Entry written by Sonia.

--- Hi guys,

Hope you are all doing well over there. I really good over here - I'm learning french, going to dance class and getting to know Toronto with Simon. This is a bit of a summary of my experiences of Toronto which I hope you find interesting and entertaining.

I am coming up to my first month in Toronto and finding that the place and people are really growing on me. There are 57.6 days of summer in Toronto, its now mid August which leaves us 15 days before autumn falls and the wild winters arrive. Simon and I are keen to experience the winters here and find out what living below 0° is really like. But for now its summer and the sun shines all day and well into the night. The streets are lined with bulging flowerpots and people open doors for each other and smile.

If I can generalise at this point there are 3 major things that strike me about Canada:

Canadians describe themselves as polite people and not Americans; Canadians play & watch some of the most gruesome sports in the world; Canadians are very protective about their squirrels, ducks and geese. You can buy an air rifle without a license at 'Canadian Tire" superstore and the sales assistant will smile nicely as she finds a "carry bag" but you can't legally kill "dinner" with it. They have clubs for that purpose.

During the summer, Torontonians take their holidays at the beaches but these areas are not for the faint hearted. The closest beaches to Toronto lie east of the city and west of the major industrial zones which use the massive lake systems to clean and dump their waste products. The weather channel actually broadcasts the Ecoli count found in the water here. The lake system crossing Canada and northern USA are so large that you can't actually see the other side even if you've cleared the smog and the haze away.

During our first week Simon and I took a trip to the beach which was both amusing and scary. We stepped off the bus to find what lay before us was sand, ducks, geese, a few brave souls and the water which melted into a hazy horizon. Missing from this lovely scene were the surf and people swimming in the surf (for longer than a quick dip). Kids played in the sand on the edge of the water and there were a few attempts to enter but no one could stay in the water long enough to actually swim. The water at the beaches is freezing - ice cold - below 5°. There were life guards, (who were dressed like extras from a Baywatch set), but we were not sure why they needed them. You literally could not swim out to drown in deeper water before becoming an ice cube. Apparently training for life guards requires time in the deep freezer in the local supermarket in case a water rescue is actually required.

Weather is everywhere here; we can watch lightning hitting downtown buildings from the apartment window, tornadoes hit Hamilton a fortnight ago and storms sporadically wash across Toronto at night but it's not too heavy. To really feel the thunder you have to go to Niagara Falls. We went to the falls with a couple of friends on a hot/wet day in July. The mist created from the falls rises up to envelope you and a million others who are standing in wonder, soaked but for the plastic poncho. The roar from the falls is deafening, impressive and thunderous especially when it is accompanied with a major electrical storm. Lightening flashed on both the US and Canadian sides and rain poured down to scatter the tourists and newly married couples. We looked at it as an unexplained initiation that wasn't listed at Immigration. With poncho, tacky tourist photo we were utterly soaked to the bone and we were ready – baptised into the mad rush that is North America.