What a great city! I went to grad school in Buffalo, and we used to go up to Toronto a couple of times a year, but that was, well, decades ago. I didn't recognize a thing. But I loved it. The weather was clear and cool, the convention smoothly run, and the food was terrific.

I'll do the business of the convention on the other blog; this one will be impressions of my days in the city, though I'm writing them in retrospect, on the plane to Phoenix. One of the things about a convention like this is it's almost impossible to find an hour to go back to your room and write. Too many people to hang out with.

First, early morning walks. I do this at home, and I try to do it when I travel, too. Every day a different direction, just looking. I like the fresh morning air and the sense that nothing has quite begun yet. I suppose it's a feeling of potential. An unfamiliar city adds a dimension of surprise. It's very like me to get lost, because I'm paying more attention to what I'm looking at than to how many lefts and rights I've made. And I suffer from the native New Yorker's erroneous assumption that cities are basically grids and blocks are four sided, so I'm always thinking I can go up this way and over that way and down here and that'll get me back... This can produce anxiety if I need to be somewhere at a specific time -- which, the morning I was stuck on the far side of the Sky Tower or the Space Needle or whatever they call that thing, wondering how the Blade Runner plaza-and-skywalk system worked, I did -- but if not, I can generally blunder my way back. When I'm walking I'm interested in everything, but as usual more interested in the backs, the sides, the unfinished and unfabulous places, the leftovers and left-behinds. Toronto has a lot of these, brick and terra cotta from the turn of the last century, stone and cast concrete from the 1930's. Some of them are quite wonderful, and all of them are evocative.