Toronto: practical tips

Winter is one of the serious ones

Toronto shares a latitude with Barcelona and bears no resemblance: there’s no warm current and no sea to soften it, there’s an entire continent to the north and a lake that freezes the wind. In January and February it’s routinely between five and fifteen below, and with the wind off the lake it feels considerably colder. The snow lasts months.

That changes everything. It explains the PATH, those thirty kilometres of tunnels under downtown. It explains why the terraces vanish for five months and come back in April with an almost desperate joy. And it explains one practical consequence for you: if you come in winter, the city can be seen but not walked, and you plan indoor to indoor.

If you can choose, come between May and October, and if colour matters to you, in October.

The price isn’t the price

In Canada, as in the United States, the ticket price doesn’t include tax: in Ontario thirteen per cent is added at the till, so what you see on the menu or the shelf isn’t what you’ll pay. It throws every European and there’s no way round it: you add it in your head.

And on top goes the tip, which here isn’t a gesture of thanks but part of the server’s wage, which is lower because of it. The expectation in a restaurant is fifteen to twenty per cent on the pre-tax price, and the card machine will offer it to you directly as buttons. Not leaving it is considered a serious lapse, not an opinion about the service.

Add it all up before deciding whether somewhere is good value: between tax and tip, the bill goes up by a third.

The Maple Leafs and 1967

Ice hockey works as this country’s religion, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are worth more than any other team in the league. They haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967, which is the longest drought in the NHL by a distance: fifty-nine years. There are retired people here who have never seen their team win.

What’s interesting for you isn’t the fact, it’s what it provokes: raising it in a bar is the fastest way to get a conversation in this city, and it produces a mixture of black humour and genuine pain that’s about the most Canadian thing you’ll see. If you fancy a game, the season runs October to April and tickets are expensive and hard. And if not, the Hockey Hall of Fame is downtown and explains why this matters so much.

Mobile data

In Toronto the phone is mostly for one specific thing: knowing where your streetcar is. The streetcar network is the largest in North America and shares the lane with cars for much of its route, so the theoretical timetable means nothing and what you need is the real position in real time. Without it, you wait twenty minutes not knowing if it’s coming.

Coverage is good across the city and on the subway.

An eSIM activates before you leave home and works on landing, which here covers the first thing: checking whether your terminal is 1 or 3, because that decides whether you need the LINK Train before the train downtown.