Of Matters Zoological

On Saturday, we (the Wife, the Daughter, and I) ventured into Canada. Our destination was the Toronto Zoo, which is a terribly fine place. The best part was that we kept the ultimate destination secret from the Daughter, so when she saw the animals, she squealed with immense delight. Then, we traveled to a suburban Toronto mall (Yorkdale, to be specific) and ate dinner at the Rainforest Café. Here's a dull rundown of our day, interspersed with pithy comments.

First off, color me unimpressed with the current state of Canadian meteorology. I consulted no fewer than four online weather forecasts for the Toronto region prior to leaving, and the worst forecast was "Partly sunny, with showers possible." The sun did not actually emerge until around 4:00, after a day of steady rainfall that began about when we drove past Hamilton (the halfway mark on the drive from Buffalo to Toronto). When one dresses expecting temperatures in the mid-60s and partly sunny conditions, one tends to get really cold when the actual conditions at the zoo – a predominantly outdoor place – are mid-50s and rainy. For the first half of our visit, we kept ducking into the warm indoor pavilions as much to bask in the heat and humidity inside as to look at the animals kept there. And the picnic lunch we packed was consumed in the car. And since I had dressed for the weather I'd expected, I didn't even bring a jacket, so before we ever got to the zoo, we had to stop at a Canadian Sears and buy a jacket for me to wear. Luckily, I've actually been needing a new spring and fall light jacket, and even luckier, the ones at Sears were on sale for over half-off. That rocked. (And by the way, I've never been a fan of Sears, because they are, in my experience, nearly always crappy -- even the newer ones seem to leave me thinking, "When are they bringing the rest of the merchandise in?" Well, now I know why American Sears stores are so icky: because the company apparently spends all its money on the Canadian ones. Those were the cleanest, nicest damn Sears I've ever been in. (Yes, there were two Sears that day. First, to get me a new jacket; second, to get the wife a dry pair of pants for dinner. Did I mention that it friggin' rained for six hours straight?!))

In general, though, the Toronto Zoo is a magnificent establishment. We have been there twice now, and we still haven't seen everything. (There is one entire section, devoted to Canadian wildlife, that is off by itself, separated from the remainder of the zoo by quite a walk. Perhaps next visit we'll get down there.) The monkey and orangutan exhibits are mightily impressive, as were the fully-grown Komodo dragons and the Komodo-dragon hatchlings. The lions were also beautiful, although one of them stood in one place, roaring into the distance in a fashion not unlike the ending of The Lion King. My theory is that since this particular lion was facing the paddock where the giraffes are housed, he was simply thinking, "If these fences weren't here, I'd be eating one of them right now!" And the most amazing thing I saw on this visit was the bat exhibit, which is maintained in darkness illuminated by blacklights. One bat was hanging directly in front of the glass window, and it was washing its wings in cat-like fashion – except when it spread its wings momentarily, I saw a baby bat, clinging to its mother's belly as it nursed. This was a stunning moment.

(By the way, if you're not a person who handles embarrassment well, you'd be ill-advised to take your child to a zoo when she is in the midst of her fascination with, shall we say, "bodily functions". Especially when the elephant twenty feet away decides to void its bladder, upon which no fewer than three different people in earshot make some comment about "opening the floodgates".)

Dinner, as noted, was at the Rainforest Café. The food there is good for chain-type places – i.e., it's not a culinary delight, but it's still worth the higher-than-Applebee's prices – but really, with all the cool stuff on the ceilings and the animatronic elephant stampeding and the giant fishtanks and the butterflies and the fiber-optic starfield and the simulated thunderstorm every thirty minutes, this place is just about the most fun place to eat I know of. It's just a blast to go there and was so last night, even despite the fact that the little nitwit who was apparently handling the seating simply wasn't doing his job, thus forcing us to wait about an extra half hour for a table. A funny thing is that the giant tropical fishtank there includes a single member of whatever species the character of Dorrie from Finding Nemo happened to be. Thus, all through the night, there is an omnipresent chorus of children standing by the tank shouting, "HI DORRIE! DORRIE, COME BACK!"

(By the way, it would be really nice if restaurants that include macaroni-and-cheese on their kid's menus go the extra mile and serve something of slightly-higher quality than regular old Kraft mac-and-cheese. Of course, it's easier to just do the boring Kraft stuff, since Kraft makes restaurant ready single-serving packages of premade mac-and-cheese – it's a cryovac package, all you do is boil it for a minute or two – but it still seems kind of lame.)

After dinner, we meandered a bit through the Indigo Books location across from the mall from the restaurant. This store's appearance is far better than its selection, although I did manage to at last acquire a copy of Guy Gavriel Kay's 2003 poetry collection Beyond This Dark House, which is not available in the United States. Sadly, there was only one copy; I was hoping to buy two and use the other as a gift for a certain reader who's been pretty generous with me in the past. C'est la vie.

Other random thoughts, in no particular order:

:: The drivers of Southern Ontario are insane. I'm talking crazy here. First of all, they speed, no matter what kind of car they have. I don't mind getting passed by a late-model Camaro, especially when I'm already going 68 or 69 on the QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way), but getting passed by a 1986 Ford Escort – a car that I can practically see shuddering as it careens down the highway at speeds that would have been questionable when the thing was new – is really disconcerting. Plus, the Ontario drivers have little concern for things like, oh, cars in other lanes. I counted at least six instances of drivers being in the middle or inside lane of a three-lane highway and cutting all the way over to exit (and I'm talking cutting over into the exit, not into the right lane approaching the exit). And since when is it standard procedure to come up behind someone in the middle lane, flash them with your brights, and then pass on either the right or left, which are both open? This happened three times. Weird.

:: But then, the sanity of Toronto-region drivers probably isn't enhanced by the ridiculous Toronto roadways. Mostly, the roads themselves are fine, and I've long known that if you want to get from one area in Toronto to some other area in Toronto, generally there's a fairly easy way to get there. It's when you want to get to one specific point that you're in trouble. You get off one large highway onto a smaller limited access highway, and then you get off that to take yet another busy street, and then you keep driving until you find an entrance to where you're trying to go. And these are rarely marked. It's like you can see where you're trying to go just out your window, but none of the roads you are on actually go to that place, and the proper sequence of roads you must take to get there is not marked in any way. Ugh.

Oh, and what's up with the traffic signals flashing? What does a flashing green light mean? Everyone seemed to react as though it was the Canadian equivalent of an American left-arrow, so that's what I did, but why not just use a left-arrow?

:: Toronto has a beautiful downtown and an impressive skyline, but what I've noticed on my last few visits is the rapid construction of "skyscraper clusters" north of downtown proper. Some of these buildings are quite large indeed – a few would likely dominate the Buffalo skyline, if relocated there – but their location so far away from downtown is always striking to me, as if the businesses ensconced therein wanted a skyscraper but didn't want any part of downtown. There is one particular such plaza, consisting of four buildings topped by art-deco style caps, a sort of twenty-first century homage to the Chrysler Building. I thought for a moment I was driving through Coruscant.

:: In my return-from-hiatus post below, I linked Aaron's picture of the Minneapolis skyline. I've always loved city skylines at night, when the lights of the buildings shine against a dark blue or black sky -- but returning from Toronto, I was reminded of the irony that I live in what may be the only large city on Earth with a skyline that is better looking by day than by night. Buffalo's buildings are mainly stone, with none of the sharply-illuminated steel or glass towers popular in the last couple of decades. Buffalo's tallest buildings are all more than thirty years old; there are a couple of younger buildings that are too short to really show in the skyline. Thus the Buffalo skyline at night is very dark, and combined with fairly dark roadways, in general the city looks pretty dingy when one is returning from the brilliance of Toronto and Hamilton (even though from the QEW, one can see little of Hamilton beyond the factories lining the harbor). It's always amazing how traveling outside of Buffalo can make me glad to get home, but to also give me a mild feeling of dissatisfaction or disappointment when I see anew the faults my city presents to the world.

UPDATE: God in Heaven! Above, where I complain about Toronto motorists? You thought that, maybe, just maybe, I was exaggerating a bit? Nope. In my experience, at least half the drivers in that damn town are like this. And the other half? They're just aggressive speeders. Like Chicagoans or Clevelanders. Thanks to Aaron for finding this, and not linking it before we took our trip.