Toronto from my point of view
I arrived in Toronto 5 month ago. I've traveled to a lot of countries but I had never been in Canada before. For me was difficult to image how Toronto was. People knew Toronto gave me so different general perceptions and that was not enough to image city. The most pictures I found in Internet showed some places like CN Tower from Ontario Lake.
When I arrived in Toronto I had a great surprise because I met with a wonderful city. After the family host welcome, I immediately went out to know the city.
I walked to the subway and that was my first disappointment because it is dirty, slow, old, noisy, but I thought that subway could be only a bad spot. I got up in St George station and I immediately went to University of Toronto’s Campus St George. I enjoyed a lot walking, seeing and taking pictures about St George Campus, because it is really awesome. There are a lot of new and old buildings with different nice style architectural, large green areas, absolutely open, many people walking around. I thought: Here really there is life and there is a good atmosphere. At the end of that day I had a great impression about Toronto.
Whit the advices of my family hot, touristic guides and common sense, during the next days I was walking and knowing the city and I realized that Toronto had a lot of interesting places to know and things to do, in other words Toronto is a enjoyable city.
I’ve visited many places as Toronto Island, CN Tower, Distillery, St Lawrence Market, downtown area, King Street where are the financial district, Dundas Street, High Park and other parks, Kensington Market, Yorkville, Greek town, CN Tower, AGO, Beach area, Spadina, Casa Loma, etc.
I could practice one of my favourite hobbies taking pictures in those places while some of them I sent to my family and mine friends in Chile. They had a well impression about this city. “Toronto is so beautiful”, they said me. However, under my point of view Toronto has nice places but ugly places too, as all cities around the world.
Sometimes the circumstances makes that the city has a bad atmosphere as was the long garbage strike in Toronto. Everything dirty and with bud smell. I really hate Toronto during that time. For me was very difficult understood that the government didn’t take measure to improve that situation.
Maybe that situation marked the end of my honeymoon with Toronto. At beginning everything were beautiful and new for me. After two month since my arrived, I started to realize that there were a lot of thing that I didn’t like and in Santiago, my city, are much better. In this moment I realized too that I was living in Toronto and I was left to be a tourist. Other example, is price level. Toronto is so expensive and each day is more expensive because Canadian currency is stronger than US currency and this was a very bud surprise.
A city is done to beautiful places, ugly places and so many different things. Usually when people arrived to a new city first see the beautiful places and with the time people start to have a global vision about the city and I’ve have that experience with Toronto too.
At the beginning I felt that everyone were so kind and polite until I had my first experience with impolite and rude people. Well, finally I understood that I was in the Earth and I wasn’t in the paradise.
Definitely a highlight about Toronto is the cultural life. Concerts, plays, streets festival, theatres, games, parades, cine festivals, restaurants, are permanent part of Toronto life. In Toronto also there a lot of book stores where people find a large quantity of books and magazines with current information about many topics. I like the magazines and I enjoy when I’m in a book store and I can review and read everything without complaint of nobody.
Finally, I think that Toronto is a great city with good things and bad thing. But I keep the goods things: cultural life, good universities, tolerance, good restaurants, beautiful places and landscape and nice people.
Studying English in the U of T
I have been studying in Toronto for 5 month. It has been a good experience for me.
I go I go to class every day and I used to study in OISE library every day, because there I can be concentrated. On Tuesday and Thursday I have activities during afternoon.
I used to read ideally every day. When I’m in my apartment I listen radio or TV in order to developed that skill.
The studying activities are not easy to organize because we have to developed four skills speaking, reading, writing and maybe the most difficult listening and to do that demand a lot of time.
