A night in Toronto

Rock on, I actually made it to two posts...
So last Friday (22 Sept) was our last day of camp up at Jackson's Point. On Thursday night, our evil leaders hid our luggage so we got to sleep in our clothes lol, - I had worn them all day Wednesday and Thursday already, but mostly just for classes, so it wasn't too bad. So yeah! We went back to Toronto on Friday, and it was the night we were to spend on the streets :)

The deal - me, Grace and Naike were left somewhere around the city suburbs in the same clothes as yesterday, with no money :) We had to do a list of tasks - including using public transport, "pan-handling" $5, and finding some monuments and stuff downtown.

So, for an hour we tried asking people if they had spare change for the subway.... it took a couple of hours I think, but FINALLY we made it onto the subway and into the city. YAY! I made a total of $3 pan handling. Which covered my subway fare and part of Naike's.
So while in the city we killed time by checking out a gourmet supermarket (that also happened to have free samples...) and by looking in a bookstore. When we finally had to meet up with Joe at 1am in a restaurant we were totally exhausted :( But he bought us food, (brownies and ice cream mmmmmm) so that was sweet.

The rest of the night we got ourselves saturated (it rained), then spent from 3:15am to 5am failing dismally at trying to sleep under a temporary stage in a cemented park area. It was kinda cold too...
So at 5am, totally busting, we set out to find a public toilet... and found our ride home instead - an hour early!!!! yay! so we went back home to bed.

An interesting experience. If we didn't still look like students even after 3 days in the same clothes, I don't know how much more difficult it would have been. I doubt we would have been able to get enough money, and we probably would have been kicked out of the shops if we had actually looked like street people. It gets extremely disheartening when you're a bit short of a subway fare, and everyone you ask for a bit of spare change ignores you or looks at you like you're worthless. Even when it was just for one night. But it was also really cool when people did actually help you out, and were nice about it. It sucks when people ask for money. You don't want to give people money so they can blow it on drugs or alcohol, but if it's for an actual good reason... and you can't really tell sometimes....ICK. It's tricky....

It gives you something to think about anyway.