It is a surprising relief to be in Toronto. It’s a nice city: affordable, charming, quirky. Big enough that there are things to do, but small enough that you don’t feel like you’re missing all that much if you don’t do them.

It’s more than that, though. Despite their differences, Canada and the United States share a huge amount of cultural overlap.¹ Traveling is exhausting, and with no place to call home it’s relentless as well. I’ve been underestimating the steady drain of just existing someplace foreign — it’s not bad, but even being someplace like London where I’ve frequently been and there’s a common language, it’s definitely taxing.

It’s just nice to be somewhere where you know how things work.² I’ve spent a very unhurried week seeing friends, or trying some restaurants out, or just staying in and relaxing. And there’s been a lot of staying in and relaxing.

I found a nice, small apartment just north of Yorkville, an easy walk to grocery stores and some restaurants and the University District. I thought I’d get more out of the location than I did. The problem (and yes, this should have been obvious) is that I was flying into the aftermath of some winter storms and getting around by foot has been tricky.³

Couple this with what has been some of the most vicious jetlag I can remember. I’ve been fighting it by making a point of staying up late — 11pm, midnight, 2:30am — and the most I’ve been able to do is push my 4am wake up time to 5am. I had planned on a big tourist day on Sunday, hitting brunch then the CN Tower and an art museum, but I called it shortly after eating because I just couldn’t function on three hours sleep.

So the bulk of my time has been invested in the grand art of doing nothing. I’ve been ordering in food, watching a couple TV shows, working on-and-off on a couple projects, and napping when I can manage to. In a lot of ways this is the life I was trying to escape when I left New York, but I’m finding it’s suddenly critical to make time for it now that I’m on the road.

It’s the grand art of doing nothing. I think we fail to understand exactly how revolutionary modern life has been in providing leisure time. Growth in productivity has resulted in lots of us having lots of completely discretionary time to ourselves.⁴ This is only going to get worse, as automation continues to take over more and more complex tasks, which is why things like a Universal Basic Income are attracting such interest. We’re running out of stuff we have to do.

You can react to this (intentionally or not) by finding something that will wipe out all your free time for you. Kids are a popular choice. But if you don’t do that, I think there’s a tendency among some people to decide to Tetris the shit out of their schedules, wedge every spare gap and block full of Zumba classes or beach outings or trips to the top of the tallest building in the area.

I am firmly in that camp, just naturally. But life’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. Pace is important. I’ve talked about the kind of self-imposed pressure I feel when I’m someplace new and unfamiliar, and I want to try all the restaurants and see all the sights and drink all the cocktails. But you burn yourself out. I’m trying to adjust to a pace where I can book in for a week someplace and just sit by the pool and not go out. Adventure is great. So is sleep. Both are important.

It’s not like I locked myself in my AirBnB and didn’t ever venture forth. I did see some friends⁵ during the week. And especially recently, as I’ve been ever so slightly better adjusted to the time change,⁶ I’ve been going out to eat in the evening. Toronto is a weird sort of restaurant town, especially for someone coming from New York City. There’s a lot of interesting, great places to eat, in a variety of cuisines, both expensive and cheap.

The weird thing, and I can’t quite wrap my head around it, is that there’s not a lot of vegetarian options most places. Bar menus might have a vegetable burger. Fancy prix fixe establishments don’t offer a vegetable tasting menu. Italian places — my usual go-to — will include a single mushroom pasta on the menu.

What makes this baffling is that there’s actually a ton of interesting, innovative vegan places around the city. Upscale Mexican places, greasy-spoon diners, burger-and-brunch takeaways, breweries and juice bars and bakeshops and ice cream stands. All completely vegan. And of course you’ve got the usual mix of Indian/Thai/Middle Eastern/etc places which have been standbys for vegetarians forever.

But it feels like there’s a missing jump that’s happened in places like New York and London but hasn’t quite made it here. And I’d say it doesn’t really matter — I just went to the vegan places and had some great meals⁷ — but I’ve lived plenty of places where there’s reliably been a single entrée on most menus, but rarely a second one, and it makes a difference. Being able to assume there’s 2–3 things I could eat most everywhere just changes things.

It’s about feeling like you belong someplace, that people have taken you into consideration, that you’re welcome there. It’s having prayer areas available for public use. Or maybe obvious wheelchair access points and closed captioning. Or bilingual and trilingual signs. These are all nice and useful, but they really signal, to an increasingly diverse world, that everyone is welcome in this space. If you’re lost, wandering far from home, that’s nice to hear.

At the moment I’m sitting in the Toronto airport lounge waiting for my flight to Boston. I’m catching a train there and heading to Providence for the weekend, for my second larp convention in about two weeks.⁸ I’ve been back on forth on how I feel about it; I didn’t really want to fly back across the Atlantic and I’m reluctant to spend time in the United States for a number of reasons. But ultimately it’s a chance to see people I don’t normally see, and that’s worth it.

This lounge is a little odd. Rather than the standbys of peanuts or pretzels they’ve gone with Cheetos.⁹ There’s a soda machine but no glasses, leaving you to pour your ice and Diet Pepsi into coffee mugs. But there’s the usual open bar and a jar of surprisingly fresh chocolate chip cookies, so it’s hard to complain too much.

I suppose the oddest thing about this airport is that you pass through passport control to the United States before you board the plane. I’ve already gone through security, walked through the Global Entry line and did the fingerprint scan and I’m now, in some kind of official sense, back in the United States. I’ll be here for the weekend. It’s a bittersweet feeling flying in. And it’ll be a bittersweet feeling leaving.

Welcome home.

Next: Providence to New York City
Prev: Copenhagen (CPH) to Toronto (YYZ)

Footnotes

¹ While I was here Toronto shut down for “Family Day” which is scheduled directly opposite “President’s Day” in the United States. Quelle surprise!

² Somewhat embarrassingly, I’m finding the same kind of feeling when I arrive at international airports. Because none of them feel local — they’re all part of the same virtual space with the same shops and restaurants and amenities — so just knowing you know how to interact with the space can be a massive relief. Particularly if you’ve just spent a week repeatedly trying to communicate your dietary restrictions to people with a generally shaky grasp of spoken English.

³ Some neighborhoods are fine; the sidewalks are clear and solid. Others, not so much. Fluctuating temperatures have ensured there’s a decent patchwork of black ice covered in a thin sheen of water in various places I’d like to be walking. I’m not yet at an age where I’m worried about breaking a hip, but I’m solidly at the age where I’m expecting to wrench a knee or pull my back at the slightest slip.

⁴ Obviously, some percentage of the population needs to raise food and always will. And there’s a lot of activity — building residences, maintaining the electrical grid and sewers and roadways, operating the bureaucracy of government — which are effectively required for modern life. But most of what we do for work, like running restaurants, or stock exchanges, or universities, is nonessential. They might make life better, we might vastly prefer doing them to doing something else (or at least value the cash people pay us for them over the time we’d otherwise have to ourselves) but if you can find a warm beach with shade, a hammock, and a pile of fruit, well, everything else is optional.

⁵ It’s sometimes easy, and sometimes difficult, to connect with friends when I travel. And this whole thing is a lot more fun and interesting when I connect with friends.

⁶ Or maybe I’m just more used to being chronically exhausted.

⁷ I tried Rosalinda (the upscale Mexican restaurant I mentioned) and it was a little pricey but pretty great. Not so expensive you’d feel weird taking a first date there, but fancy enough and tasty enough that you wouldn’t regret taking a first date there either. Honorable mention to Mythology Diner, where I inadvertently arrived on “All-You-Can-Eat Wing Night” and would be fantastic for an altogether different, and probably better, kind of first date.

⁸ This one is Intercon

⁹ Ever try to type on a computer while snacking on Cheetos?