The Classrooms of Canada

Mixing business and pleasure means learning forever. I flew to Toronto for an academic conference for media law professors and other educators of journalism and mass communication. But I booked a flight a few days before the beginning of the convention. I diligently researched tourist attractions and wasted no time teaching myself about the culture once I arrived.

My first stop was the Royal Ontario Museum. The special horror exhibit included movie posters of Creature from the Black Lagoon and Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. It also included a special exhibit from which creepy red holographic light shone on the face of anyone who looked down, against a backdrop of a Frankenstein poster. There was also a variety of ethnic art. I came away from the museum versed in Roman pottery to Dutch Rembrandt paintings to Chinese pagodas.

There was another type of art in the Distillery District: hip graffiti art, meaning paintings on the sides of buildings and sold on the street. I saw a large peace sign made of flowers and a heart statue, as well as provocative, semi-nude paintings and a mural of a candle melting on someone’s face.

Art history was not the only subject in the grand classrooms of Canadian culture. Sports are a major pastime in Toronto, so I strolled into the Hockey Hall of Fame museum. It glorified the likes of Wayne Gretzky and Guy LaFleur, housing the jerseys of these champions. There was an interactive exhibit of the Stanley Cup, where museum patrons could be photographed with the award. People could view collections of pucks, nets, gloves, helmets and hockey sticks. The museum implicitly explained the strategy of how the game is played.

Along with art and sports came architectural lessons. But I found out that to get to the top of the CN Tower, which was the world’s tallest tower until 2009, you had to wait two hours and pay 38 Canadian dollars. I settled for a photo of the outside instead. I encountered a similar situation with the Casa Loma. This castle had been filmed in X-Men and Goosebumps, but the museum required a long wait, so I remained content with the outer view of the Gothic-style architecture. Both the CN Tower and the Casa Loma are modern wonders of structure.

Ontario Science Centre included tons of interactive exhibits and machines on which children could play, including a Space Center with a Hubble telescope on display. There was a Question of Truth exhibit on the fifth floor. It contained, among other things, a phone that connected accents to photographs of people’s faces. Guessing which people were talking was not so simple a task, but it was an edifying experience that taught about how cultural biases and prejudices could affect scientific research. My favorite section contained human body exhibits, one on diabetes, one called “The Skinny on Fat,” and an ode to blood complete with vials of red liquid.

The science education stretched into geography and zoology at Ripley’s Aquarium and the Toronto Zoo, the largest one in Canada. Ripley’s aquarium featured nurse and sand tiger sharks, an octopus, a lobster and jellyfish. The zoo, by contrast, is much larger and split into general regions of the world, like the white lions and giraffes in the African Savannah, the polar bears of Tundra, and the Mayan Ruins. It was in this last section of the zoo that I learned that South America contained black and spotted jaguars beside capybaras and flamingos. The flamingos weren’t blocked off by glass or by fences, so I managed to get a spectacular pink view.

Or maybe it was a spectacular rosy view that I had, not just of the zoo but of Toronto as a whole. It was culture-packed, with art, science, architecture, geography and interactive sports journalism. I felt like I was acquiring knowledge wherever I went in Toronto. In other words, touring Toronto wasn’t so different from reading a legal treatise. The classrooms of Canada were instructional, and the visuals of Toronto painted a rosy portrait.

Published in the October/November issue of The Docket, the Denver Bar Association magazine.