Tourist for a day

Sometimes you need to be a tourist in your own city.  Regardless of how long you have lived there, or how many times you have seen the same landmarks.  Sometimes its just fun to go for a walk down a street you may have passed a hundred times, but never actually ventured down.   Born and raised here, I have so many memories of events, happenings or just streetcar rides as a kid going to the CNE, or watching the Santa Claus parade. There are very few streets that I haven't been down already, and with it being as cold as it was yesterday, I decided to head underground for part of my walk.

My mission was to take a journey around the downtown  trying to be super conscious of looking at things through the eyes of a tourist. Trying to notice details on buildings and looking for landmarks that tourists may use to make their way back to where they started from, I was wondering at the same time -is our city easy to navigate through?  Its hard to pretend to not know where you're going, when you have travelled the same route so many times, but I think Toronto is one of the easiest cities to not get lost in due in part to our grid system for streets which make finding north and south relatively easy.

I ventured through part of the PATH system towards the Eaton Centre and that made getting from King to Dundas very easy, only because I am familiar with the underground maze.  Many times I see confused groups or families examining the maps of the system trying to figure out where they are, and where they should be.  Toronto at ground level is very easy to navigate, underground (if you are new), is not.  Albeit convenient and warm on a bitterly cold winter day. The PATH system is not something I would recommend to any tourist who is looking for a short cut underground.  I was hoping to see something on my walk yesterday that I hadn't already seen before, and I didn't.  The crisp clean air and the sunshine made a brisk walk yesterday more enjoyable regardless of how cold it was.  It made looking at our buildings and streets a little more enjoyable, and made me forget for a while how tragic our failing transit system has become.  I challenge everyone to be a tourist in their own city for a day, you may notice something you never did before, not only in your surroundings, but in yourself.