Living in Toronto: My host family and Toronto's infrastructure

kolibrature

May 12

I'm sitting here outside again on a sunny Sunday evening in spring and just settled down at the table on my balcony with my notebook, snacking a Dutch Stroopwafel, admiring the flowers around me, and thinking about how things went on in Canada. And I just remembered that in my last post, I wrote that the quarantine hotel room was for free. I'm not entirely sure it was, though, actually I think I remembered it wrong, we had to pay but it was with a significant discount or something like that. I don't recall the exact amount, but EF didn't pay for the stay in the end. Apologies for getting it wrong last time 😀

Now let's continue our story.
Once the quarantine was finally over and I could leave the hotel with all my luggage, first I contacted my host family to let them know I'm finally coming, then ordered an Uber and headed to Scarborough, a suburb in the west of Toronto where they lived. My host family was so wonderful! They were a couple around 65 years old of Filipino descent who had lived in the U.S. and then in Canada for many years, and they were really sweet; I had such a great time with them! (I love Filipino Canadians, they are so open-hearted ❤ There are many Filipino immigrants in Canada actually (Canada is an immigrant country with many different people from many countries and of different ethnic groups just like the U.S.).)

At the subway station "Victoria Park" near our home. This sentence perfectly sums up Toronto 🙂 ❤

First I met my host mom, a cute, slender lady, always in a good mood and so friendly and welcoming! She showed me around where I would live. They had a small house in a residential area. Upon arrival, she offered me a piece of blueberry cake and some tea to warm up from the weather outside.

I actually shared a room with another EF student, a girl from Belgium much younger than me (10 years of age difference :D) but really nice! We lived in the semi-basement of the house which was basically a separate apartment with two bedrooms, a kitchen, as well as a small washroom. Later there was also another girl (from France, mid 20s) from a different English language school in Canada, iLab, who joined us in the other room. The host family had their home upstairs. There was also another room upstairs for an exchange student where another girl from the other school who was from Turkey was living. Due to the covid wave still going on, though, the family didn't want us to mingle with them upstairs and we were supposed to stay downstairs in our apartment, which is why I met my Turkish flatmate later. In fact, I wasn't upstairs the entire time until I left in May, unfortunately. This was mainly due to covid still going on, though. But school often started same for the three of us which was great because we could often travel to school together as she headed the same direction!

Later, the French girl switched rooms with the Turkish girl (there was a reason but I don't remember it) so the Turkish girl came to live with us downstairs.

At one point in April, I started feeling a bit sick and her too. I didn't mind much because it was just a mild cold (or so I thought) and in case it was covid, I was afraid to get tested because I feared if it comes out, our host family will make us move out and have us quarantine in a hotel again or something. These were crazy covid times… I thought so because they were so cautious about never mingling with one another (upstairs and downstairs) and our host mom really only came downstairs to serve dinner or do the laundry, never to spend time with us.
But after a few days she wanted us to get tested. So we had to do a covid test and of course found out we were both positive. To my surprise, though, thankfully, the family didn't throw us out; quite on the contrary, our host mom made us quarantine at home and even cared for us the entire time while we were sick in bed! ❤ ❤ ❤ She brought us medicine, hot tea, sanitizer, and our meals, and sanitized our apartment regularly! I was so grateful to have her. We were lucky 🙂 I'm sure not everyone would sacrifice so much of their energy and care. Our host family was really sweet and I'm so thankful we were living with them!

At EF, when you're staying with a host family, breakfasts and dinners are included in the budget (not the lunches, but one was at school anyway during that time of the day). So our host mom always made sure cereal, milk, toast, jam, and peanut butter were ready in the mornings. Our host mom was an already retired nurse whereas I saw our host dad maybe five times during the entire time because he worked night shifts at a hospital and returned in the morning after I left for downtown. So our host mom was home most of the time doing housekeeping tasks around the house. She would come downstairs in the evening and bring us dinner. She often cooked Philippine cuisine which often consisted of rice and vegetables with a sauce, often vegetarian, because they themselves were vegetarians (and I am, too, which was ideal!) and it was all delicious! Sometimes, she also cooked pasta, burgers, and things like that for us. Even pancakes with maple syrup! ❤ My favorites! Oh, that reminds me that I should maybe make some pancakes with maple syrup again soon ❤ 🙂

Canadian maple syrup pancakes 🙂

Our host mom also washed our clothes; there was a washing machine and a dryer in a small room in our basement but she preferred using both devices on her own so that's why she washed our clothes. (Alternatively, one can always use laundromats in the city/neighborhood.)

To go to school, I took a bus in the morning that would take me to the nearest subway station Victoria Park on Line 2. Line 2 went straight to Bathurst station where I changed to the streetcar line 511 that took me to the Queen St West stop where the EF school is. It took me about an hour to get there. Toronto's public transport system is called TTC (https://www.ttc.ca/routes-and-schedules). It's not the world's best, to be honest… 😀 I was actually puzzled by how few subway lines there are compared to the size of the city! Toronto is the most populous city in Canada, and there were actually only two long main subway lines throughout the city, and then two short subway lines that only served as extensions of the two main ones (of which line 3 stopped operating in the meantime, as I just saw online, so now there are even just 3 subway lines in Toronto! :D). Okay, there are quite a bunch of streetcars and busses, and I get it that most Canadians have a car themselves to get around (or use Uber). But the streetcars and busses aren't nearly as fast, and a big city like that of about 4m inhabitants needs more subway lines imo…
The subway was always so full! If I think of San Francisco that has like 1m inhabitants and where there were several streetcar, cable car, and BART (=SF subway) lines that connected the whole city with the suburbs, or of Berlin in Germany that is about the size of Toronto and has an endless amount of subways, urban trains, streetcars, and busses all over the place, I can't quite comprehend how Toronto can function with that kind of infrastructure 😀

Next time I will tell you something about the EF school and my first experiences with the Canadian weather… 🙂 🙂 🙂