Four? Nahh…

For practical reasons, summer is jokingly called the ‘Construction season’ …the other season, obviously, being Winter.

Pictures from Bloor Street at Avenue Road.

Last weekend, I biked to Port Credit, a little town located South West of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario. The name comes from its historical roots as a trading post where goods were bought or sold on credit. Today this place is a small tourist destination and the main stretch of road contains a number of restaurants and boutiques.

Port Credit is about 25km from Toronto downtown but the nice thing is that it is almost fully connected to the city by a cycling trail along the lake. Some parts of the trail are quite scenic.

Unfortunately we did not find much to do here as the day turned cold and dull, so a follow up visit might be required.

College Street

The weather is quite bizarre… in last ten days alone the weather changed from a sunny 27ºC weekend to few damp weekdays to a cold -4ºC weekend. Today it is springish 11ºC again!

The Legislature of Ontario is located at Queens Park, Toronto. This unicameral house has 107 MPPs (Members of Provincial Parliament) and is currently governed by the Liberal Party with The Progressive Conservative Party being the opposition.

The ruling party sits on the right side of the speaker while the opposition is to its left

The house has some beautiful decorations and carvings

Mace, the symbol of Queen’s authority, on the clerk’s desk

From the viewer’s gallery

Entrance

One can take free building tours to explore different aspects of the Legislative building. I was there last week during a lunch hour tour.

Bessarion subway station on the Sheppard (Purple) Line is the second least used metro station in Toronto.

For some reason the pictures appear faded, but if you click on the thumbnails, you can see higher resolution pictures.

These pictures on the platform level show commuter’s heads facing away from the camera. The only face facing us is that of the baby, that’s kinda creepy.

Platforms still shine and the color is still glossy.

The train schedule on this line is very simple, hence quite often one can hear both trains pull into the station at the same time, their doors open and close in unison and they chime together. The nice thing is that one has the entire station to oneself to enjoy this.

In 2008, only 2000 people used this subway station per day on average. However, a number of new residential towers are under construction in this area so the usage might improve in few years.

The public art in the station, by Toronto artist Sylvie Belanger, is a frieze of hands, feet, and backs of heads, which represent the users of the station. (Wikipedia) The feet images appear on the concourse level while the heads appear on the platform level. The hands images appear along the stairs between the Sheppard Avenue North Side entrance/exit and the concourse.

What do you do on a cold cloudy day when you are forced on the public transit?

…open the window to take pictures until your hands and nose freezes. ^_^

Dundas St. West (click to enlarge)

It took me a long time but Toronto Tuesday is back starting today.