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Day 226: Bus tour wars
Now anyone you speak to when travelling will have an array of tales about beautiful sites, wild parties, wacky characters, loves won and lost, friendship coincidences and just down right bizarre incidents. I was to have, on my second day in Toronto my first bizarre incident.
I arrived in Toronto in the afternoon and after successfully mastering their subway system - there were only four different lines after all - I arrived, fairly exhausted from the weight of my backpack, at the hostel. I checked into a dorm room of males in a bed next to a man from Barbados. We had a pleasant chat, discussed shared Caribbean knowledge about different islands and I decided I would escape the hostel for a walk. I wandered around Toronto city centre and stumbled onto Younge Street, unsurprisingly as it's officially the longest street in the world - its over 1800 km long. This fact and many more factual nuggets would be well known to me before my stay was over.
As I walked along Younge St I came across a square/plaza area unashamedly modelled on Time Square, New York but much smaller in scale. A large stage was erected but unoccupied and a large group of people were gathered around taking pictures and videos of some spectacle being accompanied by music in the centre of the crowd.
Embracing my tourist status (I had the obligatory back pack, camera and map) I migrated to the sweet, free tourist nectar as instinctively as a bee to honey. In the centre of the circle street artists performed various styles of dancing but dressed in very normal clothing - jeans, t-shirt, trainers. I couldn't work out if the performers were just passers by who'd decided to display their dancing skills normally reserved for the dance floor. I also thought I could most probably put on a better performance than a couple of the artists/passers by (see videos) but I didn't have the energy or gall to try.
Just as the audience's interest in the amateur street performers was starting to diminish our attention was averted to a show on the main stage. It appeared that each night had a different theme on stage and tonight was a Disco fever themed show. Some excellent singers and musicians in appropriately tacky, sparkly outfits and donning the obligatory wigs, started belting out 70s classics such as Saturday Night Fever (see videos). I shuffled around from foot to foot and it was a lot fun albeit on my own. I was pretty tired but yearning for a taste of home wandered along the street till I migrated without thinking into an Irish bar where I treated myself to an extremely expensive pint of Caffreys exchanged small talk with the bar tender and read a paper at the bar like an old Irish or English man. It wasn't a bad introduction to the city at all.
The next morning I headed down to breakfast in the HI hostel. In the reception a very attractive Mexican girl kept saying ´Hi´ to me, we tried to communicate but unfortunately as I couldn't speak Spanish and she couldn't speak English we got no further than "hi" and school girl/boy type giggling. I headed on down to the cafeteria for breakfast. I sat on my own while French exchange students swarmed around me and a loud boisterous elderly Canadian woman shouted out random comments to them.
Just as I was voyeuristically observing all about me a girl came and sat next to me. We began talking and ended up having a really good chat. She was travelling around America on her own and seeking an alternative lifestyle living in the woods and maybe setting up a refugee for children with problems. We ended up chatting for ages, exchanged email adresses and agreed to maybe meet for lunch.
I had decided I was going on a cheesy bus tour however and when she disappeared I didn't know whether or not to wait. I went and got changed and headed off for my tour. On the way the Mexican girl was with two of her friends in reception again and we all ended up trying to talk, they were fascinated and playing with my hair (not the first time this has happened) which I didn't mind one little bit and we ended up taking pictures and videos of each other (see http://www.statravelblogs.com/smarsha78/albums/torundo). I left armed with more email addresses.
Next I booked my bus and boat tour of Toronto with the ´red´ bus tour company (I won't use company names, just in case). I'd got the details of the bus tour from my hostel as it was the only one advertised. At $30 it seemed ok and I couldn't be bothered to search around. Little did I know what bearing that would have on the later events of the day.
The tour was the obligatory cheesy ride around the city with an affable host named Dana who was well rehearsed, fairly comical and pretty informative. The tour was quite historical, and full of facts such as the length of Younge Street, names of families that had helped to build Vancouver and various sites, which I liked. A couple rows back a girl got on the bus on her own. As people filtered on and off the bus we ended up having a brief conversation and realised we'd both be catching the boat together.
When the boat part of the journey began we walked together and ended up sitting together. She told me her name was Sarah, she was a student studying drama and she lived with her cousin just outside of Toronto but was visiting the city. She was a little shy and quite funny. I shared details of my Canadian experience so far and we were getting on pretty well. Just as we were talking, our conversation was bizarrely interrupted by the guy who had moments before been handing out Barcadi Breezers bursting into musical song on an oboe type instrument. It was quite sweet but hilarious and very corny and Sarah and I tried not to laugh hysterically. To my surprise the boat tour went near to the surrounding islands but didn't stop on them much to Sarah's annoyance. I was to find out why shortly.
We finished the tour and headed back to the mainland. Sarah offered to buy me a drink as she said she "had something to tell me". I asked her if she was a man. And she said "not exactly". We sat down and she said "Well, first thing´s first. My name is not Sarah." At this point I started to shift uncomfortably - she looked like a woman! - and she then informed she did not live outside of Toronto with her cousin but in Toronto and a lot of what she had told me was a lie. I was a bit shocked and confused. She then hit me with the bombshell that her name was actually xxx (can´t reveal, sorry) and that she worked for a rival bus company, that "was a lot better!!". She was actually on an undercover mission to discover how the rival tour company was operating and she could not believe how much of their "$%&"ing stuff they were stealing!!". Sarah was suddenly a lot louder and more boisterous and had completely changed in character and when I remarked on this she explained that she had been demure so that she didn´t alert the attention of the rival tour company.
Then ´Sarah´ went on to tell me in detail about the ongoing rivalry between the two tour companies that had apparently even ended in street brawling, that her company actually took people on to the islands and she then insisted that I go on yet another city tour with her company that was "so much better!". I reluctantly agreed as I was a little freaked out and didn´t fancy going round the whole city again and she took me along to meet some of her colleagues and staff. We joked about the bizarreness of the situation and they quizzed me as to whether or not the ´red bus´ tour was any good to which I had to reserve any praise. Then Sarah took me to catch her yellow bus from the very same bus stop I´d disembarked from a red bus about an hour before. She told me that the next tour bus that was coming was being hosted by Jason who was ´hilarious´. And indeed he was.
Jason was very humorous, anecdotal and had a different style to Dana throwing in interesting pop culture references in relations to landmarks. Sarah to my relief only wanted me to see several of the stops that their company featured and we got off. I gave her a fairly honest critique of the yellow bus company tour and she then took me on a walking tour of the city. She unsurprisingly had an in-depth knowledge of the city and we went on to have a really good night.
I wandered back into my hostel much later that evening chuckling to myself at the strange events of the day from beginning to end.
Tomorrow I was going to visit Niagara Falls to view one of the modern natural wonders of the world.
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