Two years in Toronto

Victoria – a bastion of English charm some 4,700 miles from home. Named in honour of the famous Queen, today the capital of Canada’s westernmost province boasts a temperate climate, multiple universities and a famously laid-back attitude that attract tourists, students and retirees from across Canada. With Vancouver so close, we had to visit. Although, when we said in the last post that Victoria is only a ferry-ride away, that wasn’t strictly true. The ferry ports are at the tips of their respective islands, so the journey involves two buses and light rail as well as a boat. But the scenery is so beautiful that the challenges of public transport were entirely forgotten as we motored around tiny islands in the Georgia Strait. In downtown Victoria, with seaplanes taking off beside us, we found British Columbia’s legislative assembly and a statue of Vicky herself. Unlike the hipster cafes and micro-breweries that have sprung up in Vancouver, Victoria’s culinary highlights are more...

Vancouver – Canada’s gateway to the Pacific. Its site, nestled in the Rocky Mountains and sheltered from the ocean by Vancouver Island, has seen human activity for over 8,000 years. In the 1860s a new settlement emerged – called Gastown after ‘Gassy’ Jack Deighton, the proprietor of the local tavern – but with the arrival of the first transcontinental train twenty years later came a new name, one inspired by the Royal Navy Officer George Vancouver who had charted North America’s western coast a century earlier. Since then it’s attracted inhabitants from across the country and around the world with its consistently high quality of life and reputation for progressive thinking – becoming not only Canada’s most densely populated city but also one of its most diverse. While Canadians were taking October’s second Monday to eat turkey and celebrate Thanksgiving (a holiday of uncertain origins that now seems associated with the harvest), we flew from the country’s busiest airport to its s...