Yearning: Toronto vs Waterloo
I’m not girly and emotional very often, but I’ve been missing Toronto wildly in the past few months.
I consider myself to be a Torontonian ex-pat. I grew up in Scarborough before it was absorbed by the Greater Toronto Area; when the Sky Dome was still called the Sky Dome and the CN Tower was still called the CN Tower; when the Eaton Centre was still home to Eaton’s, and Simpson’s was still in the Scarborough Town Centre.
About five years ago, I moved to Waterloo, lured by the availability of a desk job to fund my passions, and a cost of living which is a fraction of Toronto’s. And, although I can now comfortably call Waterloo “home”, I still look longingly at Toronto. In the past year, I’ve been there so often that some acquaintances assume I live there.
That’s not to say that Waterloo doesn’t have anything to offer. Instead of 401 Richmond, we have a more artist-centric centre with Globe Studios. OCAD and The Centre for Innovation Law & Theory host public lectures, but so does The Perimeter Institute (but, sadly, not free) and CIGI. Toronto has Adam & Eve Chocolatier and C’est What, but we have Vincenzo’s (which gets the best cheesecake I’ve ever had) and Wildcraft (absolutely heavenly mushroom fusilli, double-baked cheesecake, cheesecake lollipops, and the most respectable scotch/cognac/liqueur menu I’ve ever seen). CopyCamp was in Toronto, but CultureCamp will be birthed here. The spOtlight festival hosted by the Ontario Arts Council is being piloted in the Waterloo Region, and we have CAFKA and Cinematheque Waterloo; Toronto has TIFF and Nuit Blanche and its ongoing art scene.
But…somehow, the energy isn’t the same. The focus of the major institutions and cultural centres is different, as are the types of people feeding into and on them.
Grand River Transit is an absolute disgrace compared to the TTC, making it a chore to get around Kitchener-Waterloo without a car. And, despite the presence of the University of Waterloo, Laurier University, CIGI, The Perimeter Institute and RIM, we have no equivalent to The Centre for Social Innovation and certainly no critical mass to pull off something as awesome as #hohoto.
The Prosperity Council of the Waterloo Region and the stuff we’re doing at Globe Studios give me glimmers of hope that Waterloo might get shaken out of it’s sleepy-town mentality. But until that happens, I suspect I’ll still be spending many a weekend in the T-dot.
