My First Grown-Up Vacation (part six in a series)
It was my turn to pick the touristy event of the day, so I chose to go to a museum. We looked at the map, and staring at us in big letters spanning a few city blocks was the Royal Ontario Museum. We studied the map a bit more to figure out which subway stop to go to, and after a quick breakfast, headed on over.
When we got out of the station and looked around, we were once again lost and confused. So we picked a direction and walked until we could see street signs. Luckily, this time we picked the right direction. Unluckily, there was construction, and where I thought the museum should be there was plywood. We kept walking anyway, and eventually saw what Mike lovingly refers to as the spaceship that landed on the museum. He calls the new part of the New England Aquarium the same thing.
The “spaceship” was not yet complete. The metal framing was up, and there were construction workers hanging from various places doing… something. But we knew we were close. We walked around the corner, and there it was – the old museum building. We followed the signs, and walked in the door to what was obviously the backup lobby.
It only cost $8 Canadian to enter the museum. That’s pretty darn awesome. We got our maps, and headed over to the stairs, where we saw the first awesome thing – two huge totem poles. They reached up and up and up… four stories high! And every carving was beautiful. I really love museums.
We went up one flight of stairs and found that the first floor was closed for construction. Up another flight, and half of the second floor was also closed! Not to be deterred, however, we began traipsing through the natural history portion of the museum. We looked at lizards and turtles (stuffed), birds and butterflies (preserved), deer and lions (…some other euphemism for dead…). We went through the bat exhibit, where they made you feel like you were in a cave surrounded by bats – definitely creepy.
This whole wing took us more than an hour to peruse, so we headed back down to the lobby to grab some lunch. I had an egg salad sandwich and Mike had a hot dog. My sandwich had far too much mayo on it, but it was still pretty tasty.
Once we were done eating, we went back over to the stairs to go up to the third floor. This floor had all its’ wings open. First, we explored gothic and renaissance art. This was followed by armory, including an exhibit showing the commonalities between mideval armor and hokey goalie’s padding.
Next we found the exhibit explaining the construction. The new wing(s) of the museum will be housed in a “Crystal.” The models and mock-ups were all on display, along with a framed window to the outside where you could see the construction workers putting up dry wall. It is sad we would not be able to see the wing – it looked like it was going to be very exciting. But it was interesting to see the evolution of the idea from napkin (literally!) to drawing to model after model to computer rendering to blueprint. I find architecture fascinating.
We continued along the other end of the museum, investigating the history and artwork of Muslims, Egyptians, and Greeks. We saw transcriptions of the Quran, a real live… I mean dead… mummy, a reconstructed wall from an Egyptian temple, and a scale model of Athens. The temple wall interested me most of all, as they had a 10 minute story to go along with it. It was about a queen who brought a group of heroic people to a new land and brought back riches. I could not do it justice; just know that it was fascinating.
We had finally finished the museum, nearly 6 hours later. I cannot imagine how long it will take to go through the entire place once they reopen the first floor and open the Crystal! I’d probably go back to Toronto just for the museum – it was pretty awesome.
We were in need of some dinner before the game, so we headed back to the downtown area to look for a restaurant. There was a light drizzle in the air, but it didn’t bother us too much. We ended up going to this restaurant that we’d walked by a few times earlier in the week. The neon sign outside read “Jack Astor’s” and had an interesting defect. The letters “tor” were slowly blinking on and off.
This place had an extensive cocktail menu, so we each ordered something that interested us. I got a frozen drink which was half raspberry and half lemon. Like literally, they poured two different drinks into one glass, but as they were frozen, they stayed mostly separate. It came with frozen raspberries and was extremely tasty. Mike got something that tasted like coconuts. I dislike coconuts. He loves them, so good for him :).
While looking at the menu, I noticed that my choice came with two side dishes. I found the list of such things, and decided on the mixed veggies and the one pound baked potato. Now think about that for a minute. How big do you figure a one pound potato is? Let me tell you, it’s pretty huge. It could make a meal all on its own – especially if you got all the toppings (butter, sour cream, cheddar cheese, and bacon). I chose to get just the sour cream and cheddar cheese. Oh, and I had some awesome chicken along with that potato :-D. Mike got some stir-fry thing that he was pretty excited about.
After our awesome dinner, we went back to the hotel to change for the final time into our Red Sox gear…