The first week I arrived in Toronto, I was wearing a Leafs shirt and was genuinely asked by a shirtless homeless man, “What are you wearing that for?”

Bemused, I pointed out to the gentleman that the Leafs were a local sports team. “But the Leafs suck, why are you wearing their jersey?” he replied.

He didn’t even have a shirt on. He might not have owned a shirt full stop. But there he was, in extremely mild March weather, aggressively querying a total stranger about wearing the colours of an underperforming local team.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I moved here in March. I’d never been to Canada, never mind Toronto.

I anticipated the friendliness, that famous (and accurate) Canadian stereotype. I wasn’t prepared for the pessimism reeking from many of the city’s inhabitants. And to be clear, I’m Scottish. We’re perhaps the most negative, despairing people on earth.

You could argue the negativity surrounding sports teams is warranted. The Raptors are essentially the Scotland of the NBA, specialists in building optimism that ends in gloriously snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Blue Jays have a record of not reaching the playoffs that actually beats the Scottish football team’s 17-year absence at major international competitions. Of course, the last time you made it, you won the whole thing, for the second year in a row. Scotland has never even made the second round of a World Cup, despite having the fourth highest match-going attendance per population size, behind only tiny minnows Cyprus, Iceland and Faroe Islands, according to data from sportingintelligence.com.

Away from the sporting arena, it didn’t take long for Torontonians’ biggest gripe to envelop most of my conversations — the dreaded transit system.

I think public transit in Toronto is great. If you’ve been in Toronto longer than five minutes, you’ll know that isn’t a very popular opinion here.

At least Toronto has more than one subway line. My home city, Glasgow, has one line, and it’s a big circle. If you stay on it for roughly 27 minutes, you end up at the same place you started.

Edinburgh, where I went to university, discarded their tram network in 1956, only to revive it again in 2014 at a cost of $1.5 billion. The tram line currently only runs from the airport to the city centre, practically useless for locals, and the journey takes eight minutes longer than the bus.

I’ll admit the Gardiner is no picnic. But at least while you’re driving on it, it’s costing you less in gas than a hotdog at a Jays game. I handed over $100 on my first trip to the gas station here, thinking that would just about cover me to fill up three quarters of a tank. The look on my face when I received more than $60 in change would rival most kids on Christmas morning.

Never was the transport system more despised than during the Pan Am Games, a magnificent multinational sporting extravaganza — that the city of Toronto couldn’t wait to get rid of.

Maybe that’s because unlike Scotland, which has around eight per cent ethnic diversity, Toronto is an incredibly multicultural society year-round.

When you’ve got eight per cent diversity, you don’t have cultural celebrations on the scale of the Caribbean Carnival. You don’t have whole neighbourhoods dedicated to one ethnicity. You don’t have a plentiful supply of Vietnamese, Afghan and Jamaican restaurants.

Raised on a typically bland British diet of mostly fried and carb-loaded foods, I found Toronto’s culinary offering both enticing and terrifying. I went to a place in Chinatown, panicked when ordering dim sum and ended up with duck’s feet.

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I had few preconceived notions of Toronto before arriving here. The city was a blank canvas. It could paint any picture it wanted in my mind.

Dim sum disasters aside, for me, Toronto is a masterpiece of multiculturalism. From the lofty downtown peaks to the vast network of distinct neighbourhoods, Toronto delicately balances its existence as a sprawling metropolis with a small-town feel, rich in character and personality.