< Next PotD | Previous PotD >

His:

He says, “Kinda gross looking but tasty…”

There is just one restaurant that made it into my phone contacts and that is the Congee Noodle House at Main and Broadway where NPY picked up dinner for his family including this non-descript but totally delicious zhong zi or “rice tamale”. And we only really started to order take out from them in the past couple of years, weird. Our order varies little as it already has three items and can tidily be paid for with a $20 bill: we get one savoury zhong zi “unwrapped”, a congee (used to be century egg and shredded pork, but lately I’ve moved towards pork liver), and a noodle soup (flat rice noodles or flat egg noodle) with BBQ roasted duck/beef brisket/dumplings. I make a point of ordering in Chinese and even if they pick me for a CBC from the first word, they respond in kind and don’t switch to English.

Lil Sis wonders if we can find the best congee place in Toronto, or at the very least somewhere remarkably decent. It’s not that often that congee is really messed up but it is also not often really stand-out in taste. Perhaps a better question would be to ask, “Where is the best wonton noodle soup?” and go there for noodles and the congee and just get accustom to the particular taste of that establishment.

Hers:

Lil Sis ordered the full series box set of Gilmore Girls just before the Canada Post Strike of 2011 and waited something like two months for it to arrive. It was a very long time given she’s fan enough to buy the whole series! It is only because of Lil Sis that I caught episodes sporadically over the years and thus had only a mangled idea of the timeline of the whole story.

Since the show is important to Lil Sis, it is thus important to me to watch the whole series with her, something to share in the years ahead if we don’t see each other often anymore.

Lil Sis felt closer to the show in a way because she and Rory Gilmore were in the same level in school throughout the series. Aside from that Lil Sis shares with Rory sensibility, drive, and sanity despite the turmoil of crazy relatives around her. And, I might add, Rory/Alexis Bledel has that adorable, youthful, heart-shaped ponytail face that Lil Sis also has (and I don’t).

During the original run, I was five years older than the Rory character and also did not connect with Lorelai the mother, the other Gilmore girl. I guess I watched the Lane Kim character (played by Keiko Agena) the most because she’s Asian but didn’t empathize with the rock-chick streak. But while we are now watching it, I am roughly the same age as Lorelai–the mother of a fifteen-year-old!–and if you accept the show’s quirky and perfect setting as plausible, there are some remarks I would like to make, and perhaps I could learn something from the show.

• I really wonder how youthful I would be at my present age if I had a child at 16 like Lorelai. Of course the show glosses over how perilous, how much the struggle was before Rory’s fifteenth year. But somehow I can kind of believe in Lorelai’s outlook on life after all the knocks in her storyline.
• It seems to me that for all of Lorelai’s flaws and questionable judgment, taste and sense of humour, it is all okay because she has raised a shining example of a model and brilliant daughter? Was Rory destined to be as steady and driven as she was as a product of her environment? So, with an initial seed of sensibility, was my sister as destined to be different from me as a result of or complementing me while I did disruptive battles with my mother?
• The battles between Lorelai and her mother, Emily, are way too familiar to me. I have a different sense of humour from Lorelai but am as guilty of making most facetious comments to piss off my mother in an argument. At this point in my life I really side and empathize with the mother and am appalled by the daughter, but my heart was seriously tugged by an argument in the first season where the parents wondered how even they set up the perfect environment she didn’t want it, how they were controlling but she could still get in trouble, and the parents had lost her no matter if she had gotten pregnant or not.
• I was really floored and not really understanding when Lane couldn’t bring herself to tell her controlling Korean mother about the perfect Korean boy (Henry) she had met, like her parents would ruin it despite (or because) he is the kind of boy they want her to be with. In the end, her secrecy, and the crazy lengths and designs to cover the relationship drive him away. I wanted to wring Henry’s neck for not having eternal patience and Lane’s neck for being so naive.

********

* NPY’s Picture of the Day. While I’m in Toronto and he is in Vancouver, 3400km away, we will try to share with each other (and consequently this blog) pictures that capture our day.

< Next PotD | Previous PotD >

On this day..

• Coast to coast with Air Canada - 2017
• TV junkie, you say? - 2007
• destination toronto, part ii - 2005