Happy Canada Day (or, Self-Important Urbanite Hatred For Street Festivals)
Happy Canada Day (not Spain winning the EuroCup, as pictured above)!
While millions will leave their houses in search of free concerts, tiny flags, and fireworks today, I will be staying in. Probably folding laundry and making bread. Trying to ignore the revelry around me.
Like most self-important urbanites, I utterly loathe street festivals. After six years of living in the downtown core, I am so over street festivals that I will do anything in my power to stay out of their way. Why should I have to give up my city to hoards of 905ers on weekends and holidays? They clog up my transit, they fill up my favourite restaurants, they barricade the sidewalks with their slow walking...they're a public nuisance!
Sometimes it seems like every day of the summer has some kind of festivity for me to ignore. Between the 2008 Euro Cup, Pride, Taste of Little Italy, Taste of the Danforth, the Cabbagetown Festival, Summerlicious, Yonge and Dundas Square events, Luminat'eau, etc. I'm taking a lot of side streets to get around town. It's not like I hate people who aren't Torontonians, I just don't like big crowds and overpriced corn on the cob.
You may be content to pay $4 for that corn and eat it next to some hairy shirtless man in the blazing sun, but I am not, sir!
Photo courtesy of wvs.
July 2, 2008 9:10 AM
Liam said:
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THANK you. I was really starting to think we were missing something amazing by our hate of every single street festival to ever clog our streets. Since the first unannounced parade to blockade our old street in St. Catharines, to the not-missed-at-all Molson Indy, to Nuit Blanche, to every Friday and Saturday night living in Parkdale, to Taste of the Danforth, to just last night when the simple act of going to a bank not more than a 90-second drive away took half an hour (thanks to clogged streets from Ashbridges Bay fireworks -- now that we live in Little India), I thought that I was the scrooge ruining everyone's fun.
But it's TERRIBLE. Toronto is a busy enough place without giant Vaughn-crawling SUVs cutting across paths of streetcars with about 37 teenagers hanging out of it hooting.
And don't get me started on soccer celebrations. France won a QUARTER-FINAL World Cup game once, and my old streetcar ride from King and Jarvis back to Parkdale took 90 minutes, since they all piled out of those bistros near King and John wielding their baguettes and seafood and class riots (too far?).
Thus has been the reason we've tried to leave Toronto for nearly every major event in the past couple years.
Preach on!