Once a year someone in Toronto convinces various heritage buildings (and other interesting sites) to open their doors to the public (See? See the title? Yeah). Last year, SharkBoy and I nearly died of heat exhaustion while waiting 4 hours for a glimpse inside the Don Jail. This year, we decided to play it cool. If there was a wait more than 5 min, we moved on. Which worked well, especially when we saw that the CityTV building (Who wants to see a design-by-committee-boondoggle building?!?) had an hour long line and we decided to hoof it to the movies instead. Thankfully we chose correctly.

We did get to see the rooftop garden at City Hall and that was beautiful. I was mauled by bush people. Seriously – Bush People. We went up into the 14 floor deck of the Canada Life building and got some great shots. We also saw the inside of the Trinity Church, where the band The Cowboy Junkies recorded The Trinity Sessions. I do have to say that this year was a bit of a snoozefest. When we went into the MaRS building on College Street, we were treated like marketing/science lab rats. If we weren’t asked to fill out questionnaires on computers in the lobby, we were asked to leave stickers on questionnaire plaques all around the building, that had leading questions like “If we could read your genes to discover if you had a defect, and treat it, would you want your genes read?” Uh… DUH! One office we had access to on the 4th floor was the centre for observing prosperity world wide (or some such high concept). Big brain think tank stuff. We were lead around the beautiful Victorian Hospital – converted to office space – by the office manager herself who boasted to us “You know Roger XXX? From the University of Toronto?” Blank stares from us “He’s a big name in academia…” which resulted in us nodding politely. When the office manager asked if we wanted to leave our emails for updates on their upcoming projects, I stifled the comment “Maybe you can tell me exactly how Roger can afford all this?” This summed up my Open Doors vibe this year. Not much interesting.