Today, we made an expedition into Toronto, about an hour and a half's drive away.
Toronto is a big town, with a population in the metropolitan area of five and a half million, so we were driving through the suburbs for a long time. We drove towards the centre, where we noticed the solid buildings
and the transport systems depending on trams. There is a web of overhead tram cables in parts of the city.
Our route passed through the large Chinatown, where you might be forgiven for thinking yourself in Hong Kong. Every single shop and restaurant has a Chinese name, and the area is large.
Our destination was the Royal Ontario Museum, where we had booked tickets to see an exhibition called 'Maya, Secrets of their Ancient World'. We were greeted by a Mayan figure in the foyer, wearing considerably fewer clothes than we were
He was stained that blue colour, rather than being blue with cold, but given the temperature, he must have envied us our coats!
Photography was forbidden in the exhibition, even of the replica artefacts and murals and photographs of the temples facades, so I can't post any pictures here. As I knew very little of the Mayans, I found it interesting and informative. I had not realised that, when the Spaniards arrived to colonise that part of the Americas, the great Mayan cities had been abandoned for over 500 years. Nor had I realised that there was not a Mayan 'empire' with a single governing body; what we call the Mayan civilisation is made up of numerous independent city states, sharing similar traits, practices and beliefs. The cities were frequently in conflict with one another, involving warfare, torture and sometimes sacrifice. As well as the photographs of the temples, there were statues, carvings and sculptures, ceramics, household goods, jewellery, artefacts connected with ball games, and funerary masks.
After the exhibition, we had some lunch and then took some time to explore the rest of the museum, which is enormous. I started in the Chinese area, where there is a Ming Tomb dating from 1656
with attendant statues
This one is a military tomb official.
Some tombs had stone animals lining the path. This camel came from a different tomb, not the one in the museum.
I had time to visit other parts of the museum, for instance the Canadian Gallery featuring art and artefacts from Canada. I spent some time viewing the areas dedicated to Africa, particularly Egypt. This is a bust of Cleopatra
And this lovely diorama shows an imagined Egyptian lady getting ready for a party. She has all her jewellery and cosmetics on the little table beside her.
We only had time to see a fraction of this museum, before it was time to leave. We drove through other parts of Toronto, having a brief look at the downtown areas
and Government buildings.
Toronto is remarkable in that there are quite considerable residential areas in the centre of the city, a legacy of the time before the 1950s when Toronto was a very small city
It gets dark quite early, and bearing in mind that we had 100 km to drive in the snow which was starting to fall, we headed off for home.
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