Image from Wikimedia Commons, see here for usage rights

While I am absolutely delighted to have been able to get into Canada, and plan to go back again soon, I have also been forcibly reminded that I do not cope well with eastbound jet lag. Next time I go, I need to allow a day or two to just rest after I get back. Hopefully that way I won’t lose so much time to exhaustion. Anyway, I am now in catch-up mode, and the first job is to tell you a little more about Toronto.

First up I should mention that I visited Chapters, which claims to be the biggest bookstore in the world. It is a long time since I was in Powells so I can’t really comment on how that claim stacks up, but I do know that the place is huge, and the SF&F section excellent. I’d love to see bookstores like that in the UK, but I guess that space is much cheaper in Canada.

Much of Sunday, however, was spent in the Royal Ontario Museum, which I rather like. Partly that’s because it took the challenge of extending a beautiful old building with a modern wing in a way that must give Prince Charles nightmares (see photo above), but it has good content too. I was pleased to see a large gallery devoted to First Nations people (and now know what a parka should be like). And they have a great dinosaur collection. Going around it, I kept experiencing flashbacks to books I read as kid because, poor old Brontosaurus apart, they seemed to have all of the well known creatures represented, including a T.Rex, Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops and an impressive array of hadrosaur species. It cost CA$16 to get in, but I spent several hours there and could have stayed much longer.