Dan’s Toronto Adventures: Yorkdale Mall

It’s finally time for me to get back to writing.  After spending a lot of time away from home, only to come back for long enough to leave for good, I find myself living in a new city.  With internet access finally back in my hands I’ve decided to put together what I hope to be a somewhat regular feature detailing my exploits in this new city.  I have other posts that I’ve been meaning to write from even before the move, but I want to get this started while the move is still fresh in my mind, and before anyone else I know who just moved to Toronto decides to do a similar feature on their own site.

I suspect anyone reading this already knows the fact, but the decision to move here was so my wife, Kathleen, could take part in the University of Toronto’s accelerated nursing program.  The plan seems to be to only stay in the city for as long as the program takes, and then to move away, probably back to the Kitchener-Waterloo area, when it’s over.  Since we’re both viewing this as a sort of temporary residence I’ve decided that in these two years we’re here to try and do a large number of Toronto activities, most notably, I’ve set the goal of trying to see every professional sports team that plays in the city with the possible exception of the Raptors (because I don’t think I can make myself care).  One team is already checked off, but that story is for another post.

On one of our first afternoons here we decided that instead of spending the whole day unpacking (something we should really finish sometime) we’d go off to the mall, but also use this as an opportunity to try out the TTC’s various methods of transportation.  Yorkdale was an obvious choice partly because it’s not actually that far, and gave us an opportunity to take the subway, but also because I was fairly certain they had an Arby’s in the food court (Last I checked there was only one restaurant in all of Kitchener and Waterloo, and it was so far away from everything, so I try to get to them when I can).  We set out early in the afternoon on a walk to the subway station during a terrible heat wave, and it turns out the subway is further away from here than I had thought (I knew where the next station north was, but it turns out instead of just going south from there the train goes south-east and we needed to walk much more).  By the time we finally got to the train we were already exhausted and we were only a fraction of the way to our destination.

The walk around the mall was kinda boring, but it turns out I was right about the Arby’s and so it was worth it all along, as the 2nd largest mall in the city, and 5th largest in the country I have to say I am unimpressed, although I’ve been there before so I don’t know what I expected.  Other than the token bookstore, video game store and movie theatre the rest of it is just filled with clothing and cell phones with some food here and there.  I can’t imagine how all these clothing and cell phone stores can be profitable while surrounded by competition but apparently there is money to be made by having 5 different providers with stores, as well as several stores willing to sell you a phone and set you up with a provider that has their own store nearby (I don’t remember but if you told me that Rogers had multiple stores in the mall I wouldn’t be surprised, and I’m not counting Fido here, but normal Rogers stores, just on opposite sides of the mall so you don’t need to go all the way over there to get yourself a new phone.

I’ve been to many malls less than half the size according to wikipedia that had a better variety of stores, it may be big and fancy but it certainly doesn’t have much for me (except delicious roast beef sandwiches) and it seems there’s other places closer with the same services in a more compact way, but how can you know that when you’ve lived in the city less than a day and don’t have internet access?  In the end, we got everything we were looking for that afternoon (as well as air conditioning during horrible heat) and made our trip home this time taking the street car back from the subway making the trip much more enjoyable.