Now that staycations are all the rage, we took a couple of small steps in getting to know our city better and ventured to the waterfront and found two little parks next to one another.
The first was Norway park - not really a park but a corner of a park to commemorate the Norwegian army base on Toronto Island in 1942.Despite the visits by the Norwegian royalty, the park didn't do much for us and we cynically concluded that they should've built a Statoil station right next to it to properly mark the park's presence. This city - that endlessly prides in its diversity - has all kinds of memorials for everything one can imagine (including Jean Sibelius park) but screams of Aboriginal absence, even on the national Aboriginal day which is today.Just around the corner, Ireland park was consirably more moving with its 'famine ship' and sculpture to commemorate the Irish people who escaped the famine in Ireland and came to Toronto (where those who survived ended up in Cabbagetown, named after Irish growing cabbages in their front yards). The 'ship', made of cobalt from Ireland, had names of those who came on the famine ships across inscribed 'inside' of the boat (on the stones in the middle of the sculpture).The sculptures of starving people reaching the shores beside the ship were haunting (but obviously not to all - there was a small group of happy tourists picnicing just beside them, asking us to take a photo of them beside the sculptures after finishing their meal - quite macabre in fact).
