Over the past week I’ve done some fun stuff. The kind of stuff that reminds me why I like, or liked, Toronto.

Friday

Lindsay, Kirsten, and I finally tried Tiflisi, a Georgian restaurant in the Beach which made Michelin’s Bib Gourmand list the past two years. We had:

• Assorted phkali (vegetable spreads with walnut sauce) + shoti-puri (traditional Georgian bread)
• Lamb khinkali (traditional Georgian soup dumplings w/ lamb)
• Kebab platter (w/ chicken, pork, lamb)
• Bottles of Rkatsiteli and Saperavi wine, both aged in Qvevri

It was goddamned delicious. Even the vegetable spreads were seriously good, but the dumplings…holy crap.

Sunday

In the morning, we went for a walk / wee hike in Crothers Woods. We probably missed the height of the fall colors the previous weekend, but it was still pretty nice. At the entrance to the park we started chatting with another erstwhile hiker (and her beautiful black lab Grayson) and just began walking together. We had a nice little stroll, enjoyed the weather, and Grayson found a tennis ball that we used to play catch.

Wednesday

Early in the workday I received word that I had somehow lucked into an invite to the Bruce Springsteen concert at the Scotiabank Centre that night. I’m probably not the biggest Bruce fan but I know his live shows are legendary, so I went.

The set list:

• Main set:
  • Long Walk Home (introduced as a fighting prayer for his country)
  • Land of Hope and Dreams
  • Lonesome Day
  • Candy’s Room
  • Adam Raised a Cain
  • Hungry Heart
  • Better Days
  • Letter to You
  • The Promised Land
  • Waitin’ on a Sunny Day
  • Reason to Believe
  • Darkness on the Edge of Town
  • The E Street Shuffle
  • Nightshift (Commodores cover)
  • Last Man Standing (acoustic)
  • Backstreets
  • Because the Night (Patti Smith Group cover)
  • She’s the One
  • Wrecking Ball
  • The Rising
  • Badlands
  • Thunder Road
• Encore 1:
  • Born to Run
  • Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
  • Glory Days
  • Dancing in the Dark
  • Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town
  • Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
• Encore 2:
  • I’ll See You in My Dreams (solo acoustic)

Thoughts:

• (I only really knew 10 of the 29 songs he played last night, and 3 of those 10 were covers…including “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town“, bizarrely enough, when a fan handed him a Santa hat)
• My favourite song of the night was a hard-chugging blues version of “Reason to Believe”, the only song he played from Nebraska. Close seconds were “Adam Raised A Cain” and the Patti Smith cover.
• The man is 75 and he played at high energy for three hours. Three fucking hours.
• The E-Street Band is huge (I counted 16 members, including Bruce) but so tight. Nils Lofgren and Little Steven are icons, but seeing Max Weinberg power through that 3-hour set without so much as a few seconds’ break was incredible. And there’s some magic to a band whose core has been playing together for fifty years.
• Most of the fans there were older than I was, and knew every word to every song, but I could see people in their twenties around me singing along too.

They were late going on — 8:45 instead of 7:30 — so the show wrapped up at 11:45. I left, tired but pretty blown away.