Toronto Islands

Saturday was a beautiful day, it was about 30 degrees, so we decided to go to the Toronto Islands. It is a chain of islands in front of the city and you can get there by ferry. The crossover takes only about 10 minutes and then you arrive in a totally different atmosphere. It has parks, beaches and even a children's amusement park. People can rent bikes, canoes and quadracycles, but we preferred walking. From the island you have an amazing view on downtown Toronto, with the CN tower and all its skyscrapers. On the islands there is a small community of about 260 homes and they even have their own school. A funny thing about the selling and buying of the houses is that the prices are set and are governed by provincial law.
So whenever you are in Toronto, we recommend you to visit the islands!

The city airport

Fighter plane giving a show, because of Labour Day

Disc golf course

Toronto by pics

Seconday school with 3000 students

Estonian church around the corner

Yonge and Dundas

Canadians love their take-away

Billboards

Harbourfront

Luxurious apartments at Lake Ontario 

Lake Ontario

Boulevard

O-week

Our first week in Toronto has been great. Juha is having an orientation week from his school. During the days they have lectures and info about the school and in the evenings parties :)
On Monday evening I went with Juha to a block party at school. It had a carnival theme, but nobody was actually dressed up for it. There was a barbecue, a life band and they played some drinking games. The drinks were not expensive. You could buy for 10 dollars three coupons and for one coupon you could get a beer or sangria.

Flip Cup drinking game

On Tuesday evening we went to a dinner cruise. Most of the students had taken their boy-/girlfriends with them, so we were with quite a lot on the yacht. It was still light when we left, but quickly it was getting darker and the views from the water were astonishing. Downtown Toronto is soo beautiful at night. The quality of our pictures is really bad and don't show at all how it really looked like. The food on the cruise was very good as well and we had a good time.

Yesterday Juha went to the Niagara falls. He told me that they looked different now in the summer. Last year we were there in the spring and we were a bit disappointed. But this time Juha said it was very beautiful, because he got the chance to get on the whirlpool boat and got near the falls.

Today there will be a beach party, but I think we take a break and just hang out at home. Tomorrow however Juha has tickets to a football game and maybe I might join him as well.

Besides Juha having o-week, I have been applying like crazy on all kind of jobs, opened a bank account at the Finnish Osuuspankki and went to get my social insurance number. One big difference with Europe is that everything is quite old fashioned over here. Internet banking is quite new and you are not able to transfer money to another's account through the Internet. They still use cheques to pay for example the rent or even salary.

Osuuspankki - The Finnish Credit Union

This weekend will be a long weekend, because it is Labour Day on Monday. There will be a lot of events around the town. Next time more about that.

Cheers!

This is it!

It is five o'clock in the morning local time and we are sitting on the couch writing this blog. We are quite not used to the time difference yet.

Anyhow, everything has been great until now. Our flight went very well and the immigration officer was really nice. The process was very quick and we were warmly welcomed into Canada.

Downtown Toronto

We took a taxi to our apartment and there our landlady Elaine already waited for us enthusiastically.
She showed us the basement apartment. It is a nice sized apartment with a separate bed room. The house is on a very idyllic street, with typical Canadian houses. We already met the neighbors, who came over to introduce themselves. They told us, that there is a tight community in the neighborhood, where everyone looks after each other. Once a year they organize a garage sale, where everyone can sell their old stuff. Afterwards, there is a big barbecue party.

Our street

The house

The garden view

Keewatin Avenue

Patriotic Canadians

Elaine was supposed to be in New York this weekend, but thanks to the hurricane she was forced to stay home. This was actually a huge bonus for us, because now she had time to help us out. On Saturday we went shopping with here. She first showed Juha his new school, which is about 20 minutes away by car. We don't have a car yet, so Juha will travel by bus to his school. The bus will take about 50 minutes.
Afterwards, we did some crazy shopping at IKEA. We bought so much, that we weren't sure if it all would fit in the trunk of Elaine's car. Luckily she had an amazingly big trunk. Only the mattress needed to be delivered.

After shopping we started cleaning up the place and made ourselves feel like home. We were dead tired afterwards and awarded ourselves with a good steak and a glass (or two) of red wine. The food over here is about the same price as in Finland.

The weather has been really warm. Yesterday it was about 26 degrees. However, the humidity in Toronto area is usually quite high. For example, yesterday the humidity was 100%.

Everything has been great until so far and we are happy to be here.

A small delay

Today, we should have been waking up in our new apartment in Toronto. We should have been wandering the streets for already a week, but unfortunately we are still in Finland. Our visa applications were provisionally approved, however a medical test still had to be done. This could only be done in Finland and therefore we had to postpone our flight. Of course we were a bit disappointed in the beginning, but actually it really doesn't matter. At least now we will have all the necessary visa documents when we fly to Toronto and we don't need to stress that anymore. In three weeks we will wake up in Toronto, that is for sure :)