Weekend Round Up: Stand-Up, Improv & Tea

Friday: Since L was working late with the art department, I decided to call up my new friend Brandon and his wife to see what they were up to. They are newly arrived from Texas and neither of them knows much French so I'd kind of taken it upon myself to help show them around town. Since Andrea was opening for Joey Elias at the Comedy Nest I suggested we do that since it also met the necessary criteria of being an Anglo activity.

After some not very helpful directions from me, they managed to find their way to the club just as Andrea was getting ready to go on. Her set was good and included some material I hadn't heard before, but for whatever reason the audience wasn't that into it.

Part of Joey Elias' thing is to just talk to people in the front row and riff on what they tell him, and oddly enough the couple he was picking on also happened to be from Texas, which we all thought was extra funny. His set was very long, but there was at least point where I had to wipe away tears and Brandon and his wife seemed rather impressed with their first Montreal comedy experience.

After the show I suggest we go for a drink, but then it came out that they'd never had poutine, so I took them straight to Belle Province to remedy that. We got a family style poutine, but between the three of us we only managed to finish about half of it. Then I looked at the time and realized L was probably freaking out so we opted to call it a night.

When I got home L was lying on his back on the sofa, barely conscious after a 14 hour day. I helped him into bed, despite his incoherent and half-hearted protests and tucked myself into bed.

Saturday: Being that L wanted to hit a public pool at some point in the weekend I insisted in doing a pilates workout at home before going out. While I was in the shower we got a call from Alain & MC who were apparently in our neighborhood at a Spring Tea Seminar and they wanted to know if we wanted to join them for a couple sessions on Sunday. We told them we'd join them for the Intro session and talked them into joining us for brunch at Coco Gallo.

After brunch we followed Alain and MC back up to the Jean-Talon Market and L and I got lost in the Marche des Saveurs du Quebec. We decided to stock up on local beers for when Kat and Doug are in town and I picked up some Caribou pate.

When we got home I realized I was exhausted so I opted to take a nap while L sat outside and called friends back west. When I awoke L let me know that he'd taken the liberty of making evening plans for us. We would be going to an improv show called Argument with a Dolphin that was a part of the Fringe Festival.

The show was very funny and successfully washed the disappointing taste out of my mouth from my last improv experience. The format was similar, a single story interupted periodically for the audience to vote on whether to continue the story. But this time, instead of starting a whole new story, there were merely interruptions, either shorter scenes or other games with provocative titles like "Argument With a Dolphin" or "The Slap". After each interruption we were then given the choice of whether to proceed to another interruption, or go back to the story and with one exception of two interruptions in a row, the evening followed a story, interruption, story, interruption, etc. format.

After the show, Mark, Andrea, MC, L and I decided to walk up to Sergeant Recruteur for a drink and Alain met us on the way. While we paused on Mont-Royal to wait for Alain I ran into my colleague Alexandre and convinced him and his date to join us for beer and pizza.

At the bar I opted to stick to the Frousse, and while I was concerned about my tummy and it's adverse reaction to my shish taouk dinner I was shocked to discover that the beer seemed to settle my tummy. I decided to take advantage of this gastral calm and ordered the Beer Mouse cake. While L admitted to becoming bored with the beers on offer, I have to say that the beer cake would certainly entice me back. Thin cake layers with delicate mouse with a faint beer aroma and a layer of dark beer jelly right in the center. Incredible.

By 11 PM it was down to me, L and Mark so we managed to coerce into coming back to our place to hang out. He and L had another beer and decided to finally check out our creepy basement. Turns out there's lots of room down there for storing beer once we start brewing, although that probably won't be until sometime in the fall.

Sunday: Despite our late night, L and I still managed to get up in time to attend our 11:00 AM intro to Spring Teas seminar. Luckily we got to taste the teas too, otherwise we might not have made it through the entire hour.

After our seminar we met up with L's cousin Annie for breakfast at Coco Gallo, and L started to have second thoughts about our planned afternoon excursion to the public pool at Parc Jean-Drapeau. I pointed out that if he wanted to go to the pool he'd need sandals, so Annie accompanied us to Plaza St-Hubert after breakfast so that we could find L some flip-flops and I managed to find some walking sandals.

However, by the time we'd finished our shopping there were some mighty angry clouds gathering so L chickened out for good and we called Alain and MC to see if we could still register for the afternoon session on Japanese tea since we weren't going swimming after all.

After the second session we stuck around the Market and picked up some boar and pork sausages, corn, and new potatoes for dinner. When we got home I opted to scrap my original plan for the potatoes, butter and chives, and skipped out to get some spicy panchetta, green onions and parsley to make a warm potato salad that L is still raving about. (I'll post the recipe tomorrow).

While I was cooking, at my urging, L called our landlord to inform him that the contractors he'd hired to sandblast our building had not only failed to shield our tiny vegetable garden from clay dust, but they had also repeated dragged their hose through it, effectively killing every last plant in it, effectively break L's heart. Later, L also discovered that they had taken our garbage out of our garbage can and left it instead filled it with murky grey water. L wisely decided to stay out of the house on Monday when the workers were due to return to finish the job as he was afraid of confronting them in a rage.

After dinner we tidied a bit in preparation for Kat and Doug's arrival next week, I called my dad to wish him a happy father's day and we watched as much of the second season of weeds as we could fit in before bedtime.