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We couldn’t afford to see Toronto by rickshaw, so we night-prowled on foot, from the Sweet Sensation on Yonge Street, where Beginner’s Bondage Kits are a hot item, to The Vampire Sanctuary Sex Bar on Queen Street West and beyond, always making sure to be good pedestrians. Although Toronto is now so touristically uptight about being Good, Tidy, Disciplined, Orderly, Organized, Victorian, Prudish, and Right-Brained (“New York City run by the Swiss”) that it’s trying to look B A D, jaywalking is still a public misdemeanor. ‘Pedestrians Obey Your Signals’ hangs over every crosswalk. And even the rickshaw runners must comply.

Rickshaws? In Canada’s largest and most sprawled out city, this Nordic Los Angeles known as Tinseltown North? My Newfoundland friend David and I could not believe our eyes when we were approached by one the size of an Amish buggy. College students and out-of-work actors work as horses. Tall leggy “John” gave us a run-down on the prices - $3 per person per block-and the number of customer/blocks he had to jog to make a profit over his weekly rickshaw rental of $90. Rushed Torontonians often prefer these four-person conveyances over taxis: they maneuver faster between Toronto’s wide streets and sidewalks. And they’re almost romantic.

But $6 per block seemed steep. On foot we could stop and poke our noses into every weirdo shop and bar, picking up on various scents. Like roses, for example. Ever since David and I decided to check out the espionage paraphernalia at SpyTech, “Toronto's Own Supplier to the Spies”, we were sure we were being followed.

We were dining at The Ethiopian House, in the Gay Village, a block down from the ‘mansion’ where we were guests for the weekend. Perhaps Victoria’s Gloucester Street Mansion had been a stately 1880’s residence before it was sub-divided into 23 budget hotel rooms with mini-fridges and microwaves. The decor was kitsch, the furnishings, verging on tacky. I said I wanted a wild weekend in Toronto, if that were possible, so Victoria put us in the ‘African Serengeti Room’, with lions roaring out of photo frames, fake tiger-skin spreads luring us to bed, and a plastic leopard-skin curtain defending the shower.

Still in Africa, now in Ethiopia, David and I had been savoring a forkless dinner of Vegetarian Bayaaynatu slopped up by Injera (fermented pancakes). The fetching black waitress was explaining the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, which smells like a Catholic mass and looks like TV because it features smoking Frankincense and huge bowls of popcorn, when a rose pedlar shoved a bunch of long-stemmed reds over our smeared platter.

Hours later, I was musing over the studded leather bras at Sweet Sensation when the Rose Man accosted David among the massage oils. Then, after we’d passed under the white cross guarding the door of The Vampire Sanctuary Sex Bar, into a high-decibel zone of smoke, chicken wire, leather, chains, rings, tattoos, ghoulish eyes - there he was again, pushing his flowers at the Goths. Our last and most aggressive Rosie-Sighting was in the Bovine Sex Bar where, like Vampire’s, there was no sex, but lots of noise. Thrusting his wilted goods at the cloven-hoofed crowd, he was hilariously incongruous. Had he, perhaps, some black roses with devilish thorns...

The next morning, to get our bearings in this 243 square-mile grid megalopolis where 14% of Canada (4.6 million people) live, David and I took a walking tour. Our guide was David Adler, a radio and TV man and long-distance cyclist, whose every other Toronto reference related to food. Italian restos. Cheeses. Macadamia nuts. Peameal bacon. Thai noodle shops. Eggs. I gave Adler the culinary description of Toronto I’d heard from a taxi driver in Kingston, Jamaica: “That city’s jus spreadin’ out all over like pea-nut buh-tter on a sandwich!”

Though he suffers from a peanut allergy, Adler chortled, for Toronto is a flatbread city. There are no mountains or rivers to curb its sprawl or divide it into smaller, cozier burgs. Its transit system of subways, streetcars and buses covers 2,500 miles. Yonge Street, the longest in the world, runs uninterrupted for 1,190 miles from Toronto’s harbor on Lake Ontario to Rainy River near James Bay.

“Toronto feels surprisingly exotic,” I remarked.

“It is!” Adler enthused. “The U.N. declared it the world’s most ethnically diverse city, with over 100 languages, and the largest Chinatown after San Francisco. Eat your way around the Chinese provinces - but be careful in Swatow - their cuisine features organ meats!”

Toronto is a city of neighborhoods. We go from the Gay Village’s rainbow flags and colorful cafés, to the Victorian bay-and-gable architecture of gentrified Cabbagetown, to the Entertainment District to prowl Honest Ed Mirvish’s Las Vegas-style Museum of the Absurd, to the Bay Street financial district to admire the Royal Bank’s windows tinted with 2,500 ounces of gold flakes, and to the old Lawrence Market where a tired busker bellows out sea chanteys to a stall selling emu meat.

And we continue on to Toronto’s original City Hall, where jailed convicts were oft to drown in basement floods before they could be hanged, to the Kensington Market, a take on London’s Soho, where Adler stops to buy eggs. The curious Augusta Egg Market sells high-cholesterol double and triple-yoked, quail, goose, brown, white, flecked, broken... by the hundreds!

On Queen Street West we admire a sidewalk Superman portrait in progress. A chalk artist has rendered the local hero created in the 1930s by Torontonian Joe Shuster. He hopes to raise $279,000 “to buy a new Lamborghini Diablo. My first one doesn’t have a cup holder for my coffee. Sincerely, Chalkmaster”

After lunch, David and I dash over to the Toronto Public Library at 238 College Street to see the “Spaced Out Library,” otherwise known as The Merril Collection of Science, Speculation and Fantasy. Collection Head Ms. Lorna Toolis shows us around of one of North America’s three largest sci-fi collections; 32,000 books, 25,000 pulps and periodicals, original artist’s designs, videos, adult graphic novels, and fantasy/role playing games on parapsychology, UFO's, Atlantean legends, fantasy and magic. It’s awesome. Worth a week in TO just to binge on this X-File-rated stuff.

Next we follow our foot fetishes over to the Bata Shoe Museum at St. George and Bloor. Expecting a small, offbeat hole-in-the-wall, we are amazed to find a modern building shaped like a shoebox with a lid across the top. The only such museum in North America and the largest of its kind in the world, it contains the whole human history of footwear, from caveman sandals to astronaut boots and Elvis Presley’s blue pumps. Fascinating and fetishistic.

You can step into the first human footprint ever found, an enormous impression made in volcanic ash over 3,000,700 years ago, found in Tanzania by Mary Leakey in 1976. Then you gawk at human hair slippers worn by Australian Aboriginal executioners. Medieval footwear, none more frightening than the French chestnut-crushing shoe with long serrated blades. Tiny clippers for bound Chinese feet. Boots worn by American soldiers in Vietnam - with soles insidiously shaped to simulate the footprints made by Vietnam peasant sandals! And along with these, Queen Victoria's ballroom slippers and Napoleon's socks.

At the Metropolitan Toronto Police headquarters, we learn all about how bad Toronto really is. This sparkling, glamorous edifice houses a morbid museum on the history of Toronto’s police force, detective and forensic methods, and local murder stories. Of all the weapons on display, the most haunting is the strangling chord of an electric iron set at “delicate.”

We regretted missing the History of Contraception Museum, whose 580 artifacts include ancient dung-and-honey tampons and dried beaver testicles. But we did end the weekend with a bomb at Lush, the London-based cosmetic company whose homemade soaps, muds and salves look like luscious cakes, ice creams and whipped mousse. The sherbet-colored bath bombs create a sensual explosion when they hit the tub. But at Victoria’s Mansion, we didn’t have a tub! No tub at the Mansion, and not one single nasty prostitute shoe with stiletto heels at Bata’s Shoe Museum. Was Tinseltown North just a tease? Well, when the natives are friendly and the soap smells like chocolate, who cares?

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