalist.  Here she is during our visit to the Bata Shoe Museum.



Did I mention that she was a professional ballet dancer and was able to strike a perfectly elegant pose at my request (Something intelligent sounding like "Hey, Colleen do something ballet-ee.) in the "Rise of the Ballet Shoe" exhibit?  Well timed, that exhibit. 

As I often talk about knitting, it was apropos that there was a pair of famous socks on exhibit.

Look, Napoleon's socks!  He had bigger feet than I expected.  No conclusions to be drawn here -- Just sayin'. 

We also went to the still-in-the-process-of-being-renovated Royal Ontario Museum.  The dinosaur exhibit was phenomenal -- almost like they could come alive and chase you for a meal.  Demonstrate, dear sister.



Thank you.

Did you ever feel like you were being watched.... from a third century BC Chinese funerary exhibit?


Colonel Mustard did it in the conservatory with an 18th century solid silver candlestick.




As I'm a knitter and no visit anywhere would be complete without a visit to a yarn store, I dragged, led a forced march directed my sister to Lettuce Knits in the Kensington Market neighborhood of Toronto.  What  jewels!  The store and the neighborhood.  Lettuce Knit is one of the Yarn Harlot's hangouts and I can see why.  Beautiful store. And Kensington Market -- Who wouldn't like a neighborhood with two stores dedicated solely to cheese! 

 

Many of the stores were devoted to one particular food stuff, fish, bakery, butcher, green grocer, etc.  This store however was able to concentrate on two specialties.



Can you see the two signs in the window?  "Bridal Registry"  Reasonable.  And just below that.  "Knife Sharpening Service".  <Giggle>  Hopefully, those two services aren't used simultaneously too frequently. 

Totally unintentionally, we were there for Nuit Blanche, an all night art event encompassing 155 art installations in three zones in the downtown Toronto area.  It was difficult to take any decent pictures at night but here a couple that came out OK. 

The above is Light Up the Night: Sitting Ducks by School of Interior Design, Theatre School Ryerson University, aVisual Art, Light Installation, Interactive duck blind.  Quite the urban duck observing experience -- it just added that certain amount of surrealism that the ducks were small, plastic, yellow  and bobbing around in a fountain. 



And Into the Blue, 2008 by Fujiwara Takahiro - Tokyo,  right in the middle of Eaton Centre.  You obviously can't tell from the picture, but it was slowly spinning and a crowd had gathered under it to look up the middle. 

And I'll leave you with one last picture.  The famous no-neck pigeons of Toronto.