So anyway; Canadia, more specifically Toronto

We did a lot of meandering around various bits of Toronto: visited Riverdale Farm and giggled at the piglets bullying each other, moseyed around the Necropolis and got a bit scared by a humungous orb web spider wrapping a Monarch butterfly that had become entangled in its web. We wandered up and down the Don Valley, poking through rampant belladonna and stencilled graffiti and marvelling at the total lack of warning when trains came thundering by. There were some pretty nice views of the CN tower and when we hit the edge of Lake Ontario we were amazed to see that Very Large Tankers come right up into downtown, looking bizarre outlined against the skyscrapers, occasionally dissapearing into the mist. The lakeshore is also a good spot for Rockstar Posing.

Toronto isn't strikingly picturesque and I agree with the locals in that it's a crap city to visit but a great city to live in. There are hundreds of amazing places to eat: we sampled luscious upmarket Japanese at Nami, tasty Portuguese at Adega, massive portions of bibimbap at an out of town Korean, the best dimsum I've ever had at Chinese Dumpling House off Highway 7 at Markham (near the terrifying Pacific Mall, so much bubble tea... so many rhinestones...), Mexican in the back of a grocer's stall whilst sat on oildrums in Kensington and enormous portions of pollo con mole and nopalitos in a peculiar Mexican folk art gallery. I could go on and on. I probably should mention the amazing veal and eggplant kaiser at St Lawrences Market too... OMG.

We also spent a whole day traipsing through the Royal Ontario Museum, as completist a museum as you could ever hope to find. In here we saw the Toronto Chinese Orchestra playing harvest songs, medieval European sculptures, Oriental antiquities, entire rooms mocked up demonstrating art (and musical!) styles from 1400s to the present day... but the real stars were the geology and natural history collections. Special mention to the incredible dinosaur galleries. We later realised that the Massive Dynamic office (as seen in the pilot episode of Fringe is in the top of the Crystal). We even managed an eleventh hour catch up with catalyst37 who took us to what seemed like the only pub in Toronto.

OK that was a lot, and I haven't even got on to Massasauga and Niagara yet...