And... Action!

You begin to notice it slowly at first...

Something just feels a little... off... but you can't quite put your finger on what it is...

Then you realise - hey! This isn't William street! Who changed that sign?

Hmmm, that's odd, there never used to be a subway station here... and our subway stations don't even look like that!

And why is there a cop car outside my apartment? Is something bad going down?

Then it hits you - you're on the set of a movie!

Toronto is a very popular movie-making destination as it can easily be made to resemble New York city, although it's much, much cheaper to film here. In fact, the city is often nicknamed "Hollywood north". In the two years we've been here we've seen countless advertisements, TV shows and movies being shot around the city. It's amazing how little is needed to transform a block into a New York scene. Just add a couple of UPS post boxes, a trash can and some yellow taxis and hey presto - you're in the big apple! My new favourite game is called 'Toronto-spotto', where I watch a movie filmed here (such as Robocop) and try to recognise where the scenes were filmed (such as a high speed chase scene in Robocop that passes by the gelato shop one block away from our apartment). The Pac-Man themed Mini Coopers in the first picture were for an Adam Sandler movie called 'Pixels' - look out for it in 2015 in a cinema near you!

Canadian Cuisine - Part 3 (Stereotypical Canadian foods & drinks)

Maple syrup

This quintessential Canadian sweetener is made by boiling the sap collected from maple trees. Different cooking temperatures and processes are used to make maple sugar, maple butter and maple taffy. It's best eaten on waffles or pancakes, but I've also seen maple flavoured cookies, maple fudge, maple chocolate, maple doughnuts, maple coffee, maple beer, maple sausages and even maple potato chips.

Poutine

Poutine is Quebec's version of the dirty late-night kebab. In it's most basic format, poutine is a pile of french fries smothered in gravy and topped with cheese curds. Many interesting variations exist, including poutine with pulled pork, poutine with curry sauce, duck poutine and so on. McDonald's has even started serving McPoutine! I know it's not pretty, but it tastes a lot better than it looks, I promise.

Double Double & Tim Bits

Tim Horton's is an extremely popular Canadian coffee & doughnut chain. It's fiercely loyal following is due in part to the rock-bottom coffee prices, but it's also based on a strong sense of national pride. Not only was the company's creator a famous hockey player, but the brand itself is uniquely Canadian, and therefore considered the 'anti-Starbucks'. The most popular beverage by far is a Double Double (coffee with two creams and two sugars). Doughnuts and doughnut holes (called Tim Bits) are available in many different flavours and offer a welcome distraction from the awful tasting coffee.

Butter Tarts

Butter tarts are a simple yet delicious pastry, with a sweet and gooey filling made from butter, sugar and vanilla. Controversially, some butter tarts contain raisins or pecans, but purists such as myself prefer the plain, unadulterated version.

Nanaimo Bars

The Nanaimo Bar is a no-bake slice made with a chocolate biscuit and coconut base, a vanilla custard layer and a chocolate topping. They are named after the city of Nanaimo in Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Nanaimo bars are readily available in most bakeries and cafes (including Tim Hortons).

Beavertails
Picture a cinnamon doughnut that's been flattened into a long, thin slab in order to maximise the deep-fried surface area, thereby exponentially increasing the yumminess (and calorie content). These are best wolfed down piping hot in freezing cold conditions, such as ice-skating along a frozen canal.

S'mores

A tasty treat best enjoyed by the campfire. Take a graham cracker (a square, sweet biscuit), place a couple of pieces of milk chocolate on top, then add a toasted marshmallow and sandwich the whole sticky, gooey, delicious mess together with another graham cracker. Bonus points awarded if you can eat one without getting any on your face!

Montreal smoked meat sandwiches

Montreal smoked meat is seasoned, cured beef that is cut into thick slices and typically served in an enormous sandwich with yellow mustard. The oldest and most famous placed to get a smoked meat sandwich in Montreal is Schwartz's Deli (which incidentally, is co-owned by Celine Dion).

Mac & Cheese (Kraft Dinner)

This is a Canadian comfort food that fills people with a profound sense of nostalgia as they recall the heavily processed, artificially coloured and flavoured snack of their childhood. For the sake of cultural research, I consumed a serving of Kraft Dinner and was not entirely convinced that it qualifies as a food product.

Peameal Bacon

I'm not really sure why this is a thing, but I'll tell you about it anyway. Peameal bacon is made from pork loins that are rolled in cornmeal. It doesn't sound very appealing and the taste did nothing to change my initial opinion. Back in the day, the coating was made from ground peas (hence the name 'peameal') in order to preserve the meat. Eating a peameal bacon sandwich from the St Lawrence Market is considered to be an authentic Toronto experience.

Ice Wine

Ice wine can only be made from grapes that freeze naturally on the vine during winter, when temperatures drop to between -8 and -14 degrees celsius overnight. Once the conditions are just right, the grapes are harvested and pressed immediately. The water molecules in the grapes are frozen, so the juice that's extracted is high in sugar content and flavour which results in a sweet dessert wine. It's also much higher in price, with a 375ml bottle (half the size of a normal bottle of wine) often costing anywhere from $40 to $100. Although ice wine is made in other countries such as Germany, Canada is the largest producer of ice wine, with over 75% of its vineyards located in the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario.

Caesar

A Caesar is a cocktail similar to a Bloody Mary, with one notable exception. Instead of tomato juice, this drink calls for Clamato juice, which is a mixture of clam broth and tomato juice. It's typically served with a salt and pepper rim, plus a garnish such as celery. This drink is very popular, so bars and restaurants in Toronto have been creating increasingly more elaborate garnishes to set themselves apart, like asparagus, sausage, cheese, olives and so on. The craziest one I've heard of included a mini cheeseburger on a skewer - it's a drink and a meal in one!

Jasper, Banff & Lake Louise, Alberta

After our adventures in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, our next stop was the Canadian Rockies. We spent five days travelling along the Icefields parkway from Lake Louise to Jasper and back again to Banff.

Amazingly, as we drove into Lake Louise on the first day, I spotted a mummy bear and her cub on a grassy hill next to the highway! I think they were grizzly bears, although I didn't manage to get a photo.

Lake Louise is every bit as spectacular as all the pictures I've seen. The calm turquoise water framed by majestic ice-capped mountains is so other-worldly, I had to pinch myself to believe it was real. We followed the trail around to the back of Lake Louise and hiked 5km to the Plain of Six Glaciers, which offered a stunning view of the surrounding mountains. I was surprised to see ice and snow still on the ground in spring, although it probably won't last much longer as it was already melting and trickling down the rocks in mini-waterfalls. A Swiss tea-house at the top of the trail allowed us a brief rest before we made our way back.

The next day we started our drive north on the Icefields parkway to Jasper. Every stop along the way was breathtakingly beautiful. From the mirror-like reflections at Herbert Lake, to the stunning turquoise water at Bow Lake and Peyto Lake, the powerful Sunwapta and Athabasca waterfalls and the many large glaciers attached to the mountaintops, it's incredible to see so many natural wonders in such a short amount of time.

We took the 'Ice Explorer' bus which drives you up onto the Athabasca glacier. It was interesting to hear about the science behind these formations and pretty exciting to walk on top of a real glacier! I filled my water bottle with fresh glacier water to drink, I wonder if it made me look any younger?

After spending one night in Jasper we drove back along the Icefields parkway, stopping to take in the scenery at several points along the way. At the 'Valley of Five Lakes' trail, we had a surprise encounter with a black bear! It was sitting on the path in front of us, so we promptly (and quietly) retreated to safety. Fortunately a group of Dutch tourists (equipped with bear bells and bear spray) let us join them to finish the trail.

Banff itself was much larger than I expected, with a population of about 7500 people. We took the Banff gondola up to the top of Sulphur mountain for an incredible view, getting there just in time to see a beautiful rainbow spread out across the valley. Outside of Banff, we walked the trail around Johnson lake and drove by the Vermillion lakes and Lake Minnewanka.

We learnt that a good way to spot wildlife from the safety of your car is to look out for 'bear jams', which are traffic jams that occur when multiple cars stop to take photos of a bear. We saw two more black bears this way, happily munching away on dandelions by the side of the road. In addition, we also spotted an elk, a deer and several bighorn sheep. Sadly there were no moose, however I made a special visit to Toronto Zoo last week to see one (I think it was a lady moose, as it didn't have any antlers). I did get to see two grizzly bears up close though!

This was an amazing holiday and I feel very lucky to have seen so much of Canada during our two years here. I hope we return to the Rockies one day as the scenery is just so spectacular. One thing's for certain, I'll be sure to carry some bear spray with me next time!

Lake Louise

Plain of Six Glaciers trail, looking down to Lake Louise

Herbert Lake, Banff National Park

Icefields Parkway

     Athabasca Glacier

Black bear, Icefields Parkway

Elk, Icefields Parkway

Grizzly bear at Toronto Zoo

View of Banff from Sulphur Mountain

Sulphur Mountain, Banff

Lake Johnson, Banff National Park

Calgary, Alberta

Yee-ha! We spent one night in Calgary, Alberta before embarking on our trip to the Rockies. It was the week before the Calgary Stampede and cowboy fever was in the air. The city reminded me a bit of Perth, with large open streets, low-lying suburbs and a similar feel in the city centre. Maybe it was also the hot day, which quickly turned into a thunderstorm with hailstones! The saying in Calgary is, if you don't like the weather, just wait 5 minutes, as it's likely to change again soon.

    

St John's, Newfoundland

After flying to St John's, Newfoundland at the eastern-most point of the continent, you start to get a feel of the sheer magnitude of Canada and the incredible variety of scenery that exists here.

St John's is considered by many to be Canada's cultural capital and there's certainly a vibrant, creative feel to the community. We enjoyed exploring some of the cool shops and cafes in the city and had an authentic 'Newfie' dinner of codfish and scrunchions at O'Reilley's pub, while a local musician sang traditional Newfoundland folk songs.

The so-called 'jellybean row' of brightly coloured Victorian townhouses in St John's is very charming. It's said that the vibrant hues enabled sea captains returning from voyage to correctly identify their house through the thick fog, however I've also read that the colourful paint was part of a revitalisation project in the late 1970s.

We drove north along the coast from St John's to visit a couple of sleepy seaside villages and do some iceberg spotting. Fortunately we were able to see two large icebergs directly off the coast of St John's at nearby Signal Hill. When the ocean temperatures rise in spring, the glaciers in Greenland start to break up and the resulting icebergs migrate south through 'iceberg alley' towards Newfoundland. The 'bergs are at least 10,000 years old and incredibly, the visible 'tip of the iceberg' (so to speak) is only 10% of its entire mass. We took an iceberg cruise to get even closer and it was quite magical to see these beautiful formations just floating along.

 

  

 

Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

After completing the Cabot trail, we headed back towards southern Nova Scotia. Peggy's Cove is a popular tourist area, featuring a tall lighthouse overlooking a rugged coastline of granite boulders. Lunenburg is a historic fishing town with some very colourful architecture. It is said to be one of the best examples of British colonial settlement in Canada and is a designated World Heritage site.

Cape Breton Highlands, Nova Scotia

Our next stop was Cape Breton in north eastern Nova Scotia. We drove clockwise around the Cabot Trail, which is a scenic loop about 300km in length. The rugged natural beauty of this coastline was very different to anything we've seen in Canada so far.

Prince Edward Island

After leaving New Brunswick, we drove north east along the enormous 13km Confederation bridge that links Nova Scotia to Prince Edward Island. The capital Charlottetown is a sweet little city with some lovely shops and restaurants. We had a fantastic dinner at Terre Rouge Bistro, which features fresh, local produce from the island's many farms.

PEI's size is a little deceptive. Looking at a map, you'd assume you could travel the entire island in a day, however at 224km long and 64km at it's widest point, it can take some time to cover. We spent a beautiful sunny day driving across the sprawling countryside and taking in the spectacular scenery. With rolling green hills, wild purple and pink lupin flowers, freshly ploughed fields of red earth and sandy dunes lining the coast, it's such a uniquely beautiful landscape.

It's not surprising that this picturesque environment inspired LM Montgomery to write the highly popular Anne of Green Gables series.We visited the famous Green Gables house in Cavendish, which was thoughtfully decorated with period furniture and surrounded by a beautiful flower garden.