Purgatory and Pierogies (or My Weekend)

As you can probably guess from the title of this post, I had quite an interesting weekend, both dramatic and multicultural.

Let's begin with the dramatic (that is purgatory, if you couldn't guess). Friday night I went to see a play called The Queens, which was being produced by the drama department alumni of University of Toronto. The play was based on Shakespeare's Richard III and followed the women of Shakespeare's original play, focusing on their relationships to each other as they individually struggled to gain power over one another. The director's note describes the play in the following way, "[The play] is an endless cycle for these queens, collectively reliving their greatest sins and ultimate defeats. They are all in different states of understanding, different distances from redemption. Those who do not learn their lessons are forced to repeat them until they do. This is their painful cleansing process. This is their personal purgatory."

In short, this play was not a comedy. However, the acting was beautiful as well as the creative use of props. The play was performed "in the round" (meaning the stage was in an oval shape and the audience sat around the stage). I sat in the front row, which made it even more intense, leading me to conclude that if purgatory is anything like the play, I hope I never go! (Though I wouldn't mind wearing the fancy costumes!)

After glimpsing into "purgatory" on Friday, I moved onto a more lighthearted diversion, the Polish Street Festival. A couple friends from my department invited me to join them last minute and we hit the street ready for polka and most importantly, pierogies. However, obtaining pierogies was no easy task. There were the usual crowds to sift through and since we arrived at dinner time, it seemed the hungrier we got the more people there were blocking our way to the pierogie goodness. Our second challenge of the pierogie hunt was to discern which vendors were actually selling pierogies. We came across all sorts of cultural foods from Mexican to Thai to carnival-type foods before we actually found pierogies! (I never knew the Polish were so multicultural!) Once we found the right place, we purchased our Polish dinner and enjoyed the doughy, cheesy meal while watching a myriad of people pass by and while listening to the happy polka tunes churned out by the accordion players on the street.

All in all, the weekend was very satisfying for my intellectual side and for my stomach!

A trip to Greg's Ice Cream

Well September is back and that means I'm back to school and back to Toronto after having survived the wrathful (or the slightly cross) Irene. The start of the semester has been busy as usual, but I did make time for a back-to-Toronto adventure. I have recently recruited my Torontonian friend, Christine, to be my guide for all things Toronto. To start off the year (and to take advantage of one of the last warm days before the cold) we went to a local ice cream parlor, Greg's.

On the outside, Greg's seems like a pretty normal type of shop. In fact, I would have likely passed it up on my own and moved towards one of the more flashy-looking and trendy yogurt shops, which were conspicuously lining the street. I quickly learned that would have been a mistake.

A simple front- deceivingly simple

Once we were inside, I was elated to see a great menu of creative ice cream flavors (or "flavours," if you're Canadian): stout, banana nut, smarties, maple cream, cinana (banana + cinnamon). I couldn't decide which flavor to try first. After much deliberation and a couple samples,  I chose a scoop of maple cream and a scoop of cinnamon. Christine informed me that all of the ice cream is made using a sweet cream base and real ingredients are added to flavor it (not artificial flavorings). The cinnamon was made with real cinnamon and the maple cream was made with real maple syrup and you could taste it!

Note the Canadian/French spelling of the word "flavors."

While enjoying our ice cream, we chatted with the girl behind the counter who is a friend of Christine's. She informed us that pumpkin ice cream would be arriving soon and I decided then and there that ice cream is no longer a warm-weather-only indulgence. I'll most definitely be breaking from my work this semester to venture back and taste their Greg's fall-flavored treats!

Note: Photos were borrowed from blogTO's review of Greg's Ice Ceam