Eat Fresh
Moments from Canada are always going to stay with me. It’s inevitable – I spent a year of my life there. While it’s quite obvious that I didn’t have fun there, there will always be those little moments where I remember exactly what it felt like to be an international student at the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies. Those cues or smells or flavors that take you back to where you were two years ago (in my case). It’s strange to think that it’s September 2004, and it’s been two years since I started (or rather, at this point in time, attempted to start) graduate school. In April, it’ll be two years since I finished. Weird, dude.
What got me in this thinking mode was a dicussion on the merits of Subway. Yes, Subway, don’t look at me like that. During the summer of 2002 (ah, glorious summer! the introduction of yours truly to Dominick’s! damn my undergrad friends), my older brother and I would sometimes have lunch together at Subway as we both worked about equidistant from the epicenter of that shop. Day after day (well, for me at least), it was a chicken breast sub with no sauce or cheese – just lettuce and tomato, if you please, thank you – along with a bag of Baked Lays. I truly loved it at the time. It was a relatively healthy lunch that got me close to Briarwood and the hell away from my office. Damn appraisal office.
Anyway, a few days before classes were slated to start in Toronto (a Sunday, to be precise), I was waiting for the Robarts Library to open so I could check my e-mail. Since the library didn’t open until noon or 1pm (I forget which), I decided to go to the Subway around the corner. As I bit into my regular sandwich, a sick, sick feeling came over me. I was so. Damn. Sick. Of. Subway.
To this day, I still remember the feeling of revulsion. I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t pronounced by the fact that I was missing my friends and my family and I had a premonition through Subway that something B-A-D was about to happen to me (that something, was as always in Toronto, housing troubles). It was like my stomach did a flip, all the pollution in the city rushed into me, and the hot summer sun only made it boil over that day. I look at Subway to this day and am mildly revolted, though I can sometimes eat a sandwich.
Why am I telling you this? I don’t know why.
My reaction to that Subway sandwich that day basically characterizes my entire stay in Toronto. While waiting for something to start, I’d inevitably do or see something that made me sick. Be it literally or figuratively, nary a week went by without my being disgusted in way or another by fellow students or life in a large Canadian city. The sickness was compounded by the fact that I had been expecting something better, just like my Subway sandwich. I had been expecting to be immersed in a fount of knowledge and Med/Ren/Early Modern goodness that would suffuse my being and make me into A Better Person. With Subway, I had been expecting a lot less, but it also never materialized. And like Subway, I can take Toronto again, in small doses, as a tourist, but never on a daily basis.
The lesson? Never eat Subway in a large Canadian city. The end.
