Tidbits

Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…

Classical World Artists at the Perimeter Institute

March 29, 2008, 5:20 am

So I went to my first classical concert today at the Perimeter Institute. They have a series of music and cultural events under their Event Horizons program, from classical concerts, jazz, dinner and music, etc. We only heard about their Classical World Artists series because one of the performers this year was Yo-Yo Ma. That was around December and everything was sold out by then, so we signed up for the waiting list, and that was that.

So yesterday they announced there were space for the Cho-Liang Lin (violin) and Jon Kimura Parker (piano) concert tonight, which was the last event of the season. So that’s how we ended up with some of the best seats of the house (second row from the front, right in the middle). Granted, the place only seats about two hundred people, being pretty much a lecture hall, but we were close enough to hear the violinist draw in his breath while he played. Student pricing for these events is just $20 (compared to $59), so yeah, it would have been nice if they had this back when we were still in school!

I think you need to have some music background to appreciate these type of concert though. Me, being from the black sheep Chinese family, was never forced into piano or violin lessons when I was a kid. So no musical background. I read the program descriptions of the pieces, and pretty much go “huh”? I thought some of the techniques are neat, from strumming the violin strings like a guitar to strumming the actual piano wires. I also admired how quickly the performers’ fingers and hands can move. Though I have to say that my favourite pieces were the encore ones where they played some tango stuff. The beats and rhythm of those are much easier to appreciate, something you can actually feel and react to instinctively. Some of the others were a bit too deep? I mean, what the heck is “real and implied harmony” that makes “a form of chaconne”? I think I ended up concentrating on their techniques (how their hands move, their facial expressions) vs the actual music.

Overall, it was an enjoyable evening. Now Mike is set on getting tickets to the TSO while he’s still young enough to get a discount.

Black Hole Bistro

Before the concert, we had dinner at the Black Hole Bistro. It’s basically a private restaurant inside PI for resident students, researchers, visitors, etc. Key word being private, meaning that the general public can only eat there if you attend a ticketed event. So of course we were interested in trying it. We really enjoyed our meal. I mean, it’s so fitting right, one of the very few restaurants in Waterloo we like, and of course we can’t go whenever we want to.

So the good things about the place is that the menu changes several time a week. So they usually have two appetizers, three mains, and a dessert, with an international style. So the stuff they do make, they make it well cause it’s always new and fresh and different. Compared to regular restaurants where their dishes have been made the same way, day in and day out, for years. The sizes were also quite decent, normal portions. We wanted to share the salad appetizer, and they took the extra steps to give it to us on separate plates. It says much about the size of the salad when we were worried they charged us for two separate salads instead of one because of how much we both got in our “half” portions.

We had the crusted trout and the stuffed veal medallion. The descriptions were quite the mouthful, but I didn’t take a picture of the menu so can’t remember. I started on the veal and Mike had the fish, halfway through, we switched. Both were good, but I like the veal more, and Mike liked the fish. Both mains were very reasonably priced as well, at $22 each.

Which leads me to the not so great things. Everything else besides the main courses were expensive. Dessert was an apple crumble pie with ice cream, it was good sure, I enjoyed the cookie crust, but it wasn’t wow. It was just a small slice with a regular scope of ice cream, $8. Boo! $8 for a martini glass of essentially Soho is pricey to me, but at least they are generous with their glass of wine.

So I think we will definitely be back to check out their Jazz in the Black Hole or Dinner Concerts events, as the food is worth it.