THIS IS MY TORONTO.
When one of my exchange partners arrives in Toronto we have a day or two of orientation before I fly off to their home in Sweden or Scotland or New Zealand. Out the front door of our apartment and east one block to the dazzling Santiago Calatrava atrium in BCE Place. From there a short walk to the little park with its gathering of noontime office workers and the whimsical sculptures and the elaborate bas relief adornments on the old Bank of Commerce Building. I love showing it off to visitors. They are startled because what they have heard is that Toronto is nice and clean and friendly, but dull.
So the news that tourists in Toronto are “less satisfied” that they had been in past years was all that the let’s-all-hate-Toronto newspaper pundits need to launch another attack on the city I live in and love. All they needed was a new statistic and their self-anointed criticism of our city begins anew.
To paraphrase some of the more Cassandra-like sky-is falling pundits, the streets are crowded with panhandlers, the new garbage containers are monsters, the food and hotels are expensive, and you simply can’t find the waterfront. (I am paraphrasing Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail.)
I am fed up with the endless comparisons to Chicago, where the Mies van der Rohe apartment buildings face but do not block the lake.
I love Chicago. Not for its waterfront, which I don’t think is as varied as ours, but for its truly American architecture, it’s used-to-be jazz clubs , and its Viagra corner where rich middle aged guys in Lamborghinis go to pick up beautiful young women.
But this is Toronto. Our cityscape is an archetypical cityscape. Drive into town from the west along the Gardiner. At night especially, you are greeted by the dazzling array of condos and office building on both sides of the expressway.
The critics obsess that it is a “wall of ugly condos.” (True enough some are ugly, but in Chicago not all apartment buildings are by Mies van der Rohe.
Toronto-phobia at its best derides our “ruining” lakefront. (In fact they are referring to the Harbourfront, the lakefront is not behind the “wall” of condos.)
Waterfront: there are several. There is the promenade that runs between the buildings and the water. Thousands of tourists can walk and admire the expanse of the bay, or take a tour of the island lagoons. There are concerts and events and a wonderful gallery and all the variety of restaurant and street foods any tourists loves.
The fact that tens of thousands of people choose to live in the Harbourfront area is a testimony to its attractiveness.
So you want a lake view - according to the critics, we come in a bad second to Chicago. Have these gloom-spreaders ever walked the eastern beaches from Ashbridges Bay to Balmy Beach? Have they walked from the western gap (for the Toronto bashers information, that’s where the hated Island airport is, you can find it if you leave your snug little condos.) along the Sunnyside walk which takes them, past the western beaches and to the exquisite suspension bridge across the Humber river, then to the walk past new condos and Ontario Place and to the shores of Humber Bay.
Chicago does not have these vistas. They do have if you the a Chicago river cruises. What you get on a lakeside walk is a view of water, unless you stop off at Lincoln Park and go to the zoo.

Back to my exchangers and their quick tour. Going east from my front door we stop at St. Lawrence Market, once named by Conde Nast as one of the twenty best markets in the world. We head south to the Esplanade and walk east along a tree-lined allee reminiscent of Paris. At the end of the Esplanade is the Distillery District, with galleries, a great coffee house, a brewery, an award-winning theatre and a number of fine restaurants. I always take them through one of the finest glass galleries anywhere – the Sandra Ainsley gallery, where the world’s finest art glass makers, including Dale Chihooly, are on display.
In no time at all my visitors learn how to use our transit system The whole city is there for them: Bloor and its fashion neighbourhoods on Yorkville and Cumberland, the Royal Ontario Museum with its new crystal cubes designed by Daniel Liebeskind, one of the best displays of pre-Columbian art at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics. (I have to remember that meso-Amnericans do not like to have their art referred to as from the time before Columbus “discovered” America.).
The same subway and trolley system takes them to Chinatown and Kensington Market, Greek Town, or the “Strada” St. Clair west or the south Asian village around Pape and Gerrard. Funny how the naysayers forget that we are still one of the most, if not the most, multi-cultural city in the world..
The complaint that everything is expensive simply means you don’t know where to go. True -in my neighbouthood there are restaurants where for dinner, if you can get a reservation without booking weeks in advance, you will have to offer up your firstborn to pay for dinner, there are even more restaurants where you can eat well for twenty to thirty dollars.
I really am tired of the snide-self-loathing “critics” who have used the “satisfaction” figures to prove what they have always believed, that Toronto, as a destination, sucks!
Well, how many of you self-styled mavens of tourism have walked the streets and spoken to tourists and have made sure they got the help and advice they need.
I often visit the sidewalk pub on the Esplanade that sells 400 different beers. There is usually a tourist sitting close by. I engage them. I ask them what they have seen. One German couple, said they were looking for the famous Victorian buildings. In fact, after the entire downtown burned down in the early 1900s, new construction gave us rows of wonderful buildings like the south side of Front or just one block north, the Colborne street buildings, lit up at night.
Alas, living in Toronto, at least for some people, carries with it the obligation to wish you were somewhere else.
Too bad.

Many of you were interested in Home Exchange. Here is an article I have written which may be published in the Star Travel section.
HOME EXCHANGE - the way to go..

The first obvious benefit of home exchange is you don’t pay for costly hotel accommodation, and you won’t have to eat every meal at a restaurant. But the real advantage is that you become part of a neighbourhood with its own shops, supermarkets, and – as in our Paris exchange – the best boulangerie.

Downside:: you are on your own (except when you are met at the airport by your exchangers,) – no convenient bus pick-up or tour guide pampering. You are on your own in a strange city armed with nothing but a guide book.. What can happen? How about this:

“Here we are – this is the zoo,” announced the exasperated Lisbon cab driver.

“You can’t let us out here,” I protested.

except when you are met by your exchangers, except when you are met by your exchangers, “The address you gave me is not even in Lisbon, it’s in the suburbs” he replied angrily.

“But my friend in Lisbon said he lived behind the zoo,” I said.

“So you’re here,” replied the now furious cabbie.

The upside: new friends: Alberto, mathematics teacher and aspiring artist, with the elusive address in Lisbon. Trees and Dick in The Hague. Henri and Michele in Paris, Debby and Lu in Hengelo, Ken and Caroline in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mary in Brussels, Gianni in Treviso, Leonard and Anne in Auckland, and Mike and Pam in Aberdeen.

Where there is “overlap” we pick each other up at the airport, then home for a jet-lagged nap and a meal, and. a brief orientation tour of the neighbourhood.

. How is it done? We belong to two major home exchange organizations. You have access to all the listings on the website. Ours are HomeLink and Intervac, two of the biggest, but you can find more by googling Home Exchange.

If you have an apartment in a prime location like Paris, London, Rome or maybe Barcelona, offers pour in..

We solicit, sending dozens of Emails to preferred locations. We travel only in “shoulder months – never in summer – so we miss many potential exchanges. Many listings are for people with families who want July or August. exchanges.

Another question: “Don’t you worry that strangers will come to your home and do damage?” I remind them that we are also in their home and living with their possessions. So far, not so much as a glass has been broken and usually the place is left as neat and clean as when we left.

What really matters is that we make friends. On our way to Venice we stopped for a couple of days in Amsterdam. We invited Trees and Dick in The Hague join us for dinner. Her Email response: “We will be at Schipol airport (arrival time 7:30 a.m.) to take you to out house for a couple of days. You didn’t see Vermeer’s :”The Girl With The Pearl Earring,” and you didn’t get to Delft.“ Two days later they drove us back to our Amsterdam hotel. They did it again two years later picking us up, staying in Amsterdam then driving us all the way across Holland to Hengelo.

Pretty little Hengelo just across the border from Munster in German was a treat and devoid of tourists. Here’s where another feature of home exchange saves money. Debby and Lu offered a car exchange – not unusual if the exchange is in a small town or the countryside. We were able to tour the back roads and discover an unpublicized part of Holland which just happened to include one of the world’s great art parks, with a collection of Van Gogh’s bigger than the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Debby and Lu of course used our car to tour but not in the city.

In New Zealand, our stay was in an elegant big house in Auckland. The only way top see New Zealand is to tour – we used their car, and they used ours.

Just one note about the ”elegant” house. Some people complain that they will only exchange for something that is comparable to your home. So if you have tennis courts and a swimming pool, your exchanger should have them too. Forget it. Better you should stay at George V in Paris. You’d hate the cozy little stuio we stay in.

We’ve stayed in everything from a tiny house in a small town in Belgium, to the Treviso “villa” with the marble floors and winding wrought iron staircase.
In Lisbon Alberto’s atelier was, in a word – cozy. If your inclination is toward five star luxury. Forget home exchange. We want the experience and the visit and the neighbourhood and the people.

Our former Paris exchangers Henri and Michele maintain a very chic studio apartment in the Port Maillot area with a permanent home in Chantilly. We have an open invitation to stay whenever we want. He is a designer, artist and photographer. The home in Chantilly is breathtaking combination of fun and high-tech design. He picked us up at Charles de Gaulle and after waiting patiently for more than an hour for lost luggage. drove us to Chantilly for an elegant al fresco lunch, then all the way back into Paris to their apartment.

In Charlotte Ken and Caroline “hosted” us. They offered to vacate or we could share the space. We had our own bedroom and bath in a big house with two charming hosts. Every morning, Caroline would have fresh oatmeal and coffee waiting.,

In Treviso., Gianni met us art the airport and took us to his elegant marble-floored villa in Treviso, about a 15 minute train ride from Venice.) He lives our of town in his country home. One sunny afternoon we spent picnicking on his property complete with chilled bottles of Proscco.

Mike and Pam from Aberdeen stayed with us last summer after a holiday in Muskoka. They repaid us with eight days of Scottish hospitality. They drove to see all the castles. We visited the Whisky Trail. One night when I decided I had to cook we went to the supermarket. He wouldn’t let me pay.

Try getting any of these experiences through a travel agent.

By the way, the Lisbon stand-off worked out? Finally we agreed that he should drive us to the suburban address. Enroute, a nagging thought. : I had envelope with Alberto’s key in it. I opened it. The correct address was there.

Yes, he did live behind the zoo.

When one day starts to feel like the day before; when you find yourself obsessing about what to have for dinner; when you are "filling time" watching TV and can't remember the name of an actor - you wonder what was so great about reaching 80 relatively unscathed.
I mention "filling time" because that is, I think, one of the most insidious elements of growing older. You think you are following the advice to "keep yourself occupied," when in fact you are simply filling in time. Before you know it the day is gone and you can now fret about what to have for breakfast tomorrow and what day is tomorrow?
If all this sounds familiar to you, it has become an everyday experience for me, the self-anointed guru of staying focussed and maintaining a productive routine.
After nearly six weeks of illness, pain, hospital confinement, and the limitations of movement imposed by hip surgery, I am coming out the other side.
I even remembered the name:Gene Hackman. But that is another story.
I am taking hold again. Now I am going to be in control of my day. Now I can take some of my own advice and stay involved.
I have a friend, a bit younger than I, who filled his day playing bridge at a club but has had it evaporate with the death of partners. I ask him what he does to stay focussed, to maintain a schedule - he says that he reads the Globe and Mail from cover to cover and by that time it is time for lunch. Not good enough.
In my most productive years I awoke to the need to absorb the news from as many sources as possible before going to work. I would write opinions, short opinion essays. It kept e busy. What's more, it made me relevant. I have said before, and it is in my book "Blindsided by Retirement" that feeling irrelevant is toxic. Having something to say but nowhere to say it is frustrating. I would quote Archimedes announcing: "Give me a place to stand and I can move the world."
I lost my place to stand, but I did not lose my obligation to be relevant, even if only to myself, some old colleagues, and my family.

Buzz Hargrove has made a pact with the devil. To save jobs and perhaps prolong the death throes of the Canadian auto industry, he conceded to the Ford Motor Company that his members would not ask for a wage increase, and to sustain the faltering auto giant, would reduce the value of certain benefits.
When GM announced the layoff of one full shift at the Oshawa truck plant, the entire Durham region groaned. Buzz suggested that somehow there should have been job sharing instead of layoffs.
The whole idea of shortening the work week to give more workers a job has foundered. In fact, part of Sarkozy's victory, a triumph for the Right, is his pledge to "put people back to work." What he means is that for the sake of productivity, France should not continue with its short work week and start sweating its workers. (My words not his.)
The other question is, would the GM workers, most of whom voted for Jim Flaherty and the Conservatives, be self-sacrificing enough to give some of their work time to keep their fellow workers employed? Clearly they would not.
But the idea has its merits. Of course, the Federal government, through Employment Insurance, would be obliged to "top up" the earning somewhat. Everyone would take a hit but the long term benefits would be enhanced prosperity.
I am not so naive as to believe that there is such benevolence that workers and government would give. Frank Stronach who wants to build an electric car, has told the auto industry it has to cut wages.
Unfortunately it is Big Business that holds that ruling hand. Their decision to out source, to look for low wage labour markets, is inimical to the maintenance of healthy living standard for all our workers.
They are, and will continue to be, a disposable commodity.