Anyone from Toronto Canada?

[Dumbee]

Comment if you're from Toronto and if you like it

[Clanscorpia]

Im an hour away  

[Dumbee]

9 minutes ago, Clanscorpia said:

Im an hour away  

Do you go there often?

[Clanscorpia]

22 minutes ago, Dumbee said:

Do you go there often?

I often go to Whitby and Ajax

[AshleyAshes]

Sure.  This place is great.  It's the capital of Canada and everything you could want is here.  If it's not here, it's probably not worth having.

[Tocsin_786]

2 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Sure.  This place is great.  It's the capital of Canada and everything you could want is here.  If it's not here, it's probably not worth having.

When I went there (road trip from NYC), I went to the city center where the aquarium and the tower is. Did I miss any attraction in the city not in that general area? 

[MoonSpot]

4 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

It's the capital of Canada..

Cause fuck Ottawa and politicians.

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, Tocsin_786 said:

When I went there (road trip from NYC), I went to the city center where the aquarium and the tower is. Did I miss any attraction in the city not in that general area? 

Well, lots, but it depends on what you're looking for and it's not like you could see everything in one trip.  There's a lot of museums.  You could go sight seeing for various locations used in movie or TV shows.  There's shopping.  There's Canada's Wonderland, the theme park north of the city.  There's Toronto Island, south in the lake, the ferry service is right downtown.  The list really goes on and on and really depends on what you want to see.

[Tocsin_786]

3 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Well, lots, but it depends on what you're looking for and it's not like you could see everything in one trip.  There's a lot of museums.  You could go sight seeing for various locations used in movie or TV shows.  There's shopping.  There's Canada's Wonderland, the theme park north of the city.  There's Toronto Island, south in the lake, the ferry service is right downtown.  The list really goes on and on and really depends on what you want to see.

Well, I actually went to go see the falls and realized that Toronto is about an hour away. So it was only a few hours that I was there, and went to the only place in the city I knew I wanted to see. 

[themctipers]

in toronto

 

[yathis]

1 hour ago, Dumbee said:

Comment if you're from Toronto and if you like it

No

THANK GOD

 

But I was born just outside T.O. but my parents moved westward when I was very young, to follow the big money in the early 70's.

I just talked to a chap just the other day, he is from T.O. and he told me Toronto has quite the night life, and quite the melting pot of immigrant races. To tell you the truth, I wouldnt like it one bit. I dont even like Vancouver for much of the same reasons, plus the sprawl, plus I dont know where anything is, plus the cars, plus the people, plus the traffic, plus its a rainy shithole. That is just my opinion of Toronto and Vancouver. They are equals, but I'd imagine Vancouver to be slightly better then T.O.

[sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ]

?

[AshleyAshes]

27 minutes ago, yathis said:

quite the melting pot of immigrant races. To tell you the truth, I wouldnt like it one bit.

#TotallyNotRacist

[Andreas Lilja]

Poor man's Montréal.

[Dumbee]

10 hours ago, sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ said:

I own an apartment in the Financial district and used to live in the Entertainment district but I'm only there a few days a month when I'm there for work.

 

The down sides are obvious: if you're not pulling in a mid-6-figure salary a lot of the things that make that city a great place to live are severely restricted. There are countless things to do at any given hour, but as soon as you decide to have a night on the town you're committing to blowing a few hundred dollars. Living inside of Bloor/Bathurst/Church is a limitless selection of dining, entertainment, and shopping, but even my tiny 2-bedroom apartment is a 'million dollar home'; most young people probably won't own a house they don't inherit from their parents, and even owning your own apartment is starting to be something most people can't afford. Compared to other cities in Canada the salary-to-cost-of-living ratio is way too low (70k average household income vs some of the highest real-estate prices and tax rates, vs >90k average household incomes in 'medium sized' cities like Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary. Those other cities have a lot less going on, but an extra $15000/year means you can take spend a week at a 5-star resort every 3 months and still have money in the bank.

 

If you're down town you can walk to anything you want even in the middle of winter. Even a 'walk' to Chicago or Montreal via Billy Bishop is a reasonable prospect, but if you've got to drive anywhere, the place becomes miserable: the cost of parking in my building and also at work is more than rent for a similar sized apartment in Montreal to say nothing of the fact that driving is always slower than cycling and frequently slower than walking once you factor in the hassle of finding a place to park.

 

Access to the harbour is nice enough but finding a slip for your boat is a hassle. You have a few choices for private clubs, and you can find work at some of the largest companies in the world there, along with some of Canada's best companies having offices there. If you're going to start a new tech company it's probably the best city in Canada thanks to a healthy investment culture and a good supply of fresh grads from Waterloo coupled with 'big companies' like Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al. to anchor more experienced people. If I were a fresh computer science graduate it's probably the place I'd want to be to find work unless I was prepared to move to America. If you like sports you've 3 large processional teams along with stuff like MLS that is gaining some traction, there's plenty of 'beer league' stuff to join if that's your thing.

 

IMO the weather sucks; the rain in the summer is nice but otherwise it's humid and gross outside. The winters are perpetually grey and miserable without the easy access to good winter sports.

 

Ultimately, I think Montreal is a more interesting city at half the cost, but Toronto is still top 2 or 3 for Canada and top 5 for North America.

Well, I liked both Montreal and Toronto from what I read, and, I've read that to work/live in Montreal, you HAVE to speak decent French, and, unfortunatly, I don't. Doesn't Toronto also have cheaper apartments like everywhere else in the world? And whats the average income per month for an average job? (Restaurants, clothing shops, etc)

[3 Lions]

According to Google Maps I would have to take a 10 hour 15 minuet flight to get to Toronto  

[kelvinhall05]

I'm in London, ON, so pretty close (2 hours?).

[sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ]

?

[Dumbee]

42 minutes ago, sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ said:

Montreal, especially on the island proper is bilingual. Life will be more rich if you can speak French and there are plenty of government programs to help you learn the language, but if you're a committed anglophone you'll get by just fine. As you venture into the suburbs or North into places like Quebec City it becomes much harder to get by in English. I've lived in the city for weeks at a time without speaking French to anybody and try to avoid it wherever possible—my accent is atrocious and vocabulary has atrophied—it hasn't caused me any significant hardship.

 

I'll admit I'm quite a fan of Montreal, one of the best things about my Apartment in Toronto is that I can walk out the front door in Toronto at 3pm, and meet my friends for dinner at 5pm in Montreal, the round trip flights are only $250 and about an hour long. I'll probably never buy a home or make my primary residence there, but I'm happy to spend a couple of months a year there.

 

Those sorts of jobs are low-skill/low-demand/low-pay an I wouldn't call them "average job" but if you want to use those as an example then it's typical for those to pay minimum wage or $14.00/hour for a typical 35–40 hour work week, after standard taxes and deductions that'll leave you with about $20,000/year CAD.

 

Assuming that the 'regular store clerk' is a part-time position, lets use supervisor roles as a benchmark for some enlightenment. A little bit of Googling shows that a restaurant supervisor doesn't crack $25,000/year after-taxes/standard deductions and a typical retail store supervisor is going to earn about the same.

 

The entry price for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto is quite high, but if you want extend your search into into the amalgamated cities then something in Scarborough can be found for $1100/month. That's about a 1-hour bus+train ride from the CN Tower, but you could make the drive in about 30 minutes assuming there's no traffic or construction. There are a few shitty apartments you can rent in Toronto proper for $1000 if you don't mind living in the worst neighbourhood in the city  You should expect something closer to $1200 at the low end and closer to $2000 in order to live somewhere you can really take advantage of the city. Spending more than half your after-tax income on rent is generally seen as ill-advised and it may be hard to sign a lease. To get your rent much under $1000/mo then you're going to be looking at renting a room in somebody else's home or inviting room mates into your space.

 

As I mentioned earlier, it's certainly possible to live in Toronto on a modest income but you end up losing access to many of the things that make the city a nice place to be. There's a lot to be said for a sense of financial security and that's going to be much harder to secure in Toronto than just about anywhere else in North America.

So, an "average job" pays about 20,000$/year, so that's about 1,650$/month and rent is 1,000/1,200$ for a cheap 1br apartment, that's like 2/3 of the income. Damn that's bad xD. One more thing I want to know, is Toronto a good place to work with videogames? (3D modeling and animation)

[AshleyAshes]

20 minutes ago, Dumbee said:

So, an "average job" pays about 20,000$/year, so that's about 1,650$/month and rent is 1,000/1,200$ for a cheap 1br apartment, that's like 2/3 of the income. Damn that's bad xD. One more thing I want to know, is Toronto a good place to work with videogames? (3D modeling and animation)

Well, no, not 'average job', that's more like 'Minimum Wage Job'.  With the current Minimum wage in Ontario of $11.45 you'd gross $23 712/year which would be about $19 350 net.  However the average gross wage in Ontario is a little over $50 000/year.  Speaking of full time, 40hr/week work, of course.

 

Though you're not that far off on rent, though how much you pay in rent really depends on how low you're willing to go in terms of quality and distance from the downtown core.  But as a personal example, I pay $1140/mo for about 600 square feet in a quiet community near St. Clair West station.  However I've also lived here for some time and I've been under rent control since moving in, meanwhile for a NEW tenet, they're asking for $1370/mo.

 

[sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ]

?

[SpaceGhostC2C]

From Toronto, Canada? Rush!

Spoiler

 

 

[Dumbee]

3 hours ago, sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ said:

As I said, working at a retail store or restaurant isn't an "average" job; those are entry-level minimum wage positions which require few skills. Living in any large city on a bottom-of-the-barrel income is going to be tough but millions of people make it work. I'm not convinced it's worth the hardship but many people disagree with me on that point.

 

Minimum wage will be $14.00 at the start of the new year. An average salary would be something like a welder, a dental assistant, or some sort of account-manager at a bank.

 

It's important to remember where you are with respect to the average because average salaries tend to be earned by average people. The 'average Canadian' has a university degree and is 40 years old so they're going to be mid-way through their careers and pulling down about $37,000/year after taxes and standard deductions. If you're 20 years old and haven't completed a post-secondary education then you should expect to be on the low side of the average. There's no shame in earning a below-average wage when you're early in your career, but you also shouldn't be surprised that you haven't attained the social-economic status necessary to fully enjoy a city.

 

No, not particularly. While there are a handful of studios in the city, and offices for some of the larger AAA studios it's really nothing special, and "jobs per capita" in that industry aren't going to be more prevalent than anywhere else. Montreal is the home of most of the major studio in Canada, though Vancouver has a few too.

 

When I was working in that industry (first with Konami and later at Bioware) I did it while living in Alberta; a place that is mostly known for its resource-based economy, particularly oil, natural gas, and lumber. If you just want to "work at a game company"—and I question your sanity if that's the case—then Toronto isn't any worse than most places. If you have a specific company you'd like to join then you're going to have to move wherever they are or negotiate for remote work.

Bethesda is my dream. They have a studio in Montreal (correct me if I'm wrong). But I also like Ubisoft, and they have studios in Montreal but also in Toronto. My only "problem" with Montreal is that I have to learn French, but I can do that if I "have to". Is Canadian French the same as France' French?

[sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ]

?

[Dumbee]

24 minutes ago, sgzUk74r3T3BCGmRJ said:

You don't have to learn French to work in Montreal, certainly not at either of those companies. I've a friend who worked at Ubisoft for years with English as a second language and his first wasn't French.

 

When you study french in Universities in Canada you typically get the Persian variant—and that's the one I learned—but language is 99% identical. You'll discover some minor differences in grammar along with regional differences in accent (just like traveling across England will show you several different ways of saying the same thing unique to different parts of the country). While I'm hardly an expert on French language and culture I'd say the differences aren't any more significant than what you'd see comparing English in New Jersey vs English in London; we can all understand one another well enough.

 

You'll notice differences like words for things that you'd use in Paris don't always map perfectly to the words you'd use in Quebec. That's particularly noticeable for things that didn't exist in 1900, but usually the 'loan words' are just the English equivalent. In Montreal it's common to greet people with "Bonjour hello" to indicate that you're prepared to talk in whichever language the other party prefers. Even if you start in French it's okay to switch if you feel like you're in over your head. Almost everyone you regularly encounter is going to speak both languages. If you just say "hello" people will assume you prefer to talk in English, and if you just say "salut" people will assume you prefer French, but most people are willing to make an effort even if they're not fluent in whichever language you like.

 

I'm not trying to downplay the value of learning to speak French if you're going to live in Canada, especially Montreal. The government will pay for your lessons in order to teach you and it's not too hard to find people to practice with so it's worth putting in the effort because you'll unlock access to more music, theatre, art, and generally just fit in better. Still, it's not essential and you can treat Montreal just like any other Canadian city if you want to.

I just thought I had to learn French since road signs and names of thing are often in French. I don't know if it's everywhere in Montreal but the stop sign is in French and street names are aswell (from what I've read). Btw, how is the weather compared to Toronto? Any significant diference?