Toronto - Part 2 Hotel

Okay, I gave you the nice part of the hotel/Toronto. Now I will give you the flip side.

While the hotel was gorgeous, the restaurants in said hotel were super expensive. Hubs and I had a 'light dinner' in the lounge after we arrived. We split a seafood chowder which was excellent and a salmon open faced sandwich which was equally good. Hubs ordered a gin martini and I had water. Price of the martini: $18.50 CAD which is Canadian currency but was pretty much 1:1 with the American dollar. Nope, this was not a bottle of gin, but one wee drink. The total price of said 'light dinner': $100.00 which included tip. One night we did eat in the main dining room for dinner and hubs learned to order a coke/soda/pop and I had water and our dinner bill with no appetizer and no dessert (menu was totally ala carte) was $150.00 So we then decided to go somewhere but the hotel to eat if we wanted to bring any money home. We also attended a 'high tea' which will be another post.

We toured the area around our hotel in search of other restaurants within walking distance. Nope - no McDonalds in site but we did find a small mini-mart and picked up snacks, pop, gatorade, milk, and cereal for the room. We did manage to find a few restaurants that were semi-close but our meal tabs usually ran between $100.00 to $150.00 per day and as much as possible we shared one meal.

I had monitored the weather in Toronto for a couple weeks prior to our arrival. They stayed fairly close to the Chicago weather but usually 5 degrees cooler. Um, yeah, best thought plans went kaput!

First Canada is on the metric system. I quickly learned that 30 degrees Celsius is not good and 20 is better than 30. I also learned that neither our hotel or the conference center or anywhere we went entertained any idea of air conditioning or fans. They were foreign words to them. So this hot flashing woman soon learned to not take the time to do her hair or wear makeup because it was sweated off as soon as I would put it on. If I braved the hair or makeup, it would decide to pour in Toronto. This was a daily occurrence. The odds were against me. (This will also be why there is only 1 picture of me for the entire trip).

As if the hot flashing wasn't bad enough, this will give you a clue as to how hot it was even in our room. I have really thin hair. At home it usually dries in 3 minutes all by itself. In Toronto I had to use a hair dryer which of course had more hot air blowing on me which turned into a vicious cycle.

We also didn't take enough clothes for the entire time. We figured we could wash at the hotel. Um....wrong. The only service they had is if they did it themselves to the tune of $6.00 for a pair of socks, $15.00 for a shirt, $25.00 for a pair of pants. So we did laundry in the bathtub and hung it up to dry. 3 days later, the clothes were still wet. So we took the hair dryer and slowly dried the clothes using the hair dryer. Not a pretty sight.

There is more but I will save them for another day.