i called tony after work today to see if we could hook up because we were both going to st. george subway station before going home - tony is at oise doing his CFA class and i had to stop by Innis to drop off the rental agreement (to which i affixed my name!!! oh horrors!! I AM A RESPONSIBLE PARTY!!!! eek. what is the world coming to?) for the toronto japanese short film festival. anyhoozles i called tony and he was ready to leave work too, so we met at union and decided to go to st. george and grab something to eat. tony wouldn't tell me where he was planning to take me and i was too tired to think so i just followed him out of the subway station and across bloor street and into the new bar mercurio location underneath woodsworth.

it's an interesting atmosphere - it has been so warm out lately that no one was inside the bar, but rather on the medium-sized patio they've created on the east side of the building. they've kept the brick on the ground, and a rather large rock that was there before, and they've fenced it in and put out silver tables and mesh chairs that match the fence. the menu is small but seemed interesting. tony and i got paninis and the l'espresso salad (three kinds of beans on salad with cucumber and portabello mushroom and cheese). everything sounded really good but i was unfortunately disappointed. the food is so-so (altho tony's salmon panino was apparently good) so i wasn't terribly impressed. our waiter was kind of odd too - actually everyone there was odd - in the sense that they were overly concerned about our enjoyment of the food and atmosphere. tony commented that it seemed like the staff treated the experience as that of a high-end restaurant that served extremely high-quality food (akin to rundles in stratford, for instance) rather than a casual bar with medium-quality food and a lot of alcohol.

anyway we were talking about moving to europe (when we would, what we would do to get there) and i suddenly asked - what would we do if we needed to come back? for whatever reason - perhaps opportunities for our kids, health care, what-have-you - and tony said he thought it would be fine, and really that there were quite a lot of opportunities for kids in europe, depending where you are. to which i replied, "but what about that time when your parents sent you for a year to canada to learn english?" (which happened when he was quite young, in grade 1). he looked puzzled and said, "what do you mean?" i explained that i thought his parents sent him to canada to take advantage of the better opportunities over here. to which he replied, "OHHHHH no, i didn't come to canada because of that. i came because of the seaweed. you know, the plankton."

[sappho] spluttering

[toni] I thought I told you about this already?!

[sappho] speechless, perplexed, still spluttering

[toni] well, you know, there's seaweed. and it goes in cycles. that summer the sea was filled with plankton.

[sappho] AND THIS IS WHY YOU CAME TO CANADA.

[toni] Yes.

[sappho] BECAUSE OF SEAWEED.

[toni] Because of seaweed.

[sappho] (laughing my ass off) You came to Canada because of PLANKTON.

[toni] Yup.

He came in the summer because the sea was full of plankton and he wouldn't have anything to do for the summer, you know, because all the seaweed in the entire world was migrating to the coast of Brela. and then he just decided to stay in Canada for that year.

After that, he went back to Croatia. You know, because seaweed goes in cycles, and it had moved on by then.

Labels: happy