We have one day in Toronto. Just twelve hours or so of sunlight to see all the city has to offer before moving on to our final destination, Niagara Falls, the next day. It wasn’t much time, but enough if used right.
Which, to be honest, we didn’t even do at first.
It’s kind of hard to expect a really full day when you wake up at 8:30. Thanks to our late pho breakfast, our family didn’t even start sightseeing until around 10. Nobody knew it yet, but this was probably one of the most productive and accomplished days of the trip — we were in for a long, long day. As we drove through the city towards our first destination, one really large structure began to stand out across the crowd of large skyscrapers.
The CN Tower.
The tallest structure in Canada is over 553 meters tall. That’s 1,815 feet, or more than half a kilometer for those of you who are actually Canadian. We drove closer and closer to the impressive structure until the thing was practically right on top of our heads. I leaned against the window of the car, staring all the way up at the monster building above; from the ground, looking at a building this tall almost made you dizzy. You don’t need good photography skills to get an impressive-looking picture of urban Toronto. All you need to do is point your camera straight towards the building and you’ve got a good view.
We continued on into a parking lot and eagerly left it as soon as we were done with all of the business surrounding getting a ticket. We proceeded outwards, towards the great CN Tower, which was so tall it was almost scary; you couldn’t even see the top of this building unless you stretched your neck backwards. When you were that close to the tower, it felt like you had to look up ninety degrees just to see what was at the top. It almost felt destabilizing just to angle your neck backward to see it; it was like I might fall over in the next moment.
We approached the tower…
and entered the building next to it.
Not beneath it. A short distance away.
As it turned out, our visit to the CN Tower would come later. For now, we were going to visit something else, partially because I need to keep the most anticipated landmark out of reach for the sake of audience retention.
That last part was a joke. We just had a reservation to visit the tower that night.
Our first attraction of the day was Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada. Just the area around the CN Tower alone has enough stuff to keep you occupied for a day. A couple of other places that we didn’t get time to visit include the Rogers Stadium and the Toronto Railway Museum, both of which we got glimpses of on our way to the CN Tower. If we had more time in Toronto, I certainly would have been eager to get more views of these attractions, but we were on a pretty tight schedule, so we immediately headed to Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada with a CityPASS to spend the next hour admiring vibrantly colored marine life. The whole aquarium was divided into all of these sections, each with its own specific theme and environment.
First on the list was Canadian Waters, which was pretty self-explanatory; it showcased all the interesting fish and aquatic creatures native to Canada. Biodiversity isn’t exactly the first thing to come to mind when I think of Canada, but this aquarium experience definitely made me rethink that.
The first few tanks showed us some of the species that inhabit the Great Lakes Basin; I had initially tried to keep track of all the different species I saw around the tanks, just like I had done when I was in Montreal, but it was impossible. Every container was a miniature universe. I tried to capture as many interesting creatures as I could find, but going through so many tanks made it inevitable that I would miss something. Without further ado, here are some of the most interesting creatures I managed to capture photos of from the Great Lakes, which really made me feel like I’d teleported to the Great Barrier Reef rather than the Great Lakes. Who knew it could be so vibrant?
PHOTO DUMP
But Canada’s got a lot more than just the Great Lakes. The Canadian Waters section of the museum had this huge Pacific Kelp tank, which is meant to mimic the ecosystems on the Western Side of Canada, near British Columbia; think of the Vancouver area, for example.
The place could’ve been its own ecosystem; the tank was (and I am not joking when I say this) comparable to the size of my suburban American home— it even was the size of two stories. Hundreds of fish that were too big for previous tanks fit comfortably in here, and kelp plants that dominated the tank were so big that I almost forgot we weren’t in a rainforest.
COUPLE MORE PHOTOS HERE
The next part is called Rainbow Reef, which was probably the most colorful of the exhibitions. This part of the aquarium doesn’t really focus so much on Canada as it does on more tropical areas of the world, featuring animals from a vast number of places, including the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Once again, the tank size of this thing was absolutely stunning. Just look at how it compares to a normal person!
Here’s a picture
This was probably the most saturated in color of all of the tanks. It was filled to the brim with tropical, colorful fish swimming back and forth across the tank. I even came up with this genius idea of recording a 2-second time-lapse of the fish in the tank, but it was just chaos— so many fish were moving across the water that it was kind of hard for me to keep my eyes on any singular fish whenever I rewatched it.
TIMELAPSE HERE IF YOU CAN.
After this was this thing called the Dangerous Lagoon, which ended up being the finale of our visit to the Ripley’s Aquarium, which featured this moving conveyor belt of people that passed slowly through a tiny, transparent glass tube, allowing you to immerse yourself deeply in the biggest tank yet— the previous big tanks I’ve shown gave a lot of fish, but there was never anything bigger than a foot or two inside.
This tank was so large it could’ve contained creatures that were almost as big as Casey and me. Of course, there was still the presence of hundreds of colored fish traveling across in their little schools; little corals sat in every corner of the tank. And best of all, there was a turtle. (To my friend who’s reading this, whom I always refer to as Turtle: What were you doing in Toronto that day?) A couple of other interesting things I saw included this one exceptionally blue fish, a school of yellow but blue-eyed fish, and a shark. Also, this seahorse.
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The remainder of the aquarium consisted of a section for jellies and a section meant for dragons.
*PICTURE*
Rating for Experience #38, Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, B+
With our hour in the aquarium finally up, we proceeded to go on a little walking (and driving) tour of the city, where I took some of the best pictures of the entire trip. It’s really hard to get a picture with views that aren’t good when you snap your camera in the middle of a city street, and the Toronto skyline is a great example of that.
At some point, we stumbled back into a building that looked oddly familiar.
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You remember this picture from the last article? Yep, that’s the old town hall of the city of Toronto, and this is what it looks like in the middle of the day. And if we were there, we might as well see it again; this is what the area around the Toronto sign looked like in the middle of the day.
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After this, we took a quick break to head to lunch at this mall’s food hall called Queen’s Cross. It had a lot of food options, but Casey and I ended up just getting a quick taco for a long time because the next experience that we were really eager to see was out on the water; we had plans for a boat tour of the entire city. We finished our lunch unusually fast, and before we knew it, we were on the dock where the boat tour would immediately start.
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I had anticipated that the views of the city would be decent from a boat, but the view from the dock itself was already really good, and honestly, I think it could be an attraction on its own. Before long, we were moving out into the harbor, and our field of vision expanded. You could see for miles once we were far enough away from all the noise at the center of the city; I was pretty sure I could see the skyline of the nearby city of Mississauga from inside the bay, but it was nothing compared to what the view was right in front of me. At one point, a plane even took off in the airport nearby, and I got this really cool shot of the plane in front of the harbor.
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As we continued to push further and further away from the main portion of the city, we entered this little island just off the coast of the main city. This island, called Mugg’s Island, was sort of like the opposite of what the inside of the Toronto Downtown was like. There were no buildings; just trees and yachts in all directions— much calmer and quieter than an urban environment. It was like the boat had moved into a park of some sort, just outside of the city. The nature was nothing compared to what we would see tomorrow (if the next part of the article series is out, you know what I’m talking about), but it was definitely nice for a change, especially after spending a whole week exploring cities that felt comparable to New York.
Eventually, the boat turned around and began to return to downtown Toronto in the same direction that it had initially come from. I continued to walk around the boat, checking around again and again for things to take pictures of that I had missed before. I realized I hadn’t taken a picture of the skyline of the two cities adjacent to Toronto, one of which is Mississauga and another is called Burlington. (which if you’ll remember, we visited another decently- sized city called Burlington less than a week ago in Part 4 of the CANEDA series) We would visit one interesting attraction there in the next article on the way to our last stop of the trip, Niagara Falls. You’ll see it later on in this article.
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Rating for Experience #39, Toronto City Boat Tour, A
An hour after it started, the cruise docked back at Toronto’s downtown, where it had initially left from. And finally, it’s the moment you’ve probably been waiting for since seeing it: it was finally time to visit that large, metallic monument poking out of the ground and into the sky, high enough to make a lot of the buildings next to it seem like class projects in comparison.
The CN Tower was located a short distance from the dock, so we decided to just walk straight there from where we had just disembarked from our cruise. In all the time we spent in Toronto, this probably ended up taking the title of the walk that I enjoyed the most. The city streets, at least downtown, are really well-maintained.
One thing I noticed while we were walking was that bike lanes in this area are much, much bigger than they are in California (and a lot of cities I’ve been to, in fact), so unlike some places (cough cough my own community), bikers here aren’t in a state of perpetual war with car drivers. (Just a note: this kind of biking infrastructure is only found downtown. The outside part of the city had nothing like this, and there are other parts of the world, mostly in Europe, that have better bike lanes than this. )
As we walked, the CN Tower soared further and further over our heads to the point where you couldn’t see the top of it unless you tilted your neck all the way back. And it wasn’t just the CN Tower that made the city so visually pleasing; I continued turning around everywhere I went to marvel at the view of the city, because just about every building contributed to the view in some way, in the same way that every musician contributes to a symphony.
Rating for Experience #40, Walking to CN Tower, A-
We came pretty early. Far before our reserved time. Long enough, in fact, that we ended up just sitting around in the lobby beneath the CN tower, waiting for our reserved time for over two hours. We sat at this table in the very well-decorated lobby just beneath the main tower, which included a gift shop, a playplace, and a few other things. In an effort to keep Casey and me from dying of boredom as we waited, my mom got us a couple of drinks, but it wasn’t nearly enough to keep us entertained for the amount of time we were waiting.
The wait seemed like it would take forever; a minute might as well have become an hour, and Casey and I went to search for several ways to keep ourselves entertained. I normally would solve the problem of boredom by just going on my device (because that’s what teenagers do), but my battery was already running low, and I needed to save some of it for taking pictures once we reached the top of the CN Tower. Once we arrived at the top and I was able to secure a spot for my camera, I knew exactly what I could do with it.
The gift shop itself was really well-decorated. It contained this weird modern-art thing above it in all Canadian Colors…
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…and had dozens of little souvenirs, smaller models of the CN Tower itself, and several pieces of clothing dedicated to Canada and the city of Toronto. I walked around the gift shop for a while with Casey, judging and examining every single product they sold until I was pretty sure that I had seen every single item at least four times. Because the play place was mostly empty, Casey and I spent a lot of time just climbing up and down the small but compacted set of tunnels. I walked through the lobby over and over until I had its layout stuck in my head. After what felt like forever, we finally began to climb up the staircase of the lobby to the elevator, which would take us up to the very top of the Toronto CN Tower.
Prepare yourself for one of the most amazing views of the entire trip…
IMAGES HERE
You could see forever. I was pretty sure I could see Mississauga in the distance in this image…
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From this angle, I could see the islands just south of Toronto, which our boat had taken a short cruise through just a few hours ago…
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This image came straight from the airport in Toronto, which was easily visible from the CN Tower.
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There were so many good angles, so many good buildings, that it was kind of hard to decide where my next photo should be. It didn’t matter where you took a picture from — the angle was always going to be museum-worthy.
The challenge of getting a good photo, as it turned out, was fighting with all the people up here at the top of the CN Tower for a place to even be able to take a good photo. There was plenty of space; dozens, perhaps hundreds of spots all across the top of the tower in which you could take photos of the surrounding view. But no matter how much space there was in this thing, it never seemed to be enough. Everyone wrestled with each other endlessly for the opportunity to take pictures of Toronto from a bird’s eye view. There were a handful of tables up there meant for the restaurant, which offered a priceless view of the Toronto Harbor below that you could enjoy without interference while still devouring a good meal. But of course, there was that one small family already at the table, hogging the seats.
The best part about waiting so long to be able to travel up the CN Tower was that we arrived there at the precise moment when the sun was about to set. I waited patiently for an opening to appear in the crowd for about half an hour. As I examined the horde of people with a calculating expression, I set my phone down on the side to charge it (yep, they’ve got chargers up there too. They must’ve realized how incredibly essential some people, like me, would find them.) and watched, waiting for my chance like a lion eyeing its prey. I gave my phone ample time to accumulate battery, because I was sure that what I was about to do would drain it entirely of the little energy it had left. Once it was finally time, I jumped up from my seat and immediately took the first empty spot I could get. I took one last photo of the sunset over Toronto:
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And then I took my phone, switched it to timelapse mode, and clicked the record button. Right as the sun was glowing red, hanging low in the sky.
And then I waited. For a really long time. Thirty minutes, in fact, would have slipped by the time I finally clicked that big red record button a second time. The sun, which had been glowing brightly in the sky when I clicked it the first time, had now been slowly submerged and swallowed by the Earth. This weird pinkish glow still illuminated the clouds if you looked to the West, but it had gotten noticeably darker between the start of the timelapse and the end, and nightfall was on its way. Lights emerged from the windows all across the buildings.
Oh, before I forget, here’s the best timelapse that the blog has ever seen.
THE TIMELAPSE>>>>
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Another big surprise after that: my phone only lost a few percent of battery after that long time lapse, which meant I continued to walk around and take even more pictures of the now-glowing skyline as night fell over the biggest city in Canada. Doing this reminded me very, very strongly of when I was up in the Tokyo Skytree last year. For some reason, every city that I visit always seems to look even better at night.
This rule was definitely true when it came to the city of Toronto, and it definitely made the city feel much more alive.
PHOTO DUMP.
Rating for Experience #41, CN Tower, A+
Yep, Casey and I agreed that we’d reserve all of our A+ ratings for some occasions that we thought deserved it in particular; stuff that we thought was unmatched everywhere. Scrolling through this part of my camera roll is like listening to a song that’s so addicting you need to click back to re-hear it. And that time lapse that I took towards the end of our visit? That’s something else.
For that reason, CN Tower ended up becoming the first A+ of the trip, with one more on the way.
It was about 9 PM when we finally reached the bottom of the tower again. The impulse of hunger had once again overtaken us. Everyone was pretty eager to go back into the city and find somewhere to eat, but first, we needed to get back to our car. We hadn’t touched it in several hours; it was still sitting, idle, back at the parking garage near the dock where we had gone for that boat tour. It had only been a few hours that had passed since we left to go on that cruise through Toronto Harbor, but so much eventful stuff had happened that it felt like a lifetime ago.
The walk from the dock to the CN Tower earlier that afternoon had been one of the best urban strolls of all of CANEDA, but as I’ve said before, cities look better at night. I continued to take loads of pictures even when I was on the ground, as if every building in the entire city was some amazing monument that needed immediate photographing.
Firstly, there was Ripley’s Aquarium again— you still remember that? It was still sitting there, right next to the CN Tower. We’d been there just this morning, and it was a vibrant white building like a perfect sheet of white paper. Now, however, blue lights shone on the building’s walls and interior. The further away I walked from the aquarium, the less it looked like an aquarium and more like a single massive tank of water.
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We continued to head towards the car, and I pulled out my phone approximately once every two minutes to snap another picture. It was like I kept forgetting over and over that I’d already pulled out my camera enough, but I persisted regardless. The views, looking back on it, were probably the best pictures I had taken at night up to that point in CANEDA.
When we were finally about to reach the parking lot, I turned back to the CN Tower. I had been walking away from it for the past fifteen minutes, and I still needed to tilt my head radically just to be able to see it. From further away, I was better able to appreciate its vibrant glow, which added a lot of much-needed color to the city’s views.
And with our exploration in Toronto done, at least for today, we could finally start thinking about where we were going to get dinner for the night. The grown-ups finally decided on another Korean restaurant sitting right in the middle of Toronto’s Chinatown, called Biwon Korean. By the time we had gotten our food, it was already almost 11 PM. The meal ended up being really quiet; the visits to the CN Tower, the Ripley’s Aquarium, and the boat tour had drained us of our energy, leaving nothing left. (although Casey did manage to get some pretty good Geometry Dash runs that night)
The meal itself ended up being one of the best-tasting and best-looking of the whole trip, so I’ll give it a high rating for that. Just looking at the old photo I took makes my mouth water.
Rating for Experience #42, Biwon Korean, B+
After having one of the best experiences of the trip, I took a few quick notes from the day and went to bed thoroughly exhausted.
Zzz…
Zzz…
CHECK POINT
Another day, another depressingly slow start.
We didn’t even try to get a decent breakfast this time; that’s how slow the start to the day was. We literally just got instant ramen in the hotel room for the morning and called it a day, which was about the most depressing meal of the entire trip. Like usual, the first half of the day would be a slow, easy jog before eventually turning into a fierce sprint towards the end.
In just a few hours, we’d be outside of Toronto and heading to probably the most famous waterfall on the planet— Niagara Falls. This was the bit that everyone really had been waiting for for a really long time, and the one destination that we’d had in mind in the first place when we thought of this trip.
First, though, there was one more famous Toronto attraction that my dad suggested we visit; the Casa Loma, this absolutely beautiful stone-brick mansion that sat just a stone’s throw away from the main part of the city. It’s probably the most aesthetically pleasing building that I’ve seen in all of the Toronto phase of this trip. As soon as I got a view of this thing from the parking lot, my brain exploded with excitement. I started running all around the garden and fountains that sat in front of the building, trying to find a good angle to take pictures from.
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The inside strongly reminded me of a castle; every little bit of the place was decorated like a British fortress, and for a while, I almost forgot I was in Canada. The ceiling was decorated with chandeliers, flags, and artwork. Every few feet on the walls, I’d see a little model of a medieval soldier in armor, holding a shield and a sword. The entire place made it all feel very brought to life; I could’ve entered Hogwarts instead.
Holy Mega Photo Dump
It didn’t take Casey and me very long to reach the back end of the Casa Loma, which opened us up to an amazing view of the city of Toronto from afar. I could even see the CN Tower sticking out like a sore thumb, and it was kind of crazy to think that I was standing up there, on that tower, just a little over fourteen hours ago.
We were at the castle for more than an hour, but we didn’t seem to cover anywhere close to the whole thing. It wasn’t fit for just a king; it was also fit for a dozen princes, a duke, a baron, knights, and a squire. It didn’t take long for Casey and me to get distracted, and we quickly wandered away from our parents to the other rooms we could find; there was a second story, dozens of rooms, each with intricate furnishings. The entire castle was basically hundreds of feet of 3-dimensional art.
PHOTO DUMP!
We headed back down to the ground floor after exploring a majority of the rooms on the second story, because I had noticed earlier that there seemed to be a little passageway that was sitting a little to the side from the entrance, like a quiet person that didn’t want attention. Casey and I had no clue what was down there, but there was no sign telling us that it was “off-limits for visitors” or that “employees only” could access it. We weren’t told to enter it, so we obviously entered it.
If I wanted to film a horror movie in Toronto, the tunnel I walked through next would’ve been a pretty good place to film a scene. After first walking through that low-profile staircase, I came across a little cafe and bathroom area— neither of which was enough to entertain me. Right next to the cafe, however, was an entrance to what appeared to be some kind of sketchy tunnel inside.
Casey and I did exactly what any stupid teenager would have done. We entered the tunnel; I was pretty sure, after walking through it for a while, that it wasn’t going to get us anywhere interesting. For a couple of hundred meters, a few pieces of art and text lined the walls, telling the history of the Casa Loma. Those disappeared after a while, and we were just left in a tunnel that looked like it was meant more for plumbing than tourism.
And I still didn’t see any signs telling us to turn back, so Casey and I continued.
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After what felt like forever, we emerged on a staircase on the other side, and it led us to another museum, where we had a lot of different old artifacts, the most interesting of which was this little car.
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When we finally returned to the main part of the castle, Casey and I continued to cruise around the place to check for other rooms that we may have missed. We either weren’t very thorough the first time, or the castle was just impressively big, because we discovered quite a few new rooms that we didn’t realize had existed earlier. In fact, we also made the discovery that there was actually a third floor to this mansion.
No, wait, it was even larger than that. A fourth floor? The mansion seemed to be making up rooms out of thin air, as if it were Hogwarts.
PICTURES OF THE FEW ROOMS REMAINING
Well, that Casa Loma was definitely one hell of an experience— one of the best immersions into medieval Europe that we’ve seen on this trip. The entire place really came to life; the artifacts, the lavishly decorated rooms, and of course, the towering, overgrown mansion.
Rating for Experience #43, Casa Loma, A-
Lunchtime came right after we left Casa Loma because we got up so late; we chose to eat at Rol San Restaurant. You could see the excitement in both Casey and me at this time. Casey and I just chose fried rice— we sort of just wanted to get through this eating thing quickly and go on to Niagara Falls right away. In addition to the fried rice, Casey and I also shared a handful of these dumplings.
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Aaaaand that’s a wrap for our time in Toronto! Walking back to the parking lot and to our car, I took a few last-minute pictures of the streets…
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Before finally heading on the road to Niagara Falls. Out of all of the long drives we’d had (which at this point we’ve seen several of), this was probably one of the shorter ones. It wasn’t filled with several pit stops like our drive from Boston to Montreal was. It wasn’t hours-long, like our trip from Ottawa to Toronto just before. It was short and a pretty quick transition to our last location in the CANEDA series.
In the comparatively short two-hour trip from Toronto to Niagara Falls, we made exactly one stop, advocated for by none other than Casey.
I’ve never even heard of 50 Absolute World. And yet Casey talked about it like it was the biggest sensation to ever exist on the Internet (It really wasn’t). He said he’d discovered the building on TikTok— which is one of his favorite sources of information — and claimed that it was pretty well known and that he wanted to check it out.
Why not? It was only a small detour, and we only had a two-hour drive ahead of us. The 50 Absolute World, as Casey explained to us, was a pair of towers that stood a brief drive ahead in the city of Mississauga. They were technically visible from Toronto (and we’d even seen a brief glimpse of them on our cruise the day before), but after realizing that we were already going to drive in its direction for a while, Casey heavily suggested that we actually take a detour just to take a quick look at it. Mississauga was visible from the center of Toronto; we’d already found that out previously. So it couldn’t be that far… right?
Well, it wasn’t far.
It just wasn’t far as long as you consider an hour-long drive to be “not that far”.
I took pictures of whatever interesting buildings I could find on the way between Toronto and Mississauga, and it was a bit before I realized how large this region was. These were supposed to be next-door neighbor cities. And what the heck??? Why were they so incredibly far from one another? They might as well have been on opposite sides of the province!
I’m not complaining about the longer drive, though. The views of the city of Mississauga when we first pulled in were great; the wait to look at these towers was definitely worth it:
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If you look at it for a single glance, nothing feels off. But this is certainly not some average building. You can see that on every single side of it, something feels a bit off, as if the towers themselves were confused. These towers were so wobbly that I half-expected them to start wobbling back and forth in the sky. It looked like they’d been frozen in time, right as they were in the middle of shaking back and forth.
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I also took a look at the surroundings of the 50 Absolute World and found another pretty cool-looking building that wasn’t too far away. A very enthusiastic Casey hinted at trying to get to the top of the towers to try and see what the view was when you reached the top (I imagine he probably had some really cool pose and picture idea for his friends once he actually made it up there), and he probably would’ve gotten his wish if we simply had more time. After taking a few last-minute pictures of the thing, we continued to Niagara Falls, which was about an hour and a half away.
There wasn’t any more time for stops. Not when we knew what we were heading to; one of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen in one of my trips. The buildings and towns passed in and out of view until we were right on the border between the US and Canada. Along the way, I did remember to take some pictures of the view outside, but it was nothing compared to what was coming.
IMAGES HERE
Our hotel was called Marriott on the Falls, and we parked outside, just opposite the falls. I checked the map. We were so close. More than anything at the moment, I was extremely eager to see the waterfall itself. We went into the hotel…
Checked in…
Went up the elevator…
Opened the key to our room…
This room was large. It was, without the merest shadow of a doubt, the largest hotel room we had seen on the whole trip. That was a pretty big accomplishment on its own, but Casey and I really didn’t care for that at the moment. What was important to us now was seeing the view. That’s all we wanted to see.
We reached the other side and looked out…
CANEDA PART 10 FINALE SOON
And yeah, I’m leaving you on a cliffhanger lol