I almost didn’t make it in to Canada. I got pulled aside at the airport and asked to go through a different line than everyone else into a room with one border security guy. He grilled me about why I was in Canada, asked me how long I would be here, how I was paying for my trip and when I was leaving. I was honest with him and was overly cheerful to make up for his grumpiness. In the end he stamped my passport and threw it across the counter from where he was to me and said “Welcome to Canada”. Everyone complains about border security in the U.S, but when I arrived in Boston I had a choice of which booth to go to because there were no queues and the woman who stamped my passport genuinely seemed happy I was visiting – Toronto was the opposite.
I arrived at the Toronto City airport instead of the normal one that is out of town. The airport is on an island on Lake Ontario in downtown Toronto. There was an option to take a ferry to the mainland and the weather was nice so I queued up with 5 other people for the ferry. At first I thought I had made a mistake – if only 5 people were using the ferry, it must be expensive/take forever/crap is some sort of way. Turns out, it is the shortest ferry ride on the planet.
You can see in the pic that we left the pier at the bottom left and travelled all the way to the ferry parking spot across the way. It was free though and offered a great view of the city.
