"Home, sweet home" a Toronto Travel Page by mikey_e

I feel that I really have to re-write this page. I didn't want to archive the old one, because it had comments from various visitors to my website and I didn't want to erase those and start a new. In part, I wanted to reflect my new perspective on the city of Toronto, now that I have broadened my knowledge of all the city has to offer. Also, I have now written many, many of these sorts of pages for various other cities and towns all over the world, and I think that I have a better idea of what to write and how to describe my view of the city in which I have spent most of my life. In particular, I want this to be different from all the other pages about Toronto - the ones that describe the city's diversity without really saying anything meaningful, or the pages that feature 18 different pictures of the CN Tower, ignoring that a city of 4 million people has much more to offer the world than just a phallic symbol, a baseball stadium that is almost never filled and Union Station.

If you've come to this page, you've probably already seen my homepage, and therefore know that I'm now between jobs and looking to shift gears, from student to office rat. Surprisingly, this change has given me a whole new view on the city of Toronto and its surroundings. It's amazing how you can live in a city for years and years and, by habit or by desire, you never really explore all the city has to offer. Since leaving the University of Toronto, I've gradually branched out into other neighbourhoods and districts of the city, discovering just what the city's diversity means. I hope to use this page and my tips to help describe just what Toronto is: not only a place where people from all over the world come to meet and live, but a city in which various architectural traditions mix, a melting pot (gasp! did I actually use that word to describe something Canadian?) of artistic and cultural styles and expressions, all slowly simmering to characterize the modern spirit of Canada's largest metropolis.

Finally, I decided to radically change my Toronto pages, one sight at a time, as a challenge to those pages that seem to dominate the Toronto section on VT. With so many of us who live in Toronto, why is it that the most popular pages seem to concentrate on three or four tourist attractions, with no explanation of the characteristics and qualities that make Toronto unique, not just in Canada, but among cities around the world? I want to concentrate on everything that Toronto has to offer: not just eighteen different tips on the CN Tower, or nine warnings about homeless people, or pointless shots of Chinatown. I want to help show the world that Toronto is a place filled with creative people, that its neighbourhood system is unmatched in other cities, and that Toronto is just as memorable as Los Angeles, Barcelona or Hong Kong. So often, those of us who live in this city dump on it and make fun of how it can't compare to the traditional destinations for tourists. Its time reverse that trend and give Toronto the great name it deserves.