Oy, Canada! Part 2

A-Minus: 17 Hours

I'm sitting here in Canada, getting through the day. Toronto is actually quite a thriving Jewish city. I'm here in Thornhill, where you can get kosher pizza, chinese, and burgers all within a few feet (or metres) of eachother. You can bump into visibly Jewish people in the grocery store, see kids with yarmulkes playing basketball, and hear Hebrew spoken in the street. It's a major switch from Walnut Creek, where you can't even get kosher bread, and where I did not once randomly bump into a visible (yarmulke or sheitl-wearing) Jew during my entire four and a half years there.

Like most Jewish population centers with a high standard of Torah observance, Toronto is a magnet for Israeli expatriates. Not that they are necessarily attracted to the Jewish religion, but it reminds them of home. Still, it saddens me to see all the Israeli business names, like "Halutz Cleaners." Halutz means "pioneer" in Hebrew, and is a name that many Jews gave themselves in order to erase their European or Western backgrounds and set new roots in the land of Israel. Yet, two generations later, here they are in Toronto.

Toronto is not a particularly "pretty" city, at lest the parts I've seen, but there are nice patches of wealthy suburbs here and there. It feels quite a bit like Be'er Sheva, with luxurious and scrappy places in close proximity, and endless amounts of space and land, and so no incentive to gentrify or improve the existing strip malls and empty lots. The weather is hot, rainy, and humid, rather than Be'er Sheva's hot, dry, and humid. It doesn't have the skin-deep flashiness of California, or the pumping energy of a New York City, where people really look like they're "going" somewhere. Here they just sort of meander around. Or perhaps that's just my exhaustion and jetlag kicking in. Either way, I don't think I could ever live here, it's far too blah.

So I'm spending the rest of the day here struggling to lift my jet-lagged body off the chair to sort through my things. When I checked in for my Air Canada flight they actually weighed my carry-on, and it was 44 lbs rather than the required 22 lbs, so I had to either throw away 22 lbs of DVDs and books or pay $75 to check a third bag. I chose to throw the stuff away, though I managed to later retrieve some. What a painful loss. Then I checked my email and read Nefesh B'Nefesh's message that my load limit for tomorrow's flight is 17 lbs for carryon items, so now I have to go through and throw out another 5 lbs. It hurts, but I suppose I can just buy it again when I start my new life.