My name is Karen Kun, and I’m from Toronto.

My favourite waterbody is Lake Ontario, I grew up 50 meters from Lake Ontario’s shores in Mississauga so it was my playground.

I think what was really interesting was when I was awakened to how fabulous Lake Ontario was. My fathers side of the family is Hungarian and our Hungarian family would come visit and because we live so close to Lake Ontario they would want to walk down there and bike down there and hangout there all day and we loved going there with them. But then it was this special thing we would say “Oh we’ve rented a cottage up in Georgian Bay for us we can’t wait to go” and they were just shocked. They were like, why would we go away when we have everything we have here? And its so interesting because its a cultural thing in Southern Ontario and really in parts of Canada or even across North America that its this wonderful thing to escape and go to the cottage. And yet we sit on this absolutely phenomenal body of water and its sort of something that we always expect it to be there but we don’t always appreciate how amazing it is. And it took my foreign family visiting, I think I was about 13 at the time, where I started to sit there and get my head around how much I would miss this unbelievable body of water if it wasn’t there.