The thunder wakes us up at 4 and at 8 the rain is pouring from the sky. Nothing can stop us from a long day of museum visits, so we walk 30 minutes with our broken umbrella to visit the TD Gallery of Indigious art where dozens of statutes from all over Canada are shown.
Although it’s nice to explore Toronto above the ground, incredibly clean and modern, with many shiny skyscrapers disapearing in the clouds and unnecessary signs to watch-out for falling ice, we take the tube to our next Museum.
The ROM is Canada’s largest museum and focuses on world culture and natural history. We rent a buggy for Zeno to avoid trouble. There are 18 million items in 40 galleries. For example 150.000 fossil specimens, but also design and fine art, including clothing, interior, and product design, art wonderful art deco.
We start at the back with all kind of artifacts from China and Korea. Then we head to the third floor for things closer to home, antiquity in Egypt, Rome and Greece. We jump to the other side of the world for a child friendly exposition about Japan, there are many things to touch and hold.
Then there is a small circuit called evolution of style, showcasing the evolution of European interior design, after some random religious art we end our trip around the world with objects from the Pacific.
When we go down to the second floor we immediatly hit the highlights for the kids, the large collection of dinosaurs. The rest of the floor is all about nature with a dedicated children’s room with all kind of activities. We relax while the children run from activity to activity. Long is never long enough and it’s hard to get them to leave the best room of the museum.
We missed the first nation exhibit on the ground floor so before we return the stroller we give it a final spin and leave the museum behind us. It’s 13.00 already so we head to a pizza place next door for 4 margharita’s.
Across the road lies the Gardiner ceramics museum, two floors of ceramics from across the world. They have cool kids booklets, Cleo has to choose desserts and has to design desserts to go with different ceramics. Olga gets a lot of inspiration so we can expect a lot of new works soon.
Two metro stops further lies our final stop of the day, the Art Gallery of Ontario. This museum is also huge and spans six floors. We start with the European art, Zeno is back in a stroller and falls asleep after a couple of rooms. After a some more rooms we spot the museum cafe and we take a break.
There is a nice exhibition of a Newfoundland print artists before we head to the second floor. The first thing we do is see the Yayoi Kusama infinity room. We only have 60 seconds inside and leave Zeno outside with the guard. The next big room is entirely dedicated to Henry Moore with the biggest collection of sculptures from the artist we have ever seen.
The following 50 rooms are all dedicated to Canadian artists. We see all the usual suspects, the group of Seven, Emily Carr, Tom Thomson and Moriseau. It’s 16.40 when we arrive at the 4th floor, so we have just 10 minutes per floor. Luckily these floors are a bit smaller. The 4th floor has modernist paintings which we race through, so we have 10 minutes for the Paul McCartney exhibition and the 5th floor. It’s a combination of pictures of the Beatles by press photographers and pictures taken by McCartney on tour.
It’s 17.00 when the museum closes and we step outside. The sun is in full force, it’s 22 degrees with clear blue skies, now we’ve seen it all on this trip. We let the children play in the playground in the park before we start our search for vegetables for our dinner. This is harder than it seems, everything we find are convienence stores with energy drinks, chips and candy bars. When we are just 5 minutes away from our apartment we finally hit the jackpot with a hipster fresh market.
We relax and enjoy our balcony in the sun before we eat some much needed vegetables and wind down. Cleo walked 10km today without complaining. Applause for her!
