It's been quite a while since my last post but the holidays got in the way and with a full house I didn't have the concentration to be able to get my thoughts down.  Originally I was going to go into a detailed history of the city of Toronto for this posting but I decided that not only would it put me to sleep but it would have the same effect on anyone who by chance came across this blog.  Suffice to say that the Toronto of today is nothing like the city I grew up in during the fifties and sixties.  Toronto was clean, safe and and a stronghold of Waspdom, especially the Protestant Calvinist kind.  I don't remember seeing a non white face until about 1956 when I was nine years old.  Of course Toronto had its Jewish minority which until the late forties when Italian immigrants started to come to the city in large numbers, represented the largest ethnic group next to the white Protestants.  Today Toronto is a city of so many different ethnic groups that it is truly a global microcosm.  One of the largest groups comes from China with a population of approximately 600,000.  This fact is responsible for one of the few reasons to visit the city, it has great Chinese food.  Prior to the late 60's and early 70's Toronto Chinese food was your regular Western fare, chop suey, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken balls, egg rolls.  But once the massive influx of  Chinese immigrants began and the restauraters had a solid Chinese customer base the food became much more authentic.  That's the good news.  Unfortunately it is outweighed by the bad.  Toronto is still as dull and boring as it was in the early years but it is no longer clean or safe. 

Naturally all things must change but I never would have believed that a city that was once so conservative and orderly could be so turned on its head that it has become unrecognizeable much like the rest of the world that this 60+ year old finds herself in.  Looking back on almost six decades especially in the last three decades I don't think that any generation has had to face as much change as the baby boomers, much of it negative and much of it of their own making.