electric relaxation

I’m still pondering the whole Desi difference thing, and I’m not ready to write about that yet. But in the meantime I got some new jewels.

• Bar scene. Shockingly, I think San Francisco wins here. So far, I’ve seen a bunch of shitty sports bars, and a whole lot of frou-frou, loud and crowded places that look like they charge cover and have bouncers and shit. Moreover, the pompous places are also dressy of course (actually on reflection I guess only San Francisco has places that manage to be insanely pompous without an actual dress code).I think this explains why my friends here don’t seem to go out to bars a whole lot (other than sports bars to watch the Raptors games). Anyway, if you are looking for some eye candy and willing to stand in line for the privilege, then cool, but I actually like that in San Francisco you get the choice: if you wanna overpay for drinks and let out your inner douche you can hit up any number of bars in SOMA or FiDi, and if you wanna show off your tattoo sleeves you can hit up the 500 Club or Delirium. If you just want to actually chill for a minute you can go anywhere from Casa Nova to Home to Dock’s Clock or you can just bump some ATCQ on the jukebox at the Mission Bar.

  And then of course there’s a whole bunch of weirdly unique places like Bourbon and Branch or that house bar in Solano. I guess I gotta give the nod to San Francisco for this one, while reluctantly acknowledging that someone reading this is going to mock me for compromising my principles of uniformly dropping venom on the Bay.

  Although Toronto does gain points for the fact that they apparently really do last call at 2:00 AM rather than 1:30 or 1:15 or whatever like in SF.

• Beer selection. Almost a side note but it has been annoying me so WTF, this gets its own bullet. So, the beer selection at these places in Toronto is mostly wack – there don’t seem to be a whole lot of brew pubs around and your best bet is one of the Irish pub places (but then you’re at nothing but Irish pubs all the time which gets old).