At Yummy with Cad and Goldie

Before Goldie, Cad and myself could leave the Victory Café on Sunday night to walk to the Yummy Korean Restaurant at 620 Bloor Street West, we first had to contend with Anna. She had been loud during the readings and had distracted Goldie and Cad into responding to her. Now she was sitting in the other bar having a drink and though they had invited her to join us she refused to leave until her drink was finished and she had no idea how long that would take. Finally, we left without her.

The Yummy Korean restaurant isn’t a fancy place but I had gone in there to use the washroom the week before and the staff was very friendly. They even thanked me when I left, so I thought I’d pay them back and take Goldie for dinner there.

Goldie ordered the potato pancake, I think because it was the last night of Hanukkah. Cad selected the Bulgogi (beef) on a hot plate and I picked the spicy Udong soup with seafood. There were also several cold appetizers on little plates, such as seaweed and spicy cabbage. I asked for chopsticks but they gave me a very thin and slippery pair of fancy metal ones that were hard to handle. Later, a young woman of Chinese descent, and with some kind of dark patterned tattoo on her arm came in with a meek looking guy who might have been her brother, and when she ordered she asked specifically for wooden chopsticks and got them. I’ll try that the next time somebody gives me metal chopsticks.

Everybody enjoyed their food. The broth of my soup was so spicy that it made me wonder if the liquid had been intended for consumption along with its solid contents like the little squid that danced on my chopsticks like a puppet all the way to my mouth.

In honour of Goldie’s birthday we tried to steer Cad away from claiming that Muslim refugees are at this very minute rampaging through Sweden and raping babies as they go. I asked Goldie how she’d voted in the federal election and she said that she’d voted for Harper because she had been worried about Trudeau letting refugees into Canada. It continues to surprise me just how many people are taken in by the anti-Muslim fear mongering. Even sweet and kind people like Goldie are worried that people who are running for their lives in terror might be dangerous.

There was a middle-aged man across from us out to dinner with what appeared to be his extremely obese mother. He had kept looking over at us throughout the night until he finally told me that I look like Ben Wicks. It was the first time I’d ever heard that one. Cad said that I don’t look like Ben Wicks. We also informed the guy that Ben Wicks was both British and dead. I told them that the famous person I get compared to most these days is Nick Nolte, and this caused the woman he was sitting with to nod agreeably.

As we started thinking about asking for the bill, the guy at the table between the door and ours told Cad that he knew him and his mother. I’ve found that it is pretty much impossible to go anywhere in this city with Cad without him running into someone who knows him. It turned out that this guy was Cad’s cousin in law. He added that he’d been listening to our conversation and agreed with Cad about a lot of the stuff he’d been saying about Muslims. He said that he’d read the Koran and knows that it justifies terrorist acts. I challenged whether a non-Muslim is really qualified to make interpretations of an English translation of the Koran and said that if most Muslims interpreted their holy book as justifying terrorism then he’d be dead already. He admitted that every primary religious book, including the Jewish texts, has instructions that justify horrible things but that even though the Bible says you should stone prostitutes to death, Christians aren’t doing it, whereas there are Muslims that do it. Someone else at the other side of the room raised his voice in agreement of the anti-Muslim side. I argued that groups like ISIS are not even really motivated by religion. I think that they think they are but what really holds them together is the poverty lack of education in those regions. If modern cameras and the internet had existed five hundred years ago it would be the Christians that everyone would be afraid of.

We left Yummy to the music of happy thank yous and goodbyes from the staff despite our loud discussion.

I walked with Cad and Goldie to Christie station, gave Goldie a last birthday hug and headed home.