Adventures

Tonight's events were interesting. It started off at 7 pm in a subway station, where I met up with a good friend. She is just as crazy and spontaneous as I am, so when the two of us are together, we get into strange and bizarre adventures.

We were walking along Danforth, when she decides to show me this organic grocery store, where her aunt works. It was definitely a learning experience for me. Not all grocery stores are created equal. This grocery store had lots of vegans walking around, so me and her, we pretended to be vegans too. (This reminds me of a time when I was with her, and we were walking in an expensively priced gourmet grocery store, in a ritzy downtown area, and we pretended to be snobbishly rich.) And you may not realize it, but vegans have a very distinctive minimalism look to them. No flashy jewelry or excessive make-up on the women, and the men looked very fresh. Generally, the people in the vegan grocery store were young, in the their twenties, and looked eccentric and educated. There was a girl at the cashier who had dyed bright red hair. No one was a cookie-cutter prep, but looked rather cool with a slick, minimal downtown style, that was bordering on dark. There were no gossip magazines, or beauty magazines at the counter, instead, there were rows of gardening magazines, some feminist magazines I recognized, Adbusters, and many non-conventional thinking reading materials.

In the aisles, there were strange concoctions like apple butter, or macadamia butter, flat breads that had all sorts of seeds in them, all sorts of dried fruit (have you ever seen dried blueberries or dried mangoes?), a peanut butter making machine (at the top, it is filled with peanuts, and when you turn the handle, it mashes them into a paste), organic jelly beans, and non-ordinary jams/ cooking sauces.

Then, after looking at so much food, we decided that we were both hungry, so we walked into a random, sketchy bar/restaurant on the street.

During the first 3 minutes that we were waiting to be seated, we stood awkwardly at the door, not sure if we should find our own seat, wait to be seated, or just run out of the bar. Keep in mind that this is the first time both of us had ever been into a bar.

A waiter greets us; he is tall and angular, has long, dirty blond dreadlocks, a black bandana around his hair, metal plugs in his ears, and is wearing a black t-shirt, and cuffed tan coloured pants. In short, he looks like he is ready to go mosh at a rock concert.

As if we weren't intimidated enough by our waiter, and the dark room, we were seated by the waiter at the back of the restaurant, all by ourselves. After looking at the menu for a few minutes, I beckon to another waiter with a question. He is a short, stout man with a bald head, he looked tough, like he was the bar owner, and just as he is walking away, I catch his attention, and he screeches "YES?" in a loud high pitched voice. His flamboyantness definitely caught me off guard.

Rattled, but not (well not entirely) shaken, we order our meals, and in a few moments, our food arrives. We observe the other diners eating here; no children, and the bar was filled with middle-aged adults. We are shockingly the youngest in the bar/restaurant.

It was then that I also noticed the rainbow gay pride flag displayed proudly at the front of the bar.

We looked around, and began questioning the original sexuality of the "females" in the bar. The couple that sat next to us appeared to be male/female, but on closer inspection, we noticed her husky voice, her stubby legs, and excessive make-up.

I noticed the sole female waitress giving our table strange looks. (I do hope she wasn't checking us out) Everyone probably assumed that me and my friend were on a date, and therefore lesbians.

It was definitely a new experience for the both of us.

We ended the night by going to a dessert place, and gorging on a huge waffle topped with ice cream, whipped cream, strawberries and chocolate sauce.