Trams, treacle and trips to the museum

Travelling abroad is a linguistic adventure. Osh is now well versed in Canada-speak: trams are streetcars, trousers are pants, buggies are strollers, nappies are diapers, biscuits are cookies, rubbish is garbage, the tube is the subway and the back-garden is the back yard. But none of this is really of any importance at all compared to the utter delight at travelling on the streetcars.

Streetcars rattle up and down Queen Street (just at the bottom of my sister’s street) and they have Oisin transfixed. Although he travelled on them when he was last here he was only 18 months old and has no memory of them. We have spent many a happy (chilly) hour on the sidewalk (pavement) watching trams (streetcars) thundering past and he loves to ride the streetcar. To add to this new found love of trams about 5 minutes from my sister’s house is the depot where the streetcars all congregate. Lots of them. All in neat rows beneath a web of cables and with the myriad tram tracks glistening in the sun. This has now become a place of pilgrimage for the young master who stands by the edge of the depot expounding at length on the whys and wherefores of tram travel. And above you can see a picture of Osh and his cousin at the tram depot.

Riding them is endlessly fascinating – he can pull the cord to stop the tram (so much more exciting and interactive that just pressing a button on a bus) and watch the turntable in the middle of the concertina trams (extra long bendy ones) twist and turn as the tram negotiates bends in the road. Even better than that, he and his cousin Chloe sit like a couple of old people nattering away to each other the entire journey and don’t leap and jump around.

On Thursday we went to Castle Park for the morning and then for pancakes for lunch. Osh has discovered the sticky delights of Canadian Pancakes with maple syrup – and wolfed down a stack of pancakes (photographic evidence of Osh taking no note of Government advice to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day is above). They were drowning in maple syrup (Osh having battled his way into the tub of syrup before I had chance to do the stern mother thing regarding sugar in-take etc!). He’s not tried pancakes and bacon yet, nor Poutine (a Canadian delight consisting of fries, gravy and curds…..my favourite) but we’ve a number of days left for further culinary adventures.

Today’s excitement consisted of a trip to the drop-in centre for parents and babies to meet Rachelle and Mira. The drop-in is an extraordinary place – free, very well equipped with toys and games and books, packed with delightful and helpful people, free coffee and so on…..all of which goes to explain why the Canadian standard of living is so very high. Mind you, Portsmouth trounces all over Toronto in terms of accessibility of their public transport (Toronto might be very cheap and integrated but don’t try travelling on regular transport with a buggy or a wheelchair). Anyway Osh demonstrated how the British had conquered half the planet by building the most spectacularly complex wooden railway around most of the room (studiously avoiding the communal singing that was going on in the middle of the room!).

After lunch Osh and I paid another pilgrimage to the tram depot and then after tea we all went to the Royal Ontario Museum which is free on a Friday. What a great child-friendly exhibition they have there! Osh and Chloe donned goggles and went digging for dinosaur bones and then giggled and squealed at the tanks full of tarantulas and cockroaches. Where they got the cockroaches from I don’t know but they were bigger and more repulsive than any I’d ever seen and I’ve seen plenty of cockroaches on my travels. We visited the bat cave (Osh is apparently not a bat fan) and then we went to see the Moose. “Is it real Mim?” “No sweetheart”(mother rapidly avoiding an explanation of taxidermy). “Is it dead Mim?” “Well, yes and then it was stuffed” I said (colliding headlong with description of taxidermy). Behind the Moose was a wolf: “look Mim a dead dog!” shouts Osh. And just beyond them “look Mim a dead tiger too!”. The subtleties of taxidermy are lost of the Oshlet, it would appear.