The third day commenced… and I was still in the unit.
The funny thing about Toronto in summer in combination with doing up to 30kms/day of walking – you sweat a lot. At this point in my trip, I’d managed to go through nearly all of the clothes I brought with me, and I still had a number of days to go. This presented a bit of a challenge, in that I wasn’t staying in a hotel (with a laundry service) and I couldn’t find a laundry in the unit. After some investigation, I determined there was a common laundry, but you had to obtain a fob key from building management – and they only operated 9am-5pm weekdays.
So I decided to watch the third keynote live streamed from my laptop in the unit while I went about laundering my clothes. However, late the previous night I discovered a washing machine (but no dryer) in a built-in within the unit. I decided to stick to the plan, and also courtesy of no dryer, I needed to accommodate up to a day’s worth of drying time. So here I am, early morning, making breakfast and coffee, washing clothes and sort of ignoring the third keynote.
On my way to the MTCC
I eventually did leave the unit, and decided to go direct to the MTCC for lunch. As you do.
I spent most of the day yet again at the conference. I’ll not go into detail here as there will be detailed accounts posted at Sanders Technology.
Suffice to say I was at the conference again, until 4pm, when I decided to return to the unit for a nap and to get changed and refreshed.
The city really shines, it’s such a shame to be shut away inside all day with conference sessions and networking.
Outside it is spectacular.
In any case, the evening’s festivities included the Partner Celebration at the Air Canada Centre. It was scheduled for a 7pm start, but I knew to get there especially early, so I was in fact there at 6:30pm and lined up patiently to enter.
When the doors finally opened, we were initially barred from going into the main arena, and had to circle the concourse picking off North American-style food offerings such as hot dogs, poutine and nachos. I stocked up on water (so easy to get dehydrated), and when they finaslly let us into the arena, I made a bee line for front row centre. Unfortunately, they weren’t using the main stage for the show – so I ended up sitting in the middle of the stadium, a fair way from the stage.
I ended up between two groups of people. The group to my left were from Houston, Texas and I spent a fair amount of time talking with them. Due to an amusing mix-up, it was thought that I was a friend of the gentleman sitting to my immediate left, and as a result food purloined from the concourse was distributed to myself and the others on the left. The show kicked off with warm up act Icona Pop who hail from Sweden. At first I didn’t recognise their music (I’m getting to be an old bloke) but then they hit some notes from music I did recognise. Hooray.
They were followed by the main act, Gwen Stefani, who engaged the audience in only her second concert appearance in seven years. She brought the house down with classic hits from her No Doubt days, and all her bigger solo hits.
The concert finished, we eventually filed out. I ended up just standing around, admiring the home of Ice Hockey in Toronto before feeling pressure from staff to move on.
Once outside, I found out several Canberra locals had migrated back to the Hotel Rex near the Sheraton, so I headed up there for a few drinks and eventually walked home.