One man's love of food amongst other things

And another long \break between posts

2009-07-28T17:31:00.002+01:00

Well it's been an eventful number of months since my last post.

I finally got my ass in gear and went and visited a couple of other towns in the area, Weymouth and Portsmouth. Both of which are very nice.

Weymouth is a beach side resort town. In terms of atmosphere, it's very reminiscent of Bondi. Lots of cafes and pubs and people hanging out. The only difference is that the beach is much narrower but a lot longer. There's also no surfie culture mainly because there's no surf.

Portsmouth, the home of the Royal Navy, hasn't got a whole lot to offer besides the dockyards and Gunwharf Quay. This place is one huge shopping area full of discount brand name stores. Excellent for picking up slightly out of season gear at a bargain price.

However despite all that, I've had to take a temporary respite from my sojourn in the UK. As a result of the crappy economic climate over there, the government in its infinite wisdom has rejected my company's request for a work permit to be issued for me. As a result I've had to return home for a couple of months to acquire a 3 year highly skilled worker's visa. That went in last week and now I have that interminable wait to get that approved.

At least it hasn't been boring. Lots of catching up with the uni boys and girls, old workmates, extended family etc.

I think leaving this time will be harder than last time, then again who knows?

Holy shit!

2009-03-26T23:56:00.000Z

I turned 30!..............wtf

And so Korea became a longer than expected vacation

2009-02-10T08:38:00.003Z

Time to fill in those who actually read this and don't know what's been going on.

The original vacation was meant to be only from January 21 till February 1. It was supposed to be a 3 day snow board trip including the Lunar New Year and then a week hanging out with my brother.

Lo and behold what ended up happening I crashed while snowboarding and opened a wound in my left butt cheek almost 25cm long and 7cm deep, I lost almost a litre of blood, which was quite a spectacular sight when its sprayed all over the snow. The muscle in there was pretty much severed. Despite that, it was one of those freakish lucky wounds. An inch more to one side and I would have cut in to my neurovascular system and even if I didn't bleed to death I probably would have lost the ability to control my leg. Thats according to my doctor, who is one of the senior surgeons in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. That ended up costing me a 2 week stay in hospital. Now that I'm out, I have another 2 and a half months before the muscle is fully knitted up.

This little adventure into the Korean health system has left me in a great deal of debt to a lot of pepole. Big Uncle Gerry for one whose contacts with the doctors over here enabled me to be put in the care of the senior most surgeon of the department. Bev's friend Cho Hee Jin who I owe so much that I doubt I can repay her in this lifetime. Without her to help translate and arrange stuff I'd be hella lost. And of course Bevvy boy who's put up with all the tiresome chores of taking care of his dopey-ass brother.

Just a quickie

2009-01-22T00:56:00.002Z

So, my travels continue. Right now I am sitting at Chek Lap Kok Airport in Hong Kong tapping furiously a quick update. My flight to Seoul Incheon Airport should be boarding imminently. The first leg of the journey was a 12 hour flight lengthwise across Europe and into Russia before swinging south through the Xinjiang and Xizang autonomous regions in China.

Being winter time, the sun sets quite early that far north. The night scape across mainland Europe was a sight to behold. Large stretches of darkness extend in all directions broken by patches of golden and white light where the towns and cities lay far below. Of all the times I've flown, and there are a lot of them, this time I saw one of the most amazng sights. A city below, possibly in Ukraine lay beneath us. A small patch of cloud covered the city and the lights from the city illuminated the clouds in a golden halo. Too bad there wasn't enough light for me to get any images of it, but the ethereal beauty of it pretty much ingrained itself into my brain.

The second sight that was breathtaking was the sight of the moon from 33000 feet. From that high up, the air is so still and the clarity of the ghostly moonlight was something to see. It was the first time I had ever seen the moon from that high up. And not to forget the starlight. Although I couldn't see a whole lot of them.

Anyway time to board the plane!!

Updaaaaate

2009-01-10T17:40:00.002Z

Okaaay, I've been lax in my writing duties. I put this down to moving house.
Just before xmas I managed to rent a lovely little 1 bedroom apartment. Course it's costing me a bit of a bomb every month not to mention bills bills bills and more effing bills, but at least I don't have to put up with one little indian girl with a big arse (if I said "with a big ass" it would sound like she owned a donkey or something) stomping up stairs louder than a chimney collapsing, nor a fat couple who had a habit of blocking the hallways whenever they left their room. That's how fat they were. Nor a chubby indian girl (another one) who lisped and had a tendency to repeat her sentences. "Oh yah Australia is so sunny with all that sun" and rubbish like that, despite that she was ok to chat to.

Now I live in a nice quiet street with little traffic (the old place was next to a train yard and on a direct approach line for all the planes landing at Southampton Airport) and the only neighbours are a family of three who are fairly quiet, or that might just be the insulation. I won't post pics yet cos it's still barely furnished.

It took me about 2 weeks to get internet connected mainly because British Telecom or BT decided that everything was ok at their end but didn't check the exchange just up the road, idiots, so they had to get someone to work on boxing day, poor bastard. Still at least I am now reconnected to the information superhighway.

These days I feel more settled in. I guess it's having a place to call home, well sort of since home is really 15000km away on the other side of the planet. Having my own stuff, my own space. Funny how material possessions can give you the impression of a home. It's not entirely home yet since it is still not properly furnished. I only bought a bed, a futon mattress, this thing is awesome, doubles as a couch and lounging...thing. I haven't got anything else besides this. The bedroom is still empty since I do everything in the living room which is directly connected to the kitchen it's more convenient, especially as all the doors autoshut. It helps manage the central heating better so you're wasting heat, heating other parts of the apartment when noone's around. The bathroom is kickarse, I have a bathtub long enough to stretch out in so it's a bit of an indulgence to lounge around in one every now and then, especially as coming from a drought ridden state baths were too costly to really bother with.

Workwise, I feel more part of the team now. Helen, and her fiance Andy who has since left, being my mentors, which feels odd sometimes since they're the same age as me, helped me a lot. It's odd looking at the two of them, she towers over even me and I'm not short, and Andy is shorter than me. Sometimes reminds me of Rob Schneider and the "omg it's Bigfoot!" lady from Deuce Bigolo. Not to forget the other Andy who returned to the company having left a year or so ago to go home to Singapore. Since I work with them closely we hang out together as often as not and being the same age helps too.

The highlights that are coming up are an impending visit to that odd little asian nation, Korea, to go snowboarding with my lil bro, damn I miss that boy and in a few months a return home!!

London Philharmonic Orchestra

2008-11-27T20:03:00.000Z

One thing that London is particularly famous for is its orchestras, both the Symphony and the Philharmonic Orchestra. Last night I went to see the Philharmonic with my cousin Lilian. To be in touch with out classier side, we'd booked box seats with a wonderful view of the stage.
The orchestra played 3 pieces

Debussy's Le Martyre de Saint Sebastien
Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor
Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathetique)

Debussy's piece was haunting and depressing in some parts but overall it was a fairly placid piece.

Rachmaninov's concerto is probably one of my favourite pieces of all the classical music that I know. The concerto is a piano solo backed by the orchestra. The soloist that night was a french lady Helene Grimaud. It's a 3 movement piece that has a powerful opening movement with strong piano playing required and though I'd listened to it quite a lot, the difficulty of this piece was staggering. The speed that her hands needed to move and the precision was awe inspiring. The 2nd movement is more thoughtful, and flowing and in general a very relaxing piece. The 3rd movement was a brisk lively piece, joyous and bouncy.

Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 2 in C Minor 1st movement Moderato

This is a recording of Rachmaninoff himself playing his concerto with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra in 1929

Tchaikovsky's Symphony no. 6 was first performed 9 days before he died. It's a fairly subdued piece punctuated with bursts of incredible vigour before sinking again. It was quite a difficult piece to follow sometimes, but nonetheless still a pleasure to listen to.

It was certainly a fine experience and I'll certainly be going again

Holy meal time batman!

2008-11-22T16:17:00.000Z

Hokai, it's time for another round of whats in my bowl/plate/chopsticks. For the most part I won't have quantities because unless I am baking a cake, which I haven't done yet, cooking is more about mood. Some days I'm into stronger tasting stuff other days I'm not. Quantity wise if I make too much then I have left overs for lunch the next day. Sweet!

So here goes

First of all is my variant Thai Redd Curry Chicken vermicelli.

What's involved
150-250g piece of skinless chicken breast, diced or sliced
Red Curry paste
Coconut milk
Bamboo shoots, sliced
1 medium sized onion sliced
spring onions or shallots sliced
chilli, chopped fine
vermicelli

How to make it
This is a stupidly simple dish to make. Heat up a pan and fry the curry paste for a bit then toss in the cocount milk. If you're brave, like me, then at the time the curry paste is frying toss in the chilli and fry that for a bit to really get the heat up. Bring the whole concoction to a boil, then add the chicken, if the chilli wasn't added during the fry up add them now. Let the mix come back to a boil then add the onions and bamboo shoots. At this stage prepare the vermicelli by boiling some water and soaking the noodles in them until soft, drain well.
Once the curry is reduced a bit, or the chicken is cooked and tender, it's pretty much ready to serve. Just pile all the stuff into a bowl and voila! Snow peas are a good addition to this dish

Next up, Spaghetti Puttanesca
Whats involved
Tomato mix, either peeled tomatoes or premixed tomatos
Olives, sliced or whole doesn't matter, about a half dozen if you want to slice them, a few more if you want to keep them whole
Capers, rinsed and drained, probably about 1-2 tablespoons full. Too many and the dish becomes too sour
Anchovies, chopped roughly
garlic, for one person probably about 2 cloves, finely chopped
Spaghetti
chilli

How to make it
This is another simple dish to make. Over medium heat, gently fry the garlic and anchovies for a minute or two then add the tomato paste/canned tomatoes/fresh chopped tomatoes. Bring the mix to a boil. I used whole canned peeled tomatoes once, so I had to chop them up as they were cooking. Once bubbling away nicely, add the chilli, olives and capers. Do the usual seasoning. You made need to add some sugar if it tastes too sour.

Prepare some spaghetti in the usual way. Because the sauce cooks fairly quickly, you can start on the spaghetti at about the same time as you start cooking the sauce.
Unlike bolognese where the sauce has huge chunks of meat, this one is more liquid so it's possible to cook the spaghetti to just short of al dente and then drain it out then add it to the sauce and finish cooking it the rest of the way like that.

Variation
For a more carnivorous version, I added in chunks of diced chicken. The chicken should be added before the sauce has reduced otherwise the chicken becomes tough.

Stir fried Chicken Egg Noodle (although the stuff I used looks like Ramen)

Whats involved
Diced chicken breast
Onion
spring onion
Chinese cooking wine and fish sauce.
corn flour
chicken stock
finely sliced ginger

Making it
Before cooking, soak the chicken in the cooking wine and fish sauce. I only did it for 20min or so while I was chopping the veges, but obviously you can do it for longer. There's no major skill involved in cooking this meal. Soften the onions with the ginger and throw in the chicken, stir fry until chicken is cooked on the outside. Add in a cup or so of chicken stock and boil for a bit to reduce it and intensify the flavour. Add in the corn flour mixed with water to thicken. Not too much else it will look like glue.

Boil some water and soak the egg noodles in it till they're soft, then drain. Now if you want to, you can toss the noodles in a hot well oiled pan with some salt for a few minutes to make them toasty or just throw it straight on a plate and pour the chicken sauce on top. I recommend the first option. It tastes better.

Until next meal time, gochizousama!

Aight then

2008-11-06T21:03:00.000Z

It's been a while, again, since I last updated. For all of you not into the happy news. As of November 1, I am a full time employee of SPI Lasers in Hampshire, which is in the south of England for all you non-geographers. So I'm gonna be settling for a while in this soggy nation.
About the only thing that means is more chances to roam around Europe and wherever else.

So lets see what's been happening lately. Ah yes Lilian and I hit the Natural History Museum in South Kensington this last weekend for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards. Some amazing pictures, particularly by youngsters. There was a category for 11-17 and under 10s. The winner for the under 10 was an amazing shot of a red fox on snow. The contrast was startling. My favourite pictures was one of a macaque (a type of ape) which had these clear brown eyes, but its expression was one of total confusion, imagine a big duh, but on a monkey. We had a good laugh about the monkey and I naturally pulled a few faces, which quickly brought "people don't need to take photos of animals, they can just take one of you!" from Lil... damn I got snapped =P

We also took a wander through the science museum next door, which turned out to be a giant disappointment. It's a big place filled with lots of dated junk from yesteryear. It feels more like an amusement park than a museum. We only took a turn through there to get out of the rain. The highlight of the evening was dinner (of course).We hit a creperie nearby. Behold our meals!

This was my Portuguese crepe. The filling being chicken, potatoes and cheese among a couple of other things I have since forgotten. It was yuuuuum

Here we have Lilian and her salmon and spinach crepe, which also had garlic (piles of it) and a powerful cheese sauce. I ended up having to finish it....it was FILLING!

Here's something else I made lately.

Looks like a pile dunnit. I'd picked up a bottle of Rendang curry sauce from the supermarket, made from all natural ingredients and get this it was imported... from Australia...the place that made this stuff is based in Botany, how random. Anyway this is my Rendang Curry Beef, which wasn't too bad despite the fact I used the wrong sort of beef.

This one is my special Drunken chicken fried rice noodle...it was a total mistake... there was so much of it i nearly swelled up and exploded. Looks good don't it =P

I need to find something new to make soon. I'm getting kinda bored with what I'm making. Thai curries, fried noodles, rice and what not. Sure I could refine them and all, but the ingredients over here are nowhere near as good as back home so....

I might make a fish pie next weekend. This weekend is gonna be rather busy.

What a monstrosity!

2008-09-29T20:01:00.000+01:00

Ok, I made this tonight and it was so deadly it had to be unhealthy but it was oh so good.

This is Benny's own creation, Spaghetti Marinara a la Roquefort with smoked trout.
Here are the ingredients I used
2 x 150ml tubs of sour cream
250g of seafood marinara mix
1 smallish onion
2 good sized chestnut mushrooms
1 spring onion
1 bacon rasher
3 slices of smoked trout
1 x 150g block Roquefort

Pretty basic start, fry bacon and onion together until onion is soften and bacon is cooked through, toss in the mushrooms and soften them too, then throw on the cream. Keep the heat on high until the cream as collapsed into a puddle and thoroughly mix until the whole lot is a gravy-ish brown colour. Throw in the spring onions and seafood mix. My mix was still frozen but it's ok since you gotta reduce the sauce anyway. Bring the sauce to a boil and toss in the roquefort. Now I used 150g, but that was way way way too much. Probably a quarter of that is about right. And for those who don't like blue cheese it's all good, cos with a smaller amount in really enhances the flavour, but what I used changed the sauce into a blue cheese sauce basically, fine for me (and Ingrid) but overpowering for just about everyone else. When the spaghetti was done, I tossed a couple of slices of smoked trout over the spaghetti and ladled over the sauce. This was just an extravagance I was treating myself. The heat from the sauce and pasta made the trout really salty, but was a nice blend of flavours since it smoothed out some of the bite of the sauce.

So there you have it, some thing that started out healthy but probably jumped my cholesterol by 2 points at the end.

Even more food!

2008-09-25T19:27:00.001+01:00

Well, then another day in the life of Benny, or rather many days. Most of my days are largely filled with work, eat and sleep, with some play here and there. But one can always have fun with food. Here's some random stuff I made, cos I was hungry

This one is kinda simple. Just took some lamb fillets, roughly diced and fried in some olive oil and cumin powder. The mushrooms were quartered and fried in more olive oil and garlic. The spaghetti was tossed with some sliced asparagus. And cos I was hungry enough I made up a bowl of peas :p
This is my rather basic seafood fried noodles. Nothing fancy, just fried the egg noodles after softening them in hot water. The mix was just some marinara stirredtogether with some fabl fungus.
This is my rather over the top random mix, more lamb fried in cumin again over more spaghetti

This was a favourite. Chicken, bamboo shoots, onions and a few other things stirred with chilli bean paste in egg noodles. mmmmm
It's been ages since I had any sort of Thai dishes and there aren't any take away shops here that serve it, sooo that means one thing. MAKE IT MYSELF. So this one is my green chicken curry, with bamboo shoots and snow peas (which are called mange tout, means "eat all" in french, over here). The concoction was then served over a steaming bed of jasmine rice. I didn't put enough curry paste in so it was just a bit light on flavour for me, but thats just me XD

And following on from my green curry chicken, I made red seafood curry, also thai style. It's cooked largely the same way as the green chicken curry but I used prawns and calamari instead of chicken.

Next time I make it, I'll need some stronger chillis. The "medium" chillis I bought were lame.

Feeling a bit nostalgic tonight, and also I didn't have much in the way of other ingredients available. This is dad's mince meat and peas in a gravy dish which is laid over a raw egg. Bev and Bink will know what I mean. I took a half kilo of mince beef and browned it over 3 finely chopped garlic to which I then added 1 diced onion and 3 sliced mushrooms as well as 1 sliced shallot. Then added some water and boiled it to reduce some of the liquid then added 3-4 tablespoons of cornflour dissolved in water as thickener. The whole thing was then simmered until it thoroughly thickened up. The rice was piled on and an egg cracked over it. I threw a handful of roughly chopped coriande over that then liberally spooned the meat over.... gaaaawwwd so filling.

Speaking of rice. I haven't got a rice cooker but I have perfected boiling rice in a saucepan. There is a little bit of the burnt rice at the bottom that is oooh soo fragrant. mmmmm.

Well thats it for this post. Maybe i'll post something thats NOT about food next time :p

Damn it's been a while

2008-09-16T23:25:00.001+01:00

Indeed it has, over a month since I last wrote. Mainly because I've moved house and haven't had net for a while. I now live a half hour's bus ride from work, which is brilliant since I can sleep in a bit more.

Ok looking back. Most recently, I finally met my cousin-sister, Lilian, who lives in London. Had a good long talk with her on Sunday over yum cha. It was good to finally meet her.
As an added bonus I popped by the Empire Casino theatre in Leicester Square where Robert De Niro and Al Pacino showed up to the premiere of their new movie. Ooooh my brush with fame... -_-

Oh the new place. I now share a house with 5 other people. All pretty alright. My room is a little single room with a shower. I'll post up some pics later, once I've cleaned it up a little ;p And of course now that I live alone means that I get to experiment on my food in a not-like-a-mad-scientist sort of way.

There's a chinese grocer about a half hour-ish away where I can stock up on those necessities. Next on the list is a big ass cleaver.

I'll finish my half arsed blog there since I haven't seemed to be able to collect my thoughts yet <.<

More food

2008-08-09T22:26:00.000+01:00

Well then shall we have an all new, "what's been on Benny's plate?"

First off is my own Chicken Pad Thai, first attempt didn't turn out too bad. I didn't have any chillis so I had to use sweet chilli sauce which was pretty good.

This here is my potato salad, with a lemon, dill and caper sauce. It was damned good, but a bit on the sour side. I probably should have put in all those capers, but the potatoes cut the sourness out quite well. I'll work on it a bit!

And here is lunch! Chicken, mushroom and onion stir fried vermicelli. Slight on the salty side, but eh XD

As promised

2008-08-05T11:21:00.000+01:00

As promised here are some of the shots from the Farnborough Air Show

This here is the all new Eurofighter Typhoon, the newest plane to join the RAF. Apparently if you turn off its engine, it has the aerodynamics of a brick.

This is the new unmanned reconnaissance vehicle for Europe, the Euro Hawk. This thing is huge, just so you get an idea of how big, I am only as tall as that hump at the front.

This is obviously the classic F-16, still one of the finest fighters in the world. Due to be replaced in several years time by the F-22.

And here we have the F-15, due to be replaced by the F-35 in the coming years.

Here is a firm current favourite, the F/A 18D Super Hornet.

Here is a better shot of the Typhoon

These two are MiG-29 Fulcrums that are visiting from the Croatian Air Force.

It's hard to do justice to the Red Arrows skill so here is a brief video of them

This is the Eurofighter Typhoon

The Apache, enough said

I think that might be enough ;p

Farnborough Air Show 08

2008-07-19T22:52:00.000+01:00

Well, I've done one of the things on my list of things to do before I die. Today I hit the Farnborough Air Show. That was a total blast. For those not in the know, this air show is for companies to come together to show off their new stuff. There were 3 exhibitions halls full of exhibitors showing off their wares. Naturally the USAF and NASA were present. There were heaps of planes to see, combat and civilian, a Eurofighter Typhoons, an F/A 18 Super Hornet, F-16 Falcon, F15 Eagle, a pair of Mig 29s and assorted others.

The main attraction of this show has to be of course the air displays. There was a very long list of them but I'll run through a few of my favourites. The absolute cap of the displays was by the legendary Red Arrows. These guys are one of the best aerobatics teams in the world. They fly these little planes call Hawks made by British Aerospace. I'll post some pics up of what they performed. Their formation flying was simply outstanding. Another thing was, this was my first full experience of being in the middle of a sonic boom. This is the monstrous air ripping sound you get when a plane breaches the sound barrier and when the entire flight of Hawks were going, all 9 of them, the sound was tremendous.

Next up, the demonstration by the Eurofighter Typhoon. This is the latest aircraft to join the Royal Air Force. It is a beautiful plane and somehow was even louder than all the Hawks combined. It rolled, weaved, climbed and banked with awesome power.

Then came the F16. This has been the USAF's main fighter for years, soon to be replaced by the F22s. This is put simply one of the most maneuvrable fighters in the world. It tore up the sky all the while it's engine was shredding my brain.

Following on was the Super Hornet. This plane now serves in the USAF and the US Navy. It's more powerful than the F16 but not as maneuvrable. I was wincing in pain when this thing flew past. It was LOUD. One of the more impressive tricks was to put itself at a relly steep angle to the direction of travel, the angle of attack. Most planes stall when this happens, but this baby just ripped from that back into full speed without breaking a sweat.

The Avro Vulcan. This is Britain's only big nuclear bomber it built during the early 80s. It is enormous. It looks like a giant triangle and it flies like a fighter pulling turns and banks like it was a quarter of the size it was. One these big birds took off from the UK and, making an inflight refuel, flew to the Falkland Islands during the war of the same name to do a massive bombing attack. It was mainly done to show that Britain's arm could reach a long way. It was a not so subtle threat telling the argentinians that their home land could easily come under attack as well. It was very impressive to watch this big fatass fly around.

The Rockwell B1-B. This is one of the prettier big bombers in the world. The Russians copied its shape when the Tupovlev company made their version. It's a sleak swing wing bomber that was the predecessor to the wedge shaped B2 that we all know of. This plane was only doing a fly by but it was incredible to watch. It did one pass with its wings open and another with its wings swung back. It was doing 800kph at that point.

The most impressive flight was by the A380. This thing is HUGE but the pilot flew it like it was a quarter of the size it was. Its turning circle was incredibly tight and its banking turns were fast. It's damned maneuvrable for a plane its size. There was rowsing applause when the pilot landed it.

There was a flight by an Apache chopper and a Boeing tilt rotor, kinda like the Ospreys and many others. All in all it was a lovely day although it started out by raining but then the sun came out and I've now got a mild sun burn to the face. Brian looks like a tomato, he's so burned. I'll put up some pics soon.

Something more important to talk about

2008-07-13T20:38:00.000+01:00

I don't think I'll bother blogging about Bordeaux, the last stop on my trip. Mainly because there's nothing much to blog about. However, here is something that I'm sure is close to everyone's hearts... well stomachs anyway.

Recently near where I'm staying in Wokingham a seafood restaurant opened up. Part of a chain called Loch Fyne. Naturally, when you think "chain restaurant eh, how good can it be??" One thing that a large chain can do, though, is pour a reasonable amount of money into ensuring a good supply of ingredients, should they choose to. I can safely report that this place is FRICKIN AWESOME. The food is top notch. According to their promotional stuff, they have their own smoke house and fish supply meaning..yep... they smoke their own salmon, trout etc.

This was my entree, a Bradan Orach. I swoon just thinking about it. This plate is a piece of lightly smoked salmon on the far left. Going anti-clockwise around there are 3 types of smoked salmon. The difference is in the length of time they've been smoked. The one to the lower right has been smoked for 12hours, up from that the fish was smoked for 18hrs and the top left one has been smoked for 24hours. I can only say again that this was fantastic. The biggest piece was very fishy in flavour, but the smokiness was very delicate. The first piece of salmon is similar to what we get back home, but going around, the smokiness intensifies. Not just that the flavour of the salmon is enhanced substantially.

Now then, this was my main, a Bradan Rost. This is kiln-roasted salmon, which is then char-grilled and served with a shellfish mushroom and whiskey sauce.

The fish was incredibly intense in flavour and quite salty too. The sauce was delectably sweet. Sort of creamy. It went beautifully with the mussels, which were tiny and had a lovely strong mussell-y flavour too. Sounds obvious, but sometimes the bigger the servings the more dispersed the flavour is. It doesn't look like much, but it was very filling.

Now onto something else. This was what I made for myself for dinner last night.

This was a sage and tomato sauce with chicken pieces served over linguine. I scratch made the sauce. No crushed tomatoes or anything out of a bottle. 5 tomatoes, 1 onion and about 200g of diced chicken chunks.

Evaluation: Not bad, the chicken was a bit overcooked and 1 onion was too much. Flavour wise it wasn't too bad. Chicken isn't particularly good to use to intensify sauce flavour. I should have used some sort of seafood mix or beef, but since I had neither I had to make do. The linguine however was done to perfection, which is a good thing since I managed to screw up last time i made linguine.

Till next time on Benny's Kitchen Experiments!

Blog blog blog

2008-06-19T20:51:00.000+01:00

Ok I know I am more than a month behind on my blogs, so I'm just going to post a super blog on everything that happened after the wedding and if you want pictures you can go browse through them on the links. If I find a particularly good one, I might put it up. So here goes

May 12: Newcastle upon Tyne Day 2

The day dawned cold and dismal. Cloudy and very much sub 20 degrees. As is my habit when travelling alone I went out on a long wander. I went down to Castle Keep, the fort that gave Newcastle its name. To put it simply, it was total and utter crap. It was £1.50 to get in and it was totally wasted mainly because there was nothing special about it. It had been attacked a few times in its history by the Scots but that was to be expected since it was built in the north and what castle hadn’t been attacked in its history. This place was just plain boring not to mention it spooked me too. It was all shadowy tunnels and such. I’m not terrified of the dark or anything, I mean, it might have been a little bit of claustrophobia or maybe it was some sort of innate danger sense, but seeing as there was no other visitors in the place and the gate keeper was criminally inattentive, if I were to slip or fall down or some such, it could be a while before help arrived. So I left after a very brief visit. So thus I decided it was high time for my aimless walk through the streets of this distinctly unattractive little city.
The one redeeming feature of this city was that it had a Chinatown. Although it was small, it did give me a very necessary sense of the familiar. I was very surprised by the number of mainlanders and hongkies that lived in this city, particularly the hongkies. I would have thought that the climate would have been super disagreeable to them. I had a bowl of soy chicken noodles, ordered in Cantonese of course, at a small eatery. For some reason it was very comforting to be able to speak in Cantonese again. I ended up crisscrossing Chinatown back to front, front to back and even side to side a couple of times. It reminded me how much I missed Hong Kong, perhaps. After some more hours of walking in which I went past the home of famous Newcastle FC and the old town walls I returned to the hostel for some warming up.
This day will always be marked down as quite special for me. I finally met my friend, Carina Nilsen. I’ve known this girl for a number of years but had never had the opportunity to meet. Rina, as I call her, is a Norwegian girl who moved to Newcastle to live with her boyfriend, to work and, soon, to study. And so I finally got to see her. As with meeting anyone for the first time, there’s always a first impression that hits you pretty hard. The first thing that slapped me in the face was that she had completely lost her Norwegian way of speaking English, which I found kind of sad. She sounded completely like a local. It was impossible to distinguish her speech from anyone else. The other thing was that she was even paler than I had previously seen. However the most noticeable thing was that it seemed like a lot of her old vitality and vivacity had been sucked out of her as if the lifestyle and working had leeched it out of her. (Sorry Rina!) Ah *sighs*
Anyway, we went and had dinner and chatted for hours. Even though we had known each other for years, it was like a first meeting kind of chat which I suppose it was. I walked her to the station and got her onto a train and then gripped by the melancholy at how the years, and life, change people, it was back to the hostel to do more laundry.

May 13: Newcastle upon Tyne Day 3

Having realized there wasn’t a whole lot to do in Newcastle I stayed in for the afternoon to decide whether I still wanted to go to Nottingham. Ultimately, I decided that I would forego the trip to Nottingham as 2 nights really wouldn’t do Robin Hood’s old territory much justice.
Then it was dinner again with Rina. This time we walked down to the Quayside and had a look around down there. For a small city it had a ridiculous number of bridges, 9 in all and a tunnel, to cross the river. Sydney with a population of over 4 million only has 4 major bridges for crossing the river plus a tunnel. How odd. It also has a footbridge which when viewed from above looks an eye, which incidentally was also its name. Quayside also boasts one of the oddest pubs I have ever seen. The building is sort of in the Tudor style, white with brown framing, but the oddest thing was that the walls of this pub actually bulge. They’re not straight! It’s very, very odd to see.

Newcastle also boasts a copy of our own Harbour Bridge, but unfortunately it's smaller. Even more unfortunately, it's not in Sydney.

Dinner was at a small pub with a deep back room, which we nicknamed the Brick Pit. Dinner was accompanied by a very long chat and a very strange person. The Brick Pit is a rectangular room with alcoves at each end and cubicle style seating. This rather odd fellow came in and walked into the alcove near where we were sitting. Naturally we thought he was getting a seat but instead he stopped and faced the wall and held out his hands, palms down as if he was blindly feeling about. As if that wasn’t strange enough, he went to the opposite alcove of the Brick Pit and did the same thing! WTH?! Then he went out in to the main bar. A pair of chaps sitting over there looked at us with puzzled expressions and we all broke into a good old chuckle. I peeked around the corner into the main bar and there he was! Facing a wall and holding his hands out! Wacko alert! Well, after that bit of amusement we resumed our chat and in time I walked her to the nearest station and farewelled her until the next time we met, whenever that would be.

May 14-15" Interlude

Nothing much happened here save that I stayed at Yan's for a couple of days and sorted out my accommodation for France.

May 16: Leaving for Paris

This day did not start very well. In order to get cheap travel in France, I had bought a Rail pass for France. This got me cheap travel on all the TGV and local trains for around 200 euros. I also got a cheap fare for the Eurostar, the express train that links London with Belgium and France. A full e ticket is a very expensive 150 pounds, my pass entitled me to a reduced fare of 50 pounds, but unfortunately that was the 7:30 train leaving from London's St Pancras (or as Ingrid calls it, St Pancreas *chuckle chuckle*) International station. So to get there, my day started at 4:15am as I had to get the first train out from Teddington, where Yan's place was. The train arrived duly at 4:59am and got me to London Waterloo at 5:45 at which point I jumped onto the underground that took me to St Pancras and thus I arrived, largely zombified at 6am to check in to the terminal. The Eurostar was fast, very fast, but not as fast as the Shinkansen of Japan, nor as comfortable. Anyway, the Eurostar arrived, a little late, in Paris at 10:30.

The hostels of Paris are almost as pricey as booking a hotel room, without the comforts. So to avoid all that I booked an studio apartment for the 4 days I was going to be there. I felt a certain amount of sentimentality about staying in this apartment. It felt like those french films I saw once or twice, weird. The street I stayed on, Rue St Charles has a rather nice view looking down the street, that of la Tour Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower, which really isn't all that spectacular.

I met up with Bink and Ingrid (what a coincidence!) at the Notre Dame. Paris is one of those old cities which have certain uniformity in its buildings. Many people find it nostalgic, but because so much of the city is covered in the same sort of buildings it’s actually kind of boring. The little alleyways are delightful with their cobbled stones tucking around the back of the boring buildings. To be honest, the main drags that are always packed full of people are never as interesting as nipping around the back streets.

I have now got the hang of how my GPS works! It’s brilliant. As long as there is a reasonable amount of clear sky the phone will pick up the signal from the satellites and stick a cross hair on where you are, brilliant wot.

We saw most of the “amazing” sights on this first day, the Notre Dame, St Chappel’s, the Louvre. To be honest, both Bink and I found Paris a little on the cloying side. It had a major sense of the overdone. The cathedrals, Notre Dame and St Chappel’s, were both lovely buildings, intricate in design and decoration but they were both heavily decorated as if someone had decided that having a simple stone interior was not enough. Compare to Westminster abbey where there is no painting. The windows are stained glass of course but the walls are unadorned stone and the wood simply stained. The stonework is no less impressive than the two French ones we went to but the lack of overwhelming colour lent it a matronly dignity while Notre Dame and St Chappel were like a pair of giddy sisters who’d broken into a paint shop. The other thing that got to me was the total lack of decorum by the visitors in Notre Dame. People clattered about talking loudly and snapping off flash photographs all over the place. It had all the hallmarks of a tourist attraction rather than a cathedral. This was the same at St Chappel. The stain glass window work in that place was even more incredibly beautiful. In Westminster Abbey, photographs were forbidden, so I absolutely had to have a few hehehe until I got busted. *ahem*

It was quite a difference. The Brits treated their cultural monuments with near-religious reverence while the French viewed them as another place to hang out or take a partner. No one seemed to view its historical significance.

This is the inside of St Chappel's Cathedral. The stained glass window work is simply one of the most brilliant I have ever seen.

The absolute highlight of the day had to be lunch. One of the nice things about Paris are all those little back streets where if you wander through and randomly pick a place to eat you might come across a little gem. Such was the case at this café just off the Rue de Rivoli called La Toque Saint German. It was a thoroughly cozy little café restaurant and the food there was sensational and so was the coffee. I had a warm camembert salad, Bink a veal escallop, she’d ordered an escargot but the guy got it wrong, Ingrid had a duck breast salad, and Kathy had nothing. Food was so good the ladies had to have dessert too. And thus, Bink and Kathy had a feuillantine and Ingrid a chocolate fondant. I made do with an espresso. Damn me, the desserts were impressive. The fondant was one of the richest I had ever eaten. The espresso, had to have been one of the best I have ever had, a smoothness that was like warm chocolate without a hint of bitterness. The coffee was served with a little biscuit which when dipped in the coffee was simply, for want of a better word, divine. We ending up sitting there till closing time and whiled away an hour or two.

Next Stop La Conciergerie, a one time prison for political and petty criminals generally on their way to their execution. A much nicer building since it wasn’t covered in paint and artwork, just bare stone. Marie Antoinette was imprisoned here prior to her execution.

Our next destination was the famous La Musee de Louvre and as it was starting to rain we decided to jump on the Metro. If Ingrid ever reads this she'll probably want to kill me, but hell, we all need a few good laughs. Anyway, Paris's metro system uses a system like Sydney's where you slide in a ticket and the gates open. but sometimes the tickets don't work and the gates don't open. So, as Ingrid approached the gate she put her ticket in almost as soon as the ticket from the lady in front of her popped out so the gate reacted badly and she had gotten past the first set of gates, but for some strange reason, there is a second set of gates and these didn't open. Of course the first set of gates locked and lo and behold, Ingrid was stuck between the gates... Here is the result.

As everyone knows, the Louvre is one of the greatest repositories of old art. The place is literally chockers with it all arranged by region, although the European art is further broken down by period because there’s so much of it. The place was also packed with visitors. The biggest draw card is of course the painting La Jaconde or more familiarly the Mona Lisa. It’s always been a mystery to me as to why this particular work of art has drawn such attention. The area around it was roped off and the painting itself hidden behind a Perspex shield. There was such a crowd of people around it; it looked like a gathering at a country fair to see the circus freak. The other thing that I didn’t understand and I said as much to Bink, was that why do people want to take a picture with a painting. It’s like they’re trying to prove that they actually were there. *shakes head*; we also had a look at the painting of Mary Magdelene, lots of conspiracy theories abound about modifications that were supposedly done by da Vinci to this painting. The other one he allegedly changed was the Last Supper but that’s housed in Milan, which is a bit of a hike to go see.

There were some redeeming features of this place. Some of the rooms had very impressive ceiling work, very intricate sculpture work and artwork, but more often than not there was a religious theme particularly in the Italian art section. Obviously to an agnostic, the religious significance was lost but the beauty of the work was nonetheless impressive. The final stop had to be the Pyramid Inversee, that famous inverted glass pyramid. I got Bink to do a pic of her hefting it and quite promptly there were imitators, pfft.

Having walked around so much we’d worked up quite an appetite so off we were to search for a feed and we found it in another little alley at a restaurant called La Sourdiere. Here we had a choice of ordering a la carte or getting a 3 dish meal. For entrée, I had a plate of Provencale style prawns; Bink had escargot, Ingrid a salad of some description and Ingrid’s friend Kathy, a French onion soup. The prawns weren’t too bad and the escargots were a bit on the soft side. The main was most impressive, I had a fusili with a four cheese sauce with Roquefort, Emmenthal and two others that I forget and it was simply the best four cheese sauce I have ever had. The smell alone nearly made me swoon. One of the things I’ve found with cream sauces is that initially they can be intense and delectable but after a bit once your palate caught up to it, the sauce loses a lot of its lustre. Well this one was a whole new kettle of fish. The sauce managed to keep tasting new and intense the whole way through. Vive la Roquefort!

Ingrid ordered a pair of quail, why I don’t know since she didn’t end up eating much of it… Bink’s salmon looked alright but not particularly inviting. Kathy’s veal looked pretty boring too. Then to dessert where I had MORE cheese; this time a block of goat’s cheese, which was deliciously smooth and melt-in-the-mouth, in a walnut salad. Bink had a crème Brule, a necessity since we were in the home of this dish, this one had coconut shaved over the top of it and a pineapple slice thrown over it. That too was delicious. The crème Brule was exceptionally smooth.

Ingrid’s one was some sort of strawberry ice cream pan cake, which was also very nice. The strawberry ice cream had super strong strawberry taste and Kathy had an apple tarte. The chap there was even nice enough to separate my meal out into its component dishes as it worked out cheaper than if I’d paid for the 3 dish meal.

Having wound down for the night we walked to La Place de la Concorde and took some happy snaps of the Eiffel Tower then called it a night.

It was pretty good to get so much touristy stuff out of the way on the first day. Although it was only my first day here, I’d come to see an interesting difference between the French and British cultures. The French lean heavily towards the arts, intangible delights of the mind and senses. The Brits are more into actions. Their history is a long one of large numbers of conflicts with the European neighbours, during the middle ages, and overseas, in more modern times, and a significant number of people distinguished themselves through the ages of warfare. The most famous square in England, Trafalgar Square is named after their most famous victory. The French have La Place de la Concorde which is best known for the 3000 year old Egyptian obelisk that sits in the middle of it. The other thing that caught my attention was the way the French moved through the streets. They frequently overtake each other going up stairs and escalators or even just on the foot path. They rushed to get onto the train, which is in significant contrast to the Brits, hongkies and Japanese who will politely wait until everyone had gotten off before getting on. Their behaviour on the roads was also quite chaotic. People crossed the roads whenever there was a gap and the cars slowed down, even if it was a green light and few people honked the pedestrians! Another thing is their police or ambulance siren. It is literally pitched at the most annoying sound possible for a siren. The Australian, Hong Kong and American police use a very high pitched one that you almost have to plug your ears to block, but the French one rings through your head painfully. This could potentially be a painful stay if I encounter too many police vehicles. The other thing I had to gripe about was the shower in the apartment, it didn’t drain fast enough and the shower base was very shallow so it filled up in a real hurry. I set a new record for myself for the fastest showers. It’s interesting having a water clock to time your showers.

May 17: Paris Day 2

This day was to be a bit of a sad one. I was sending Bink off, again, but for the last time. Quite possibly it could be a great deal of time before I saw her again. I didn’t get to send Bev off and that was kind of sad too. It’s pretty hard to describe it. There couldn’t have been more than a month or so that any one of us has been away from the other two, but now we were all apart. I make light of it a lot. I am for the most part a fairly solitary person, but that solitude is spent also knowing that those two are nearby. It’s quite difficult parting with people who you have watched all their lives. I think I’d rather have lost my right arm or left leg.

Anyway, having deposited Bink at the station, I went and booked my ticket to Lyon. That merely cost me a reservation fee of 3 euros. I was getting the feeling that this France Railpass was going to pay for itself over and over. The city centre and a lot of the surrounding are very old and after a while it all looks pretty much the same.

A few decades ago, the government decided it needed a new district, for the higher tech industries. They built a whole new area called La Defense. It’s all glass and steel there and is dominated by La Grande Arche de la Defense. In the right sort of light the place looks like something out of Star Trek.

As I travel more and more by myself, I find I am more interested in just absorbing the feel of a place, hence the large numbers of kilometres I clock up just wandering around. This place wasn’t anything particularly special. Ultimately it’s a technology park; there are about 1500 companies here and a big shopping mall underground. After a couple of hours wandering around went back to the apartment for a couple hours rest before I got hungry. I popped down to the local grocers for some cheese (more Roquefort! And Goats cheese), a baguette and meat and made a meal of that.All in all I find I was getting a bit bored of Paris. It didn’t appeal to me as much as London did.

May 18: Paris Day 3

The plan today was to meet up with Ingrid and Kathy for brunch.; they crossed town to get to my end. We originally planned on getting a pile of cheese from a fromagerie, a cheesemonger, and some bread and munching away. Unfortunately, the French being the way they are, often do not open their stores on Mondays. So brunch ended up being a light meal at a restaurant near my apartment. Brunch was decided ordinary, nothing particular to speak of. I decided that today I’d have a bit of something else apart from more art. So while Ingrid and Kathy went off to Saint Germain de Pres and wherever else, I went off to the Musee Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle, or the National Museum of Natural History, which is in actuality just a giant park with 3 museums and a garden. I wandered the garden which was fairly beautiful but there was something missing here.

Personally I feel that a garden or a park should fill you with a sense of serenity and peace a place where you can relax. That just didn’t happen here. There were just too many people, this being a Saturday and all. After a bit of thinking I hit upon the problem. Paris’s buildings, unlike London’s, were largely 5 to 6 stories high.

That puts them about a storey higher than most of the trees in the city; that seemed to press in on the parks and made them feel more claustrophobic. It felt like something was just hanging over you. London’s buildings on the other hand are largely about 3-4 stories putting them on par in height with most of the trees. This gave London a much airier and expansive feel. Hong Kong didn’t feel that way because the buildings absolutely towered over you so you didn’t take much notice of them. Paris’ were just low enough to see but not tall enough to tower over you, a very strange effect.
After a while I gave up on the museum of natural history and went off for a long, long walk. I walked past the Pantheon but declined the ridiculous price of 6 euros to go in and view a tomb. I wandered past into la Jardin de Luxembourg, or the Garden of Luxembourg. There I happened on a bit of a treat, a big band playing music in a stand. That was a bit of a surprise. The kids were certainly enjoying it. After they finished I resumed my stroll through the garden. This particular garden featured a menagerie, I which I found emus and wallabies! Oh how I missed those furry and feathery critters of home!

My final random stop of the day was for the old church at St Germain de Pres. This is France’s oldest church, dated to about the 10^th century. I didn’t linger long as it didn’t quite fascinate me enough, at least not as much as the nutella crepe that I ended up buying, now that was really good. At this point I decided that I would walk back to the apartment, a fair hike of about 4-5 km, but after about halfway I got bored and jumped on the metro. That’s the thing about walking. I’d willingly walk three times as far, and I did on the Great Wall and in San Francisco where I walked for about 8 hours, if there’s something interesting to see but if it’s boring I couldn’t be stuffed. Dinner ended up being the remainders of the cheese, meat and baguette from the night before. Not really all that satisfying but eh I didn’t want to spend too much money this early on in the trip.

May 19: Paris Day 4

My final full day in Paris, this day I paid back the favour to Ingrid who came all the way to meet me for lunch, although it had been originally for cheese but the place was closed. We had a quick bite at a crepe store near her place then went up Butte Montmartre to see Notre Dame de la Sacre Coeur or the Sacred Heart. There’s quite a legend attached to this place. A saint, Denis, was executed for some religious reason or other and his headless ghost, bearing his head was seen plodding up the hill not long after and thereafter it was called Montmartre, coming from the combination of Mont, meaning “mountain”, and Martyr.
It was quite a view of Paris from the hill, but you can only stare at the scenery for so long before you get bored. On the way down the hill I noticed a few black fellows holding handfuls of coloured threads and it hit me pretty quickly that these were the dodgy bastards that Des had mentioned to me. What these guys do is offer to braid you a bracelet but they’ll say they need to do it on your wrist so that they can ge the length right. If you’re stupid enough to let them do it, they end up with what is effectively a rather thick wrist restraint with which they basically hold you until you pay their usually overpriced fee for making the bracelet. Seeing them, I herded the ladies down the other side and away from these shifty characters The original plan was for us to have cheese at a local fromagerie, so after a fairly decent walk we ended up finding out that this place was closed too… damned French opening hours, lazy bastards. So instead I went looking for Asians and that meant Chinatown. Unfortunately, Chinatown was on the opposite side of the city, so that meant another long metro trip. Reaching there was a bit of a relief. I don’t mean to be racist or anything, but I do find myself feeling a hell of a lot more comfortable around my own kind. It’s my comfort zone I suppose. I chowed down on a special beef noodle. Damn it was good to eat asian good again. Nothing against French food, but really it’s hard to compare with asian food.

And so my Paris visit came to an end. All in all I found it less than satisfying. It just wasn’t a place that appealed to me, but I guess I’m happy to have been able to come over here and experience it and be able to say from seeing it first hand whether I liked it or not.

May 20: Lyon Day 1

Ah and the long trip begins. The first step in my whirlwind tour around France, first stop Lyon. Compared to Paris, Lyon is small. The city itself has only about half a million people but the entire metro area has about 2 million, the second largest conurbation in France. The TGV is so fast that it’s only a 2 hour ride out of Paris. I gotta say I am very impressed by the train system in France. It’s fast, efficient and fairly comfortable. I managed to misread the map getting on the metro so I went a station in the wrong direction… *ahem*

So…

Lyon is the considered food central in France, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. The city centre is bounded by two rivers the Rhone and the Saone and bridges crisscross the rivers. The river side is a very pleasant walk along tree lined boulevards, although the roads are called Quai. The city has instituted a local bike hire scheme. There are bike stations with ticket booths and you can hire one for whatever length of time you want and park the bike at another station and walk off, very slick, but I chose to walk. Compared to Paris, I found Lyon more comfortable. The people didn’t seem as uptight. I didn’t really do much on this first day. I did found out however that I had walked more than I had to and changed metro lines even though I didn’t have to. There are 4 metro lines in Lyon, originally named Metro Line A through Metro Line D, no confusions there. I had changed from B to D thinking that the station was the closest. I ended up walking 7 blocks to get to the hotel but upon picking up a map from the hotel I found I could have stayed on line B and made it to a station just 2 streets away. Lyon 2, Benny 0.

So having made a bungle of the metro a bit of walking was definitely necessary so off it was. I walked around for a couple of hours looking for food, not that I didn’t find it, I just couldn’t decide on what to eat. Finally decided on having a steak, which was ok but really no chop on the ones back home (no pun intended). The one thing I dislike about the two cities I’ve visited so far is that they both have big variations in the opening and closing times. Most places tend not to be open on Sundays and some places aren't open Monday either. Also, the French have a tradition of having 2 hour lunches, makes you wonder how they get anything done at all. So by the time I finished dinner pretty much everything had closed, how dull. I walked another couple of blocks then went back to the hotel. I should really call it an apartment. This place was huge. It was closer to being a studio apartment than a hotel room. The main room was as big as my bedroom back home, not to mention there were a stove and a fridge!! My window bears special mention. It had a security roller shutter and a curtain rail so I could hang up my washing and having a fairly good chance that it would be dry the next morning. It also opened out onto a small rock garden, which was pleasant.

May 21: Lyon Day 2

Today I decided I’d go visit Vieux Lyon, or Old Lyon. Lyon is very old; it started out as a Roman settlement a couple of thousand years ago so some of the old buildings still stand and Old Lyon dates back at least several centuries. To get up to the old town you have to take the metro to Vieux Lyon station and then a cable car, la funiculaire up the slope. Naturally I misread the map again; I took an extra stop on the cable car and ended up further up the hill that overlooks Lyon and where Old Lyon is situated, but on the northern side of the hill. I was on the southern side and I ended up in the district of St Just, rather than St Jean, which is pretty much only a residential area. It looked a bit like the eastern suburbs without the nice houses. Of course I didn’t know this at the time so I wandered around for several hours until I got bored then jumped on a bus to Croix Rousse. Lyon 3, Benny 0

Just for fun I fired up the GPS and being another one of those lovely days, it picked up the satellite quick smart. I then watched my weaving journey through the hills over Lyon until I reached my destination, the old silk weavers’ quarter of Croix Rousse. Unlike central Lyon, Croix Rousse is a jam packed sort of place. All the streets are bloody narrow and the buildings are at least 6 stories high, it’s a very characterful sort of place, but not one where you want to be caught alone late at night. There is one bonus of this part of town. There is a open plaza-cum-lookout which opens into a stunning view of the city and from there you can follow a cobbled street down the hill to the first district of Lyon. The view really was breathtaking. The stroll down to the first district followed a pedestrianised street that flowed down the hill. The street’s lined with lots of quirky shops but as it reached the city it became a little dodgy looking.

One of the features of Lyon is opposite their l'Hotel de La Ville. It's a fountain with a giant sculpture on it. It's of 4 horses drawing a carriage. The four horses are meant to represent rivers or something. The whole thing is made of 120 tonnes of lead.

It’s quite depressing travelling alone sometimes, especially when you’re alone in a city where the best thing is to eat. Eating out alone is boring and you look like a total twat. Drinking alone is even moredepressing, you look like an alcoholic. Dinner ended up being a ham quiche and a croque monsieur, lots of cheese over ham on thick toast. I heated them back up over a slow heat on the stove. The quiche was damned good but the croque was a bit of a crock.

Random shot. Seems even Leonidas had a soft side, or should that be soft centre?

One of the lovely things about a city on the river is that it becomes quite a sight after dark. In this case, it didn’t go dark till after 9pm so a slow stroll out to river side at 8:30 yielded an amazing vista of the river and the city. I wasn’t the only one with such sentiments, a pair of Korean (I think) girls were wandering the riverside taking shots as well. All in all I felt it was a lovely way to end the night.

Oh and Celine Dion got the French Legion of Honour for her contribution to music or some such

May 22: Lyon Day 3

No matter how stupid you look eating alone, in some places it’s not too bad. Since I was in the gastronomic heart of France I had to have at least something. Leafing through the food section of the Lonely Planet guide I came across a place called Giraudet, a small boutique eatery/deli that serves up a local delicacy called a quenelle. They’re little dumpling like things, the most basic form which are made of flour, cheese and eggs. So after some dicking about in the city centre I managed to find it.That’s another thing, French streets will be named along one stretch of it then suddenly there’s a tiny stretch no more than half a block long which will be a completely different name, such as it was with the Giraudet.

The place is really quite cute. There are a small collection of high tables and stools where you can eat. Then behind it there is a counter where you can get the raw quenelles so you don’t have to make them yourself. There over a dozen different fillings. I went for a quenelle volaile in a simple salad. I’m going to have to look up what volaile is. These things were delicious! At first I thought that they were a little bland, but as I ate I figured that if they were fairly strong flavoured, it’d get pretty hard to eat towards the end. They tasted of light fluffy egg with a hint of cheese, it was excellently balanced, although admittedly mixing balsamic vinegar and cream probably wasn’t the best idea. By the end of the dish I was thoroughly satisfied with it. It was an excellently light dish suitable for a light lunch, but filling enough that it’d be a while before I got hungry again.

Now I decided it was definitely time to explore Old Lyon, without getting lost and what a delightful old place it was. Lots of cobbled streets and open squares filled with bouchons, Lyonnais eateries where you can get theire local specialties. The streets were lined with small quirky art stores or occasionally offices. It was a bit like the Rocks, a blend of the commercial and the old, but not quite as cramped and quite a bit more relaxing.

I had to get a picture of this dog. Reminded me of Lulu, so cute. There was a doberman pup that was running up and the down the street. He was really cute.

This is the city from a ways up the hill behind Old Lyon. Quite a lovely sight. Lyon has a really airy and far more sentimental feel than Paris, I found. Yes it didn't have all the museums and art and what not, but there was a certain stateliness about it.

The other thing I had decided to have a look at was the confluence, the point where the two rivers met, so back onto the metro it was and off to the nearest metro. After 20 min walk I found a point where I could see the confluence and it’s not really much because that part of the city is a cross between a redevelopment project and a port. It used to be an industrial wasteland, but it’s being rehabilitated into what I don’t know. Still, it was something I’d never seen before and the area near it is very much a light industrial/technology park. Large numbers of steel and glass buildings housing small companies and their bigger cousins housing larger companies, a really boring kind of place. At that point, I called it a day. I’d seen pretty much all of central Lyon, I’d crossed it north to south and east to west in the three days, which wasn’t a bad effort.

May 23: Marseille Day 2

I’d often found the travelling to a place more exciting than getting a place, as the saying goes, the journey is more important than the destination and my next destination was gritty Marseille, an hour and a half south from Lyon. Marseille is the second biggest city in France with over 800,000 people. It’s famed for being the home of bouillabaisse, a sort of seafood soup/hotpot, which used to be poor man’s food but is now what the city is most celebrated for. My hotel turned out to be only a couple minutes walk from the station, Reformees Canebieres, which in turn was only one stop from the TGV station, bonus! The hotel itself was in one of those old style buildings, terracotta roof tiles, stucco coloured walls and wooden shutters and of course there were no lifts. My room was on the top floor, affording a beautiful view of the…street, which was a lovely tree line affair, but very busy. The shutters looked like they hadn’t been fixed since they were first installed. The locks and all other metal fittings had been completely rusted away. Very RUSTic haw, haw.

Having dumped my stuff, I took a jaunt down to the Vieux Port, or Old Port of Marseille. This is the part of the city where it all happens. This old port has been in use for 2600 years according to the history and it was absolutely packed with boats. It’s not quite as big as say Blackwattle Bay back home but it had history.

Along the sides of the port, it’s all restaurants and hotels. It is super commercial. At the innermost side of the port there are shops, cafes and stores of all sorts. It’s busy as all buggery. Marseille also has a reputation for being pretty rough and it actually feels fairly rough.

The most imposing features of the old port are the pair of forts that guard the entrance to the port, Fort St Jean and Bas Fort Nicolas, both built by the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem in the 13th Century. Very imposing features for any harbour. The view of the city from St Jean was most impressive. From the top of Fort St Jean, there is a very imposing panorama of the port and the surround city. About the only word for it is bustling. I have never seen so many boats in one place before.

This is Rue De la Republique, Republic Road. Every city I've visited has one. This one is a bit of a shopping drag. Mixed shops not all that impressive.

This rather imposing view belongs to La Cathdrale Notre Dame de la Garde. It overlooks the entire city, making for a very impressive viewing lookout.

After a couple more hours of walking exploring the back streets of this grimy city, I picked up dinner, more cheese (blue auvergne thus time), meat (parma ham or prosciutto) and a baguette. I gotta say that that can actually be a fairly satisfying meal and moderately healthy.

My first impressions of Marseille was of a distinctly "in you face" sort of place. I wouldn't say I was comfortable in it, but then again I'd only been there for several hours. I definitely liked it more than Paris, I'd put it a little below Lyon though.

May 24: Marseille Day 2
The other thing that Marseille is famous for is the Ile d’If, home of the Chateau d’If, which is the setting for Alexander Dumas’ famous novel, The Count of Monte Christo. The island is a 20min ferry ride from the old port and voila! I was cruising on the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s quite a lovely sight looking back at Marseille from open water. Unfortunately, the further out we went the heavier the winds got. It was coming into gale force when the ferry reached the island.

The island itself is basically a big pile of rock and the Chateau covers pretty much the entire pile. It was originally a fort to guard the approaches to Marseille, which it had to do a few times during its long history. From the water, it's a very forbidding looking place.The fort it self is one of those 15th century style forts. Lots of rounded towers and reinforcings. This is mainly because of the increasing use of firearms, especially cannon in that period. Round towers make it easier to have guns facing and firing in all directions. I'd imagine that any large ships attempting to force its way into the harbour would find itself under a blizzard of cannon balls from the fort. Even if it made it past the fort, it would still have to deal with the two old forts guarding the port itself. A most defensible position. The interior isn't quite as elaborate or as imposing. It is a prison after all. Here are there I saw "graffiti" left behind by the prisoners of the time. Seeing these sorts of things is like having the past talk to you.

The view from the battlements of southern France is spectacular. The day was absolutely beautiful and the visibility was kilometres all the way around. Although to the south of the fort there's nothing to see but more of the Mediterranean.

Another thing of note was the size of the seagulls. They were the size of small hawks. Compared to them, the ones back home looked like pigeons. In fact there were warnings strung all over the place about aggressive seagulls, which might attack. Fortunately, the wind was so great that most of them spent their time gliding around on the updraughts or sitting around taking cover. The flipside of that was the wind was making it increasingly difficult to take pictures since the buffeting from the wind made it damned hard to hold the camera still. Walk in a straight line getting difficult, even for someone of my mass. There were other visitors that were having it really tough.

. So it was back down to the wharf to await the ferry which got there in short order. The ferry took a side trip to Ile de Frioul, which is actually 2 islands that were linked by a dyke. This island was used as a quarantine station during a cholera epidemic centuries ago. The ride back was damned nasty. The wind howled and the ferry started smashing its way through the waves. Eventually, or should I say inevitably, all of us brave souls who sat on the upper deck were thoroughly drenched and I was probably going to get a cold. A quick detour back to the hotel, a hot shower and a short rest I decided that I absolutely had to try the specialty of the city. I scooted back to the old port so I could treat myself to a big plate of the stuff. Naturally, there had to be dinner hours, after 7-7:30 and I’d gotten out there at 6:30, so I spent an hour or so wandering le Panier Quartier. This old quarter, meaning Pantry, dated back to Roman time but during WW2 when Marseille was liberated by allied and French resistance, the quarter was blown up and later rebuilt. It’s a pretty boring area.

Now, I love strong flavoured foods and the more intense the better, hence my love of blue cheese. However, I gotta say that bouillabaisse completely bowled me over. The soup base was incredibly intense. It was also an unwholesome off green colour. The mix of flavours was awesome. I’d asked for the bouillabaisse royale which include a half lobster. Our lobster back home is so much better, I must say. The fish was scorpionfish, I think. The flesh was delectably firm with a nice amount of "bounce. There’s another addition to the meal, a basket of hard toasted bread, a sort of aioli and a dish of shredded cheese. The trick was to spread some of the aioli on the bread then sprinkle cheese onto the sauce and then drop the bread into the soup to soak it up and of course go soggy. That turned out to be an unexpected collision of delightful flavours. I didn’t think I’d be full after that but damn me I was full and it was so delicious.

Dinner had been great so I topped it off by enjoying a sunset over the open water. The day had nearly been a disaster but in the end good food and a beautiful evening made it pretty darned good.

Just for fun here are some night shots of the Old port.

May 25: Marseille Day 3

Unfortunately, this day turned out to be a Sunday when virtually EVERYTHING is closed. At least there were no people out. Of course it started raining after I’d left the hotel so that wasn’t too pleasant. To add to the unpleasantness I visited the rather rundown poor sectin of the city called the Belsunce quarter. Of course it felt like a ghetto so after half an hour or so I promptly went back to the port. The whole place feels like the housing commission of Redfern Waterloo. There's meant to be a rehabilitation project going on. This place doesn't need rehabilitation, it needs
to be bulldozed and rebuilt. Dynamite or TNT would be good.
One of the crowning features of Marseille is the cathedral, la Cathedrale Notre Dame de la Gard. This old, old cathedral sits on a hill overlooking Marseille although with the pounding rain it was a bit on the dreary side. This is a view of the Ile d'If and Ile de Frioul from the hilltop. Notice how dreary it is. The whole time it was raining and being the bright spark, I had neglected to bring my jacket so I was getting damper by the second. I thought I was going to get a cold from all this. First the drenching from the Mediterranean, now this...

This is the view of the old port and part of the western side of the coastline of Marseille. Towards the upper part of the coast is the newer ports where the real cargo is delivered.

This is the Notre Dame herself. It's a fairly grand old building. No pictures were allowed inside which is fair, as there were a large number of people praying.

In the end, I’d pretty much decided that I’d more or less exhausted what I could. I’d gotten quite damp anyway so I gave up and went to the net café for a couple of hours instead.

May 11: Departing Lulworth and travelling 500km...

2008-06-16T15:25:00.000+01:00

After a moderately hearty breakfast, it was time to leave. Yan, the champ that he is, dropped me and Bink at Wool. Upon reaching London Bink and I parted for the second time (the first time being when we arrived in Hong Kong separately), she on her way too Berlin and me to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Incidentally, Bink missed her flight due to complications following the previous night’s festivities when she got stuck with caretaker duty.
Newcastle was a six and a half hour train ride north. The day was one of those perfectly blue sky days that you wouldn't expect to see, but there you have it. The countryside was dominated by rolling plains broken with small clumps of trees. It was a really delightful trip north. The first impression of Newcastle is of a singularly dreary place, no surprise given that it is one of the northernmost cities in England. An impression reinforced by the dullness of the buildings. see for yourself.

In the south it had been a very balmy 24 degrees and thus I was in shorts and a t-shirt. Unfortunately, stepping out onto the platform a few hundred kilometers north of the south coast, the weather differed markedly, by about 10 degrees. It was damned cold and I was shivering by the time I reached my accommodation, a nice little hostel called the Albatross that had been voted the best in England last year. As it was a week day I got lucky and had a 6 person room all to myself. So I promptly started spreading my stuff all over the place. And bonus of bonuses, right across from my room was the laundry! So my gear got a good clean, or at least as good a clean as I was going to get without washing powder.

Having hauled my carcass into some decidedly warmer gear, I took a bit of a stroll around the place. Newcastle is a fairly small city of around a quarter of a million people. The first thing that struck me was that it looked old. There were a lot of the old style buildings, but there were a disproportionate number of bars, pubs and clubs. Also the people were fairly rough, not in the sense that they were getting into fights and what not, but there was a very raw quality to the people. The people mostly speak a dialect called Geordie, which is Scottish sounding English with a few words changed. They made the place feel like a frontier town. It was a far cry from the polished politeness of London. The whole place felt like a cross between Gosford, Newcastle (at home) and Old Sydney Town. This is the rather uninspiring monument quite simply known as Monument, below which is... you guessed it...Monument Metro Station.

No matter where I go in the world, I come across odd sights and not many got odder than this. The Sydney Deli. Offering an Australian style self service sandwich bar. Since when was there such a thing? It looked more like a Subway...

Despite such oddities, there are some nice looking buildings in Newcastle, such as this one.

However, as nice as it might be to keep strolling around, the sun was setting and I began to have doubts that it would be all that safe to move around town when there were so many pubs, bars and clubs around. I've never seen so many people standing around drinking in a city before.

I found this city to be distinctly disappointing and so rather than brave the streets alone at night I returned to the hostel and settled down for some tea and a long bout of blogging.

May 10: The Big wedding day

2008-06-09T20:56:00.000+01:00

The big day had arrived! However to power myself for such a major day I obviously had to have a hearty breakfast. I noticed on the menu that there were kippers on offer. Now as most of you know, I’m game to try to eat most things at least once in my life. Being in England where one of their traditional breakfast foods is kippers I absolutely had to have one. The lady asked me if I wanted toast and coffee/tea first, so I happily had the coffee despite it being the crappy American sort. Ever since I went to the US and tried first hand the complete and utterly useless liquid that looks like rainwater left in the gutters for too long and tastes, and I use the word “taste” very generously, like it too, I have hoped that it could be renamed to something more suitable like “swamp water” or “puddle water” so as to differentiate it from real coffee. Anyway back to breakfast and luckily I had a fried egg as well because the kipper, note the singular form, would have been a rather lonely specimen in that enormous of expanse of white that was the plate. Fortunately, there were members of my family who were not big eaters and I managed to make up a reasonable meal from theirs.

Before the wedding, there was a bit of time to explore the surrounding area. So we all took off like fledglings leaving the nest. I took a gentle stroll along the cliff side with Bink. Although I had made light of this place before I got there, I had to admit that it was a beautiful place.
It's the kind of serene country side village that you might associate with the English country side, as you can see here.

After a while it turned out that a lot of people agreed with me as the car park across from the inn filled rapidly with hikers. Lulworth was also well known for being a fossil ground and that attracted the kids who had interests in that direction.

There's a moderate sized hill that was a short walk from the inn and many of the visitors delighted in walking around, over it, across it or however they wanted to get to the other side. I have it on the best authority that there wasn't much to see. The hill also had the rather ridiculous name of Doodle Dor

This bit of the coast is pretty interesting to look at, if you had an interest in geology. You can tell that there had been some pretty serious movement of the rock by looking at the rock lines to the left. The whole lot looked like it had sagged.

Tucked down in a little corner is this lagoon. There were some people paddling around in canoes and a small group of scuba divers here.
It looks pretty overcast, but that turned out alright since it didn't get too hot so all the poor people dashing around in suits didn't sweat too much.

The lucky lady was busy getting herself sorted out for the big day as were the rest of the other important people who left earlier to ensure all was in readiness. Not to belabor the point, all the other people who were not driving piled into a coach, in all their finery, which had been thoughtfully provided by Pat and Brian. To add a bit of humour to the afternoon, the driver took the wrong turn towards another wedding that was going on the same day. *cough cough*
After a brief trip we arrived at Lulworth Castle, which isn’t really a castle but more of a fort, but let’s not quibble over technicalities. The castle was not terrible impressive as it had been severely damaged in a fire some years back and the upper floors had collapsed. However this did have the positive impact of making the hall higher and more airy than it otherwise would have been.

A string quartet was on hand to provide the necessary waiting music while the small crowd awaited the arrival of the bride. The plucked and sawed their way through some classical pieces like Pachelbel's Canon to keep everyone entertained until the big moment. This ended being later than expected, but then again isn't the bride allowed to be fashionably late?

After a few hiccups the bridal party arrived and the wedding finally got under way.Uncle Patrick giving his daughter away. I must admit to a feeling of oddness seeing Uncle Patrick in a suit. Pat's dress was stunning though, as it should be.

Joel delivering his reading. There was a bit of confusion earlier in the day when he asked Brian about his reading because Brian's sister, who was also doing a reading had the same one as Joel's! That would have been a bit of a disaster. It turned out that Brian had managed to email the wrong one to his sister.

As it wasn’t a Christian wedding, the ceremony was sorted out in a fairly short time and Pat was duly married to Brian, and we gained a new family member

And here we have Mr and Mrs Beaumont, at last.

With the wedding out the way we got into the obligatory post-ceremony pictures. Being part of the family, that meant they took forever and a day to get through. There were large numbers of pics taken, but I think this one pretty much summed it all up.

After pics it was on to the drinks accompanied by large amounts of the canapés and the like. Joel had a hard time nailing down any sort of food since he started chasing the serving ladies who would run out of food by the time he caught up and finally decided to camp near the exit where the food was brought through with the pretense of chatting with the other groomsmen.

After what seemed like an interminable wait we all sat down in the hall for the reception dinner. The speeches ensued. The speeches were quite moving especially the best man’s speech about Brian’s acts of selflessness while they were sailing round the world together; Brian certainly was moved by it judging by the snuffling that was going on.

Brian's speech was nice and straightforward. Pat's one was so emotional she could barely get through it, mainly because she had to thank her bridesmaid so profusely. Of course that started a vast quantity of tears.

And thus started the food, which was excellent timing because I was beginning to starve. The food was pretty good. The dessert was delicious, Joel had a second helping and judging by his face, that was a very welcome sight...

Then of course was the cake cutting.

Then came the obligatory dance, but Pat decided to surprise Brian by belting out her rendition of Shania Twain’s From This Moment. Pat’s got a reasonable voice for someone who hasn’t been professionally trained, but did she have to sing that song? Not to criticize Pat or anything but that song is on my top-ten list of most annoying songs of all time. After her song came the first dance, which was quite nice but the other people jumped in on their moment too damned soon. After a bit, even I had a bit of a spastic attack on the dance floor. Erica, Bink and Yan decided that it was a brilliant idea to chug down vast amounts of wine. That sort of fit the location, especially when Erica got wasted.

The beginning...

Oh dear...

stop shaking the world please...

Game over

May 9: Tower of London and Lulworth

2008-06-05T15:20:00.000+01:00

Today was the final day in London before we head down to Lulworth for the festivities. For the morning and part of the afternoon we visited the infamous London tower. There we saw the Tower Ravens, birds that if they were to leave legend says that the tower will fall down. They even have a Ravenmaster to keep them happy, damn big buggers they were too, the birds not the Ravenmaster. The tower has a rather large collection of antique weaponry some of which date back to Henry VIII’s era. Rather than doing a boring blow by blow account of what went on, I’ll post a few pics with a description and upload the rest for you all to appreciate.

This here is the White Tower, i actually used to get whitened, hence the name.

I guess keeping the Raven's caged would definitely prevent them from leaving and the tower from falling down. Isn't it odd that the old song goes

London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down....

One of the stunning arrays of weapons from the days of the musket. This is the sort of weapons display this section of the Tower of London used to have when it was used as a weapons store.

Another weapons display.

These two swords are ceremonial swords. They're longer than I am tall. I estimate their length to be about 2.2 metres from pommel to TIP.

As this part of the Tower used to be a weapons store, there are endless displays of weapons and armour from the 15th through to the 19th centuries. If you really want to look through all the pics I took, click on the link to the album.

We also visited the museum dedicated to the members of the Fusiliers of HM army. Many a moving tale of heroism and all that, but that was to be expected. I doubt there is any unit in any army that hasn’t got its own share of tales of heroism and tragedy.

This here is a bottle of 1914 Moet & Chandon champagne. This is of particular note as it was presented to the Fusiliers by the owners of taht famous vineyard. Bottles of this vintage commemorate the death of large numbers of workers at the vineyard, mostly children. This vintage is only opened on anniversaries

(This one's for Fred, if you ever read this)

One of a number of Imperial Eagles captured from Napoleon. This one was captured by the Fusiliers.

We finally had the ubiquitous English creation, fish and chips. We got some from a little take away stand outside the tower and there was quite a huge crowd of people lining up for them too. I must say that it wasn’t too bad either, for 5 quid, although it was a bit on the oily side.

On the whole London had been a thoroughly enjoyable stay. Admittedly, we had been fortunate with the weather which had been a lot like Sydney in summer time. I’m sure winter will be a lot less clement. There’s a certain dignity to London, a quiet understated dignity. Sydney has a certain feel of raucous youth, Hong Kong smacks of insanity, Beijing has the feel of centuries of history drawn into the present, a sense of agelessness despite the rapid progress of the nation, and Tokyo has a sense of the clinical precision, but London exudes a strange sense of dignity and grace. I find I leave it with some regret.

The train down to Lulworth took about 3 hours time well spent dozing and listening to music. The English countryside in spring time is incredibly green and peaceful looking. Fields of golden flowers (probably canola) swaying in the breeze, rolling hillsides swept by spring grass. It’s a thoroughly romantic looking countryside. Forgive the rather blurred images, I hadn't fully figured out how to use get decent images while travelling at over 100kph.

The first impression of Wool, our stop, was distinctly of sleepy town with very few people. An impression reinforced by the presence of only 2 taxis at the station. Said taxis were quickly snapped up forcing us to wait almost half an hour before another showed up, when I was right on the verge of calling the local cab company to summon one. Our garrulous drive-cum-guide took us on a 15min journey to the even sleepier seaside village of Lulworth. Sleepy though it was, it was one of the most peaceful places I’d been to, a truly relaxing place. There had been some confusion with the accommodation with Auntie Gloria getting Lulworth Cove Inn, where we were staying, with Cromwell House, where we weren’t. So naturally there was no booking there for us and ended up with her going to another place for accommodation and then of course we worked it out

*chuckles*

The room was definitely a good one. The bathroom was huge! I could have slept on the floor fully stretched out and people would still have enough room to step around me without stepping ON me. The view of the sea, from the bedroom, was blocked by some cliffs. Shortly after settling in, it was dinner time where we got to meet the newest member of our family and also a reunion with our elder cousin, Philip, his wife Jayne (who I hadn’t met before) and his mother, our aunt. There was much rejoicing as I really do like Philip, he’s one of those rare fellows who you can’t help but like. I took to his wife as well, who I believe he is lucky to have. His mother though, well that’s another story and I’d rather not go into any details. Those who know her will know what I mean.

So here we have Jayne, Philip, Joel, Erica and Pat

And me and Philip (look at me I'm enormous!)

You know, I'm not quite sure what was going on here...

Our newest family member, Brian Beaumont, is a rare fellow; thoroughly likable, easy going, nice, caring and generous. I thought Pat was quite fortunate to find someone like him.

After some pleasantries where I got to meet the bridesmaid Erica, who in an odd twist was already married, as well as another of Pat’s friends, Yan. Both of them were delightful people too. Dinner passed by pleasantly, although Bink may have reason to complain since I ate the roast veges that she had ordered. I had thought it was quite strange when the lady came out told me that the roast veges were to go with the apple faggot roast pork, which had exactly the same veges.

Yep, that’s right

Apple

Faggot

Roast pork

Lots of jokes that night about the faggots, which looked like a pair of balls, as you can see

Anyway, moving along… One thing that the brits do which I heartily disapprove of is the way they serve beer. Beer should be kept so chilled that the serving tap is covered with a layer of frost and then served in an ice cold schooner. The Brits keep it at quite a few of degrees above zero and then serve it in a room temperature pint glass. Of course the beer goes flat and warm in a real hurry, yech. If I end up staying in the UK for any extended period of time, I’m going to have to lay in a stock of beer stored and served in the correct fashion to keep from going mad.

And thus the night ended. All in all it had been one of the nicer days of this trip.

Damn you Bev

2008-05-31T03:49:00.000+01:00

The rules are:
1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves
3. At the end of the post the player than tags 5 people and posts their names, than goes to their blogs and leaves a comment, letting them know they done got tagged and to ask them to play and read your blog.

What was I doing 10 years ago (1998)?
1. I was in second year uni
2. I had no idea if i still wanted this degree
3. I was doing 25 hours of uni a week
4. I was commuting a minimum of 1 hour in the morning, each morning and at least the same in the evenings unless i had night lectures
5. headed to HK that year with whole family.

5 Things on my to-do list today:
1. Should probably sleep as its after 3:30 am
2. Help my friend pack stuff for his move back to Sydney
3. Eat my Marks & Spencer 4 min meal
4. Find a job
5.

5 Snacks I enjoy
1. Macadamias, cashews
2. chips and gravy
3. Sushi
4. Ramen
5.

5 Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Buy a small house
2. Learn to invest
3. Fly first class
4. Travel more
5.

5 of my bad habits :
1. Being lazy occasionally
2. Procrastinating
3. Mixing work and play
4. Saying things at the wrong time
5.

5 Places I have lived:
1. Sydney
2. Hong Kong
3. London
4.
5.

5 Jobs I've had:
1. Tutor
2. Research Assistant
3. Engineer
4. Lab demonstrator
5.

I tag
1. Anyone who bothers to read my blog
2.
3.
4.
5.

Damn me I'm behind

2008-05-25T14:32:00.000+01:00

Yes yes yes I know I'm way behind on blogging about well anything. I just haven't had reliable service here in Marseille. The hotel wifi shows up but it refuses to connect. If you've noticed, I'm closer to being current with the pics than I am with the blogs. There's going to be a massive blog session when I can sit down for a decent length of time.

Just so you know, I've been keeping notes and what not so I can copy and paste. I would have done it here in this netcafe in Marseille, but the stupid PC won't let me connect up my USB drive, bastards. Not to mention the fact that it costs E3.80 an hour so I 'm not goign to do it all here. Bah!

Random musing about food

2008-05-15T14:19:00.000+01:00

I must say that London is pretty good. Today I'm staying at a friend's place in a little suburb called Teddington. Food here can be surprisingly cheap if you know here to go. Last nights dinner was a couple of roast beef dinners, for £2.50, and 2 salmon salads for about £6 from Marks and Spencer. The variety there is amazing!

Pub food isn't too bad for the most part. There's going to be the odd crap place, but with the sheer number of pubs over here, it shouldn't be too hard to find a good one. There is literally a pub every 2 blocks, especially in London central

Admittedly you have to get used to thinking in pounds.

Speaking of food I need food soon...

May 8: Dover Castle

2008-05-14T14:11:00.000+01:00

An amazing trip today. We visited the mighty Dover Castle, a citadel that has seen service with the United Kingdom for over 900 years. This fortress stands overlooking the famous White Cliffs of Dover.

A brief history (if you can anything I lecture about brief)
The original structure on this site was a an Iron Age fort. The only evidence of this fort was the earth embankment that surrounds the site and is now part of the defenses. The fort was long gone by the time the Romans arrived and built a watchtower on it, which still stands inside the castle grounds. There was a matching watchtower on the other cliff on the opposite side of Dover, but that one is gone. Later the Saxons built a church, St Mary de Castro, next to the Roman watchtower, which by now had lost the top 4 floors of its structure. In the 12th century, the keep and the internal curtain walls were built under orders of Henry II, using the original earth embankment to form part of the moat. After a French siege in the early 13th century, modifications were made to improve the defenses with towers added and gates modified. During the late 18th to early 19th century, massive modifications were made to the castle and the surrounding area because of fear of invasion by Napoleon. These modifications were made of changes to the walls to accommodate artillery and musketeers as well large numbers of fighting positions also accommodating cannon as well as a new fortified position where the other Roman watchtower stood, called the Western Heights.
The castle again saw service during WW2 where it was the headquarters for the evacuation of British troops after the Nazi army invaded France then it was used as the command centre coordinating the navy for the D-Day landings. In the 1960s it was the regional seat of government in case London was obliterated in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Obviously I've skipped over a large amount there, but this gives an idea on how much this place has seen.

This place is so large it's hard to do it justice with pictures.

They didn't let us take pics of the secret wartime tunnels though.

This the view of Dover city from the top of the keep. In the distance you can see the hill where Western Heights was built. If you know what you're looking for you can still see the earth embankments that were used as the defensive wall of the fort. Now it is mostly overgrown bush.

This is the south east view of the castle. On the horizon is France. On the far left of the image in the background is the old Saxon church and on the right of the church is the Roman watchtower.

I won't belabor this too much cos there are links to my photos on the main page. But this gives you a bit of an idea on how important this place was.

There were some underground tunnels leading to one of the moat defences and I went own there and it completely spooked me out even though it was broad daylight. No idea why. It was one of those cramped tunnels that the brits were so fond of back then. Lights had been installed but one of them was flickering and then a pigeon flew out. It was the setting for any shock flick. *shudder*.

That said, Dover itself kinda reminds me of Gosford. Lots of single parents roaming around. It's also the gateway by sea to France as the Calais to Dover Ferry puts in here, so there were a fair number of French roaming around. On the whole it's not a bad place, fairly quiet.

One particularly funny thing I saw was a sign leading out of a driveway. It said "To avoid damage, drive dead slow". This was from a drive way leading out into an alleyway. I can only imagine at the carnage that coming out into a little used alley must have caused such that a "drive dead slow" warning had to be issued....

May 7: Hampton Court

2008-05-12T01:57:00.000+01:00

Well, this day was a nice little jaunt down to the Hampton Court Palace. A beautiful 16th century palace ordered by Cardinal Wolsey who served under the famous (Or rather infamous) Henry VIII. Pictures weren't allowed of the interior of the palace but were allowed around the gardens. Hampton Court Palace also has a garden maze nearby.

The train passes by Wimbledon on the way down there. The ride is only about half an hour from London, a pretty quick ride.

The palace lies on the bank of the Thames and is built on some fantastically beautiful parkland. Although I must say that as much as I love and orderly garden, having everything in perfect straight lines isn't very natural.

There was some sort of restoration work going on when we were there but enough was visible to see how lovely the buildings are.

This is the Clock Courtyard, so called because of the clock that was built on the opposing wall, which is a technical marvel. It shows the phases of the moon, what constellations are currently visible, and some other info which I have forgotten. Oh it also tells the time like all good clocks do, about all it doesn't do is bake cookies.

At this point we entered the palace. The palace is separated in to several distinct sections, Henry VIII's section, the apartments of King William II and Queen Mary II, King George II's apartments as well as the great kitchens and other halls. All of them house countless works of art, beyond the rooms themselves. All of them have chambers where courtiers waited surrounded by the King's guard and an inner chamber where the King received visitors and then there were their private rooms.

The gardens outside the palace are exquisitely beautiful. This fountain has been in the palace for almost 500 years.

Here are some pics of the outside gardens

I think I'll post most of the pics of the gardens, they're just that lovely.

And here we come to the maze. This was quite a lot of fun, Bink took a couple of wrong turns (no surprises there)

And here we have the centre of the maze and big metal plaque and a spinning metal needle. An express exit was off to one side so you didn't have to go back through the maze, and get lost again.

After the maze we took a fairly leisurely stroll through the remaining gardens, not too leisurely since it was getting close to closing time.

I'll put up some of the nicer ones now. I took way too many pics ;p

And with that I will leave my picture insanity. I have heaps more pics, nice ones silly ones etc etc. I'll put links to them on the main page.

May 6: More touristy stuff in London

2008-05-09T02:18:00.000+01:00

Weeeell today certainly had interesting things in store for me. A trip to the famous British Museum!! But first off there was a brief visit to a little shopping are called Leadenhall. This place is really quaint. Very Victorian. Any new shops that open keep to the victorian facade, it's quite a delightful effect. Stopped at a cookie shop and had a delicious lemon cookie and a dark chocolate cookie along with a great coffee, made my morning I tell you. Here's a couple of shots.

The cookie was thoroughly wicked.. sooo rich. Oh, that's Ingrid holding the cookie (Thanks for being the hand model, Ingrid ;p). The coffee deserved special mention for being as good as one I'd made myself.

I think the sepia texture suits the Leadenhall market. The colour image refuses to rotate properly, so I'll fix that later.

Once satisified we made our way to the British Museum, but not before I picked up a new sim card and Ingrid went to grab a laptop that her friend had given her to sell. So we went looking for a shop to sell it and lo and behold we came upon Tottenham Court Rd which just so happens to have a string of PC stores along it... fancy that...unfortunately, the stores here wouldn't take the damn thing because it was an australian machine with an Australian power cable not to mention the fact that the battery was dead. Thats what you get for being dodgy.

On to the museum!!

After a wrong turn and past a nice little garden, we made it to the museum!

I must say that the museum is one of the most amazing places I have ever been to. I got caught up in the first section I visited, a theme room named Enlightenment. Filled with artifacts from all lover the world displayed in such a way to show the period of enlightenment in the 18th century.

Got stuck in there for an hour and a half. So that I wouldn't spend my whole time in just one room, I also explored the China exhibition and the Japan one.
I took an incredible number of pics here. I'll post up a few of my faves with a few words about them, else you'd be here all day and nothing would get done.

This is the Enlightenment exhibition, the room is amazing rich in decoration. The upper gallery level of th hall is lined with book shelves which are inaccessible but lend the room at quiet dignity and library like atmosphere. The display cabinets were spaced by more bookshelves filled with old books and such.

This is one of favourite pieces. It's a nautilus shell which has been cracked open and the inner coils picked out so that it resembles a knight's helmet. It is a phenomenal piece of work. The outside of the shell has been painted to show a naval battle scene.

This is the inside of a nautilus shell where it has begun to turn into a fossil. The inside spaces of the shell have begun to fill with crystals.

This is a gold filigree case used to hold a Goa stone, a supposed cure for poisons or some such. The workmanship on this thing is exquisite.

This is a Ming Dynasty china plate. The glazing is incredibly delicate and it's really big, wider than my head.

This is another favourite piece of Ming Dynasty china. One of the things I love about it is the writing. This piece of china is about 500 years old and you can see that the written form hasn't changed in that time. Of course the entire writing system was standardised 2000 years ago.

There are many more and all are as interesting as these ones. I'll add a link to my photobucket account to the main page so that people can browse at their leisure.

Now in an adjoining chamber, there was a display of ancient clocks. I'll show a couple here.

This clock is amazing, especially given its age. It's about 2-300 years old. It was designed to roll slowly down a long dinner table and belch fire and smoke every quarter hour while some small figures move along the quarter deck. This is a true piece of art.

This clock ran on a brilliant system. A ball bearing rolled along a grooved track machined into a metal plate on the bottom of the clock. It took 30 seconds to go from one side of the metal plate to the other side. At each side a bar bounced the ball back and triggered the plate to tilt. On the seconds face, the hand would make a half revolution marking 30 seconds. According to the display, the ball bearing covers 4000km a year.

In the same room but on the other side was a display about the pacific island cultures. One particular display really caught my eye. This is a pacific island, I forget which one, sword of manhood. When a boy reaches manhood, his father makes him a sword such as this one. It's made from wood with shark teeth bound onto the shafts using hair and coconut fibres. An amazing piece of work. I certainly wouldn't want to be hit by this ugly thing.

I'll leave this one at this point. I'll write a part 2 for this day else it would be WAY too long.

May 5: London at last

2008-05-07T22:51:00.000+01:00

Sometimes first impressions are lasting ones, other times you have to look back over your first impression and revise you opinion of things. Such was the case when I stepped off the plane into pommyland. My initial response was to run to the nearest airline desk, buy another ticket and haul my arse back to HK. Immigration was very initimidating. Most places I've been to the border guards don't talk to you or at least minimally. Here it was like a brief interrogation, 'What are you doing here? where are you going to go?" things like that. Bink got stuck at the desk explaining how she'd screwed up a visa application as opposed to having one rejected as the border guard thought. An idiot Korean decided that he could start being touristy straight from the get go and whipped out his camera to take a few happy snaps at the airport..... in immigration, got himself yelled at by a fat brit lady. He had no idea what he was doing and had even less idea of what the fat woman was saying so the poor tour guide got yelled at too. Mighty fine start to a trip, wot.

The London underground was distinctly unappetising. It was a hell of a lot better than Sydney's poor excuse for a rail system, but it was a far cry from the incredible efficiency of Tokyo and Hong Kong's rail lines, not to mention the expense. The rail cars had manually opening vents as well as windows at the doors at each end of the car leading to the next car. These windows had a sign saying "Lower window for ventilation", which would have been fine except that meant exposing the entire car to the dust in the tunnel. I've been blowing fine grit out of my nose most evenings and early in the morning.

However getting out of the underground and onto the actual streets I felt a little better. It wasn't too unlike Sydney, just a whole lot more people. It was pleasant to walk through Mayfair and Soho. Lots of little boutique shops with exquisite products and lovely parks, not to mention the quaint houses. Got a brief guided tour of the area by our host, that was nice of him. The thing that struck me most was that it didn't smell too bad. So the first day was mostly doing the tourist thing, met up with Ingrid who just happened to be visiting Europe at the same time, 3 times in 2 years we've travelled with her now, but she's good value

Moving along, saw Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Green Park (original name huh), Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard at said palace. As a bit of an aside I had a pint of Foster's, that lovely beer that we aussies export for the pommies to enjoy because we don't want to drink it ourselves. Been a long time since I had one of those. Got busted at the Abbey taking surreptitious pics when I wasn't supposed to ^_^! , ah well.
Went and had a look a London Bridge, nice looking bridge but doesn't really compare to the old coathanger back home. Lunch/dinner (linner? dunch?) was at an italian chain restaurant along the river looking at the bridge, wasnt too bad. After the meal it was decided that we would walk to the very nearby London Waterloo a major station where Overground and Underground lines passed through. That's right they call them Overground trains here. Aaanyway, we managed to find the rail overpass and figured that it shouldn't be far away. Predictably we completely missed the station even though it was enormous and ended up at the rather unimportant station of Lambeth North whose only reason for existance was to link Waterloo and the ridiculously named Elephant and Castle station. Having reached Waterloo and realised our folly we walked back to the river and took a "flight" on the London Eye. Not too exciting bar the ridiculous picture taken by the London eye camera while we were looking in different directions, anywhere but at the camera, top stuff.

But anyway that capped off the first day

Hong Kong Day 3 and 4: Distended bowels and fond farewells

2008-05-07T11:01:00.001+01:00

After Macau, I knew (much to my chagrin) that things are going to get worse before it got better. This rather hideous prophecy was fulfilled when my cousin, Dorothy (yes Dorothy) picked us up from Wan Chai. Incidentally, we went to the Wan Chai PC centre where I picked up 2 more microSD cards for my phone, because the ones I had bought on ebay arrived at home, in Sydney, on the same day that I left. That balances out with the fact that Bink's BritRail pass arrived on the day that she left, oh the bitter irony. Anyway, having been picked up in a wonderfull airconned car, it's mid spring in HK meaning that the temp is already climbing its way through the mid 20s and the humidity hit 95% so virtually every particle of dust that you walk past/through, can and will stick to you and there are plenty of those. So anyway, Dorothy took us to Kowloon to eat at a muslim restaurant which was big shit because it featured on a TV special, and celebrities ate there and gave it the thumbs up.

That's something you gotta understand about the hongkies. If your favourite celebrity goes to a restaurant, your brain is automatically wired to do the same thereby fulfilling your fan's duty of following your idol slavishly.

In any case, that meal was massive by my standards now. Also it involved sharing the table with 5 other people, a couple and 3 girls. I gotta say that the meal was damned good, again pics will be forthcoming. Unfortunately, the meal was at 3:30pm after which we went to Hiram district. A coastal suburb well known for being a tourist haunt where there is a whole stretch along the waterfront devoted entirely to seafood restaurants each with an aquarium display out the front, albeit one where you can eat the inhabitants. Tanks filled with mantis prawns, horseshoe crabs (never knew they were edible, confirms that cantonese will work out a way to cook just about anything), cuttlefish, eels, groupers, urchins, tube shells, abalone, crabs, etc etc etc. All of the maitre d's at each restaurant we passed tried to get us to go in an eat, which of course if we had would probably have caused fatal food poisoning, not from bad food, but just from too much food, I'd have had sauces replacing my blood.

Dorothy managed to convince us to go eat some dessert with her at around 5, easily done, all she did was say the word "durian" and I followed like a brainwashed puppy. And as was the case, it was delicious. The only trouble was that at 8 we had dinner at a seafood restaurant in Kowloon with some aunts. Luckily it was seafood and I made it through without exploding. Anyway, somehow I managed not to lumber on the way back to the apartment.

Day 4
The final day of my stay in hong kong started off with some more shopping. Not that I really minded. My stay in HK was really just a readjustment in preparation for my next leg to Europe. I gotta say that I really enjoyed HK, it's strange how much I missed it. I think it has something to do with the fact that previously I was either staying at someone else's place or at a hotel, but this time it was with family and so HK got to feel a little like home I guess. Not to mention that I do find HK girls strangely appealing. Some guys like girls with serious curves and a massive rack. Personally I really like the slight willowy frames of HK girls, not to mention that they're a whole lot less annoying than mainlanders.

But anyway. towards the end of the afternoon, after much shopping as well as lunch at Spaghetti House. I must recommend this place. If you're craving something western, this is a damned good place for it. Steak is seriously expensive in HK because it is ALL imported, primarily from australia, which is quite simply the best there is. British beef, well all I have to say is mad cows. American beef, if you can call it that, is so sodden in steroids that the Health Department had to issue a warning that expectant mothers should not eat any significant quantities of it because of potential effects on the foetus. At the end of the night was another dinner, this time with Dorothy, her sister Eva and their parents who just returned from Singapore. They're a delightful family to hang around with. In a way, they're like extra sisters. The dinner was at one of the renowned BBQ geese joints in HK. Damned fine meal quite promptly followed by being dropped off at a nearby bus stop for the shuttle to the airport for a midnight flight to the UK.

This is where things started to go sour.

First off, the take off time was pushed back because another plane was delayed by a half hour and there were passengers from that flight that were joining my flight. So while we waited, Bink and I started up a game of scrabble, great time filler that. Then the next load of bad news arrived. The chinese government had decided that due to severe weather, they would close their airspace. All of it. So we ended up stuck at the terminal until 1:40 an hour later than initially scheduled. At least it was in one of the newer Cathay 747s which had those newfangled seat shells where the seat within would slide up and down without the whole seat moving. Excellent idea I must say; I had plenty of leg room, but that didn't stop my sciatica acting up, damned legs.
Following a 12 hour flight, with less than 6hours sleep, 3 and a bit movies (Cloverfield, Rambo, the Golden Companss and most of Aliens) the plane landed in the realm of the poms. That will be continued next time...

Hong Kong Day 2: Macau

2008-05-02T16:48:00.001+01:00

Well, today was fun. Visited the old portuguese colony of Macau. For those not familiar with the little city, it was ceded to the portuguese by the old empire as recompense for the losing some war, but has since been returned to the chinese government. Like Hong Kong, it holds Special Administrative Region status, ie the communist government hasn't run over its existing government with a steamroller. The reason for this is that Macau is the Las Vegas of China. Much of it retains its portuguese character. All signs have both traditional chinese and portuguese on it. There also remains many classic portuguese style buildings such as several churchs and a lot of old housing. Some of the old buildings have since been modernised to house stores, restaurants etc, but the exterior is mostly restored.

We arrived by ferry from Hong Kong, a trip of about 50min, not a long trip but one which takes you to another country and all the bureacratic rigamorale with immigration and customs. Quite a pain, got stuck in a queue with hundreds of other people for what seemed like forever, but was only about 25min. Mainlanders can be such a pain. Having breached immigrations and customs, we wandered out to the bus terminus. Here there are only a handful of public buses and they have to fight their way through the dozens of casino shuttle buses that block the area. There are at least 5-6 buses for each casino here all waiting to whisk you off to lose your hard earned cash. We jumped on to the shuttle to Wynn's casino, which I might add completely blows Star City out of the water and into orbit for sheer elegance and grace. The lobby to the side entrance of the place is very understated, with a pair of angelic statues fronting the entrance. It's the chandelier that is amazing. Wandering around to the main entrance and lobby to the casino itself is a display of incredible size. In the middle of the room is a dome easily 10m across. Above it is a domed roof about 15m across. The dome on the ground is engraved with the twelve constellations, Aries and the others, but also with the images of the animals super imposed on it. The dome about is even more amazing. The twelve animals of the chinese zodiac are...how can I say...emerging from it. They're not flat but actually erupt from the dome. The truly amazing thing is that both domes are designed to open. The upper dome is designed in 12 "petals" so that each petal retracts into the roof while the lower dome retracts into the floor and some show is exhibited, unfortunately, the domes were under repair today (bugger!) I'll save further comment until I upload the pics.

Next were the new and old Casino Lisboa. The old one is probably the oldest casino in Macau. The new one is across the road from the old. Nothing too impressive either one, if anything the new one reminds me of a shopping centre. The lobby looks very cheap, but it did have some interesting antiques.

Lunch came up, and we went to one of the most respected noodle shops in the city. So respected that the Singapore government issued a special invitation to the owner to travel there to perform their noodle making techniques. Pictures and descriptions of the food to follow. A stroll through the, thoroughly packed, streets and alleys of Macau we sampled such things as the local almond cookies, which I might add, are deliciously light and powdery. As well as some fresh made pancake like treats and some local durian and some sort of odd fruit that looks like garlic in a passionfruit shell but tastes like yakult. Odd yet deliciously refreshing. No pics on these since we scoffed them too quickly.

Following lunch, we took a stroll (or a hike if you ask my sister) up Fortress Hill part of the original defences of the city. Visited the museum there, lots of interesting stuff and antiques there. I learned where the english pronounciation of "tea" comes from. Yay for me!

After another little stroll, followed by a quick trip back to the ferry terminal to catch another casino shuttle we arrived at the Venetian casino. The largest casino in Asia. Within lies a replica of Venice, an enormous arcade filled with shops, bridges, walkways and a replica of the waterway replete with gondola and gondoliers, all westerners to keep in the theme and some of who can sing! Lots of entertainment to see, such as statue impressionists, jugglers, stilt walkers as well as a little song and dance show with some nice operatic performances. After an hour or so here, it was dinner time. Rather than describe the dishes, I'll upload some pics and comment on them then.

After the rather filling dinner, another nice stroll to another casino for a brief respite. I lost HK$40, but my sis won some. Then back on to the ferry for another 50min trip back to HK and a 15min wait in immigration. Some stupid mainlander had something wrong with his passport or entry permit or some other piece of bs paper work, the customs officer gave him a talking to, while i was stuck waiting. I even jumped to another queue but by that idiot officer was finished the equally idiotic mainlander so I went back to that queue...idiots... Leaving the terminal, we dived 3 floors underground to reach Sheung Wan MTR terminus for a 20 min ride back to Quarry Bay.

Tomorrow, shopping... then lunch with cousin(s) [someone's probably gonna make a comment about the vast numbers of cousins that I have] followed by who knows what the hell.

Day 1: Hong Kong

2008-05-01T14:58:00.000+01:00

At long last the trip begins, but not with the best of beginnings. First I had only about 2hours sleep since I absolutely had to check everything over again. I had a 7:30 flight so I ended up at the airport at 6ish, checked my bags in and pretty much went through the gate after farewells to the folks and my bro. I'm gonna miss that lad as he's off to kimchi-land, Korea. To start the trip off, my flight is then delayed by another late arriving flight so we didn't take off for an extra 45min. And as it turned out, it was one of those old airbus A330s. I like airbuses but this one was due for retirement.

Food was surprisingly good, had an omelette for breakfast with a sausage, lunch was a selection of some sort of fried chicken, hake and a vegetarian pasta dish, so I went for the hake. The inflight entertainment was crap. It completely didn't match what was written in the guide, so I gave up on that and had a series of catnaps repeatedly broken by my sciatica in my left side acting up constantly, not pleasant at all. After lunch watched some stuff on my laptop hoping to while the time until landing, but ended up using all of the battery instead with an hour and a half left before landing, shit...

Finally landed! I've often complained that hk is only good for 2 things, eating and shopping and that's true, but landing back in this muggy city I've come to realise that I actually did miss the chaos and oddities which make this city what it is. The people who sleep in short snatches, the constant noise, the crowded streets. The other bonus is that it's spring time here. Today was a balmy 27 degrees (or 81 degrees Fahrenheit for you americans out there) and thoroughly humid so I was sweating enjoyably wandering around the streets looking for food. Unfortunately, having found and consumed said food my severe lack of sleep has caught up to me and I must to sleep. Tomorrow -> MACAU

P.S will have to post pictures at a later point since I'm borrowing someone elses internet....