Oh, Canada! One thing that is not obvious from my blog is that one of my favorite things to do is take a trip to Canada. In fact, I love visiting Canada so much that I briefly lived there five years ago which was also my first time to ever travel completely alone! I've never written about any of my trips to Canada because they always occurred at a time when Kimi's Travel Thoughts either never existed or when I wasn't actively blogging. However, it's never too late to share my story about living in Canada -- especially when it was such a memorable experience!
Previous Trips to Canada
June 2008
After my brother's graduation, our family along with one of his friends drove from New Hampshire to Montreal, Québec, Canada. We had a very scenic drive and spent a couple of days sightseeing, eating good food, shopping, and trying to translate French to English (my favorite part of the trip). It inspired me to take French courses in college and was a great introduction to Canada and what makes Québec a very unique province.
June 2010
Summer 2018
August 2019
Living in Canada Rundown
If you're wondering how living in and working in Canada came about, this section briefly summarizes months of planning.
Who
This trip only involved me! My family and friends were not along for this extended stay in Canada and I was officially on my first ever solo trip. However, I didn't feel alone because I was living with other people who were in Toronto for the same purpose and we had the same companies working together to help make our extended time in Canada was positive and safe.
What
I was living in Toronto to work as an intern with a local digital marketing company. I was the Business Development Intern and spent two months assisting with sales, managing social media, hosting Instagram workshops for local businesses, learning about search engine optimization (SEO), and shadowing meetings with clients.
When
I was in Toronto all of June and July 2018. My work visa was for 60 days, so I could only be in Canada for those two months. However, I could've crossed back into the United States if I wanted to, but I would have to keep my work visa with me to get back into Canada. I got really close the border, but never crossed over the entire time I was in Canada.
Where
Although I was living in downtown Toronto across from the University of Toronto - St. George campus, I was working in a Oakville, Ontario -- a nearby suburb in the Greater Toronto Area where the main office of the company I interned for is located. I always looked forward to getting lunch from the local restaurants in Downtown Oakville! I also took some time to visit Niagara Falls and a winery at Niagara-on-the-Lake during a one-day bus tour of the area.
Why
I was interning with a digital marketing company that summer because I was getting my degree in communication studies and thought this would be a field I would go into after graduation. I was also in my final term of introductory French courses and thought it would be good to be in Canada while still learning French because everything is labeled in both French and English. In the end, I chose not to work in marketing. However, all the skills I gained from that experience are what I use to run Kimi's Travel Thoughts, so nothing I learned went to waste!
How
I'm a member of a scholar organization and in 2018 they had a deal with The Intern Group offering discounts to members who decided to do an international internship through the company. Toronto had just been added to the list of locations and I quickly applied, interviewed, and was admitted to the program within a couple of weeks in January 2018. I had been wanting to go back to Canada and felt that I couldn't pass up on an opportunity to live and work there for two months! My y family helped me get everything paid for to spend the summer in Canada as I interviewed with the digital marketing company I would be working for and discussed what my role would be. Yes, it did cost money and wasn't cheap by any means, but we all agreed this experience would be worth it. The clear guidance from The Intern Group and their partners at SWAP Canada made the entire process of arriving to, living in, and leaving Toronto pretty seamless.
Highlights of Living in Toronto, ON, Canada
Lots of fun, lots of food, and easy to get around!
Easy to Navigate
Toronto is very much a walkable city with wider sidewalks and several major streets that are close enough to each other with main attractions to get to most popular places in 15-20 minutes or less. It's easy to know which direction you're going as you walk around should you ever feel lost. Lake Ontario is south, so if you are facing the water, you're facing south. If you're at the lake, you can hop on a ferry to check out some of the islands that make for a perfect picnic at the park on a nice day or to just do a harbor tour!
Although many of the local Torontonians have some complaints, the public transit is actually very good in my opinion as a person that's taken public transit around the USA and in Europe. They have buses, trains, subways, and streetcars to get around the city and the Greater Toronto Area. I would walk to the subway station, catch the subway to Union Station, hop on the GO train to Oakville to go to work, catch the Oakville bus to get to the office, and do it all in reverse when it was time to go home. This sounds like so many steps, but I got the timing down just right so it only took about 30-40 minutes each way. I relied on my Presto card a lot because it was the only transit card that worked across all of the public transportation services, but I also had a monthly pass for the Toronto transit.
Multicultural
Toronto is very similar to New York City (which I've been to before) because it's the most populous city in its country and is a multicultural hub. People from all over the world have immigrated to Canada and established cultural communities in Toronto, running a multitude of businesses which includes restaurants with tasty food. So many options ranging from steamed pork buns, to pad thai, to burgers, to burritos, to spicy Jamaican beef patties, and more were all just a few steps from the door of the apartment I was living in with some of the other interns!
That being said, I also learned more about Canada's history in my extended 2-month stay. Like the United States, they have historically been violent in their treatment of Indigenous and First Nations peoples. The U.S. perspective often depicts Canada as a "perfect" place with kind people, universal healthcare, and more progressive laws. It's not that this is completely untrue, but it doesn't paint the most accurate picture of the country. Canada isn't perfect and it's okay for that to be acknowledged. While many efforts have been made and legislation passed in an attempt to correct the wrongs that have occurred, there is still work to be done.
CF Toronto Eaton Centre
This mall is HUGE and spans several blocks in the heart of Toronto. It includes many of the same stores you would find in any mall in the United States such as Nordstrom and Forever 21, but it also had plenty of stores that were uniquely Canadian. The same can be said about the food court which features an A&W Canada -- which is truly it's own version of A&W with extra foamy root beer and burgers served with Canadian beef. Oh, I should mention that Canada is big on Canadian beef and dairy products, so it's basically no different than Texas when it comes to that!
Great Nightlife
I lived just a few blocks away from a street with more budget-friendly bars, lounges, and clubs. More expensive locations were just a few streetcar stops away from my apartment. The drinks were good at each place I went (I only went to a few because I was busy with school) with the other interns and the music was always good. Drake's Scorpion album dropped just a few weeks after I got to Toronto, so you couldn't go anywhere without hearing those songs the rest of the summer. The other interns really liked to pregame before going out and one day I went with them on one of their trips to buy drinks. That's when I found out buying alcohol in Toronto was different than in the United States. The LCBO is where wine and spirits were sold and it's well-regulated. If you want to purchase beer, you have to go to The Beer Store for the widest selection. Definitely not like Spec's in Texas where you can get everything you need all in one place.
Tourist Attractions
Fortunately for tourists, most of the main tourist attractions in Toronto are clustered together in downtown. Ripley's Aquarium, the Hockey Hall of Fame, Rogers Centre and the Toronto Blue Jays, CN Tower, Scotia Bank Arena and the Toronto Raptors, Yonge-Dundas Square, Lake Ontario ferry tours, Graffiti Alley and so much more are all within a few blocks of each other, many of these places sharing the same block along Front Street!
Special shout out to my brother, Mr. Well-Travelled, for capturing the pictures of me at Graffiti Alley and the picture of our mom and I on the train to the airport!
Close Proximity to Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake
Toronto to Niagara is kind of like Austin to San Antonio. It's a straight shot once you get on the highway and it maybe takes about an hour or so to drive there. Whether on a tour bus which I took in 2018 or in a personal/rental car like my family did in 2019, you'll be able to enjoy a scenic drive to Niagara Falls. There are some fun attractions in Niagara Falls such as museums, the Skylon Tower to get a nice aerial view of the Falls, and, of course, the boat ride to the Falls for that close up view of water doing its thing. The Canadian side is what you see in all of the popular Niagara Falls pictures which is why everyone always says the Canadian side is better (and it's true)! While I was living in Canada, I didn't have an international phone plan and had to rely on WiFi everywhere I went to be able to stay in contact with my friends and family through FaceTime, iMessage, and Snapchat. This worked out fine for me with most of my time spent at work and my apartment, but the train and subway stations also had free WiFi to use. However, I was back on my regular cell phone service as soon as I got to Niagara Falls because I was right at the border and was picking up on the U.S. cell phone towers again. I was so excited and called as many people as I could in the time my bus tour was stopped there.
Niagara-on-the-Lake is a great town to visit on the way back to Toronto if you went to Niagara Falls in the morning or decided to stay in a bed and breakfast for more time in that area. The wineries of Niagara-on-the-Lake are so quiet and peaceful, but they can also be a fun place for bachelorette parties to turn up and have a great time from what I've seen. My bus tour stopped at Lakeview Wine Co. where I participated in a wine tasting and learned about how some of the wine was made. This was my first time doing a wine tasting or visiting a winery and it quickly made me realize why my mom loves doing this activity with her friends. It was also my first time trying icewine, a very sweet dessert wine that has a bit more complicated wine-making process, resulting in a smaller yield and higher retail value. Icewine is my favorite wine and the trick to saving money on a bottle is to purchase some at the duty free shop in airport as you leave Canada!
Be sure to follow Kimi's Travel Thoughts on Instagram for even more pictures of my trips to Canada!
Wrap-Up
That concludes a very condensed recap of multiple years of visits to Canada and my time spending summer 2018 living and working in Toronto. As you can probably now understand, I really do love going to Canada. As a child, I thought I would one day attend McGill University after visiting Montreal and instead went to Toronto 10 years later to be an intern, and I'm currently exploring Ph.D. programs as a reason to go back to Canada and to experience education in a country other than the United States. I'm also considering taking another trip to British Columbia in summer 2024 by way of a ferry from Seattle, but I'll need to do some additional planning before confirming that vacation. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy these memories of Canada and my time spent living there, sipping on some icewine purchased stateside as I reminisce!
Feel free to leave comments below, tweet (@KimiThoughts), or leave a post/message on Facebook (@KimisTravelThoughts) to share your memories from trips you've taken to Canada or to ask me any questions about my time spent in Canada!