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Molly and I rode into Toronto again today. We planned to visit the CN Tower (no longer the tallest in the world, but still pretty tall) and visit the Royal Ontario Museum before getting dinner with some of her friends and catching a concert.
We got a little sidetracked, though. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant called C'est What? and had a couple good local beers before going up to the top of the tower. From the glass-floor area of the tower, I spotted what looked like an antique train in the middle of a switching roundhouse, unconnected to other track. We took the wrong exit from the CN Tower and ended up heading right towards it.
It transpires that when the convention center was built, they agreed to move the historic roundhouse, taking it apart brick-by-brick and reassembling it, to make room for a parking garage. The now-disconnected roundhouse surrounds a historical park with several old Canada National trains.
And inside the roundhouse building is a brewing company, Steamwhistle, that gives tours. We decided that we'd sneak in for a quick tour before heading to the ROM. I've been on a number of brewery tours, but this one was unusual. The brewery only brews one beer (a pilsner), and is small enough that the entire company is housed in the building. Including marketing, the graphic designers who design promotional materials, the accounts receivable department... We got introduced to all of these guys. I'm not sure how they get any work done with a tour coming through every 30 minutes. There's more traditional brewery tour fare as well, of course, all very thoroughly labeled so you don't get the bottle washer confused with the keg filler.
By this time, it was getting a little late to visit the museum, so we headed over to meet up with Molly's friends and then headed over to the Phoenix concert hall to see Ladytron. They put on a good show and had a great lighting setup with towers of small on-stage lights capped with moving lights and a pyramid of light surrounding the drummer. The lighting programming was very well done too, with lots of effects synchronized with the music.
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