We took the cheap, roomy Go Train from Pickering to Union Station in downtown Toronto. The weather was balmy and warm, and we could see from our map that the hostel was only a mile at most from the station, so we set off at a brisk pace. Half an hour later and seemingly no closer to our destination, the sweat was lashing off me as I toiled along under a kilo-litre rucksack filled with clothes, shoes and approximately a hundred Kraft dinners to ease the inevitable Canadian junk food pangs once we got back to Scotland. “Where the fuck is the damn hostel?” I asked, not unreasonably.

We looked at the map again, mentally tripled all of our mileage estimates and plunged onwards into Chinatown, finding it just off the main drag. I pressed the doorbell, which was the intercom button on a desk telephone duct-taped to the front door frame. A Chinese cleaning lady answered us, gesticulated for us to come in and (unwisely, for they smelled tremendously bad) to take off our shoes. There followed a long period of awkward, smiling silence in which we all stared at each other, each of us waiting for someone else to attempt to break the language barrier.

I cracked. “Hi, we’re booked in here for two nights.”

“你好,” she said.

“Oh dear,” I said.

Some time later, after numerous lengthy calls to the absentee landlord*, the cleaning lady gave us to understand that we were not, in fact, staying at this particular branch of the empire. “Five minutes,” she assured us, pointing at a different street on the map. We sighed, whinged and grumbled but hoiked our gear up and after a few minutes’ walk, found it relatively easily.

The doorbell was the intercom button on a desk telephone duct-taped to the front door frame. A Chinese cleaning lady greeted us.

“你好,” she said.

“Oh dear,” I said.

After finally negotiating our way into our room, we went out for a meandering stroll around the downtown area as the weather started to cool off, stopping along the way for coffee and doughnuts (what else? I was practically freebasing the things by this point). Following the omnipresent bulk of the CN Tower, we wound up down on the shore as the last of the warmth went out of the air, leaving us to have an over-priced, dissatisfyingly crap and distinctly chilly dinner at an open air restaurant on the quayside.

The weather was almost Scottish the next day: solid grey skies, a bit damp and lightly windswept. I almost felt at home. We walked north up to Bloor Street, passing some excellently unhinged architecture in the university area and shopped for a couple of hours, browsing down towards Queen Street. At lunchtime we listened to some old school New Orleans jazz** in the Rex, a blues joint at the easternmost edge of Queen Street’s array of hip clothing shops; in the afternoon we propped up the bar at the freshly minted, faux-grimy† Dakota on the intermittently pretentious Ossington Street. We made our way back to the hostel to change for a touristy night on the town.

[Man, it's taking an age to get this all down. We're in the process of moving to Glasgow at the moment…]

* The walls of the lobby were plastered with pictures of the man himself shaking hands with the great and the good, Hu Jintao among them. “How impressive,” I thought, “but how utterly useless in resolving our present situation”.

** In an odd coincidence, the band played Royal Garden Blues, mentioned prominently in a book I just happened to have finished reading. Jazz — nice.

† Toronto seems to have a few anti-style bars where the intention is to convey a downtrodden, grungy feel as if they’ve been open for years, and perhaps more importantly that they were never exactly jumping in the first place: the hipsters here are taking studied indifference to a whole new level, and a gleaming style bar just isn’t blah enough.