The flight out of Germany started in Frankfurt, and let me tell you something about Frankfurt Airport: it is not designed for travel. It is designed for transport. Everything is cargo here, including the people. You are tagged, weighed, scanned, and loaded onto pressurized aluminum tubes with the same bureaucratic tenderness they reserve for a pallet of machinery parts bound for Russia. Ah, no they don’t say Russia anymore in Germany. But you know what I mean. There is no romance left in this operation, no sense that you are embarking on anything. You are being shipped. The terminal smells of recycled air and quiet desperation, and the only thing separating you from the freight containers on the tarmac is a boarding pass and the thin fiction of customer service. And yet, against all statistical probability, I made it onto the plane out of Germany on time. This, I assure you, is an exception of historic proportions for German transport. Just a few days prior, I took a train in this country that accumulated six hours of delay—six hours—as if time itself had given up on the Deutsche Bahn and wandered off to find a more punctual civilization. The whole system has the reliability of a sundial in a thunderstorm. So when the wheels lifted off the runway at Frankfurt, I felt something close to elation. Good to be out. Looking down at the grey patchwork below, I couldn't help but think: the Marshall Plan was such a spectacular waste of money.
I landed at Toronto Pearson, and the contrast was immediate. The immigration process was efficient and genuinely friendly, even though I had to answer a few questions. I don't always get stopped at immigration, but when I do, the officers seem to enjoy the conversation. Perhaps it is the passport stamps, perhaps it is the stories behind them - either way, we parted on good terms, as we always do. I spent a few days in Etobicoke, taking bus trips downtown into the beating heart of Toronto. It felt unreal to be back, like walking through a dream you once had but never quite finished. The city was familiar and foreign at the same time, the way a childhood home looks when you return decades later and the furniture has been rearranged by strangers. Seeing the CN Tower piercing the skyline, I always have to think of the beautiful 11th birthday of Lars up in the 360 revolving restaurant, the whole city rotating slowly beneath us like a giant clockwork model, looking down on the tiny propeller planes taxiing around Billy Bishop airport on the islands below. That memory alone is worth crossing an ocean for.
One morning, I took the tram east to The Beaches, our old neighborhoods . One of the most beautiful places to live in Toronto, stretched along the shores of Lake Ontario like a postcard someone forgot to send. I had breakfast at the Beacher's Cafe, sitting where we had many Sunday family breakfasts and even more often Elena and Lars went to have pancakes and play chess. Afterwards, I walked down to the Leuty Lifeguard Station, and then through Kew Gardens, where the trees have grown taller and the benches have been repainted but the light still falls the same way it always did. I stopped by the dog park, and for a moment where Eddie made friends among local huskies.
From Etobicoke, I moved to Scarborough, on the other side of the Toronto suburban outskirts. Bonjour Tristesse. There is a particular melancholy to the sprawling concrete of the eastern suburbs, a kind of architectural resignation. But I was not there for the aesthetics. I had a mission: get a car to the shipping forwarder close to Pinkerton, move my personal items from storage on the way to Malta, and end the storage arrangement. Pinkerton first. The car - hail to Subaru - actually started after a long and brutal Canadian winter, once I reconnected the battery. It turned over with the reluctance of a bear woken in March, coughed twice, and then roared to life as if nothing had happened. On the way, I stopped at the Bruce Power Visitors' Centre in Tiverton. I am a big fan of nuclear power, and the information center overlooking one of the world's largest operating nuclear generating stations on the shores of Lake Huron was genuinely fascinating—the raw, contained fury of the atom, harnessed and humming away behind concrete walls while the lake stretched out to the horizon like an inland sea. Then the storage unit. Everything packed, processed, sent. All of it now on its way to Malta by sea. I closed this chapter and felt remarkably good about it. There is a particular satisfaction in ending long-running arrangements, in cutting the last rope that ties you to a place. I would love to return to Canada one day—but this specific chapter had to be closed. Canada is nice, and the people are genuinely friendly, but they can be a bit of snowflakes, easy to offend if you don't tread lightly around their ever-expanding catalogue of sensibilities. Still, I have a soft spot for this country.
For my final days in Toronto, I moved into Knox Residence on the University of Toronto's St. George campus. A nice place with a great location, right in the intellectual heart of the city. The Knox College building, erected in 1915 in Gothic Revival splendor, sits on King's College Circle like a stone sentinel guarding nearly two centuries of academic tradition. The cloisters, the arched windows, the heavy wooden doors—it all whispers of a time when education was considered a sacred undertaking, not a transaction. During the summer, the campus is mostly populated by East-Asian and Indian students, heads down, working, researching, studying with an intensity and discipline that commands respect. The Western cultures, it seems, are more characters suited for holiday parks these days—off somewhere "finding themselves" while others are busy building futures. I enjoyed being on campus and explored it in meticulous detail by foot. The University of Toronto, founded in 1827 by royal charter of King George IV as King's College, is a sprawling 138-acre tapestry of Romanesque stone, Victorian brick, and modern glass. University College, completed in 1859, still stands as a national historic site with its medieval turrets and carved gargoyles. Hart House, the great Gothic Revival student center, presides over its circle like a secular cathedral. This is where insulin was discovered, where the first cardiac pacemaker was built, where deep learning was developed—a campus that has produced five Canadian prime ministers and thirteen Nobel laureates, and still somehow manages to feel like a quiet park on a Sunday afternoon.
Today is Victoria Day, in honor of Queen Victoria's birthday, and the official start of the Canadian summer. The holiday mood is everywhere; the campus is lively, sun-drenched, and buzzing with the particular energy of a nation collectively deciding that winter is finally, irrevocably over. Fireworks tonight, barbecues already smoking in backyards across the city. But for me, it is time to get ready to return to Malta. There is a melancholy in leaving, the kind that sits in your chest like a stone you swallowed without noticing. I hope to return soon. But for now—Malta calls. Toronto, especially the Beaches, are a bit like Lamma Island in the South China Sea for me. Sometimes, you have to leave places you love. But they remember you.