When we checked into our hotel, there was a phone message waiting: "How’s two o’clock tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow" was going to be the first of two full days in Toronto. It was early May, the end of the school year, and my wife, Kay, and I had come to pick up our son, Dave, who was finishing his second semester at the University of Toronto. We had visions of being shown around the campus, and the city, by a kid who must by now be an old hand at the place. He was an old hand, all right -- one with so many friends and so many things to do before heading back to Vermont that he was having a hard time penciling us in. He probably figured what the hell -- it wasn’t like we weren’t going to be under the same roof all summer. So we called the dorm and said no, we’d probably be out in the afternoon, and why not wait till five? Meanwhile, we’d start showing ourselves around.

Toronto has no shortage of mainstream attractions -- places like the Royal Ontario Museum, the CN Tower, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. We had done them dutifully on our last trip, at the end of summer, when we had brought Dave to the university (during that stay, we had also built in a day to spend at the Canadian National Exposition, a grand county fair on a country-wide scale held on a campus of monumental permanent exhibit halls down by Lake Ontario). This time, though, we decided to simply wander, to poke into neighborhoods we had yet to explore, and to see what we could find to eat along the way.

"Cheap and cheerful." That’s how one Torontonian described the west-to-east run on the Queen Street trolley, a roughly seven-mile excursion that begins on downtown’s western outskirts and ends at a neighborhood called The Beaches, sort of a small-town extension of Toronto proper where there are, yes, beaches, and a boardwalk along Lake Ontario. The Toronto Transit Commission provided the cheap part -- we had 24-hour go-anywhere passes that cost $8 CDN (the regular individual fare on subways, buses, and streetcars is $2.50). It was up to us to be cheerful, but how hard is that on a nice day when you’re riding a trolley to nowhere in particular?

We boarded the streetcar at Queen Street and Ossington Avenue, in a district where dusty little shoe repair shops and dry goods stores now rub shoulders with the kinds of bistros that have their names cut out of brushed aluminum plate in lower-case serif typefaces, and stick one poppy in a bud vase on each white tablecloth. West Queen Street also teems with tiny little shops, most of them looking as if they popped up yesterday. The street exemplifies a city that boasts dense thickets of both practical small emporia and goofy boutiques, as if every Mom and Pop displaced by Wal-Mart had been resurrected here, along with the trendy, ephemeral little joints that Mom and Pop’s kids opened. What a collection! We passed the Iconic Shop, Nearly Naked Lingerie, Syriandipity, Brown’s: A Short Man’s World, the Condom Shack, the Cannabis Culture Shop, and a place called So Hip It Hurts. I couldn’t tell what they sold, and of course we are both too hip to have gotten off the streetcar and gone in to ask.

Queen Street picks up a good deal more gravitas as it enters the heart of downtown Toronto, just north of the financial district. But even though the civic and corporate structures of the city center are not hip enough to hurt, "gravitas" might not be the right word when there is this much architectural variety and occasional outright whimsy going on. Within a stretch of only a few blocks we passed neoclassical Osgoode Hall, a colonial takeoff on a stately English manor set in its own six-acre park and housing provincial courts and the Law Society of Upper Canada; the new Toronto City Hall, built in 1965 and suggesting two upraised hands cupped around a clamshell; and the old City Hall, a Richardson Romanesque pile bedecked in gargoyles said to be caricatures of municipal officials who had ticked off the architect. If, as one critic suggested, urban architecture is a form of conversation among different eras, Toronto’s is a particularly lively one.

The trolley carried us farther along the arc of urban density, to the largely residential Beaches, where Queen Street serves as a handy commercial boulevard. "Trendy" is the word that keeps turning up in connection with the Beaches, and I suppose it might cross the casual visitor’s mind if, say, it was a Saturday evening in late July and the Beaches International Jazz Festival was is full swing. But on a spring weekday the lakeside quarter seemed out of the ordinary solely because it harked back to a saner sort of urban organization, a grid of neat residential side streets connecting with an artery of services, shops (not all of which sell antiques), and superb public transportation. Trendy a la 1950, that is, and made only slightly surreal by the fact that just a couple of blocks away a tree-shaded boardwalk skirts the shores of an inland sea.

Distillery District

On the way back downtown -- after the Queen Street trolley reversed direction by looping around a tight cul-de-sac behind some Beaches backyards -- we hopped off to take in a couple of locales close to downtown: the Distillery District and the St. Lawrence Market. When I first heard about Toronto’s Distillery District, I figured it was a neighborhood with a distillery, working or defunct, at its core. I was surprised to find that the distillery in question is the district. The old Gooderham & Worts complex, once the biggest manufacturer of hooch in the British Empire, comprises the largest remaining collection of Victorian industrial structures in North America. A Dickensian warren of brick and stone, 300,000 square feet in all, it rambles over 13 acres, and looks so much the way a lot of the urban world once looked that after Gooderham & Worts ceased operations in 1990, the complex became a choice location for filming street scenes in movies ranging from "Chicago" to "Cinderella Man."

In 2003, a private outfit bought the whole thing, lock, stock, cooperage, and fermenting cellars. Now strollers down Distillery Lane and its side-alleys can shop for handmade jewelry and glassware, poke into artists’ studios, sample chocolates and pastries after lunch at one of a half-dozen restaurants, and attend events built around dance, film, buskers, jazz, and dogs (that would be the "Woofstock" festival). There is, of course, a brew pub, although washing down a burger with Canadian whiskey concocted on the premises will have to wait for another day.

The St. Lawrence Market has undergone no such transformation, because it’s doing what it has always been doing, practically since the cavernous big building finished its stint as Toronto’s first city hall more then a century and a half ago. Located just east of the financial district, the market deals in far more tangible forms of capital: we traipsed hungrily past stall after stall displaying ruddy cuts of prime beef, doormat halibut filets, smoked salmon and sable, caviar, artisan breads, colorful heaps of fresh vegetables, and great wheels of Ontario cheddar and a hundred other cheeses. For lunch, we ate what just about everybody else was eating -- peameal sandwiches. It’s always fun to chow down on something you hadn’t heard of just an hour before. In this case, what sounded like poverty on a bun turned out to be pork back -- what Americans call Canadian bacon -- brined and rolled in cornmeal, baked, sliced, and piled on a sandwich.

The peameal sandwich is a homey little throwback to an era in Torontonian comestibles that was all but entirely Anglo. Nowadays, Toronto is the premier culinary polyglot of North America, taking no back seat to New York or anywhere else. And it is Asian food, above all, that dominates Toronto’s ethnic dining scene.

The night we arrived, we tucked into one of the two Asian feasts of our stay. Our find was the Bangkok Gardens, which, the headwaiter told us, is the oldest Thai restaurant in a city that must by now have 200 of them. The fact of its having been the first, despite its being only 20 years old, speaks volumes about just how quickly Toronto has been transformed into a metropolis with 19 languages on its transit map. The place showed its age in a pleasant way, by still hewing to an upscale minimalism in decor that reflected -- in the mid 1980s -- the fact that Thai food was the occasion for a serious night out; nowadays, it’s storefront chic that shouts ethnic authenticity. But the offerings at the Bangkok were as authentic as any hip little storefront could muster. We started with mussels wok style, beautifully seasoned with lemon grass and medium-hot peppers, served on a bed of rice that absorbed all the juices and made for great shell-scooping. Our entrees were beef mussseman, a dense, moderately spicy stew cooked almost to a paste; and a chicken stir fry laced with coconut milk, land-mined with little hot peppers, and studded with cashews. A couple of Singh beers, and you’ve got a meal.

St. Lawrence Market

Our other great Asian discovery was the Miss Saigon, on bustling Spadina Avenue in Chinatown, just around the corner from where the narrow alleys of Kensington Market bulge with so many good things to eat -- sign me up for a year’s supplyof spicy Jamaican meat turnovers -- that making it to a restaurant with your appetite intact is no small accomplishment. We sat at one of four or five small sidewalk tables, under a canopy, and enjoyed pad Thai noodles, a salad, diced chicken with sweet paste, and stir-fried lemon beef. It was the lunch special, and it cost $5.50 CDN each.

We took a walk through Little Italy, which ranges along College Street roughly from Bathurst to Shaw, at the wrong time of day for a major meal, but Italian quarters are a feast for the senses even in off hours, and besides, no hour is off when it comes to espresso and a flaky, ricotta-filled sfogliatella (when we did go out for an Italian dinner, it wasn’t in Little Italy at all but at a downtown spot called Mammina’s, where I had a spicy pasta Calabrese, honoring the 200,000 Torontonians whose forebears hailed from the hot-pepper-loving, toe-of-the-boot province).

College Street was full of encouraging signs that "Little Italy" was still not a quaint anachronism of a name, in a city where nationalities supersede each other with amazing alacrity. There was Enzo’s barber shop, and Il Centro de Formaggio; there were the old ladies in black dresses and the video store advertising for clerks who speak Italian. We enjoyed our coffee and pastries at a thoroughly Italian sidewalk café. There was no doubt we were in ethnically fluid Toronto, though, and the Portuguese seemed to be the vanguard of the moment. There were Portuguese restaurants, and where we might have expected to see a streetside bust of Dante there was Luiz Vaz de Camoes, author of the Portuguese national epic

Greektown, out beyond downtown proper along Danforth Avenue, is still quite heavily Greek: the Roman alphabet is in short supply on a lot of storefront business signs. The waiter at a place called Avli, where we sat at an outdoor table and enjoyed lamb shanks and retsina, said he grew up in the neighborhood and wound up being "Greek by osmosis." Even the Greeks who sell their houses on the side streets to encroaching yuppies, he told us, come back every day to run the restaurants.

Toronto’s most unusual neighborhood hasn’t the slightest bit of ethnic cachet. It’s located out on the Toronto Islands, a rough crescent of an archipelago located just off the harbor yet far enough out in Lake Ontario to seem like a world of its own. Much of the footbridge-connected scattering of isles has been set aside as parkland, although some 600 people live out here year-round. It has to be year-round, according to the terms of their 99-year leases with a city that has on several occasions tried to pry them out of their spectacularly scenic hideaway. In the winter, the residents’ dedication to staying put is heroic: only two ferries a day serve the islands in the deep off-season, and a harbor choked with ice can take two hours to cross, instead of the usual 20 minutes. We took a boat tour that threaded through the narrow channels separating the islands, past yacht clubs and cormorants, mute swans and a toy-like church, alternately thinking about what a cozy place to live this might be and how impossible a prospect a lamb shank or a sfogliatella might be on a January evening. All the while, we took in the opulent skyline of Toronto -- the CN Tower, tallest freestanding structure in the world; the Bank of Montreal, sheathed in snowy Carrara marble; and the Royal Bank, its glass walls impregnated with a million dollars in gold. You might wear out your Scrabble board living on the Toronto Islands, but for compensation you’d get to watch sunsets reflected in money.

Back on dry land, we balanced our scan of the skyline by looking down at street level. The Bata Shoe Museum, donated by a member of the Czech shoe-manufacturing Bata family, is the sort of place you tell people you’re going to just to watch them roll their eyes. But this isn’t fair to the Shoe Museum, which is really a first-rate operation, and is as interesting as a lot of the eye-rollers secretly suspect it would be. The museum, which occupies an oddly-angled, three-story building supposedly designed to suggest a shoe box (I didn’t see the resemblance), is a two-part affair. The larger portion of the exhibits do a serious and very informative job of tracing the history of footwear through the ages; the preponderance of examples are from recent centuries, although fragments of shoes dating back to Roman times have survived and are on display. The other main section of the museum is the guilty pleasure part: it’s where you get to look at the shoes of the famous, like Picasso’s zebra-skin chukka boots and Pierre Trudeau’s sandals, Elvis’s blue-and-white loafers and James Dean’s surprisingly conservative brown oxfords. I saw the black wingtips Pierce Brosnan wore in The World is Not Enough ; shoes put through glorious paces by Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly; and shoes worn by some of the more prodigiously endowed feet of modern times: Shaquille O’Neal’s size 20s were impressive, until we saw that Ronald McDonald’s dogs are a 29 triple E.

Our own dogs were ready for a rest by now, and the water slide was calling. No, we weren’t going to drive out into the ’burbs for a chlorinated romp among acres of wet urchins. This was the perfect sort of water slide, right in our city hotel. The Delta Chelsea must not have been thinking merely of kids, but of hot, tired folks of a certain age when they installed Toronto’s only three-story water slide as an adjunct to one of their indoor pools. The thing corkscrews out of an external wall like a giant piece of ruptured plumbing, before coiling back inside and dumping you into the drink. It’s the most original runup to cocktail hour we’ve ever encountered . . . in a city with an original take on just about everything. Next time, when we arrive in Toronto at the end of sophomore year, it won’t bother us a bit if Dave can’t work us into his schedule till a week from Tuesday.