Farewell et Adieu, Home and Native Land: Adventures at Quiznos

Truthfully, I've spent most of the day following the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology... also known as the Great Canadian Census Debate... And, well don't get me started.

I've been fighting with the air conditioner at work since late yesterday. Although happily, it has worked for most of the day today. Finally my work laptop was taken to have a part replaced since when I opened it up, the monitor would start pulling up the keyboard due to something being broken in the hinges. However, this left me without a laptop for several hours and thus, nothing to do.

At lunch today, I was feeling like a splurge - which means fast food and not Pola. Orlando was free and we decided to meet up and go to Quiznos. This was my first time going to the Quiznos here, which by the way, has valet parking... Essentially it is quite similar, menu wise, even all of the signage is in English. (Which actually makes it tougher for me to order, because I depend on being able to just read the words in Spanish to get across what I want) I got my usual tuna melt, which was actually tastier than the ones they make at the Quiznos by my house at home - this may have been because of the parmesan and rosemary bread. Orlando was very excited to see that you could take as many peppers and pickles as you liked! As I watched him pile on the jalapenos, I thought, wow, Orlando is a tough guy. Then I started putting a few pickles on the side of my sandwich. Orlando looked at me and goes, "ohh no. Those are the ones I like, not these!" Yep, so Orlando had a sandwich that was FILLED with jalapenos instead of sweet pickles. So he grabbed some pickles too.

While Orlando tried to eat the sandwich with all the peppers on, his burning mouth just wouldn't allow it. So he picked them all off, and replaced them with the sweet pickles. To give you an idea, this is how many jalapenos he took off, after eating several in his first couple bites:

Orlando and I also debated whether or not we could get refills. He was especially thirsty (may have had something to do with those first few bites) but couldn't work up the nerve to just go and get more iced tea. Every time he thought about it, someone would come out of the back or the sandwich staff would be looking over. We should have just asked. There was no signage saying you couldn't, but maybe here they don't have to worry about that sort of thing like they do in Canada. Another thing that made me happy were the sandwich baskets that are shaped like their speech bubble/Q design they use:

When we were finishing up our meal, we realized that we had another 1/2 hour of lunch left (I'm not sure how that happened!) so we were more relaxed and just chatting. Orlando held up a small fry and said, "what does this look like?" I looked at it, pondered, and said, "a cartoon character with spiky hair. OR like a mask that you would wear to a masquerade party." After inspecting the french fry in more detail, he came to realize that it could look like a mask on me at the right angle/distance. He took my blackberry and got a photo to show me. I burst out laughing. It was so random and silly, but exactly what I needed to cheer me up. So we spent some time taking photos of each other. I was really shaky for some reason so the ones of Orlando are not as good as the ones he took of me.