Zoe and Sean in Australia

2007-05-30T11:14:00.000+10:00

Previously on Sean and Zoe's Blog...

As you might remember we were in Melbourne and about to go for a curry. The curry place was down one of Melbourne's charming side streets which was quite picturesque. The curry was good as well.

From Melbourne we flew to Cairns.

And from Cairns we hopped in a minibus to Port Douglas - a 1 1/2 hour drive up the coast.

The place we were staying at was a five minute walk from the centre of Port Douglas which is a small seaside community.

We had been eating in restaurants a great deal and fancied some home cooking Australian style so we took advantage of one of the free BBQs at the place we were staying at and cooked some snags (sausages in pom-speak), burgers and lamb. I did the grilling and Zoe did the salad in true Ozzie style.

I have been inundated with letters of complaint that there have been no semi-naked pictures of me on this blog. Please find one below on the beach at Port Douglas.

What a guy!

One of the things we had been advised to do in Port Douglas was to go Cane Toad racing. 100 Cane Toads were introduced to Australia in 1935 as a way of controlling pests. They were crap at controlling the insects they were introduced to wipe out but very good at reproducing. Today the descendents of those 100 toads number over 200 million and they are estimated to have wiped out hundreds of indiginous Australian species. Scientists are still trying to find a way to bring the population under control.

A humane way of controlling the population seems to be racing them. Below is a picture of the Cane Toad Master of Ceremonies who breeds and keeps his 'thoroughbred' cane toads himself. He was a good source of information on the little pests and we had a great night.

Cane Toad racing is a very strange sport where a number of toads are placed in the middle of a table. 'Jockeys' then blow at them with party blowers attempting to get them to jump off the table where they can then be picked up and dropped in a bucket to complete the course. I thought the guy might be joking when he explained these rules but it seems not.

Zoe was chosen as a Jockey in the second race of the evening. All jockeys have to kiss their toads which Zoe managed with some aplomb. She came third which wasn't too bad. The video below shows it all.

From Port Douglas we travelled back to Cairns and got on a boat to Green Island. Green Island is situated on the Great Barrier Reef and is a small coral cay. Green Island measures 1.6 km by 300 metres and is entirely made of sand and coral. It is the only coral cay in the Great Barrier Reef with a rainforest and is widely regarded as one of the most environmentally sensitive tourist developments in the world. They have their own desalination plant and all rubbish is shipped off the island. Here is the island itself...

Green Island was truly breathtaking. During the day it is over-run by day trippers but in the morning and at night it felt like we had the whole island to ourselves.

Our room in Green Island.

Zoe sitting on our balcony.

Zoe and the sunset.

The skyline.

Zoe by the sea.

I really wanted to go snorkelling but Zoe was a bit concerned about wearing suntan lotion as she often has a bad alergic reaction to it and her face turns green. I find this quite funny but it makes Zoe very miserable. Going out uncovered in the sun in tropical north Queensland is not a good idea. Fortunately the island provided us with a solution - stinger suits - which not only protect you from the sun but also jellyfish. There is the slight downside that you look like a complete and utter wally.

Here is Zoe is her suit.

And here I am under the mistaken impression that I am a superhero called 'Blue Suit Man' and not a dickhead in lycra. I even did some superhero poses. It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Still the suits were worth it to see the reef up close. We even got some photos with a disposable underwater camera that we bought.

We went snorkelling every day that we were on the island and saw hundreds of types of fish and coral. On the last day we went out really deep and Zoe and I got quite a shock to see a small shark underneath us! Fortunately it was only little and didn't seem to mind us as we (quickly) swam away.

Green Island also puts on glass bottomed boats for residents to view the reef surrounding the island without getting wet. Again the coral was absolutely beautiful and incredibly diverse as were the fish.

The photos from the boat come out very badly but this gives some idea...

The next photo is evn more appalling but makes it onto the blog as it shows the Giant Turtle we saw. Sea Turtles are critically endangered. They can live for over 100 years and do not reach maturity until they are 50. Unfortunately many do not get to this age to reproduce. Seeing one in the wild was quite something.

Some more coral and fish.

The fish in the next photo is a lazy bugger who has a sucker on top of his head that he uses to attach to sharks, turtles and the bottom of our boat so that he doesn't have to swim much to get to his food.

We also took some video footage from the boat which shows Zoe, the island and then the bottom of the boat. The reflection gets in the way of the camera picture but hopefully you get the idea.

In the centre of Green Island there is a small wildlife enclosure with crocodiles, giant turtles and some coral and fish tanks.

The coral is better lit and easier to photograph here but obviously nowhere near as impressive as seeing it more naturally.

When we first saw the crocodiles we thought that they were either dead or models as they look absolutely lifeless. Apparently this is just a trick however and if you get too near them they eat you. Zoe and I found this very hard to believe looking at them.

We even got to hold a small one (though admittedly he had to have his mouth sellotaped).

As noted we had become very sceptical about the crocs ability to do any harm to anything. Feeding time changed our minds however...

There was only one restaurant on the island. Fortunately it was very good. We stayed three nights and in that time I am pleased to report that I managed to eat two of the mud crabs and one of the cray fish (lobster) in the tank below.

As Zoe and I had really enjoyed our snorkelling so decided to go one step further and try Sea Walker - walking 10 meters under the sea. We would have liked to have gone diving but you have to have a lot of tuition. Also I was a bit scared and thought we should try a milder option first.

Embarking on Sea Walker we were zoomed out on a speed-boat to a jetty off the island where we put our wet-suits on. Next up was a safety breifing where the importance of equalising was emphasised. Equalising is making your ears pop. I would have called it 'ear popping' but I guess equalising sounds more professional.

Here is Zoe having her helmet lowered onto her head. The helmets weigh 40 kg out of the water but only 4 in it.

Here are Zoe and I at the bottom with a few fish swimming round. The water is increadibly clear and we were inundated with hundreds and hundreds of fish. You can reach out and touch them which is quite strange. I wasn't 100% comfortable in the helmet - for some reason Space Oddity kept going round and round my head. Still - it was a great experience and I would definitely do it again.

We had bought another disposable underwater camera and took a few shots...

Green Island was definitely one of the highlights of our time in Australia so far and we were sad to leave. The pill was sugared somewhat for Zoe by there being a morning tea and cake event at Cairns airport...

Our next stop was Airlie Beach the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands. On Airlie Beach we were reminded that Australia can be a dangerous place by a sign given over to Hazardous Marine Creatures one could encounter there.

One of the things we had not done at Green Island was visit the Outer Barrier Reef. Zoe and I were very keen to do this but I really did not fancy a 4 hour boat trip in stormy waters. Fortunately we found a solution...

We took it in turns to sit in the front seat.

'You can be my wing man anytime Zoe'.

The flight out to Whitehaven Beach over the Whitsundays had some spectacular views of the islands.

Whitehaven Beach has been voted the best beach in Australia and the third best beach in the world. Its not hard to see why. The sand is the softest I have ever felt and the water lovely and warm. Here's the view from the helicopter approaching the beach.

Landing on the beach was great.

The Pilot kindly took a photograph of Zoe and I before building us a sunshelter to sit in while we ate the picnic they had prepared for us. Zoe said the food was gorgeous. I stuck to the champagne.

We had expected the beach to be busy but there was no-one else around at all. I had a paddle and Zoe kept to the shade of our hut and finished off the chicken tikka wraps and cake.

We spent an hour on the beach before taking off for the Great Barrier Reef. We are so pleased that we have seen it from the air. It was utterly stunning.

This is Heart Reef which we flew over a couple of times.

We landed on the Fantasea ReefWorlds Helicopter pad and discovered that apart from the staff and a marine biologist we were the only visitors there. They took us out on a semi-submersible to see the reef before giving us a couple of stinger suits and some snorkelling equipment so that we could see the reef from below water.

The reef is even better up close than it is from the air. Again we had a waterproof camera and got a few shots.

The Reef Wall and Sean

A Giant Clam

Some fish and hard coral.

The coral bed.

Unbelievable. We are definitely going to go back.

Part 2 to follow....

2007-05-18T17:38:00.000+10:00

Melbourne, The Great Ocean Road and back to Melbourne Again...

In our last 'exciting' installment Zoe and I had just got back from a restaurant and were about to go to sleep. The next day we had breakfast in the hotel before venturing off to explore Melbourne. We went to the Melbourne Museum, the Victoria Market and Zoe visited Lonely Planet whose hotel reservation website she has been writing. We also went on a walk round Melbourne recommended in our Lonely Planet guidebook.

The city is very picturesque. Here are a few photos we took along the way.

The Old Magistrste's Court and Tram

A Miscellaneous Government Building

The Yarra River

Flinders Street Station

A Small Section of the Skyline

Funky Building in Federation Square

In the evening we had booked a few months in advance to eat at Vue de Monde. Here's what The Age has to say about it... Review.

We had the 9 course degustation menu but we only managed 8 courses in the end. I had matching wines with each course. The food and wine were extraordinary. My favourite was truffle risotto. Zoe's top dish was the gazpacho/tomato/cosomme thing with dry ice pictured below (incidentally this did not count as a course)...

The next day we set off down the Mornington Peninsula to Sorento where we caught the ferry to Queenscliff and then onto the Great Ocean Road.

This is Zoe on the ferry...

And here is the ferry coming back the other way...

Ray and his wife Christine had recommended the Mornington Peninsula, Queenscliff Ferry and Great Ocean Road to us and we are very glad that they did.

Here's some of the scenery that the Great Ocean Road takes in...

One of the best things about the drive is that there are so many deserted beaches to explore.

There was a warning on this one but it was a bit of a mystery as to what was being warned against. Sudden sand storms perhaps?

There were some interesting cliff faces to climb.

Unfortunately Zoe got carried away with us having the beach all to ourselves and decided to go skinny dipping (please avert your eyes now if you are of a nervous disposition)...

(Andy - if you would like a copy of this picture with the censored sign removed send £20 to my PayPal account).

Below is a more salubrious picture of our names written in the sand...

One of the most famous sites along the Great Ocean Road is the 12 Apostles.

This sign tells a little bit about how they were formed...

Here's an apostle in the making...

On our first day we drove to Lorne and stayed there for the evening.

The Beach at Lorne

We went out for a nice meal in a local restaurant that had been recommended to us by the staff at Lonely Planet when Zoe had visited them.

We also visited the waterfall there and went for a walk around the park.

The walk was more dangerous than you might think...

The Great Ocean Road doesn't just have scenery. It also has Cheese World and a Cheese Factory.

Cheese World was slightly disappointing as it turned out to be a cheese shop with a selection of cheeses slightly smaller than you would get in an average supermarket. Still the factory looked impressive.

On the second night we stayed in a lovely bed and breakfast just outside Warnambool. The only thing I really didn't like about our flat in Sydney is that it had no bath. I guess with most of Australia being in drought baths are a bit naughty. Still, our room in the bed and breakfast had a great big spa to lie in so the environment would just have to cope...

We ate in a seafood restaurant recommended by the proprietor of the place we were staying in. I had the lobster which was excellent. Zoe thoroughly enjoyed her Special Oysters with bacon, cheese, spring onion and Ketjap Manis.

Today we drove back to Melbourne (about a three hour drive). We are about to go for a curry.

2007-05-14T20:14:00.000+10:00

Sydney has been our home for over a year now and it was with sadness that we said goodbye. We had planned a few parting activities however…

Our apartment in Pyrmont had some views of the City, Harbour Bridge and Jones Bay Wharf that we will really miss. We were keen to capture as much of them as possible in photographs. This is not so easy with our level of artistic and technical skill. None-the-less we gave it a go. I even learnt how to use night mode (turn the little dial on top of the camera to the night mode position).

Here is the city at night from a cardboard box balanced precariously on a table on our balcony (lesser cameramen use tripods)…

Here is the view of Jones Bay Wharf at night…

And of course the Harbour Bridge…

We got a little carried away with how much we liked the outlook and decided to bring the bed into the front room and sleep with the curtains open for our last three nights. The photo below shows me asleep (the lump on the left) with Zoe awake watching the sunrise…

And finally a couple of pictures of us saying goodbye on our last day just before we handed the keys back…

Aside from gazing out of our balcony we also managed to get some last backgammon in.

On our last-but-one Sunday there was supposed to be a big Greek backgammon tournament at Georges. Unfortunately no-one turned up so we held a chouette instead. This suited me quite well as I prefer chouette to tournament play. Here Mario, Maurice, Alex, Jay, Harry and Zoe ponder a position…

On our last Sunday Ian invited us to a chouette at his lovely house in North Sydney. There were cockatoos in the garden which Zoe and I were very impressed with but everyone else thought they were vermin.

Here’s Jim, David, Ian and myself with Zoe taking the photo…

Regular readers of this blog (Pam, Paul, Colin, Susan, that strange pseudo-economist person) will know that it has been mainly dedicated to food. This is not just because Zoe and I are natural gluttens – we are further encouraged by the food in Sydney being very, very tasty.

The Fish Market in Sydney is the largest in the world outside of Japan. We will miss having it ten minutes down the road. On our last Friday I cooked a paella with mussels, moreton bay bug, fish, octopus, scallops, prawns and squid from the market,

Below is a photo of the octopus and I…

Choosing which restaurants to go to for our last few nights was tricky. There were so many places that we wanted to go back to and only so many days we had left. There was also a growing realisation that we might never go back again to those restaurants which didn’t make the cut.

One place we knew we had to visit was Blue Eye Dragon – our local Taiwanese restaurant - owned and run by the Chen’s who had taught us at the Sydney seafood school. We had been there quite a few times and Muriel Chen came over for a chat at the end of our meal. Muriel posed outside the restaurant at the end of the evening for a couple of photos with us…

Another favourite restaurant was East – a Chinese restaurant next to the Opera House. The food is fantastic, the view of the bridge spectacular and it’s a great spot for watching the world go by. We had booked weeks in advance for our 3rd to last day in Sydney and were lucky enough to be rewarded with the best table in the restaurant. This is the view from where we were sitting…

The lobster in ginger and shallot was particularly good.

On our last night we ate at Guillaume’s at Bennelong (the third sail of the Opera House). We decided to go for the 9 course degustation menu and were not disappointed. I had matching wines and felt a little light headed by the end of the night. Eating in one of the wonders of the modern world is quite an experience. And this time it was particularly special as it was our last night.

With our new found photographic knowledge (i.e. the night mode dial) we took a lot more photos of us walking round Circular Quay, the Rocks, Bennelong Point etc. We were also beginning to realise that we would no longer be able to go and see the Opera House and Harbour Bridge whenever we wanted to.

Here is Zoe sitting opposite the water from the Opera House…

These are some photos of the Bridge and Opera House that we took on our various walks on the last few nights…

One we took of the Opera House in the day time…

The Opera House Bar is a great place to go for a drink. It is always full of life and the views are good. Buoyed by my success with the night mode button I decided to try the timer function to take a photo of Zoe and I in the Opera Bar with the Bridge in the background. I was quite pleased with the result…

On our last but one night we walked over the Harbour Bridge for the last time. Here are a couple of photos taken from the Bridge of the Opera House and the Opera House and the City…

This is me between the sails of the Opera House…

And here’s Zoe on the steps of the Opera House (if you can’t see her zoom in on the photo)…

Perhaps I have developed an unhealthy attachment to the Opera House. This is a photo of me cuddling it to say goodbye…

The logistics of leaving

Packing up and moving 17,000 kilometres over the other side of the world is more difficult than you might imagine. We sent 6 boxes of books back by sea mail, gave away half our furniture to a colleague from work, had a removalist team take the rest of the furniture to the tip, packed 5 suitcases of clothes and miscellaneous possessions, put two of those suitcases in storage in Sydney for a month along with my guitar and threw masses of possessions in the bin (including tipping 14 bottles of wine down the sink). There were also superannuation payments, tax, water, gas, electricity, e-tags etc. to sort out. A bit of a nightmare but we got through it. The fact that I had time off before leaving definitely helped.

Holiday!

On Thursday we got on a plane from Sydney to Hobart, Tasmania.

My luggage weighed 11 kg.

Zoe’s weighed 32 kg.

The limit per person on Jet Star is 20 kg.

Fortunately they allowed us to average our suitcases and then let us off the extra few kilos. We were not so lucky on the flight from Hobart to Sydney where they made us pay.

Zoe claimed that her luggage was heavier than mine because she had one of my (small paperback) books in her bag.

On arriving in Hobart we put our luggage in the hotel and wandered around the centre.

We found a great 2nd hand bookshop where I bought Scarne on Dice (recommended reading from Danny Kleinman’s ‘The Dice Conquer All’) and Stanford Wong’s book on Blackjack (the classic text following on from Thorpe’s work in ‘Beat the Dealer’).

We went back to the hotel for an afternoon nap and in the evening went to walk round the harbour and Salamanca.

We found a nice restaurant by the Harbour called Mures and we both had fish and chips.

The waitress kindly took a photo of us…

Tasmania makes a lot of cheese and it seemed churlish to come all this way without trying some of their local produce.

My Tasmanian Cheese platter (half consumed)…

Mures from the outside…

We spent the first half of Friday morning in the Hobart museum and art gallery. This was one of the best museums we have been to in Australia.

Zoe met a Muttaburrasauras…

After the museum we felt that we had seen most of Hobart (it’s a small place) and decided to hire a car a drive to Port Arthur – the historic site of one of the first penal settlements here.

Unfortunately the hire place only had a big 4-wheel drive but I managed to get the hang of it and didn’t kill anyone…

On the way to Port Arthur there is a ‘historic town’ called Richmond. We thought we’d have a look round it and were very pleased that we did. The first place we came to advertised two mazes and a tea room. It is hard to imagine how one could possibly improve on such a place. Possibly a third maze?

The first maze was quite easy but none-the-less I felt some satisfaction at reaching the centre…

The 2nd maze was much harder and had a minotaur and password at the centre…

The secret code…

After conquering the mazes we had a well-deserved cup of tea.

Walking up through Richmond we briefly considered dressing up as Victorians and having our picture taken before venturing instead into the model village – a 1/16 scale replica of Hobart…

After the model village we got back in the car for the drive down the Tasman Peninsula to Port Arthur.

There were some remote locations on the way where you could stop and admire the view.

Zoe on a deserted beech on the way to Port Arthur…

Zoe coming out the sea on another deserted beech…

Another view…

Port Arthur penal station was established in 1830 and in 1833 became a punishment station for repeat offenders from all the Australian colonies. By 1840 over 2000 convicts, soldiers and civil staff lived there. The site is now one large archaeological/tourist site.

Here is Zoe being sentenced for stealing a sheep…

Here’s the actual site itself…

Habitual, sullen criminals were imprisoned here. Born villains upon whose nature nurture can never stick…

Of course there were some tragic miscarriages of justice as well…

One of the more hideous things in Port Arthur was the Separate Prison. Traditionally convicts had been brutalised and made to work. This however didn’t seem to rehabilitate many people. In the early 19th Century new ideas started to take hold about more ‘humane’ ways of rehabilitating offenders. The Separate Prison was one such idea. Offenders were locked in solitary confinement for a period of 4-12 months. An hour exercise was allowed a day but convicts had to wear masks to stop them seeing or talking to other inmates.

Even the chapel had separate compartments so that inmates could not see or talk to one another while being lectured to about God. Here is Zoe in a separate pew being lectured at…

Little is recorded about the outcomes from the Separate Prison but unsurprisingly many ex-inmates went quite mad.

Fortunately we don’t do this to convicts any more. Only to unlawful combatants.

After driving back from Port Arthur we had dinner in Salamanca at a tasty Greek restaurant. The highlight was the grilled octopus.

The next day we packed our bags checked out of the hotel and drove up Mount Wellington. The drive is pretty treacherous up some fairly steep mountain but fortunately I was in a snazzy blue car…

Mt Wellington was very windy and cold but the vista was breathtaking. Here is the view of Hobart from Mt Wellington…

Only the very bravest could beat the elements and reach the summit…

After Mt Wellington we drove to Cradle Mountain – about a 3 ½ hour drive through some unbelievable countryside…

Here are a few of the landscapes along the way…

We arrived at the hotel and booked in for dinner. Zoe has a habit of sticking her nose right next to sauces to smell them. Here she got a bit close (perhaps helped by a slight push from me) and ended up with red stuff over her nose!

The next day we went on a number of walks around the Cradle Mountain National Park. They were spectacular. Unfortunately our camera broke half way round but a few of the images we did get are below…

The guide book described the walks we did as ‘easy-moderate’. This photo was taken at one of the more ‘moderate’ sections of track…

On our way to Marion’s Lookout Zoe spotted a Bennet Wallaby. David Attenborough eat your heart out…

Just after this the camera broke (the zoom stopped zooming and the camera started beeping).

We ended doing two walks taking in Ronney Creek, Marion’s Lookout, Wombat Pool and Dove Lake. We walked about 14 kilometres and were very tired when we got back.

No time for sleeping though! Cheese and wine tasting with the Bar and Restaurant Manager took us through to a Spotlight Tour where we saw Rufus Wallabies, Bennet Wallabies, wombats and a possum followed by dinner and some much needed sleep.

We have just landed in Melbourne and are in the hotel waiting to go out for dinner.

Update: We are back from dinner which was good. Tired again though. Looking forward to exploring Melbourne tomorrow.

2007-05-07T15:29:00.000+10:00

Last post

I've now been on holiday for 2.5 days and it's great! We've had to do a lot of packing up and throwing away, but we've still had time for nice things like going to say goodbye to all our favourite restaurants and going to the Chinese Garden.

We've done so much that I could do a long post, but I'm a little worn out so you'll all have to wait until we're back in the UK and can tell you in person.

We're probably not going to have time to post while we are travelling so here's our itinerary so you can imagine what we are up to.

8/5	Stay in the Harbour Rocks Hotel, Sydney
10/5	Fly to Hobart, Tasmania
12/5	Drive across Tasmania to Cradle Mountain
14/5	Fly to Melbourne
16/5	Drive down the Great Ocean Road
19/5	Fly to Cairns, stay in Port Douglas
21/5	Hop over to Green Island
24/5	Fly to Airlie Beach
27/5	Fly to Brisbane, stay at O'Reillys in Lamington National Park
30/5	Stay at the Gold Coast for a couple of nights
1/6	Fly to Hervey Bay, stay on Fraser Island
4/6	Fly back to Sydney and stay in the World Tower (where we stayed when we first got here)
6/6	Fly back to the UK via a one night stop in Shanghai.

It's going to be so cool! We're looking forward to seeing everyone when we're back in the UK. We'll have enough pictures to bore you rigid by then!

2007-05-02T21:40:00.000+10:00

Me working

Here is a better photo of me working (you can see the view much better and also the bridge in the background). I think this is the one I meant to post but I got confused.

If you click it, it will get larger.

2007-05-02T19:27:00.000+10:00

Cake and work

My life at the moment consists pretty much of cake and work.

Here are some pictures of last week's (and the start of this week's) cakes.

Cinnamon & Apple Muffins

Cherry Slice

Chilli Cheese Muffins

Super Muesli Bars

Spicy Apple Shortcake

Ginger Crunch

ABC (Apple, Banana and Chocolate) Muffins

The best is hard to choose but I think probably the Cherry slice. The Ginger Crunch was a close second - it had the advantage of tasting like it was composed entirely of sugar. The ABC muffins were also very tasty. Sean ate two, but I managed to polish off the other 10 without much trouble.

Here, for completeness, is a picture of me working. This is not a staged photo - Sean has been practising taking photos of the view (he's taken some good ones at night using night mode with the camera balanced on a box to keep it steady) and has a tendency to snap me whenever I am unable to defend myself owing to being engrossed in something else. Such as work.

Me

I notice that Sean omitted to mention that I was runner up in the backgammon tournament the Sunday before last at Georges. We also went to Georges last Sunday, expecting a Greek tournament involving 3 different variants of backgammon (you can read all about them here) however it didn't materialise so we just played chouette instead.

We've also booked the flights for our trip round Australia and most of the hotels. Expect an itinerary shortly....

2007-04-29T10:43:00.000+10:00

Fireworks Over Sydney

Friday night saw fireworks north and south of the harbour bridge. Here is the view from our balcony...

A video I took is posted below.

Friday night we went out with Pam and Rob to a pub in Surrey Hills. We had a great time. Saturday we went out to the Meat and Wine Company with my team from Mt Druitt. The evening was a bit sad but good fun.

2007-04-29T10:38:00.000+10:00

2007-04-20T17:49:00.000+10:00

Cake!

Now Sean is a gentleman of leisure, he has taken up cooking me muffins daily from the muffin cookbook he bought me for my birthday. As such I now have a personal muffin chef!

Sean cheffing

Here's a summary of the delights I've had this week:

Monday: Glazed Passionfruit Muffins

Glazed Passionfruit Muffins

The inaugural muffin. These were delicious straight from the oven, they were really fluffy and delicately flavoured with passionfruit. One slight downside was that the seeds were a bit crunchy, but still very good overall.

Tuesday: Best Blueberry Muffins

Best Blueberry Muffins

The "Best" is the title of these muffins in the muffin book, but they were in fact the best blueberry muffins I'd ever had. I think this was due to the addition of a small amount of cinnamon. They were nice warm from the oven but even nicer once they had cooled down.

Wednesday: Gooey-Chewy Fudge Squares

Gooey-Chewy Fudge Squares

In the photo in the book, these looked like they had a kind of caramel topping, so it was a surprise to find out that they had almost 200g of chocolate in them. Ours also looked like they did so we think that maybe the people in the book used the wrong photo.

These were really lovely, much richer than any of the muffins, but I still didn't feel too ill when I ate most of the batch on Wednesday night.

Thursday: Zucchini and Parmesan Muffins

Zucchini and Parmesan Muffins

I thought I'd better try some of the delicious looking savoury muffins. These were fantastic; Sean said they tasted a bit like cheese breadsticks. I think this was the first day we ate the whole batch in a single day.

Friday: Pizza Muffins and Coconut, Cherry and Cream Cheese Muffins

Pizza Muffins

Coconut, Cherry and Cream Cheese Muffin

We had two batches of muffins today as Carrie and Daniel have come to stay with us. Both fantastic as usual (the pizza ones were a particular success). Sean's also started another batch of Gooey-chewy fudge squares for tomorrow. What a guy!!

2007-04-18T01:19:00.000+10:00

Sleeping Koala

I've just been trying to post the video of the sleeping Koala (a birthday present from Pam and Paul) via the "post to blog" link in Google Video, but it just seems to give up so I'm trying a new way.

If the other post eventually appears, I'll just have to delete one of them.

Sleeping Koala

2007-04-16T18:24:00.000+10:00

Backgammon position of the day (as requested by Anonymous below)

Zoe and I were playing a 7-point match. Zoe had lucked her way to a 2-0 lead, had given a risibly early cube, had mistakenly taken a recube to 4 and then rolled her way into the position below (at least this is how I remember the turn of events).

Zoe owns the cube at 4 on roll leading 2-0 match to 7 - cube action.

Zoe cubed and I took. Zoe rolled a non-double so did I and it was all over.

To work out the correct cube actions for both sides here you need to know the chance of black winning in this position and the match equities associated with taking and dropping.

First the match equities:

Black can drop to trail 6-0 with about 10% mwc. Given that if he takes he either definitely wins or definitely loses he needs over 10% winning chances in this position to take.

White is risking 35% mwc (her chances trailing 4-2 match to 7) to gain 10% (her increase in winning chances from 90% to 100%).

Double Point = Risk/Risk + Reward.

Zoe has a doubling point of 35/45 which is approximately equal to 78%.

What are the actual chances in the above position? Well for Black to win White needs to roll a non-double followed by Black rolling a double. i.e. 1/6 X 5/6 = 5/36 = 14%

So Zoe has 86% chances of winning if she doubles which is greater than her averaged 78% winning chances if she doesn't double and as such she should double (this is a last roll position so Zoe should double as soon as she is in the window). I have 14% match winning chances if I take and only 10% if I drop so I should take.

A good example of how drastically cube action differs from money play with big cubes close to the end of a match.

2007-04-13T16:09:00.000+10:00

We do a lot

Another post with lots of subsections....

My birthday

My birthday was last Thursday and although I was working I had a good day. Mike and Donna had left me a present before they went and I'd already been bought some clothes from the Chinese dress shop by Pam and Paul. I hadn't been able to get the exact dress I wanted since (as suspected) my bum was too big for that style of dress but I got a top in that style and two very nice and slightly more modern Chinese dresses. Pam and Paul also bought me a sleeping koala (video to follow in next post). I got a "How to be a Roman" kit, some non-alcoholic cocktail cards, a gigantic birthday cake, a new singstar CD and some books from Sean. Pam and Paul took me out to Nick's for lunch and I had lobster, as it was my birthday.

Chinese dress 1

Chinese dress 2

CAKE

In the evening we went to see a play called Noir, which was produced by a lady who works with Sean. It had quite a clever plot - I won't spoil it in case you go to see it, which might happen as it was written in the UK - and was very enjoyable.

Easter weekend

We had a pretty easy Easter weekend. Saturday morning was the farmer's market and we were looking forward to showing this to Pam and Paul. Unfortunately there was an unseasonal downpour and we had to hurry round, pick up some lamb, duck and hot egg and bacon rolls and scurry home. On Saturday evening we went to see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at Star City (the Casino). Pam and Paul had already seen the film and apparently the characters in the stage production weren't quite as deep; the performance was mainly done for laughs. It was very entertaining though and some of the costumes were fabulous. Some were just odd.

A costume for "I will survive"

We had been planning to visit the Easter Show to see "The Real Australia" (their tagline). Somehow we were misinformed that it was shut on Easter Sunday so we went along on Easter Monday. The live animals were pretty good; we saw pigs, goats, sheep, cows, alpacas, horses and poultry. We also saw a few food demonstrations. The pie one was slightly disappointing, as follows:

get prerolled pastry from fridge

drap over tin containing segments for many pies

add dollops of generic meat filling (I don't think they would have been demonstrating how they made that!)

add another layer of pastry

put in oven

The sausage demonstration was slightly better.

A sausage demonstration

The fresh food tent was reasonably interesting to someone who likes eating as much as me, however as with the Good Food and Wine show that we went to in Darling Harbour, there were too many packet foods and it was stuffed full of people. There were some pretty displays made from food.

We had hoped to eat at the Easter show, but after all their displays of fresh meat the food options were disappointingly fast: burgers, chicken and chips, kebab, doughnuts. It made an odd contrast with the rest of the show. So we went back to Zaaffran and had some curry.

Uluru

It's a big rock

Tuesday after Easter we flew off to Uluru (Ayer's Rock). This was the one place that Pam had Paul had said they would like to visit and as Sean and I hadn't been we had booked this for just after Easter to avoid the rush.

The flight was about 3 hours and passed very quickly. Our rooms weren't ready so we had some lunch in the hotel bar and booked a few excursions while we were waiting. We made sure we only booked morning and evening excursions so that we could stay out of the heat and this worked well for the few days that we were there. We got up at about 5am, went back to sleep at 11am and then got up for dinner. Very civilised.

The first evening we participated in "The sounds of silence". This was a fantastic experience. Dining tables are set up in the middle of the desert and the evening consists of:

Canapes with didgeridoo playing. (We also got a talk about the didgeridoo - or yirdaki in the local language - from the musician.)

Soup, followed by an "Australian Outback" buffet with crocodile, kangaroo, barramundi and native flavourings

A talk about the night sky, with opportunity to look through telescopes

Dessert Buffet (I had a good chocolate brownie and a large helping of middle-of-the-road chocolate pudding.)

The food was not amazing, although the crocodile Cesar salad was quite nice. The kangaroo was unfortunately in a quite revolting sauce of some native Australian berry.

The best part was the talk about the night sky. As soon as we started eating we all noticed the stars starting to unfold. The view from the desert is quite remarkable; there isn't really anywhere in the UK with so little light pollution (certainly not London...). After our main course they turned the lights off. We learnt all sorts of facts about how the different constellations have viewed in different cultures and I was most struck by the fact that most of the same star groups seem to have been picked out by many different peoples. We are all one race.

The icing on the cake was looking at Saturn through a telescope. I looked at some stars, admittedly one had a smaller orbiting star, which was quite cool, but still not quite as cool as Saturn. We could see it all just like in a picture. It was small but clear. Most remarkable was the realisation that it looks like a star but close up it is much more exciting.

Next morning we were up early to do a sunrise tour of Uluru. We caught a mini-bus into the National Park where the rock is.

Nearly sunrise

Then it went red

As we had been positioned to see the sun shining on Uluru, we could also see it rising behind Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). This is another impressive large rock formation (Kata Tjuta means "many heads"), although access to a lot of it is restricted since it is important for Anangu (the local people)'s mens ceremonies.

Kata Tjuta

The driver waited for us to see the full sunrise and then dropped us off at the other side to do a walk around. We saw some cave paintings and marvelled at the size of the rock. We were then picked up again and dropped round to the cultural centre before being taken home. The cultural centre was interesting. The Uluru and Kata Tjuta National Park is the most significant example of traditional land ownership in Australia. This basically means that the land has been proven to have been looked after by a group of (I think about 50) local people and hence to belong to them. They were only granted this ownership on the grounds that they immediately re-lease it to the park (i.e. the Australian government) for 99 years. It will be interesting to see what happens when the lease runs out. If you are interested in reading more about this, wikipedia has a good article about Native Title here.

The centre was clearly reflected this co-operation between the traditional owners and the lessees. There were a lot of quotes from local elders, especially regarding taking photos of the rock (taking photographs of people or significant sites is considered disrespectful), although photos were actually used in the displays. I think this was the correct decision since they will communicate their message more effectively to the visiting tourists.

That evening I had a swim in the pool just after sundown - no chance of burning but the pool was still lovely and warm - and then we had drinks followed by dinner in the hotel restaurant. The food was very nice, but overpriced: an example of monopoly pricing.

Yesterday, our last day, we got up at 5am again and made our way out to the front to wait for a coach again. This time we were taken to a farm just outside the park to do a sunrise camel ride.

Sean and I on Di and Pam and Paul on Bendigo

Pam and Paul were on a bit of an energetic camel. He managed to break his nose chain and started taking great chunks out of passing greenery. Luckily his neck was still tied to the camel in front otherwise he would have been off. Sean says he will always remember Pam saying "No, Bendigo. Come back Bendigo." as their camel ripped off another passing branch.

We got back to Sydney about 5pm and had a quick wash before dinner in Quay restaurant for Pam and Paul's last night. We've been to Quay quite a lot so I won't post in detail - beautiful food, stunning views sums the experience up quite well.

Pam and Paul fly home

This morning we went out for breakfast and then had a last drink on the balcony before taking Pam and Paul to the airport. They were very sad to leave (and we were very sad to see them go) and it reminded us that it won't be long until we're heading home. So we'd better make the most of our next three weeks in Sydney!

2007-04-06T08:07:00.000+10:00

Leaving Australia

Some interesting and significant events for Zoe and I have occured recently. A few days ago I was offered a position as Development Director with a company called Serco who are interested in entering the UK's welfare to work market. I have accepted their offer. I let WorkDirections know that I would be leaving giving three months notice but they thought it best that I go immediately. As such I am now officially on gardening leave until mid-June! Zoe is going to take some leave from the 7th May and we are planning on travelling Australia for a few weeks before going to Shanghai for a few days if we can get a visa. We will be back in the UK early June. See you all soon!

Sean

2007-04-02T17:41:00.000+10:00

More football

We didn't do much once we got back from the Blue Mountains. I was working Wed - Fri and Sean was working Thurs and Fri.

On Saturday we took Pam and Paul to see the Mighty Waratahs at the Aussie Stadium since Mike and Donna had enjoyed it when they went.

More rugby

The 'Tahs were playing against a New Zealand team called the Crusaders. The odds against the 'Tahs were 7:1. Paul spotted a few players from the All Blacks in the opposition, which may explain this. The 'Tahs rose to the challenge of a decent opposition team and upped their game enormously. In the end they only lost 33-34 and had they converted either of their last two tries they would have won. Well played by both sides; a good game. The stadium was a bit fuller too, there are a lot of Kiwis living in Sydney and I think this ups the rivalry.

In the interval, we were treated to some competitive wood chopping by both sides. The 'Tahs redeemed themselves by winning this.

The Crusaders' wood chopper. They can play football, but can they chop wood?

On Sunday we went and had a wander round the Indian Holi festival. According to my diary Holi was a few weeks ago, but this was definitely a Holi festival; there was an arena where you could go and chuck coloured paint at each other. I wanted to go in but no-one else was particularly struck by the idea. One day I will go to India and chuck coloured paint at people.

We then hung around Darling Harbour until Zaaffran opened. Sean and I had visited this modern Indian restaurant before and vowed to go back but this time it excelled itself.

We ordered the Chef's Special Banquet served on a silver platter and served on a silver platter it was. All the curries were good, beef vindaloo (second from the right) was my favourite and butter chicken (second from the left) my second favourite.

Mmmm, curry

2007-03-28T17:36:00.000+10:00

We get cold in the Blue Mountains

On Saturday we went to stay in the Blue Mountains for a few days while Mike and Donna were still here and now Pam and Paul have arrived. We hired a car so we could get all six of us up there.

The first day we had a quick look at the Three Sisters in case the mists came in. We'd all taken our hats and although it was a little cooler than Sydney it was still about 30 degrees so we needed them for solar protection. We had a very nice dinner in the guest house in the evening - as it was still warm we sat outside.

On Sunday we had a bit of a shock; the temperature had dropped to under 10 degrees! I think this was colder than when we first stayed in the mountains in Winter. We went on a walk, had a bit of a rest and then had dinner inside.

We go on a walk

On Monday it was even colder; I think it got down to 6 degrees. Sean, Mike and Paul braved it outside for a run up and down the mountains, although I think only Mike was hard enough to enjoy it. We were adventurous in the evening and tried a new restaurant in town. It was recommended by Mel and Glenn the guesthouse owners and they took a night off and came out with us.

We came back on Tuesday via the Norman Lindsay Gallery. Norman Lindsay wrote a famous Australian Children's book called the Magic Pudding (I got a copy for Christmas), however it appears he spent more time painting naked ladies. So not quite one for the kids.

Bunyip Bluegum the Koala and the (grumpy) Magic Pudding

In other news: Sean has had a new friend to play Guitar Hero with, although Mike and Donna have now left us so Sean is back to being a band of one.

Mike and Sean rock out

2007-03-23T16:22:00.000+11:00

Pam and Paul arrive

Pam and Paul flew in to complete the Williams contingent on Tuesday at 7:30pm.

We've been taking it relatively easy since then. We went for breakfast in Darling Harbour on Wednesday and a little walk up to the Opera House. We then went out for Chinese at the Rocks in the evening followed by Macbeth at the Opera House (the only play we could manage to book while everyone was here).

Everyone except for Sean who's taking the photo

Yesterday we went for lunch at Jordan's and I remembered why I used to religiously order the fish curry. We ate quite a lot at lunch time so we went for dinner late and still had trouble managing much food.

Today we tried a new local cafe for breakfast, which was enjoyed by all and now we're going out to the Opera House again to have dinner at Bennelong and to see Alcina by Handel. Sean is planning on getting some sleep in....

2007-03-17T22:37:00.000+11:00

Football

Everything here is called football (soccer, Aussie rules and any rugby), so we had hoped to get to see a game of some sort of football at some point while we were over here. Mike fancied this too, so we went to see the NSW Waratahs play the Cape Town Stormers at the Aussie Stadium tonight.

The stadium

We went early to the entertainment quarter and got ourselves a decent early dinner at Arena. Mike and I had crab lasagne to start with, which was amazing and Mike had a pretty nice-looking steak. Also high quality petit fours, including chocolate truffles and lemon meringue balls.

The petit fours did take us over the time when we should have been leaving and we just missed the kick off. We were sat 3 rows back from the front and had a great view.

Some people playing rugby

We were behind a stag party, which caused us much amusement, particularly as the stag was wearing an England shirt and being constantly berated for being "a Pom". The 'Tahs didn't do very well, they kept dropping the ball and lost 16-10.

In other news (stop reading now if you're not interested in what I've been eating...) I went to an exciting cake shop for lunch on Friday. It's in China Town and is an Asian bakery chain (from Malaysia, although I think it is similar to other bakery chains from Singapore and Hong Kong). I've passed it a few times but have been too scared to buy anything. I spent a good 5 mins wandering round on Friday and then purchased a custard puff and a mango tiger roll. I was intrigued by a purple yam pastry, maybe next time.

Custard Puff (left), Mango Tiger Roll (right)

I was so carried away by the excitement of it all, I went to the scary iced tea shop that I have previously run away from for being over-exciting and bought the most exciting thing I could find - a red bean and taro crushed ice drink.

The custard puff was quite nice but the mango roll was a bit tasteless - I think I will definitely have to go for the yam pastry next time. I could taste the red bean in the red bean and taro drink; I'm not sure what taro tastes like so I couldn't identify it. The texture was pretty good, it was basically cake in a drink format but it was really sweet and I had to give up about as third of the way through.

Still, I think I shall make it my aim to go through all the exciting shops in China town before we leave.

2007-03-15T16:32:00.000+11:00

Mike and Donna arrive

Mike and Donna

Mike and Donna flew into Sydney last Saturday evening. We had a nice day hanging around in Darling harbour on Sunday. We went for breakfast at Nick's cafe (I had pancakes with maple syrup and ice-cream which was ace) and then played mini-golf and pool. I didn't do so badly at mini-golf and I think this made it seem more bearable than normal. I've completely forgotten how to play pool though.

On Sunday evening jet lag caught up with Mike....

Aaaah

In other news, at dancing today there was a film crew in because one of the girls is appearing on Find me a date. I was right behind her in the camera shot so keep a look out if it appears on UK TV!

2007-03-07T17:18:00.000+11:00

Cat passes through

Cat's bags are bigger than her....

Cat flew into Sydney on Saturday night - right in the middle of Mardi Gras. We had made it down a little bit late and missed the dykes on bikes, which was a disappointment. Despite a few hiccups trying to navigate Oxford St (we had been sticking to the back streets, but took a wrong turn and ended up in a crowd), we had got as far as Flinders St and set up camp to watch, when we got a call and went to pick Cat up from the station. Luckily the parade is miraculously long so when we got back from the station we still managed to see a good few floats, including the one manned by 250 Kylies.

Cat's got a super camera and I was hoping to steal some of her pictures to post, but she's moved on and I didn't manage to get them onto my PC. Still she's coming back through on the 14th so if I get hold of any then I'll post them.

We had a good tourist day on Sunday: lunch looking at the Harbour Bridge, a mosey round the Opera House and a compulsory visit to the Lindt Cafe. Sean and I had to work on Monday but I understand that after getting soaked walking round Bondi, Cat went back to the Lindt Cafe. A girl after my own heart.

2007-03-02T17:24:00.000+11:00

And finally in this unexciting week...

My sister has given birth to a healthy baby boy.

Baby Blake

Blake Matthew Daniels was born on Wednesday 28 February at 2.29pm and weighed 8lb 10.5 ounces. Tamsin was the first mother to use the new birthing pool at the hospital.

Unusually Blake was born on his due date, apparently true of only 4% of births.

I'll never predict an unexciting week again.

2007-02-28T17:25:00.000+11:00

More excitingness

OK, I lied big time. We have done something else exciting.

There's an outdoor cinema running over the end of summer in Centennial Park and we booked tickets a little while ago to go and see Metal: A headbanger's journey last night.

I bought some sashmimi and pre-cooked crustaceans from the fish market as a ready-made picnic and a new picnic blanket from Woolworths. We hired some bean bags when we got there, which were really comfy.

Sean looking comfy

As the light went down, a whole host of bats started flying around, some really low, which was pretty cool. There was also a thunderstorm going on in the distance and we could see the lightening lighting up the inside of the clouds, which was even more cool.

Giant screen

The film was really good. It was a nostalgia trip yet also informative. I was most impressed by the lead singer of Archenemy, who can do a proper growly metal voice despite being a girl. Cool! Sean thought it tailed off in the second half, when it moved from Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath to Norwegian Black Metal (those guys are crazy) but I thought it was excellent all the way though. In fact I reckon I could have watched days of the stuff.

If you are happy just listening to people talking about heavy rock music, or you like laughing at crazy people I recommend you go and watch this film (the same goes for Metallica:Some Kind of Monster, which has the same "laugh at the freak" factor). It's ace!

2007-02-26T17:18:00.000+11:00

I lied

I lied when I said we weren't doing anything exciting until Cat arrives next Saturday. I had in fact forgotten a) that I was attending an Economics course brought to my attention by a strange advert in the paper and b) that it was Sean's birthday.

A few weeks ago in the Sydney Morning Herald there was an advert stating "Economics for those seeking social justice - a four week course" run by the "Association for Good Government". Sean pointed it out to me as I am interested in that kind of thing and said I should go along. There was another advert for a one-day course with the same people about why housing is unaffordable, which seemed a bit odd.

I went straight to Google and looked up this "Association for Good Government". It seems that they basically pass on the teachings of a mid-19th century American economist called Henry George. In went "Henry George" to Google.

It turns out that his main theory was that all wealth derives from land and so we should abolish all taxes in favour of a single tax on land. (The wikipedia entry is here.) He also seems to have travelled extensively round Australia leaving endowments to teach his theories. Everything becomes clear.

This is a theory that has been clearly discredited by modern economic theory but I went along to see if I could find out anything interesting or useful. I got a booklet for the first week, which went through Ricardo's theory of rent and an explanation of why land central to a community is more valuable than land at the periphery or outside it (e.g. you pay more rent for a coffee shop inside Liverpool St Station that you do in the country). So far, not too controversial, although the guy running the course didn't explain things very well and I think he may have completely confused people who hadn't come across Ricardo's theory of rent before.

I can't go next week so I got the next booklet in advance - it definitely looks like he is heading towards a tax on the "surplus value" of land. I am suspicious of whether he is even going to try to explain how this could relieve poverty but it is a question I shall be asking if I go the week after next. It will be interesting to see how many people are still there....

2007-02-18T10:39:00.000+11:00

Lack of blogging

Hi all. Sorry for complete lack of blogging recently. This is mainly owing to the fact that we have done nothing exciting.

Last Sunday we went to the first Sunday backgammon tournament of 2007 and met with considerable success. Sean won the main competition and I won the consolation.

This weekend Sean has been recovering from a bad cold so we have been sitting at home watching Commander-in-Chief as a West Wing substitute.

We don't have anything particularly exciting lined up over the next two weeks until Cat comes to see us, shortly followed by Sean's family. So I'd better apologise in advance for the amount of time before I post next....

2007-02-05T17:19:00.000+11:00

Busy weekend

Sean's now on the Sydney Seafood School mailing list, and got sent a last minute special offer for a crab cooking class on Friday. I decided to take more photos than last time but ended up forgetting my camera completely.

The class was slightly longer (3 hours rather than 2) and I was less impressed by the chef than I had been by Jade Chen from Blue Eyed Dragon. However because the class was longer we got to make 3 dishes, which were:

Crab Cakes (with Coleslaw)

Crab & Preserved Lemon Risotto

Crab and Asparagus Soup

The risotto was quite nice, apart from the preserved lemon and the crab cakes were pretty unexciting. The soup was a real winner though and even worth all the time you have to spend getting the crab meat out of the shells.

When Sean left the UK, his work kindly bought him some vouchers for an Australian bookshop. As it's coming up to a year after the vouchers were issued, we thought we'd better go and spend them! So on Saturday we went binge book-buying in Dymocks.

New books!

On Sunday we went for High Tea at the Opera House. I was suitably armed with the camera for snapping shots of tiered cakes but I only managed to get a couple of shots of Sean and then the battery ran out.

Sean inside the restaurant at the Opera House

Still the sandwiches and cakes were served as separate courses so there was no fancy display to photograph. The sandwiches were a bit avant-guard and consisted of things that should have been in a sandwich but were just presented on a plate. We got a very nice crab and coriander sandwich, but then a vast mound of smoked salmon on a tiny piece of bread (it was impossible to pick up and eat), some chicken mayonnaise on a lettuce leaf, some slices of beef and a piece of toast. It would have better with the beef inside a sandwich, the chicken inside a sandwich and to have done away with the toast.

This was made up for by the cake selection of:

Strawberry tart

Lemon tart

Chocolate tart

Pistachio macaroon

Vanilla macaroons

Hazelnut madeleine

Raspberry souffle

And non-stop refilling of champagne (we were only expecting a glass!).

You'll just have to imagine what it looked like, unless I can talk Sean into going again.

2007-01-28T16:43:00.000+11:00

Australia Day

We found out about lots of exciting things to do on Australia Day. There was an aborignal festival called Yabun and planty to do at the Rocks and Darling Harbour including lots of live music and fireworks.

However in the end we had a bit of a quiet one. We just went to Darling Harbour in the morning; there were already a lot of people there. The food festival hadn't started so we went to Nick's for breakfast. I forgot to take my hat or cover my shoulders and the sun came out quite strongly. Luckily I was able to remedy this by buying an Australian flag and draping it over my head. Which, after all, is what Australia Day is all about.

Getting into the spirit of it

2007-01-24T17:53:00.000+11:00

Star Trek

I'm sure most of you would agree that one of the major failings of this blog is that there are insufficient posts on the topic of Star Trek. And while searching on Google today I found the most amazing site.

Motivational pictures... made from Star Trek (OS) screen shots!

No caption required

You can view the entire series (there are a lot of them) here.

2007-01-22T17:18:00.000+11:00

Back to Blue Eyed Dragon...And more Asian cooking

We couldn't resist going back to Blue Eyed Dragon on Friday and getting Jade to cook for us rather than attempting her recipes ourselves. We couldn't have the set banquet as you need a minimum of 4 people but maybe when Sean's family are here....

We had been impressed by cooking the squid at the Seafood School but neither of us was particularly enamoured of the sauce so we consulted my Kylie Kwong book and found a recipe for Stir-fried Squid with Garlic and Chilli. So Saturday evening I sat back and read Leviathan while Sean cooked the squid, plus Deep Fried Prawns with Carrot and Chilli dipping sauce and Mum's Fried Rice.

Kylie's book

The food was all delicious except for the dipping sauce, which just tasted of sugar and vinegar. The squid was a real star turn with a nicely balanced authentically Chinese tasting sauce. It took Sean two hours to chop all the ingredients, but I think it was worth it!

2007-01-17T18:02:00.000+11:00

Sydney Seafood School

Jade and Muriel Chen

As I mentioned last time I posted, I received registration at a Sydney Seafood School class as one of my Christmas presents and so along we went last Monday.

The classes are held upstairs at the Fish Market. There is a demonstration room, which is much like those you see on TV or elsewhere with a counter and an overhead mirror so you can see what's going on. You then move through to the kitchen, to have a go yourself, before moving to yet another room to eat what you've just cooked.

Overhead mirror

Our class was being run by Muriel and Jade Chen, the mother and daughter team from Blue-Eyed Dragon, our local Taiwanese restaurant. We've been to this restaurant several times as it is just down the road from us (just past Viva Goa) and they have recently updated their menu to include salt and pepper soft shell crab. We are now going even more often.

Jade (also known as "mum") runs the kitchen at Blue-Eyed Dragon, while Muriel is responsible for front-of-house. This meant that we had seen Muriel before (and she recognised us) but not Jade, as she'd been hidden in the kitchen. They worked really well as a chef demonstration team - Muriel explained what Jade was doing, while making jokes about how she never had to cook because she could just get her mum to cook for her.

The two dishes of the evening were Calamari Salad with Taiwanese Five Spice Garlic Sauce and Prawn Omlette (Chinese Style). We learnt how to clean, peel and score Calamari to make it curl up excitingly and how to marinade prawns before making the omlette with them.

Then through to the kitchen.... This turned out to be much harder than I thought. I cut my squid through the eye, resulting in black aqeuous fluid all over my chopping board. Not a good start. Jade came to give me a hand, but even after she'd shown me what to do I still couldn't remember and had to watch Sean being shown by our more observant table-mate before I really understood what was going on.

I also learnt how to chop things without cutting my fingers, courtesy of Muriel. It's quite hard to explain via text but basically involves bending your fingers to arch your hand. I'll have to practise this at home.

All the food was really tasty and we were provided with a bottle of wine between 4 (except of course on our table it was between 3) and some steamed rice, which made it into a proper meal. We'll definitely go back; we're just considering which course to go to next.

2007-01-13T15:23:00.000+11:00

It's not too long now till Mike, Donna, Pam and Paul come over to visit. I'm really looking forward to seeing them. One of the things that is difficult to organise is what everyone wants to do while they are here. To that end Zoe and I have created a web page 'Williams in Australia' to outline some possible options. If anyone else is interested in things to do in Sydney you can find it here: http://williamsinaustralia.googlepages.com/

2007-01-08T17:02:00.000+11:00

Goodbye to my parents

We've again done loads since I last posted. Carrie and Daniel came over for New Years Eve and we went to the theatre the night before. I then fitted in some final trips to the zoo and the Opera House with my parents before they left. We went to see The Marriage of Figaro (with dinner at Bennelong beforehand of course).

Also notable is a game of people in the pot we played on New Years. I was feeling a bit silly and so my entries into the pot were nearly those of famous people but slightly modified so they included an animal. This led to the classic clue "Furry Communist" followed by "Fidel Castro" (he was in the pot but not who we were referring to!). The complete list was:

Rudolph Hitler
Carol Doberman
Tony Bear
Koala Marx
Bee-linda Carlisle

I'm back to work today, so don't expect any more exciting posts until after next Monday, when we'll be attending a seafood cookery class (a Christmas present from Sean).

Pre-theatre dinner on 30 Dec

Playing People in the Pot on NYE

A silvery gibbon at Taronga Zoo

At the Opera

Zoe and the Tower

2007-01-03T19:15:00.000+11:00


Zoe jumps off the Sky Tower in New Zealand.

2007-01-02T20:26:00.000+11:00

Thought I would post a quick comment about New Years Eve here in Sydney. It was very cool. Carrie and Daniel joined Zoe's parents, Zoe and I for dinner and the fireworks. The fireworks were spectacular and we had a great view from our balcony. I linked up with my parents and Mike and Donna over Skype for New Years in Australia and then joined up with them over the phone for New Years in the UK!

Here are some good links to the fireworks - they lasted 15 minutes in real life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7--uJ1Q1Mrc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVb9gnCrHKI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqeA2NkmUyo

Zoe will post presently on what we ate...

2006-12-30T09:51:00.000+11:00

Christmas

We've been doing lots of exciting things over Christmas. Here is a selection of them.

Botanical and Chinese Gardens

Before Christmas I visited the Botanical Gardens and the Chinese Garden of Friendship with my parents. We saw lots of bats in the Botanical Garden, which was the best bit. At the Chinese Garden my mother and I got talked into dressing up. I couldn't resist putting a photo up (sorry mum!).

Bats

Empress and Princess of the Ming Dynasty

Secret Santa

We went for a "Softwire Christmas Dinner", where I wore my new koala ears from the Wildlife World (you have to wear something silly on your head at a Softwire party) and opened my secret Santa present. I got a Pink Disco Ball. Thank you Santa!

Koala Ears!

My Disco Ball

Blue Mountains

We went and stayed in the Blue Mountains for a couple of days (22 Dec - Christmas Eve). We went to see the 3 sisters and did a bushwalk before driving home through driving rain. Not very Christmassy!

The information sign at the Three Sisters

Christmas Day

The weather made up for it by being glorious on Christmas Day. We went with a traditional modern Australian Christmas of seafood on the barbie (although we used the indoor griddle as we are still loathe to barbeque after the disaster last time). We bought the seafood from the fish market, which was an experience in itself - it was open for 36 hours continually from 5am on 23rd December to 5pm on Christmas Eve and bustling when we went in on the way back from the Blue Mountains. We also had a Christmas pudding imported from the UK for a piece of home.

Our Christmas Dinner starter

Sean got a remote control car from Santa that he couldn't unscrew and had to take to it with a bread knife. I got Sing Star, which we played on Christmas Day - especially the pong game, a talking globe and books and clothes.

Sean carves up the packaging

2006-12-18T21:05:00.000+11:00

New Zealand

View of Auckland City

We've just been off for a weekend in Auckland, New Zealand. We flew out on Friday morning and got back this evening.

We did a pretty jet-set tour of the city, taking in the museum, Devonport and Kelly Tarlton's Antartic Adventure (for the penguins!).

But best of all, in true Kiwi spirit, I jumped off the Sky Tower.

Before I jump

Hanging off the tower

It was all very low key - we were having dinner in the revolving restaurant that night and so I went in evening wear and just changed my skirt for shorts, my pointed shoes for the standard jumper's shoes and donned the blue suit. No complex instructions, just up the tower, attached to a carabiner, lean over and let go.

I've done a parachute jump before (but not a bungy) and this was much better: more scary at the top (we were ordered out army style for the parachute jump; it would have been scarier to stay) and a nice speed coming down.

As the jump wasn't busy I got to go AGAIN! I was told to jump off this time rather than just letting go. It seems that the mind was willing but the legs slightly less so. Still Sean's got some good video footage and I seem to go out a bit further the next time so maybe I'm not so big a wimp as I thought.

2006-12-14T07:38:00.000+11:00

My parents arrive

My parents and me

Last Friday evening I went to pick my parents up from the airport. I've never picked anyone up from the airport before so it was quite exciting.

We've been very busy since then: breakfast and dinner and then lunch the following day in Darling Harbour (introducing them to our local haunts first), a visit to Hyde Park, shopping in town, a walk to (and around) Bondi Beach, lunch at the fish market, a walk over the Harbour Bridge and back followed by a visit to the rocks and a take-away from Viva Goa (I had tired everyone out to the point where they couldn't face eating out).

We also had some ice-cream from the Royal Copenhagen ice-cream shop in the rocks. I am perpetually flummoxed by this shop (there are several around the touristy areas). Is ice-cream from Copenhagen really good enough to be worth shipping to Australia?

It's probably back to the rocks again today, and then we're eating outside with a view of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House. Tomorrow we're off to New Zealand. It's just go go go!

2006-12-05T21:46:00.000+11:00

Bill Granger

We've actually increased our knowledge of Bill Granger of Bill's (where we ate breakfast in the last post). He has just released a new book (I think this is his 4th or so) and Gleebooks, a bookshop in Glebe that I am a member of, ran a dinner with Bill's recipes, a talk by Bill and a signed copy of his book for all diners.

Bill's book also coincides with a new TV show on the Lifestyle channel (I am assuming from the name that this is not mainstream TV).

Bill came to sign our book before the meal started. He seemed pretty friendly but addressed the book only to me, despite the fact that Sean proffered his name at the start of our chat and I only gave his mine when asked. Sean wasn't offended - he thinks Bill was nervous. How can he be nervous talking to us when he has a TV show?

The food was all lovely, although as Bill explained in his talk the book is designed to contain food you can cook at home easily rather than restaurant food. In this he was right: although tasty, none of the dishes (salad, veal chops, tart) were things I would order in a restaurant.

However we did get to take the book away with us and I have since cooked several of the recipes, all with great success, and there are plenty more I plan to try. So I can consider myself a fan of Bill's. Although I think I will draw the line at buying his latest celebrity endorsed product, which is a CD of music he likes to listen to. Hmmmm, and we thought Jamie Oliver went too far....

2006-11-26T17:23:00.000+11:00

A good shopping day for Sean

We went out for breakfast at Bill's this morning. There are two of these establishments in Sydney, started by celebrity chef Bill Granger (who has gone even further than Jamie Oliver in celebrity endorsement by releasing a CD of "songs Bill likes to listen to") and which, according to the New York Times, serves the best scrambled eggs in the world.

Given this, I was surprised to find that it wasn't in The Book and a scan of online reviews showed the service to be considered poor and the food mainly average. As usual the knowledge on the web proved to be more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica and a) the dishes recommended were very good (scrambled eggs, ricotta hot cakes and hot chocolate) and b) the service was abysmal. A poorly managed no-booking policy, staff who seemed to have been instructed to ignore the customers and a slow kitchen explained all the poor reviews. However the fact that my ricotta hotcakes were so good I would consider going back despite this explains why the cafe was full.

We moseyed back through town, past (and via) the games shop where Sean found a cool retro backgammon board of the type he usually has to bid for on eBay. There was only one so I'm not sure whether they are being manufactured wholesale or it was a relic of a previous run.

Coca Cola board - closed

Coca Cola board - open

Sean then bought a pair of trainers (ostensibly what we were shopping for) and we finished by going to the guitar shop to "buy a new microphone for the computer".

This is the result.

Sean plays his new Strat

A new backgammon board and a new guitar. What a day!

p.s. Broadband is currently working. But who knows for how long?

2006-11-23T17:50:00.000+11:00

It continues

No more fluffy posts about nice things we have had to eat, I'm afraid. It looks like all future posts are going to be regarding the absolutely poor state of our internet connection.

After being down all weekend, it started to work again on Monday at 7am. No word from AAPT regarding this and as it was fixed overnight on Sunday evening I doubt that it was because a Telstra engineer was fiddling with something to actively fix it.

By yesterday there was still no word from AAPT regarding why the broadband connection had broken, which I thought was pretty poor. However, since it was working I just couldn't muster the energy to sit on hold and tell them they were rubbish.

Until last night, when it broke again just after I finished work (I suppose it could have been worse....). I called this morning and apparently there is a big problem with the exchange and Telstra don't know when it will be fixed. The problem is analogous to our Tube escalators; apparently the machines are so old that Telstra have trouble getting parts. Good.

I accepted their offer of a backup dialup connection so we are connected, but slowly. They are going to chase Telstra today and then I need to call them back to check what happened. Why can't they call me? Well the guy on the phone said that he could tell the admin team to call me but they're very busy so they might not get round to it.

With Telstra's monopoly of the lines and inability to deliver, it's hardly surprising that wireless internet is so popular in this country. If only it wasn't so expensive....

2006-11-17T14:36:00.000+11:00

Internet problems

The Tuesday before last, which was Melbourne Cup day (everything in Australia stops for a horse race; in Melbourne it is a public holiday) my internet connection broke in a strange way. This was mildly inconvenient but I went to Starbucks to check my email and connect to my work network and it wasn't too much of a disaster. I had called AAPT support and was told that it would be "escalated" and someone would call me when it was fixed. No one called, but I noticed at 4pm that the magic light was flashing on the modem and sure enough, it was working. AAPT had no idea how it had been fixed.

Today, it has broken again. In the same way, without any explanation. Today it is not mildly inconvenient. It is a bit of a disaster. That is because today I have to upload a 250MB file to one of my customers. This is definitely too big for Starbucks (my laptop would run out of power first) so I have had to follow a convoluted plan.

I checked my emails, did some final testing and searched on "internet cafe" in Starbucks. I then went to Everywhere Internet, which conveniently lets me plug my laptop into the internet. This is better than Starbucks and next time (!) when it breaks I will go there instead.

I connect and ask it to upload my file. Expected time 8 hours. Hmmm. 8 hours sitting in an internet cafe. Do they have a faster connection? No.

I sit down reluctantly and then the assistant performs a most amazing piece of customer service. Did I want a faster internet connection? Global Gossip have ASDL 2 and are 1 1/2 blocks away. I packed up and the assistant gave me my deposit back without charging me for the time I had already spent trying to upload. What a result.

Global Gossip would let me connect my laptop, but it turns out that I need to go to a different branch to get ADSL. This is not far, but they may not have a machine and I cannot connect my laptop there (because the ceiling has fallen in in the part of the shop where I would do that). The guy helpfully emails the other store to see whether they have any machines free and I set off.

Luckily I can cope with not connecting my laptop since I have precipitously (I am not sure that it is correct word) copied the file onto a CD and I am allowed to put that into a machine. (I thought they didn't let you do that because of viruses?)

I have to use IE to upload, rather than Filezilla. This is not good, the connection has already reset once. But it is underway now and I have my fingers crossed.

2006-11-16T23:11:00.000+11:00

Broadway Jazz

I just made a mistake that cost me two hours of my life.

Sean is out with work this evening and I couldn't go dancing this morning so I thought I would make up for it by going this evening.

At 6:30pm I went to a class by Ramon very similar to my usual class. All well and good (in fact it was an excellent class). As Sean wouldn't be back until late I thought I'd stay on and do another class.

There were two available: Funk or Broadway Jazz. Hmmm. Funk. Broadway Jazz. Looking back the choice seems obvious. I know what Ramon would have recommended if I had asked him (like I would have done if I hadn't been too scared). However I chose Broadway Jazz.

The class seemed a bit odd when I went in. It was mainly young girls and a lot of them appeared to be dancing in heels. Zac (the teacher - I had him once before as a Ramon stand in) did a 10 minute warm up (with Ramon we do almost an hour warm up) and then said let's go through a routine.

OK, so we didn't do a proper warm up and it was to Broadway music but a routine must be quite normal, right? Well.... I hadn't done a lot of the moves for a while (flick your hand a bit, step on your toe and put your knee up) so I wasn't expert, but Zac seemed to just do them and everyone got them instantly. I was confused until I realised that they were practising a routine that they had been doing for the past few weeks for the dance show at the end of the year.

The whole thing was a complete disaster and as I didn't know the routine and can't go to the show anyway I felt like a bit of a wolly. Had I been 13 I probably would have cried. However being an adult, I got on with it and tried to enjoy myself and counted the minutes down.

Still 2 hours gone, no dancing fun and no exercise (it was more posing to the music than dancing). Next time, funk. I console myself by thinking that the funk class was probably practising for the show too and their routine will have been hard.

2006-11-12T11:56:00.000+11:00

Lunch at the Fishmarket

Yesterday we finally went for lunch in the fish market. We got up and had breakfast early so we were hungry at just the right time.

The weather has been a bit temperamental lately but this weekend it has been lovely and warm (too hot for Sean, but I'm starting to get used to it). We walked to the fish market and were pretty warm by the time we got there. We had a look around and decided to get lunch from Christie's as they are well known as the best place for buying raw seafood in the fish market.

We decided to get a standard seafood platter for two, comprising fish, octopus, scallops, prawns, oysters and calamari. We had a problem once we'd bought it though; there was only one table free and it didn't have any chairs. We went outside to look for a table but they were all full with some people having resorted to sitting on the grass and many others hovering. We went back to our chairless table and managed to secure a single chair.

The platter itself was pretty disappointing. The fish was OK but not great, similarly the calamari. The prawns were drowned in thick batter and the octopus was in a sweet chilli sauce. The scallops were cooked in garlic butter and the best thing on the plate. The chips were also good - but we didn't come for chips!

We got two different types of cooked oyster to try, which was very exciting. The first was Oyster Mornay. I had seen these available uncooked to take home and also lobster mornay. This had led me to hope that in fact it was not the thick, slightly tasteless mornay sauce that I learnt to cook at school but more like a thermidor sauce. It was the former. However the other oysters - Kilpatrick - were fantastic. Topped with a mixture of tomato and worcester ("Kilpatrick") sauce and chopped bacon they were really tasty.

So although not a spectacular lunch we learned a couple of useful things: always get a table before ordering and choose what you want rather than having a mixed platter. I'm just looking forward to next time....

2006-11-09T17:41:00.000+11:00

Cupcake

I finally bought myself a cupcake from Cupcakes on Pitt the prominent cupcake store in the centre of town that has been tempting me since not long after we moved here.

The choice was pretty vast and has put me off before. I was just thinking that I couldn't decide between the ones in the window when I saw a white chocolate cupcake section inside the shop that wasn't in the window display. It included a chocolate coated strawberry. I was sold. On my way out, I decided that next I would try the choc-jaffa and tiramisu cakes.

White chocolate Cupcake

Looks good huh?

It didn't taste good. In fact it tasted almost exactly like a couple of reviews I had read on the internet. I had discounted the reviews (optimistically) as lots of other people had said the cakes were OK.

The most relevant reviews were (I think they put it better than me):

The cupcakes are dry and the frosting too airy and sugary and tasting of artificial flavours.

I'm sure the cake is not prepared from scratch (bit of a shame), but the icing is really unpleasant - it should lovely soft frosting but I think they use 'mock' cream with sugar in it - not nice!

You can read the full list here. Looking back there seem to be quite a few that say that the cakes are rubbish. I think I was possibly a little over-optimistic. Who are these people who said they were good though? They clearly know nothing about cake.

2006-11-04T09:31:00.000+11:00

Quay

We've ticked off another three-hat restaurant from the book. This was is called Quay and is round the corner from the Opera house in the Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay.

I picked it as the best restaurant to visit next on the grounds that it won best restaurant in Sydney in 2003 and 2005 and a dessert from there is featured on the front of The Book.

We went with the UK chief executive William, so I have three sets of dishes to report on rather than two, although Sean and I spoiled that somewhat by having the same main course. My choice was slightly limited by the superabundance of mushrooms (all fancy ones) on the menu.

William had spring vegetable salad with flowers and herbs, goat's curd cigars and lemon jam to start. I had been tempted by this but it seemed a little unexciting compared to the other starters. It looked very exciting when it arrived though - the "cigars" were pastry cigars and the salad looked good as well. I had the mud crab congee, which contained very little rice and a lot of crab. It was absolutely delicious - as soon as I started eating it I wanted to order another one! Sean had one of the most complicated starters, this was "Crisp confit of rare breed suckling pig belly, gentle braise of green lipped abalone, cuttlefish, handmade silken tofu, Japanese mushrooms" Sean said it was nice, although the tofu part only got an "alright".

For main course Sean and I both had "Roasted John Dory, gentle braise of sea scallops, spring vegetables" and William had the complicated one: "Crisp skinned Murray Cod, shaved baby squid, abalone, congee rice, shiitake, fresh water chestnuts, black moss". The John Dory was fantastic and William similarly complimented the Cod. All of William's accompaniments were in very small quantities, we struggled to find the black moss but eventually did (it did just look like black moss but I have no idea whether it really was a moss).

Sean had cheese and so I had the five-texture chocolate cake to keep him company. Unfortunately none of the textures was actually "cake"; there was chocolately, biscuity base, chocolate mousse, chocolate layer on top (it was exceptionally nice chocolate), white chocolate ice-cream in the middle and then chocolate sauce poured into the middle (melting the ice-cream and forming a pool) for the fifth texture. It actually provided a sixth as well - towards the end it started setting. The pudding was OK, lots of restaurants do chocolate puddings of this ilk and I'm rarely impressed (although strangely unable to not order them) - I prefer a simple home-made chocolate torte. Next time I will have the "Caramelised raspberry and rose scented mille feuille", which is the dish featured on the front cover of the SMH Good Food Guide. The cheese looked fantastic. I missed the exact descriptions as I was having chocolate sauce poured at the time, but one was a sheep's milk cheese, one was Roquefort and on a soft French (-style?) cheese. They went pretty quickly.

We were also brought petit fours with out tea, although disappointingly there was only one type and it was a rather sickly chocolate cigar with caramel cream. Still, I managed to eat my two and Sean's two.

2006-11-03T07:03:00.000+11:00

Canberra and Catherine de Medici

So much to do and so little time to blog!

Last weekend we went to see our friend Carrie, who since we last saw her has moved to Canberra and become a famous published author.

Carrie in the Paper!

We flew to Canberra with Quantas and despite being kept on the runway for half on hour on the way out, I thought that the flight was pretty painless. The check in times are really short for domestic flights and the actual flight itself is only half an hour. By the clever use of food, Quantas render it seemingly instantaneous. You lift off and put your seatbelt on. Then they turn the lights off and give you a snack (biscuits and tea on the way out, dried fruit, nuts and fruit juice on the way back) and then all of a sudden it's time to put your seat belt back on to land.

We had a bit of a snooze when we got to the hotel and then Carrie and Daniel (Carrie's partner) came and met us about 4pm. We then went up the Telstra tower, which is very similar to the tower in Sydney; it even has a revolving restaurant! The view is a bit different though, look at all those trees!

View from the Telstra tower in Canberra

Man made lake designed as part of Canberra

We had tea in the Telstra tower and then went for a drink in the Phoenix, described by Carrie and Daniel as the only real pub in Canberra (it was a good deal more real than any of the ones we've been to in Sydney) and for a Canberra curry.

On Sunday, we got up early, had a fabulous breakfast in the hotel (I had: a fruit course including whole poached plums, a yoghurt course, a Bircher muesli course, an English muffin course and cake - pain au chocolate, danish pastry and American muffin - course) and went for a look around the parliament buildings.

Australian Parliament

We then went to the National Art Gallery. We thought it was the National Portrait Gallery, but it's just as well we went to this one as it was great. We didn't really have time to look at everything and we will go back if we visit Canberra again. It had a cool silver ball thing outside. From the right angle it looks as if it is suspended in mid-air.

Cool silver ball thing

We had lunch with Carrie and Daniel at Sammy's, their local Malaysian restaurant. I tried a laksa for the first time - I've been meaning to do this for a while as it seems to be almost the national dish in Australia. It was very tasty and exactly how I was expecting: very similar to Thai soups and Malaysian/Thai curry. And then we had to go home....

Carrie, Daniel and Me (Sean is taking the photo)

On Tuesday night we went for a meal at Coast restaurant in Cockle Bay Wharf. Cockle Bay Wharf is really just part of Darling Harbour so only 10 mins walk away. I saw the dinner, entitled Catherine de Medici: Teaching the French on the SMH website as the last event of good food month (they're big on food here). I recognised the restaurant as being in The Book, but I hadn't realised it was so close.

I took the camera and once again took zero photos, but I did take a menu home.

Menu (click to enlarge)

They were very good to me, they replaced my mushroom salad with an asparagus one and left the truffles off the soup. The food was all delicious; both of our favourites were the spuntino but the artichoke and broad beans came a close second for me. The cheese was more to my taste than Sean's (much like a second dessert course) and the pudding was not to Sean's taste at all so I got two. Result!

It was really interesting to see all the components of classic French cuisine that came from Italy, including onion soup, fois gras and duck a l'orange. She also insisted on separating salty and sweet courses; apparently everyone else at that time at sweet and savoury food together, American breakfast style. If you're interested, email me and I'll send you a scan of the blurb that they gave us to read (it's too large to upload).

Another restaurant success close to our door. It's getting hard to choose where to go when we go out!

2006-10-27T18:18:00.000+10:00

Pulp Fiction

One of the first things I bought while on our book buying binge in the Southern Highlands was a diary for next year. It's usually the kind of thing I like to wait until Christmas for but unfortunately it seems that nowadays Christmas is too late to start organising next year.

The selection of diaries was not great. I considered getting a Sydney Morning Herald Good Food diary, but it seemed a bit superfluous when we have The Book and it was quite bulky and irritating. In the end I settled on a dictionary, which, while very exciting, was not good for subsequent book buying levels: The Granta Classic Crime diary.

Diary

Every week there is a new photo of a crime classic, and a interesting fact on one of the dates either taken from a book (e.g. "Solomon Moretsi signed a sworn statement, as witnessed by Jesus, about his bicycle accident on 10 May. Ma Ramotswe is asked to investigate.") or about an author (e.g. "Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Morse, was born in Stamford, Lincs., on 29 September 1930.").

This prompted to me to buy trashy crime novels, firstly to collect all the books featured in my diary (I found none of them) and secondly to buy all the winners of the yearly prizes listed at the front of the diary (I don't think I found any of these either). Still I managed to buy a lot that weren't on either list but looked exciting. And that was after turning the vast majority down.

I've just finished reading the first of these. This was particularly exciting as it was written by Jacqueline Wilson, who is now a famous children's author.

Snap!

It was quite a cute book, although more a thriller than a who dunnit (I guess it was more of a whosgoingtodoit). Just another 20 or so to go....

2006-10-23T18:31:00.000+10:00

Running / swimming

We were a bit slack for the first few weeks after we came back from the UK with regards to running and swimming i.e. we didn't go at all.

However as of last week we are under a new regime which means that we go every day! We go when Sean gets home from work or before he leaves if we get up (we haven't managed this yet). We managed to stick to this last week although we had what we feel was a well deserved day off on Friday.

Sean's also been investigating outdoor runs. He found a good one on the internet here and we walked it at the weekend to see exactly where it went. It took us two hours to walk. It's a really lovely route especially round by the Opera House and the Botanic Gardens. We're going to try and find some shorter routes as well.

It's going to be a bit strange if Sean goes running outside though - he'll have to drop me at the pool and come back and get me when he's finished!

2006-10-16T18:19:00.000+10:00

A new Mezerama

Mezerama was our local Turkish restaurant that was sold to become a dodgy pizza joint. We are still very sad about this.

However our lives have been brightened since we visited Sumac restaurant in Darling Harbour yesterday. This is a bizarre mixed Mediterranean restaurant (from the book obviously) including dishes from every country around the Med: Italian (pizza), Spanish (chorizo, paella), Turkish/Greek (grilled lamb chops, falafal, shish kebab) and North African (harissa, tagine).

I had a bit of a tizzy moment when ordering. I had decided to order the calamari stuffed with chorizo and halloumi (too exciting) but was distracted by the Moroccan rabbit stuffed pastry cigars at the last minute. This confused my brain so much that I actually ordered the falafal! I had whole baby snapper for my main course and Sean had grilled lamb chops, followed by swordfish.

The falafal were great and Sean commended the lamb chops as well. My fish came in a kind of herb crust, which was delicious and also with a kind of creamy chilli sauce, which was good in small quantities (I think it may have been a bit sickly if I'd eaten all of it). I also tried Sean's swordfish, which was heavy on the cumin. I mention this as a good thing.

The whole atmosphere was very "Mediterranean", it reminded me simultaneously of Turkey and Tunisia and by the time it came to dessert I was gasping for baklava. In some ways this was a shame as the desserts were extremely exciting: turkish delight, turkish coffee or halawa (not quite sure what this is) ice-cream and loads of other exiting things including at least two that I had no clue what they were. Perhaps next time I will order the dessert tasting plate, but as it explicitly says "for two" on the menu and I know I can't rely on Sean to help me so it seems a little ambitious.

The "baklava and petit fours" option also said "for two" but I reckoned I could manage two servings worth of petit fours. In this case I may well have been wrong but we will never know as Sean ate his whole half of the baklava! I was astounded. We got 6 large assorted pieces of baklava and cut them all in half. They were all fantastic although I had a couple of favourites. I have no way of indicating which these were though as I'm not even sure what each was made of, let alone what they are individually called.

We finished with mint tea, which was surprisingly (and pleasingly for me, not so for Sean) unsweetened with complimentary turkish delight. The service was a little crazy throughout the meal but the food was so good I could forgive them anything.

In other news: I made chocolate truffles (and hence myself very sick) and we visited a local Italian (also in the book) which was OK but a bit disappointing.

2006-10-12T18:07:00.000+10:00

Miss Backgammon

If anyone would like to see me in my vague stab at fame, my photo is now up on the Miss Backgammon site (click twice on "View the Entrants" to see me). I sent them another photo as well but they haven't used that one (if you look at the other girls, you will see that a couple have different pictures for the thumbnail from the main photo). I think this is because they are a bit pushed for time at the moment compared to when they put the first photos up; it's taken them nearly 2 months to put my photo up at all (although they did apologise for this by sending me a t-shirt).

I think my plan of using this as a stepping stone to celebrity status is not going to come to fruition. The first draft of the T&Cs said that the winner would get a professional modelling contract, which could have been my way into the big time, but they've since taken this down. Obviously the quality of entrants isn't high enough :(

2006-10-10T19:14:00.000+10:00

Tanya Reinhart

We went to another lecture last night at Sydney University. This was in the same series as the lecture given by Bjorn Lomborg and was by an Isreali linguistics professor called Tanya Reinhart. She was speaking in her identity as an Isreali rather than a linguistics professor; she also writes for the "Yediot Aharonot" newspaper in Israel and has written two books on the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Her latest book has just been published and is called "The roadmap to nowhere". I would like to read it but forgot to buy a copy. This is just as well as I should concentrate on reading the books I have already.

The basic theory of Professor Reinhart is that Isreal is actively pursuing a strategy to drive the Palestinians out of Israel, basically by destroying their economy and way of life. She claims that this is being undertaken by a military elite, without support from the Isreali public. I'm not very good at explaining things and this lady is famous enough to have her own wikipedia page so if you're interested in her theories I suggest you read more about it here.

The audience were mainly students from the University, and as such as pro-Tanya as they were all anti-Bjorn. This meant that the questions tended to be lacking in content. It would have been more interesting to see her debate with someone with opposing views.

2006-10-08T11:08:00.000+10:00

Back in the swing of things

Since coming back to Australia, the weather has been getting warmer. This has induced me to start making smoothies again (and I suspect that my fondness for soup that I discovered over the winter will disappear) and to this end I have bought myself a new blender.

New blender

I've also posted another recipe to the smoothie blog and I suspect I will keep doing so, but on a very irregular basis i.e. less than once a week. I have lots of ideas (especially involving custard) but not enough time to try them out.

Yesterday it was time for the farmer's market again and we bought some cheese, some strawberries and some cakes from the French patisserie stall. We are less enthusiastic about the farmers market now we know what it sells.

We also went to the cancer shop to buy a hat for Sean. He chose a typical Aussie bush style hat. I also bought a straw hat that ties under my chin. It's not as nice as my other hat but it was the only style they had that I could tie on against the wind.

Hats

I also discovered another problem with it on the way home - the brim is not as wide as my other hat and lets more sun under. I'm not sure whether this was exacerbated by the fact that it was 4pm (i.e. the sun had started getting slanty). I shall try it next week and decide whether it is better to have more shade or more hat security. I suspect it will differ according to circumstance.

Last night we managed to get a table at Flying Fish a local restaurant with a single hat rating in the SMH Good Food Guide. It seems that if you are flexible (i.e. willing to eat at 6pm) then getting a table at a top restaurant at the last minute is not too hard.

We had the degustation menu and I took a photo so we could remember what we had. This didn't turn out too well. Don't get too excited about the fact that I remember the camera though. You will notice that despite taking it out of my bag and leaving it on the side I did not manage to take a single picture of any food. I know what the problem is now though. Food arrives and my first thought is "EAT".

Menu

Luckily the menu is on the website so I can reproduce it in full:

Seafood tapas

Yellow fin tuna with sweet crackling pork and ruby grapefruit

Seared sea scallops with green pea puree, Jerusalem artichoke and horseradish cream

Grilled green banana prawns with shaved green lip abalone and roast duck broth

Lemon sorbet

Seared John Dory fillet with " Pescadillos Salados" capers and parsley Served with hand-cut chips and green salad

Pyengana cheddar with Japanese radish

Dessert tasting plate

Coffee tea and petits fours

The seafood tapas was basically seafood based canapes, all of which were nice but the best was the Kingfish Carpaccio. The artichoke in the scallops dish had been replaced by pancetta, which I think was unfortunate, although they were great scallops. I thought the lemon sorbet would be unexciting and rather irritating but actually was rather nice and a kind of mid course pudding.

The John Dory was great and the chips were very good. They add their signature chilli salt to them, which I was looking forward to. Unfortunately it was very disappointing but the chips themselves were magificent (thick cut real potato perfectly fried). We were both disappointed by the cheese, which was a couple of thin slices of a very dry, almost parmesan-esque cheddar.

The desert plate was magnificent. I had the usual advantage of Sean's lack of interest in anything that isn't chocolate. The only thing I left was the rum panacotta (I don't like panacotta and adding alcohol certainly doesn't help). The others were:

Strawberry souffle with nougat ice-cream (this was not too insubstantial)

Almond friand with banana ice-cream

Passionfruit and mango tart

Chocolate and raspberry layer cake with chocolate ice-cream

The chocolate cake and ice-cream were the best - the cake was really cakey (I don't think I can explain better than that) and the chocolate used was exceptional quality without being too bitter. The raspberry was just a hint of a flavour and didn't overpower the chocolate.

We also got petit fours (passionfruit jelly, chocolate nougat and chocolate and honey truffle) and tea. And all this for $125 (£50). We will be going back.

Today we are playing backgammon at George's (nice mediterranean restaurant across the water) so if I beat Sean in the final, expect a post from him later on about the injustice of it all.

2006-10-05T17:40:00.000+10:00

Hat

Hat

It's starting to hot up now and so when we got back from the UK I managed to get around to buying a hat from the Australian Cancer Society Shop. Because it came from the Cancer shop it is certified SPF 30 (or something), which is very reassuring. I picked the one with the widest brim (10cm); the lady in the shop told me that the average was 8cm.

They didn't really seem to sell anything besides hats and suntan lotion. What I really want in addition to my hat are some lightweight long sleeved shirt similarly guaranteed to keep my arms safe. Still my arms are more durable than my face and neck.

I wore the hat to walk to dancing today and it is brilliant! My head and neck are completely in the shade at all times. It has a tendency to blow off as it's so windy here but that I can cope with. I might buy a less stylish one that ties under my chin for windy days.

2006-10-02T18:12:00.000+10:00

A lot of things, but mainly books

This weekend was a bank holiday. We had been considering travelling up to Byron Bay for a weekend backgammon tournament. Byron Bay is almost on the edge of Queensland and takes 9 hours to drive to. Sean couldn't get Friday off work and we were booked in to see a play Friday evening so the only option was to fly. As we were booking at the last minute, the flights were quite expensive so we hummed and haahed and they sold out. Still we did some much more exciting things.

On Friday we went to see I am my own wife in the Opera House. I tried to book the Opera house restaurant but it was full so we went to a nearby Chinese that was in the SMH food guide. The food was really nice - we had lobster with ginger and spring onion, salt and chilli squid and king prawns in black bean sauce. All the seafood was fresh and really high quality.

Also on Friday, the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra was playing in the Opera house. There was a free screening of it outside so people were streaming past us in a queue as we ate. There were still quite a few hanging around after they closed the doors because it was full.

The queue to see the Vienna Philharmonic

The crowd outside the Opera House waiting for the performance to begin

The play was fascinating. It was a performed by a single gentleman, who did very well. However I have come to realise that although bad actors can stuff up a play, good actors can't rescue a bad one so although the acting was impeccable I feel that the real credit is due to the playwright.

The play was about an East German transvestite who survived both the Nazis and the Russian occupation, while collecting 19th century furniture in a museum. The play was based around interviews that the writer had with Charlotte von Marlsdorf and there is a photo of her in the programme. One of the key aspects of the story was that while she was being feted as a heroine after the wall came down, the Stasi files were released and showed that she was not as resistant as claimed and in fact collaborated with the Stasi, even giving them information that led to the arrest of her friend and fellow furniture collector.

If you want to read more, Charlotte's autobiography is available under the title I am my own woman (I think this is the same quote with different translation of the German word Frau) or some notes on the play are available here.

As we had a whole weekend, as couldn't get flights for anywhere we wanted to visit, we decided to drive to the Southern Highlands on the outskirts of Sydney. We stayed in the Fitzroy Inn, a hotel with a restaurant in the the Food Guide.

A view from a lookout in the Southern Highlands

The Southern Highlands is an area consisting of several small villages. Mittagong, where the hotel was, was not very impressive but we went to Bowral a few times and Berrima, the oldest village, is quite cute in an extremely touristy way.

It's tulip season at the moment in the Southern Highlands so we went to one garden in Bowral. The queue was pretty long and the place was packed. The tulips were nice but we declined the offer to be bussed to more gardens to see more tulips.

Tulips

We visited three bookshops in Bowral and even better, a book barn on the outskirts of Berrima. We bought far too many books, including some Peter Ackroyd first editions. We'll be reading for a little while...

A typical antique shop in Bowral

We only stayed one night in the Fitzroy Inn, but the food was superb and we would definitely go back. We shared gnocci in burnt butter and sage and then Sean had lamb and I had a roast spatchcock chicken. We also shared a fantastic cheese platter.

We've spent today recovering from going away....

2006-09-24T17:26:00.000+10:00

First weekend back; high winds

We've been pretty tired in the evenings since we got back as we've been gradually working forward from waking up at 4:30am. Still we had some nice mornings playing backgammon on the balcony before Sean went to work.

Friday was no exception, so the weekend really started yesterday for us. I bought the 2007 Sydney Morning Herald Good Eating Guide during our (surprise) stop in Melbourne airport on the way back and we had a look for somewhere to go for breakfast and then gave up and just ate in. We must go out for breakfast more often - it's very Australian.

We started down the path to doing something else Australian; we went to Barbeques Galore and purchased a barbeque (one of the few coal powered ones they had, almost all are gas), an umbrella and a stand. We put the umbrella up when we got back, but unfortunately it acted like a sail and would have taken off, with the 16kg concrete base attached, if we hadn't held on to it. So no umbrella on the balcony then.

In the evening we went for dinner at Pier, one of the 4 restaurants in Sydney that have been awarded the top 3 hats by the SMH Good Eating guide. It was over in the eastern suburb of Rose Bay, north of Bondi. We had a bit of trouble finding the restaurant (navigation errors by me) but got there in the end. Rose Bay is very pretty, with a wide expanse of harbour and lots of boats.

The restaurant is designed like a pier i.e. jutting out into the water and so has good views from every table. Sean had seared scallops with celeriac puree and mushrooms, followed by lobster in a thai sauce. I had raw scallop tortellini with roasted broccoli, followed by bass grouper read thai curry. The tortellini was made using the scallop and was quite interesting, but the curry, although nice, was second to both the fish curry at Jordan's and at Ripples.

I tried Sean's lobster and the sauce, although it may have been good with a bland fish, was completely overpowering for lobster. We were both pretty full and couldn't manage dessert, which is a shame as the pastry chef at Pier had won a special award of her own. Still, I'm sure we'll go back, for the view if nothing else. This leaves Bennelong (the restaurant at the Opera House), another 3 hat winner, still as our favourite restaurant. But we have two more "3 hats" to try, one of which is a French Japanese restaurant. I'm looking forward to that.

Today we enthusiastically decided to try out the barbeque. We bought burgers and some pork sausages (a speciality in Oz - almost all are beef) and went to the fish market and picked up a baby barramundi and a sand whiting.

Unfortunately barbequing did not go all that well. It seems to be even windier today than it was yesterday and it caused us all sorts of problems. Firstly, a glass of orange juice and lemonade was shattered after a large gust. We don't think it actually blew off the table but was jolted off after a chair was sent flying. Secondly, although the barbeque remained upright (a constant worry), hot ash was blown everywhere including into Sean's hat (he has a small burn on his forehead as testimony).

The baby barramundi was still too big to cook all the way through, but the sand whiting was very tasty. I don't think we'll be attempting it again though.

2006-09-21T17:35:00.000+10:00

The Hunger Site

I was recently reminded of the Hunger Site when I found a link to it on a (Flash I think) coding website. Now I have started thinking about things more, I am a little less sure about how good an idea this is (surely it would be better for me to just set up a direct debit for the cost of a cup of food and then a) I wouldn't forget and b) I can decide which charity to give to rather than letting someone else decide for me). I think this skepticism is a little sad as I remember thinking that this website was the best thing in the world when I first heard about it about five years ago.

I have added the URL for the Hunger Site to the links on the right hand side of this blog. It is, at any rate, more useful than a link saying "Edit-me".

Go click and enjoy watching other people pay for food.

2006-09-19T12:49:00.000+10:00

We're back!

We've attended our weddings and seen loads of people back in the UK and had a wonderful time all round. Thanks to everyone who came out to see us; I'm sorry that we didn't have enough time to do more. Still, we're back in a year.

Here a couple of photos of the happy couples:

Tamsin and Wes

Chris and Claire

The flight back was fine, although the plane stopped at Melbourne in addition to Shanghai, which was a little irritating. We flew with China East this time, rather than Malaysia and the business lounges were not as good, despite the chocolate cake in the Air France lounge in Heathrow.

The first thing we did when we got back was to go straight to the fish market and buy some sashimi tuna for lunch with salad. Back in Oz....

2006-08-17T17:48:00.000+10:00

Last dancing class for a while

We're kind of on count down now until we come back. I'm trying to eat up food in the refrigerator, freezer and cupboard. Some things are going to have to stay in the freezer but they should be OK for a month shouldn't they?

Part of this is that today was my last dance class for 5 weeks. I had a lot of fun, as ever; Ramon said some crazy things, as ever and I realised that I am really going to miss the classes when I come back to the UK. Not this time, when we come back for a month, but when we come back for good. OK, so I work next door to a dance studio, but it doesn't run any good classes at lunch time. (The last time I looked the options were Yoga, Pilates or Salsa. Only one of these counts as dancing and that only just.) Maybe this will have changed by the time I get back. Still the teacher could not be as good as Ramon.

I got a bit bold today and went in the front row when everyone else was straggling backwards to avoid it. This was a mistake. I have got quite good at following other people while looking like I am remembering the moves on my own, but when you're at the front you can't do this! There is a further step I can take and I shall practise this next time: as we dance in front of a mirror you can follow the people behind you. This will be very tricky though and may lead to performing the moves back-to-front.

Our other count-down items are:

Tomorrow - last end of the week.

Saturday - Sean's office is coming over (~40 people including children); this is why I need to run the fridge down now.

Sunday - The new secondees from the UK are coming for lunch.

Monday - Start thinking we ought to do some packing.

Tuesday - Wonder why we didn't actually start doing any packing when we thought about it yesterday.

And then we fly! As you can see, we're pretty tight on time so we probably won't post again now until we're back. I sent an email with some dates for meeting up, if you didn't get it - drop me a line.

2006-08-13T15:58:00.000+10:00

A good weekend

But then again, when isn't it?

It started with food (as usual). I made a pretty good paella on Friday (key difference: adding paprika rather than Chorizo), followed by a self-saucing chocolate pudding. You know the exiting type where it looks like a chocolate pudding and you find gooey chocolate stuff in the middle.

On Saturday I did something a bit different and went to have some professional photos taken. This was mainly to enter the Miss Backgammon 2007 tournament. I got the chap to take a couple of me and Sean at the end - here is one. Sean complained that he wasn't warned and hadn't had time to wash his hair but I insisted. The photogropher told us that I had to look less happy and Sean had to look more so.

Us

We've also been working on a top secret backgammon project - I can't tell you or I'd have to kill you - which has been fun.

And finally, today we had (inspired by Friday) mussels on the balcony. My first attempt at mussels was really disappointing; they were almost all dead. However of the mussels I bought on Friday only one died (out of 15) and today only a handful from 1.7 kilos. Seafood in the sunshine - that's what Australia is about!

2006-08-10T17:41:00.000+10:00

The Copenhagen Consensus

Last month, along with my copy of Gleebooks (the magazine I get from the book club/shop I joined at the writer's festival), I got a flyer advertising some talks at Sydney University described as "Sydney ideas - international public lecture series".

The first of these was a talk given by Bjorn Lomborg on "How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place". This sounded exactly like the sort of thing I was interested in so I booked tickets for Sean and myself.

The talk was run in conjunction with the Centre for Independent Studies a theoretically "independent" but clearly right-wing think tank. I took a copy of their magazine; anyone who has ever engaged with Sean on one of his favourite themes of "how taxis are ripping us off" would have been interested to read an article espousing similar views. Apparently the situation is even worse in Australia.

Bjorn Lomberg was very energetic and enthusiastic. His talk basically outlined the method used at the Copenhagen Consensus to rank a selected list of the worlds greatest problems. The criteria were "How much good can we do per dollar spent?" instead of the more usual question of "What is the biggest problem?". This is a great way of analysing the situation and as Bjorn said, it is a wonder that no-one has done it before.

The list was slightly surprising, although it makes quite a lot of sense if you think about it. At the top (i.e. most good for money spent) was preventing the spread of communicable diseases, namely AIDS followed by Malaria. At the bottom was climate change prevention (expensive, and we can't make much difference).

The talk was aimed a little low for me, but that was OK since I could just buy the book afterwards, which I am now going to read. He took questions at the end but we couldn't stay through all of them as almost everyone asked the same question without listening to or understanding the previous answers. I realise now that this may be because a lot of the people who went were reacting against Bjorn Lomborg's own book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and as such were people with a vested interest.

A typical question was "The results show X (e.g. that putting money into reducing global warming doesn't do much good, or that putting money into preventing corruption doesn't do as much good as we thought it would) but have you considered Y?" to which the answer was to explain the methodology used and how it would take all these things into account etc. etc.

Still, I've got the book now so I can find out all about it.

2006-08-07T16:57:00.000+10:00

Injustice

Zoe and I attended the monthly Sunday Sydney Backgammon Tournament yesterday. As some of you will know my record against Zoe in tournaments is not great. Fortunately as the Sydney tournament is a friendly affair Zoe and I are always placed in opposite sides of the draw. Unfortunatey this leaves open the possibility of meeting in the final. Which is what happened.

Now I am not one to whinge about outrageous bad luck and terrible cube decisions. So I will let the facts speak for themselves. Match to 5 points. Zoe is winning 2-1. I have cubed her and she has taken. We have got into a race. Zoe rolls double 6s I roll 21 to leave Zoe with one checker on her three point and one checker on her 4 point. I have one checker on my 4 point. Zoe on roll.

And she cubes!

With 19 missing numbers!

I have a take point of 18%.

Zoe has an initial doubling point of 69%. (risking 40% to gain 18%)

She is winning this game just over 50% of the time.

The decision to cube loses over 10% match winning chances.

So I snatch the cube.

And of course Zoe rolls 54.

And I lose.

Again.

2006-07-30T17:15:00.000+10:00

Opera in the Opera House

We've kept busy since the last post. We went back to George's on Thursday with a chum from backgammon as he won the voucher at the last tournament. Sadly, the monthly Sunday tournament this month is not going to be at George's but at the Tuesday venue, which is not nearly as nice. We'll have to wait until we return from the UK to play at George's again.

Last night was pretty exciting. We went for dinner in the restaurant in the Opera House, Guillaume at Bennelong and I had booked tickets for "La Clemenza di Tito" by Mozart. I can't claim that I picked it with any great knowledge of the operas I was choosing between; I picked it mainly because it was only three hours long (rather than four and a half).

The Bennelong restaurant was brilliant. The view was slightly different being inside the Opera House, we got a view of the city and half of the Harbour Bridge. It's superb for people watching: the area round the Opera House is always bustling with tourists. It also rated extremely highly on the food scale - definitely the best "top end" restaurant we have visited, less "inventive" than Aria, more substantial than Astral.

We both had tuna to start, which was very good indeed. The tuna was wrapped in basil leaves and had a mustard seed and soy dressing. The dressing was subtle, but brought out the flavour of the tuna perfectly. Sean had picked this first and I was very pleased that I had gone for the same thing as I think I would have been looking over jealously if I had ordered anything else.

Sean then had barramundi for main and I had prawns; we ordered some spinach on the side. The prawns were spiced in a slightly Indian way and went beautifully with the spinach, which was just cooked and swathed in butter and garlic. Sean couldn't resist the cheese platter so I went for a pudding - apple galette and cinnamon ice cream. The pudding was executed well but it wasn't exactly what I wanted and was slightly marred by the fact that they had brought exciting petit fours with my tea and I wanted to start on them. The petit fours were mango jelly (looked a bit rubbish but was very tasty), lemon madeleine, strawberry tart (both OK, but not exciting), pistachio truffle (gorgeous) and mini macaroon (very small; looked exceedingly exciting but tasted a bit rubbish).

The waiter brought the bill with dessert saying "I just realised that you have a 7:30pm performance". We left just after 7:25pm (luckily we had had the foresight to pick up the tickets before going to the restaurant) and we almost missed the start of the performance.

I'm not a particularly large fan of opera - I'd rather go and see something choral in a church - but I really enjoyed "La Clemenza di Tito". It was light hearted, some bits were pretty funny and it was pretty fast paced for an opera. We almost missed the second half as well; I led us in the wrong door, which turned out to be the circle.

Today we have eschewed Nick's. Instead, as the weather was sunny and the sky was clear (who would think it was winter?) we bought some swordfish and ate it on the balcony. We had a pretty good meal, which started as lunch (fish and salad) and turned into afternoon tea with bread and cheese and a cake selection we bought from the bakery in the fish market.

We must make sure we do this more often before it gets too hot - the view from our balcony is better than from most restaurants.

2006-07-27T17:45:00.000+10:00

Too busy to blog

I've been a bit busy so apologies to anyone who's got into the swing of "nothing happens all week, we do something at the weekend, I write it in the blog".

Most of note last weekend was the fact that Sean completed Guitar Hero on the hardest level. He now just has to work out how to keep himself amused until Guitar Hero 2 comes out.

Sean is the champion, my friend

We went on a walk to Glebe on Saturday, ticking off another Sydney suburb. Glebe is full of delis, cafes and bookshops; in fact we were prompted to go there as it is home to Gleebooks, whose club I joined at the Sydney writer's festival. Sean bought a backgammon book. I was very restrained and managed to not purchase anything. I will read all the books I already have before buying any more.

We also continued our trend of going out for lunch on Sunday. In fact we went back to Nick's, which had provided us with such good seafood the weekend before.

We splashed out and did something exciting on Tuesday (but we are still tired as a result). Astral restaurant, at the top of the casino, was hosting a dinner cooked by Pascal Tingaud, who is the resident chef at Moet et Chandon. We had a 5 course menu accompanied by Moet et Chandon champagnes. The wine was mostly was mostly Brut Imperial, but we got "Imperial Nectar" with ice and lime to start, a 1999 vintage with the fish and rose with dessert.

The food was good; the best were the canapes: blue cheese and candied mandarin on lettuce and pate de fois gras on toast, which we were served in the bar with our champagne cocktail. We then started in the restaurant with a kingfish tartare. The original recipe had been for seabass, which is easy to get in France but apparently not in Australia. Pascal said that he preferred it with the kingfish but I think it would have been better with seabass. Still they did the usual televised cooking for us so I can try this out myself when we are back in the UK.

This was followed by scallops with ginger (minced rather than whole scallop, which was unusual), lobster with citrus sauce, whiting rolls with truffled mash and strawberry and tomato with basil ice cream (very nice if you left out the tomatoes; these were unnecessarily inventive). I didn't eat the truffled mash and was slightly disconcerted when Sean (Connelly - the Astral chef) brought over a large truffle, made me smell it and asked if I wanted to touch it. I had to decline. It didn't look like a normal mushroom though so not as disturbing as it could have been.

No photos of any food I'm afraid - I'm back to forgetting the camera whenever we go out.

2006-07-17T17:36:00.000+10:00

Highlights of the weekend

We go to the Theatre

On Friday evening we went to see "A Large Attendance In The Antechamber" at the Sydney Opera House. The play was about Charles Gaulton, the "founder of eugenics" who was quite an interesting chap. Some of his other works include "A Beauty Map of Pretty Girls in Great Britain"* and a piece of on the (in)efficacy of prayer. Unfortunately the play was not so much about Gaulton as a piece of performace art exploring the concept of "the play". I thought it was quite interesting (although I would have preferred to find out more about Gaulton) but Sean fell asleep.

We host a Backgammon Chouette

On Saturday afternoon and evening we had some people over for a chouette at our flat. A nice time was had by all, except possibly for Sean, whose chouette winning streak appears to have come to an end.

We go for lunch

On Sunday lunchtime we investigated Nick's seafood restaurant, which is a kind of anti-Jordan's i.e. it is opposite it on Darling Harbour and serves upmarket seafood at a similar price range.

I had seafood chowder (nice and full of fish but no evidence of any other seafood) followed by blue eye and snapper pie (absolutely choc full of fish). Sean had scallops followed by Moreton Bay Bugs.

Moreton Bay Bugs

Sean eating Moreton Bay Bugs

We shared a cheese platter at the end, or rather Sean ate the cheese and I ate all the fruit that came with it. We both agreed it is better than Jordan's so we may be venturing over to the other side of the bay more often.

Sean fails to complete Guitar Hero

Sean has now unlocked all the extra songs on Guitar Hero and has completed all of them except for the last song (Bark at the Moon by Ozzy). He's got to 99% complete a few times but not quite made it.

Sean... nearly there

I finally make a cake

When we came away, I foolishly relinquished my big blue cookery bible, which I have sorely missed, and brought my Rose Levy Beranbaum Cake Bible, which of course I have not used at all. Until now! I've bought a slice of banana bread a couple of times for lunch so I thought I would make my own loaf. I am now going to try for making at least one cake a fortnight - in the chapter with banana bread are loads more exciting cakes.

In the oven

Slice of cake

* In case you were wondering, the largest concentration of pretty girls was in London, whereas the most ugly girls lived in Aberdeen.

2006-07-13T17:27:00.000+10:00

New Fudge

Mmmm, Fudge

I finally managed to buy some fudge from the Harbourside shopping centre. The shopping centre is too ridiculously close to our flat for me not to have managed this before.

I was buying the fudge merely for comparison with the Farmer's market fudge you understand.

The fudge is of the same type as the Fudge Kitchen in Cambridge, very sweet and very gooey. They also only sell it in the same units as the shop in Cambridge i.e. multiples of large slab.

This meant that I could only buy one type of fudge (even I have more sense that to buy two large slabs - although I know many people who came undone because of the buy 3 get the 4th free offer in Cambridge). Shortlisted were: Tia Maria Coffee (plain coffee would have stood more chance), choc jaffa, cookies and cream, maple syrup and walnut, and chocolate.

As a first tasting I decided on the classic chocolate. I ate a small bit at lunchtime and then managed to make myself feel sick by eating most of the slab after dinner. And I mean really sick - the kind where you have to lie there with your eyes shut hoping it will all go away.

Unfortunately it didn't come close to the Bowral fudge, although I am duty bound to try some other flavours (not for a little while though) just to make sure.

2006-07-09T16:24:00.000+10:00

Another day, another restaurant (or two)

We started the weekend by dining at George's on King Street Wharf. This was partly because the food is excellent but also partly because we had won $100 worth of dining vouchers for George's while playing backgammon. (George's is where we go for our Sunday tournaments.)

We bravely sat outside, although it turned out not to be so brave as they had heaters galore and the area was covered. Still, despite being from the UK, we were still a little chilly by the end of the evening.

A quick explanation about Winter here in Sydney. We already told you about the locals complaining that it's cold and in a sense they are right. The air temperature, particularly in the evening is quite low and if you get caught in a wind it can be pretty nippy. But, if the sun is out (which is most if not quite all of the time) and you are sitting in it, it is as hot as summer in the UK. We are a bit worried about what is going to happen when it is summer in Sydney; we'll have to deal with that when we get to it.

We both had scallops to start, which were lovely and then Sean had baby chicken with mushrooms, peas and herbed potato while I had barramundi fillet with squash, sweetcorn, chorizo and clams. The squash and sweetcorn was made into a kind of mash underneath the fish and flavoured with cumin. It was all delicious.

Oddly, it was Sean pushing for dessert so we had a chocolate pudding with orange anglaise and mint to share. I'd enviously watched several people eating this pudding while we played backgammon - it's of the type cooked in a brulee dish and liquid in the middle. It was even better with the orange sauce (which had the mint in it); it didn't last very long.

Yesterday we kept the average up by eating out twice! At lunchtime we ate at Jordan's, which we have frequented a few times already. Sean went once while I was away and was disappointed by the fish and chips so this was a last chance for the restaurant. We tend to operate a two strikes and you're out policy; usually it leaves us feeling pretty silly as we repeat a dreadful meal but in this case Jordan's redeemed itself.

We shared the whole fish of the day. We ummed and ahhed over whether to go for it grilled with lemon oil, but plumped for steamed with ginger and shallots. We were told it would be 35 mins so we had a starter of grilled prawns to keep us going.

And now for the most exiting bit: I remembered to take some pictures of the food! I also include a rather nice one of Sean preparing to devour the fish.

Steamed whole snapper

Chips

Salad

Sean vs Fish

Saturday evening we went back to Viva Goa. I've only been once before but Sean became a regular while I was away. Excellent food, 5 mins from our door and low prices. It's a wonder we go anywhere else really.

2006-07-06T17:46:00.000+10:00

Fitness Punchers

I've just found some photos that I managed to take of some fitness punchers so you can see what I was talking about when I mentioned them before. This seems to be a popular keep fit routine here in Sydney.

No one does anything like this in the UK.

2006-07-01T15:50:00.000+10:00

Last Saturday, this Saturday

I promised at the end of my last post to tell you what we did last Saturday. Now it is Saturday again and I don't remember doing anything of interest in between. Work days are pretty much work - sleep - work - sleep etc. for us. I didn't even go dancing this week as I need to build my legs muscles up again after they atrophied in the plane. Last Saturday and this Saturday are, after the customary pattern, all about food.

Last Saturday was the Sydney Good Food and Wine show. I bought the tickets in advance and I was a bit worried that I wasn't going to be feeling awake enough to go to this either. Two nights of sleep seemed to do the trick though...

We made it over about 12:30pm. The Good Food and Wine show was hosted in part of the Sydney Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. (I found out that this is also the same building as Sydney Exhibition Centre further down - the building just extends a long way). We had to resist the temptation of the used-Auto exhibition or something similar on the way but managed it.

There were lots of people there. It was hard to get around and some stalls (such as the Lindt stall giving away free samples) were permanently over subscribed.

It was really interesting as a comparison to the Sydney Growers market (this Saturday) as a lot of the food had quite clearly not been "grown" - a lot of the stalls were run by instant noodle and stir fry sauce companies doing continual demonstrations. My favourite food I saw (I'm not sure I would eat it) were some almost luminous red and green nachos, which were brilliant because they were so far removed from nature.

We went to get a glass for Sean and a "show bag" for me. The show bag was slightly disappointing, containing mainly advertising material, a bar a Lindt (OK that bit was good) and a Mazda sponsored cheese slice. I was confused by this and thought it might be some kind of window scraper.

I tried a few free samples: some gorgeous yoghurt, some fake milkshake (a powder that you add water and ice too - why oh why??), some soup, some acai juice (from the Amazon rainforests, tastes a bit like blueberry) and some Ocean Spray Cranberry juice. I have to admit that I did know what the cranberry juice tasted like (Ocean Spray appear to have a global monopoly on it) but I was thirsty by this point. Sean tried various wines.

The best thing about the show was the existence of real life marketing shows. Every 5 stalls or so was set up like a program on the shopping channel where an enthusiastic chap tried to sell you some (often only vaguely) food or drink related product. One chap was even American (he was also clearly the best salesman). We resisted his attempted sale of chamois cloths but we succumbed to the usual slicing machine. We have since used it - it's great for onions and slightly less good for apples if you don't have a corer but I've bought one now. Stir fries will now be organised around vegetables that can be chopped using the gadget. Goodbye mange tout.

Slicing Machine

This Saturday was again the Sydney Growers market outside the casino. We know pretty much what is there now so we can just go and buy what we want and come home. We got some cheese from a stall we visited last time and also from a not-yet-visited stall for Sean. He is now getting into quite hard (mainly French) cheeses as long as they are not too runny.

I resisted the fudge, although it is a little easier at the moment because there is a fudge stall in the shopping centre in darling harbour and I am determined to try that fudge first before indulging in the Bowral fudge from the farmers market again.

There was a new stall selling samosas (and I think also some ready made curry sauces) so I bought one of those for breakfast. Sean had a raisin pinwheel from the French patisserie tent.

We had decided to get another duck and eat it on Monday and accordingly went to the duck stall and asked for a frozen duck. They offered to get us one from the van but couldn't understand why we explicitly wanted one. They sold us a fresh duck instead that they assured us would keep until Monday. After we had bought the duck we realised that we had become confused by the fact that the duck was frozen before and it made much more sense to eat it tonight. It is in the oven now.

We have been watching a lot of the world cup, which is adding to our need to sleep. The games are usually at 1am or 5am - 5am means getting up early, 1am means getting up in the middle of the night (we can't stay up that late any more). Tonight is England-Portugal at 1am. We might stay up as it's a Saturday (and we've already had a little sleep this afternoon) or we may have a nap beforehand.

2006-06-26T18:03:00.000+10:00

To the UK, on to Budapest, back to the UK and back to Sydney

I find that there are two reasons for not posting to the blog:

1. Not enough has happened.

2. Too much has happened and writing it all down becomes a daunting task.

The situation at the moment is 2. Still, here are some highlights from my company trip to Budapest; I've tried to keep it short (hah!) to avoid causing anyone to fall asleep while reading.

Back to the UK

I left last Wednesday evening and arrived 3pm at Heathrow on Thursday, not feeling too bad. I got to bed at a reasonable hour but had to get up early to go to work, still feeling not too bad.

After working remotely for 4 months, it was really nice to go into the office. I got some stuff done that I needed to talk to people for, I was in the same time zone as my customers (for one day) and I installed some software from the network that would have taken about a day to copy over the internet (and then only if I could keep the VPN up for that long). Everyone seemed to remember who I was, which was nice.

I then went out to the pub Friday evening. This was my one night to see everyone I know. Tall order, huh? The evening actually went well with relatively few complications. It was really brilliant to see everyone and I feel that I had at least a short chat with everyone who made it along.

Even though we were kicked out of the pub at a reasonably prompt 11:30pm, by the time I got back to Essex and into bed it was 1:30am. Alarm set for 8am to make it to the airport the next day.

This is where my body clock started behaving oddly. Despite clearly being short on sleep, I woke up at 6:30am. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with for this is that having been on three 7 hour flights, I was not used to sleeping for more than 5-6 hours. Still it meant I had plenty of time to pack.

On to Budapest

Budapest is a spa town. Being an idiot, I had left my swimming costume back in Australia. Still, my swimming costume was bought when we were last in Australia (2002) and has got to the saggy stage so I did need to buy a new one.

Gatwick turns out to be not too bad for shopping: I managed to get a costume in Monsoon. While I was there I also bought a dress for a wedding we are attending in the summer. I have been worrying about this as I am going to be the girlfriend of the best man, which is surely some kind of responsibility but without a pre-arranged outfit included (being a bridesmaid is much easier). It seemed a bit silly to be buying a posh dress and then taking it to and from Budapest with me, but it exactly matched a hat of my sister's that I had just been offered so there was really nothing I could do.

I felt I needed a sleep when we arrived, but I only had time to unpack and then it was straight out to dinner.

We dined in a lovely courtyard restaurant on Castle Hill in Buda and I had some super duck in sour cherry sauce. Cherries seem to be big in Hungary, which is good with me! I completely forgot to take any pictures until it got too dark (no change there then). After the restaurant we wandered around trying to find a bar (or more precisely the bar that the rest of the company was in) for about one and a half hours. Tom complained but I thought it was great. Randomness late at night was always the best part of an evening for me (in general if I could skip 9pm - 2am and start there it would suit me fine) and now I don't drink, bars are even less exciting. When we finally arrived at the bar it was noisy and I was refused a chocolate based non-alcoholic cocktail (I think they didn't have one of the ingredients). I went to bed.

Sunday: I walk

I was up at 9:30am to catch the end of breakfast. (I woke up earlier but forced myself back to sleep again - enough is enough.) Breakfast was a big disappointment after the Hydro Majestic the weekend before. Ric found something unpleasant looking in his eggs, the sausages were widely panned and not much enthusiasm shown for anything else. I found some fruit (OK, but not exciting) and had some pastries that had been described as "OK" (the highest praise from my breakfast companions for any item). They were indeed "OK".

I started the day by walking to the Gellert baths and having a swim. On the way I bought a dress that was vaguely reminiscent of a Hungarian peasant dress from a shop clearly aimed at tourists (it was open on Sunday). Still it made me feel like I was a proper Hungarian.

The pool was small but nicely decorated, however I think the description "like having a bath in a cathedral" is somewhat pushing it. I then found a cafe and had a cup of tea while I read my guidebooks to find out what to do. I survived the whole weekend using the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet. They complemented each other well but I think the rough guide did slightly better with its layout by area rather than attraction type. I selected the Museum of Ethnography as my destination.

I went back to the hotel first to put some sun-tan lotion on, but discovered that I could pretty much keep in the shade while I was walking through the town so in the end I just ditched my swimming kit. I then walked through the Jewish quarter (Erzsebetvaros, where out hotel was) and Terezvaros (which I would describe as the west end).

I found a lot of things on my wanders including an English language bookshop (run by an American environmental activist who now needs to earn some money as his girlfriend wants 4 kids) - I bought some books, of course -, the State Opera house, St Stephen's Basilica and the Houses of Parliament.

Treehugger Dan's English Language Bookshop

The entrance to the State Opera House

Inside St Stephen's Basilica, a choir and orchestra were practising so I stayed to listen for a while. I only realised when someone asked a resident old man if the concert was that evening that Sunday night had been designated as a "free" night when we could go off on our own. I had previously ignored this as I had assumed that I would not want to go anywhere toute seule but it seemed that this was no longer the case.

The museum of Ethnography had been described in the guide book as one of the finest museums in Budapest but little visited by tourists. It was correct.

Outside the front door was a sign saying something about "Juin" and "zarva". Zarva is one Hungarian word I had managed to learn. It was on all the shop doors on Sunday; it means closed. The museum certainly looked closed too, but as an eternal optimist I tried the door anyway. It opened.

However, once inside I was still not convinced that the museum was not indeed "zarva". Had they closed the museum and forgotten to lock the door? The entrance hall was large, empty and unlike a museum. There was a brightly colored sign about an exhibition, which was reassuring - it was the only clue that I was in fact in a museum. Then, as in a film about a bookshop where strange things happen, an old man behind a glass screen in a dark corner came slowly in to focus. I gave him my money.

Getting to the exhibits was also peculiar. The whole building resembles an old palace. There were printed A4 sheets of arrows directing you to the exhibits, but none of the other branches were roped off implying that you could go that way if you wanted. I was too scared though so I followed the arrows. There were also a whole load of doors with names on them as if the building were also used as an academic institution.

The exhibition itself was very interesting and was basically a complete description of 19th century Hungarian peasant life using objects from the period. There were some lovely shop signs for hatters, boot-makers and so on and a wide range of clothes, utensils, furniture, work tools and so on. There were descriptions in each section in English so you knew what you were looking at.

An example of an exhibit: Some old Hungarian musical instruments

The lights went off just as I finished looking round and I realised that the museum was shutting. I took some photos of the building, which could itself have been a tourist attraction and nearly got locked in. I saw only 3 other people while I was in the museum and only one of these seemed to be actually looking at the exhibits; the others seemed to be more on their way through to somewhere else.

The ceiling of the Ethnography Museum

I then wandered until 7pm when I joined the throng trying to squeeze into the Basilica. The concert was free so there was a great deal of demand and no tickets so I was pleased I had got there in plenty of time. I enjoyed the concert, although the music was not as good as the snippets I had heard earlier had led me to believe (not quite sombre enough for me). I don't go to see enough music and I'm pleased I went, especially as Budapest seems to be a very musical city.

St Stephen's just before the concert

I got home at 10pm and had a bath. The guide book said that Budapest was hot and dusty, it was right there as well. I was going to go out to the pub and meet everyone else but I didn't manage it...

Monday: I walk, but less enthusiastically

At breakfast on Sunday, I found an exciting chocolate cake, the kind you get for afternoon tea and a kind of creamy dessert. This improved breakfast somewhat.

My first aim was to go swimming in the Lido on Margaret Island and I made the same sun-tan lotion decision that I had made on Saturday. Unfortunately half way there, I realised that this was the wrong decision. If I was swimming in an open air pool there would be nowhere to hide.

At breakfast, Matthew and Karen said that they were looking for things to do that didn't involve too much walking as they had worn themselves out and blistered their feet. At the time I thought that could never possibly happen to me, however after walking halfway to Margaret Island, back again and then all the way there I felt that walking no longer had the same appeal. I sat for a while by the fountain which plays music through black speakers on sticks. The whole area was immensely redolent of The Prisoner (60s TV show): the grass was green, there were speakers stuck in the ground playing cheering music, everyone was smiling and brightly dressed and there were several odd two man cars and bicycles that I have not seen anywhere other than this island and in The Prisoner.

The Fountain

I flaked out a bit on the rest of the day. I failed to visit my pre-determined targets of Heroes' square and the Palace of Miracles (which is the rather-oddly-named-for-a-religious-city Science Museum).

I did make it to a famous cake shop I wanted to go to (Gerbeard) but couldn't face going in, as I had only brought my guide books with me and was sick of reading about Budapest.

I got home about 4:30pm and listened to Cadfael on audio tape. This had the required restorative effect and I was raring to go by the time we met up in the bar at 7pm.

We went to a very posh restaurant on Sunday night; amazingly I don't think we embarrassed ourselves too much. The vegetarian and non-vegetarian starters were both a limp looking salad (the non vegetarian one had a few slices of duck and some mushrooms on top of it) - not impressive - but for my main course I had steak with goose liver, which was very good indeed. Goose liver is another Hungarian speciality so I feel I did well.

Also in the restaurant was a "fellow from Cambridge" - I think the restaurant misunderstood as we found out later that this was in fact a "fellow, from Cambridge" i.e. he had been there once - who was filming for a Channel 5 show on culture in Budapest. Culture sounds a little unlikely for channel 5, but it is certainly low budget TV.

I was out with the last remaining survivors on Monday, which was a mistake. I only realised at 4am that if I had to get up at 7am to catch a plane (which I did), I would only get 3 hours sleep. I am no longer used to getting by on so little, I was very worried when I went to sleep. Still, not drinking helped and although very surprised when my alarm went off I survived Tuesday with a minimum of discomfort. There were more "afternoon tea" cakes at breakfast, I had 5 and then had to stop as I felt very sick.

Wednesday: And back to Sydney

I have discovered the key to long haul flying: sleep as much as you possibly can, even if you are going to sleep straight away when you get to your destination. The only reason I went to sleep on my last flight was because I couldn't keep my eyes open and I was still knackered when I got home at 9:30pm.

I had booked tickets for the cinema on Friday - it was the Sydney film festival while I was away and this was the only day we could make. The film was being shown in the State Theatre, which is a 1920s cinema that I have wanted to visit for ages. They don't usually show films so this seemed like an excellent opportunity to relive the past. However I was too tired to make it out on Friday night so I shall have to wait until next year.

I started to feel better on Saturday: another post to follow about that...

2006-06-14T17:16:00.000+10:00

Weekend in the Blue Mountains

We finally managed to get out and see a bit of Oz last weekend: the Blue Mountains, just outside Sydney. One thing crossed off our list of places to go!

We travelled down Friday evening. I met Sean at Mount Druitt at the end of his working day and we drove on to the Blue Mountains. Mount Druitt is about mid-way between where we live (i.e. central Sydney) and the Blue Mountains. It's probably slightly closer to the mountains in distance but because you have to come off the motorway it takes a little longer to get out there.

We stayed in the Hydro Majestic, which is a turn of the century (i.e. 19th -> 20th) hotel that has recently been refurbished. It was quite expensive for Aussie prices, but we chose it because it seemed to have a nice lounge (in fact it had several) and a decent restaurant.

We were a little disappointed with the restaurant on the first night mainly because the selection was quite small although my soup, despite being very hot (which is indispensable), was not particularly exciting and neither was the pilaff that came with my fish. Sean's crab ravioli and venison was very nice though, and I can confirm this because (owing to the limited menu) I had the same thing on Sunday night. My dessert of millefeuille was very poor. It was described as chocolate mousse between layers of puff pastry and this is exactly what is was. Neither of the ingredients was anything to write home about.

Still all was forgiven at breakfast as I think I can declare without any doubt that this was the best hotel buffet breakfast I have ever had. They had whole fresh fruit (apples and oranges), stewed fruit (this turned out to be less interesting), some tinned fruit, a fresh fruit platter (mainly melon and pineapple), fruit yoghurt and home-made muffins. The home-made muffins (blueberry or chocolate) were gorgeous, I can't tell you the number of times I have been disappointed by hotel breakfast buffet muffins. They also had a whole load of stuff I didn't get round to trying (cold meat, pastries, hot breakfast). But the best thing of all was a 1960s waffle machine, in which you could make your own waffles.

Saturday: It rains.

Rain was pelting down on Friday night as we drove to the Blue Mountains but, ever the optimist, I expected it to stop when we woke up on Saturday.

Sure enough, the first thing we did notice when we looked out of the window on Saturday morning was not rain. However, it wasn't anything else either. The whole of the mountains were completely covered in mist. On closer examination it was also drizzling.

We abandoned plans of going on exciting walks around the mountains and went into Katoomba, the main town, to see what was there. We went to a tea room and chocolate shop that I had found on the internet and found a fantastic bookshop. The man at the counter remarked on the variety of books we were buying: Sean had found a backgammon book, a gambling book and is trying to learn statistics and so had a statistics book as well, whereas I had added some classic novels to the mix. In general the selection of games and backgammon books was very good in all the bookshops we visited in the Blue Mountains; I have no idea why this should be.

Bookshop

The rain got heavier. We went back to the hotel.

We were still recovering from having had to work all week so we had afternoon tea (very good) and then went to sleep before having a late dinner at 9pm. I had a big disappointment that evening - I ordered fish of the day (which was salmon) only to be presented with the same baby barramundi that I had had on Friday. I mentioned this to the waiter, who offered to change it but said the wait would be 20 minutes (we didn't have time). On the plus side, it was prepared differently and was actually very tasty, and I was further reassured by the waiter coming over to apologise (he had clearly been hunted down and told to make amends). The chef came out and spoke to us at the end of the meal, which was also comforting.

We watched the England match in our room - no one was watching it in the lounge and we didn't want to disturb them. The match started at 11pm our time. I can't imagine that anyone who is reading this doesn't know what the result was....

Sunday: It drizzles.

We were more determined to try a walk today, but when we set out in the car it was drizzling and (albeit less than yesterday) misty. On our way to Leura where the chosen walk was to start, we found a scenic blue mountains circular road and decided that maybe we would have a little drive instead. We found Echo Point this way, which gives a good view of the three sisters rocks. We parked the car and got out to have a quick look. It stopped drizzling and we ended up embarking on a walk (all the tracks are clearly marked so it's very easy to go on impromptu rather than planned walks as long as you don't mind sharing your route with other tourists) but we had to turn back quite soon as we'd only put enough money in the parking meter for an hour.

The "Three Sisters" rock formation

We went and had a wander round Leura next. Leura was less interesting than Katoomba (one small bookshop: we bought a copy of the latest Eoin Colfer book on CD) and what's more all the tea shops were jam packed with tourists leaving no room for us. We had to go back to the hotel to have tea.

We had an early dinner so we could go and watch the England versus Australia rugby friendly (billed in Australia as World Cup grudge match); Sean needed to know what happened for Staff Ribbing (either giving or receiving) on Tuesday.

The fish was baby barramundi (again) so I had the crab ravioli and venison (Sean's meal on Friday), which were both excellent. For dessert I ordered Strawberry Romanov, which I was expecting to be a kind of French tarte aux fraises but turned out to be strawberries and cream in a pastry basket. It was surprisingly nice considering. The service was quite slow (overall it was very variable, we got off early on Saturday for the football but everything came much slower tonight) and we missed the first 25 minutes of the rugby. Another quirk of the service was exposed: I had noticed that some guests seemed to receive canopes (and I thought I even saw one couple with a bread basket, but maybe they ordered that) but I assumed that they were on a more expensive package (or maybe not on a package at all). However, on Sunday evening we were seated further into the main restaurant and received cucumber with horse radish cream (these were not too bad considering I don't like horse radish or cucumber, but they seemed to cancel each other out). We seemed to have been upgraded.

England were slaughtered in the rugby (the ribbing will be directed at Sean rather than coming from him). I think the final score was 36-3 or something similar.

Monday: The sun shines and we realise what we have been missing.

We had been told that the views from the hotel were spectacular. We had not seen any evidence of this - up until now it had appeared that the view from all windows was remarkable similar to the view from an aeroplane window when passing through a cloud.

On Monday morning the sun was shining and all the mists had cleared. The view was amazing.

View from the hotel window

We went out and attempted to follow a planned walk but we got distracted again. While driving to the start point, we passed a sign saying Katoomba Falls and went to investigate. We we ended up following a guided walk down the mountain (and underneath the waterfall) for about two hours. Ahead of us were some American teenage boys, who jumped the safety railing to investigate whenever possible, including at the top of the waterfall where the fall was pretty large. You can see them in the next photo. Look for the small white blobs.

Small American boys and large waterfall

Spurred on by this, Sean jumped a barrier at the bottom of the waterfall to have his picture taken a bit closer.

Sean behind the barriers

We then found we could continue for another 2 hours on the walk. Strangely enough it turned out to be the walk we were planning on going on; we had just started at the other end. This was immensely fortunate as we had started at the interesting end and gone down some very steep steps. We did not intend to re-ascend the steps; we got the scenic railway back up to the top.

Scenic railway

We stopped in Katoomba on the way back and perused another (not quite as good but still pretty satisfying) bookshop. Sean found a backgammon book by Barclay Cooke, an Economics text book by Stiglitz (for me) at a bargainous price of $5.50 and I selected the collected works of Milton and a more modern poetry book by Mailer. I haven't read any poetry for ages and this looked quite exciting.

When we got back to the hotel, we read by the fire in the lounge until dinner. I was still on Notre-Dame de Paris by Hugo, which I had bought at the first bookshop. I haven't been reading many novels recently (too busy trying to improve myself) and this was a classic page turner. Why are non-fiction books not like this?

I had booked the last night as an addition to the original booking as I had thought it would be easiest to go back to Sydney on Monday. It turned out that Sydney was quite a long way away and we were better off getting up early and going straight to work Tuesday morning (I got the train back from Mount Druitt). When I booked this extra night, I was given a cheaper B&B price so I went for that.

Given that we were not booked into the hotel and had already made a dent in the limited menu we made a vague effort to go to a new restaurant, in particular a modern Australian and a French restaurant. There was no answer from either (perhaps because of the Bank Holiday) and we resigned ourselves to eating at the hotel. There were advantages to this: we had to be up very early on Tuesday. The food was not bad either, I had pasta with prosciutto and sun dried tomatoes, followed by a good piece of steak and Sean went back to the classic crab/venison combination.

We got up very early Tuesday morning (only 15 minutes in advance of when we would get up usually but it seemed earlier as we were on holiday), missed breakfast (oh poor muffinless me) and made it back in time for Sean to start work at 8:30am. We both had a great weekend and are planning on going back. Hopefully it will be sunny for the whole holiday next time!

2006-06-07T18:41:00.000+10:00

Highlights from the weekend

Our excitement at the weekend didn't end with the casino trip. Oh no.

What we bought at the market this time

Saturday am was the Good Living Growers Market. I avoided buying anything from the fudge stall (even though they had a new date cake to tempt me with, but it was too large!). However we managed to get some rhubarb, sweetcorn, bananas, dates (I almost missed the stall, I would have been sad), duck, snails (! with shells and tongs), French cakes (served by a lady with a French accent who had trouble adding up how much it cost, which added a certain, well we could say "je ne sais quoi", to the whole experience) and some cheese.

Saturday afternoon we went to the Maritime Museum and saw: a 1970's Australian Gunboat, a submarine, a replica of Captain Cook's Endeavor and a display about Vikings. Walking round the boats gives you a feel for how claustrophobic it must have been to live on them (especially the sub). The Endeavor was manned by lots of helpful old Sea Dogs who were very knowledgeable about the ship and crew.

On Saturday evening we found out that the duck was still frozen and so postponed our duck/snail extravaganza until Sunday and ordered take-away curry. I had fish curry and it was good.

Sunday afternoon we went on a walk over the harbour bridge and back. Good views and I like walking. Unfortunately, to get Sean to agree to come I have had to promise to spend the same length of time that the walk took doing "Backgammon Study". We ran out of time on Sunday for this so this is still tbc.

By Sunday evening the duck still wasn't defrosted so we had to go out disappointedly and buy some lamb. We ate the snails but couldn't put them in the oven as it was full of lamb and so didn't bother putting them in their shells. The were very unexciting. Next time they will definitely be going in the shells for the true snail experience.

On Monday we got to eat the duck. It went in the oven for 4.5 hours and was spectacular. Next month we will have to remember that it takes ages to defrost, buy something else for eating at the weekend (they also had Guinea fowl and venison at the market) and have duck on Monday.

2006-06-02T22:37:00.000+10:00

Star City

We just made it to the casino.

After we enjoyed our meal so much at Astral last Monday, we went back there for dinner this evening. Admittedly our choice was rather influenced by the fact that it was tipping it down and as I believe I have mentioned the casino is outside our back door.

We ordered the a la carte rather than the tasting menu or indeed the $1000 tasting menu, which included the obvious things to push the bill up: caviar, lobster, fois gras, French champagne (a good way to waste money in Australia). I had a very interesting smoked salmon and tomato tea to start, which I found to be more like soup than tea (I suspect the description "soup" was dismissed as not sufficiently exciting) and came with a gold leaf wrapped quail's egg. The flavours were good though. Sean had the lobster raviolo with a treacle and ginger sauce. It looked very good.

We both had the crispy skinned barramundi to follow, which came with oxtail tortollini and carrot and anise puree (surprisingly nice). Sean finished with a cheese platter and a good cheese platter it was too: 6 cheeses (from a choice of about 25), fruit and nut bread, biscuit things and fruit and nut chutney type things (including a date. I ate that.).

I had a bit of a pudding dilemma, but opted for praline cinq cent feuilles with fruit compote and chestnut ice-cream. The flavours went well together but the chestnut ice cream (which was the reason I plumped for this particular dessert) was a disappointment on its own, tasting mainly of sugar.

I had some coffee after dinner for the first time in a long time. Whenever I smell coffee, I think I must start drinking it again and this particular coffee was a "top shelf" one. I don't know what it means, but it sounded good. Unfortunately it didn't taste good - it was too strong for me and made me feel a bit ill. I think I shall stick to sniffing other people's in future.

We had taken our passports with us in case we were still awake at the end of the meal. We wandered down to the casino but clearly looked respectable enough to not warrant a passport inspection and were allowed straight in.

As we had been warned by our dining compatriots on Monday, the casino is a little tacky. My previous impression of the casino having been based on the white tablecloths of Astral, I think I had underestimated this. The casino was at least half filled with pokies (poker machines: pictures of cards are preferred to pictures of fruit here) and there was an almost continuous voice-over through the tannoy system, which was very irritating.

Sean had come up with a game over dinner for us to play in the casino. Admittedly it is not his game, he borrowed from someone else, however it is absolutely wicked.

You decide on how much you are prepared to lose, in our case this was $100. The stake was $5 so this equated to 20 goes at the roulette table. You then bet one chip at a time on number 8 until you either win or run out of money. Sounds boring huh? But that is not the game! The game is that you have to whisper with your compatriot every time before you bet on number 8 as if you are deciding where to play. If you run out of money you just shake your head and walk away, but if you win you should have amazed the gamblers round the table with your ability to pick a winner.

In our case it worked even better than we had hoped. It was quite fun just betting on number 8 anyway. We were too far down the table so we couldn't reach and had to keep throwing it across and asking the croupier to move it for us. They changed the croupier and the new one got used to putting our chip on 8 for us. The people at our table got bored and went away, which I thought was a shame as they would miss it when 8 came up, but just as some new people game over, it did! This was brilliant as it looked even more impressive to the newcomers as they had only seen the one spin! And best of all, the manager came over to see whether we were cheating or not!

We came out of the casino $120 up, although on average we will lose about $3 each time we stake $100. Still $3 is pretty cheap for a game as good as this!

Inspired by the casino, Sean has decided to learn how to card count in blackjack so he can make money, but I don't know how far he's going to get with this.

2006-05-31T17:57:00.000+10:00

Burn the House Down - Astral Restaurant

As I think I mentioned in a previous blog, we haven't managed to go to Astral restaurant yet, despite it being (literally) outside our back door. However I did manage to book 2 seats at "Burn the House Down" last Monday.

This was a special evening where the chef (Sean Connolly) comes out half way through the meal and demonstrates the cooking techniques that he and his staff have used to make it. They did mention how many there have already been - I think it was about 12 - but I'm not sure. They seem to happen once every couple of months.

The theme was Italian food and we were presented with the following:

Italian antipasti

Pumpkin and Amaretti Raviolo

Squid ink and golf leaf risotto

Wild boar with cocoa sauce

Deconstructed Tiramisu

The antipasti included: cheese (I think it was Taleggio), parma ham wrapped round bread sticks, caramelised tomatoes (these were gorgeous), artichokes, small pieces of fried bread, tapenade and anchovies.

We had to sit at a group table of 6. This was unfortunate but couldn't be avoided, though we managed to get through quite a lot of the antipasti without anyone turning up. It was a shame not knowing whether anyone was coming as it meant that we couldn't eat it all just in case someone turned up. And in fact the other 4 guests did fail to turn up and the waitress offered to turn the table into a 2 seater for us - Brilliant!

But... just before she did so, they managed to recruit 3 passing gamblers from the casino so we didn't get to sit on our own after all. We chatted to the new recruits a bit but we also got to talk to ourselves for quite a lot of dinner so it wasn't too bad.

The pumpkin and amaretti raviolo was lovely. It was pretty sweet but served with what tasted like a kind of fish bisque which complemented it splendidly.

We then had a break, for Sean to come out and demo the cooking to us. It started with an Italian guy from Leichhardt playing a few songs on the accordion. I really enjoyed this, we all clapped along a bit and he tried to get people to join in singing (there was one chap at the central table who could really sing!).

Sean "came on" straight after. A kind of stage had been set up at the top of the restaurant with two hobs and cameras so that everyone around the restaurant could see what he was doing on the flat screens that were dotted around. We were lucky enough to be able to see Sean directly.

Sean turned out to be, rather surprisingly, from Yorkshire. It made it feel even more like watching a new version of Ready Steady Cook back in the UK! He cooked the risotto in quite a standard manner, although he chucked loads of butter in at the same time as the parmesan (i.e. the end). Sean (my Sean) was really impressed by the gold leaf, however I always feel that putting gold leaf on food is a bit silly. It doesn't look edible and it doesn't taste of anything.

The best bit came when Sean (the chef) was demonstrating how to cook the wild boar. He added some Pernod to the pan and set it on fire by tipping the pan up so that the Pernod came just over the edge and caught alight. I was very impressed, although I shall not be trying it at home.

The cocoa sauce is apparently a Tuscan classic and when the wild boar arrived a little later was absolutely superb. In fact I think the wild boar dish overshadowed all the other courses (and they were all great). It was also served with wet polenta, which was something new to me as I have only ever had grilled polenta. I was suspicious in general about wet polenta, it looks a bit sloppy and textureless. As it turns out, I was right about the texture (it's rubbish) but the flavour was actually very good (I had to eat some without the cocoa sauce to be able to taste it though). I think this was because the end of the cooking process was again adding loads of parmesan and butter.

The deconstructed tiramisu was very interesting, although a little trendy for my liking. I am more a good food, cooked well kind of girl. Not that innovation is bad, but I think innovation should be done to make the food taste better, not just for the sake of it. The dessert consisted of amaretto sorbet, mascarpone cream and coffee mayonnaise. Eaten together they tasted like tiramisu. What is the point of that?? They could have just made tiramisu. I did try all the components separately first; the sorbet was lovely, the cream bland (I think it was just sweetened mascarpone) and the mayonnaise very strongly flavoured. Also, irritatingly, there wasn't enough coffee mayonnaise to go with the quantity of cream and sorbet (see, this wouldn't have happened with real tiramisu).

There was also, at some point, a talk about the wine, which now interests me not at all. I did taste the wines throughout the evening and while I can say that I like some more than others, it doesn't hold a great deal of fascination for me. We got an amaretto cocktail with the dessert and I liked that a lot more (my tastebuds are clearly reverting to those of a teenage girl). I didn't drink it though (of course).

We were encouraged to go and see the new private dining room before coffee. I have omitted to mention the view so far, which is a bit of an omission when talking about Astral. It is situated on the top floor of the casino, which is just down from us towards darling harbour. Three of the restaurant walls are glass and you can see a wall of skyscrapers and also the harbour bridge. The private dining room comes off one of these glass walls and itself has glass walls. The view is incredible. The room seats 16, if we had 14 friends here we would definitely go.

Our table mates went back to their gambling, while we had tea and then came home happy. The next Burn the House down is in 2 months time and is French themed. Apparently there will be can-can dancers.

2006-05-28T10:49:00.000+10:00

Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House

I have never been particularly interested in architecture. I remember when Andrew would ask me "What's the architecture like?" (in particular about Cambridge I think) and I would reply "I don't know, it's a building".

The architecture tour started at the Museum of Sydney, which we had not yet come across in our travels. However, it looks interesting so we may go back one weekend. The tour involved more talking than I expected and less walking, which was not what I had had in mind; we walked directly from the Museum to the Opera House, which was not very far at all. This, however, turned out to be a good thing.

The tour was fascinating from the start. I don't think I had ever realised that architects have great visions before they start building somewhere. I had always considered building as either functional or decorative. According to our tour guide (an architect himself) the Opera House is a combination of

1. a representation of the topography of Sydney (the edges of the land go very sharply i.e. orthogonally into the water); this is represented by the orthogonal steps

2. the billowing clouds above; this is represented by the white domes.

However, even better than this (from my slightly more functional perspective) is that in order to make this building realise his artistic aims, Utzon applied all kinds of cleverness: all the functional bits that are needed in buildings but are better hidden have been put in the steps, he came up with a very effective way of creating the white domes and he designed the inside of the Opera House to be acoustically close to perfect (this was an amazing achievement, however for reasons I shall come on to Utzon's design for the interiors was not implemented).

The reason that the Opera House was built at all was interesting: the premier of Australia was dying, and as his legacy organised a competition for a building, without budget and without timescales. Only a politician who does not need to be re-elected can propose something so crazy.

And it didn't last: the Labour party lost power in Sydney in 1965; this was unprecedented and they were not expecting it. The incoming Liberal party seized on the (unfinished) Opera House as an example of all that was wrong with the Labour party: over budget, over timescales, employing foreign workers and designed for the elite (it's for Opera). I won't go into all the aspects of the talk, there were too many and all too interesting (even our tour guide ran out of time to say all the things he wanted to) but suffice to say in traditional bureaucratic style (not, so it would seem confined to the left as commonly believed) they constructively dismissed Utzon and finished the Opera house with local architects.

So, the base and domes are Utzon, but the great glass windows and the interior are the subsequent designers. You can see the difference. What's more, the acoustics that were put in place were absolutely useless and there is no evidence that leaving Utzon alone would have cost any more money (even for the better result it would have achieved).

Throughout the Utzon debate architects have been split, but a recent enhancement to the house was awarded to a pro-Utzon architect. He took the job only if he could then offer it to Utzon and in order to get Utzon involved (Utzon was understandably reluctant) offered him a bribe of being able to write a document explaining the overall site design. The enhancement (to my mind) has turned out to be an amazing success (although a very small piece of the house); one thing that I found throughout the talk is that Utzon is clearly an architectural genius (or appears so to a novice such as myself - maybe a lot of architects can produce amazing buildings).

I can't find a picture that demonstrates the brilliance of the extension, "The Colonnade" (what an omission from the Opera House website!) so I shall endeavor to explain.

Windows (and doors) have been put into one of the walls of what is used as a foyer. (The windows were not originally there as it was not supposed to be a foyer; this came about as a result of lack of space.) The walls of the windows are angled sharply inwards and the glass has been placed on the outside. From the outside it does not make exciting viewing. But from the inside it looks as if squares have been cut in the wall and frame the view. The views from the windows look like pictures. If you're ever in Sydney, go and take a look.

Utzon's document describing the design is here.

2006-05-26T17:08:00.000+10:00

Sydney Writers' Festival

It's Sydney Writers' Festival here at the moment. The reason that this was first brought to my attention, was that the festival has commandeered the dance studio for the week and so my dancing lesson was cancelled. However, I only got around to looking at the website to see what was on on Tuesday so we possibly haven't planned what we want to do well as we might have.

Yesterday I went to Sydney Theatre (also requisitioned for the festival) to see Neil Gaiman and Audrey Niffenegger talking about Graphic Novels. I am not particularly interested in graphic novels - I'll read them if they're lying around but I've never bought one - but I wanted to go and see Neil Gaiman and we missed him when he spoke solo on Tuesday. I also thought it would be interesting to see what Audrey Niffenegger was like. I've got her novel, but haven't read it yet and I saw her graphic novel in Books etc. but didn't pay it much attention as it seemed a bit gratuitous (it is called "The Three Incestuous Sisters", which just says male-oriented porn to me).

I went a little early to pick up my tickets and I thought I might have a cup of tea while I was waiting but I didn't have time! I think the theatre has been redecorated for the festival (or my memory is very poor) and a bookshop called Gleebooks has set up bookstalls all around it. On walking in my eye was immediate caught by a new Umberto Eco novel (well 2004 - but I hadn't seen it before) so I picked that up straight away. Interestingly enough it is an illustrated novel, so kind of in keeping with the talk I was going to see. All the books were really interesting and mainly hardback - let's put it this way Paul (Williams) would have been having a whale of a time. The people seemed to be interesting too, but my impression was probably affected by the fact that they were surrounded by books.

I also noticed a big sign saying that I could join the Gleebooks club and get free tickets to literary evenings and 3 free books for $25. This seemed to good to miss so I signed up when I bought my novel. One of my free books is called "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales" and is designed like a 1940s children's book. It is absolutely brilliant just for the front cover, but has a lot of well known authors inside it too (Steven King, Michael Crichton, Nick Hornby, Neil Gaimon, Glen David Gold...). According to the Gleebooks magazine (I get sent this too now I'm a member) I should have got a copy of "The Plot against America" by Phillip Roth, which I thought might have been a bit of a laugh, but I seem to have got a book about 1968 instead.

Apparently, there was an authors' signing room upstairs but I didn't manage to find it and I was too scared to look properly in case I went somewhere I wasn't supposed to. Still upstairs was by the door to the theatre and it was nearly time to go in. So I did.

Audrey was a softly-spoken American (she said she lives in Chicago but I'm not sure if that's what her accent was, I'm not really up on regions) who came across as a bit arty. Apparently she trained as a visual artist and then wrote a novel by accident. I found Neil to be reassuringly British. It's funny, I've never been particularly nationalistic but when you live in an other country, you come to appreciate your own culture and what I consider most British (aside, of course, from tea and cricket) is wry, off-the-wall humour (c.f. Python, Douglas Adams).

Unfortunately we're playing backgammon this Sunday so we will miss the talk on speech giving and the chance to have afternoon tea with readings. (Which, by the way, is a great idea; there should be somewhere you can go and do this in the UK.) Something else we were considering was the literary walking tour of The Rocks but it is sold out. However, the people who are organising the tour for the writers' festival also organise other tours (which presumably aren't as well publicised) so I've booked us in for an architectural tour about Jørn Utzon (creator of the Opera House) instead.

I'm off now to a talk on The Politics of Poverty (in the dance studio), which promises to be interesting.

2006-05-22T17:32:00.000+10:00

What we did at the weekend

We didn't manage to go out at all after our Kylie Kwong extravaganza on Monday - it completely wiped us out. I've booked us in for another one of these food/drink/celebrity chef inclusive dinners next Monday ("Burn the House Down" at Astral in StarCity) so I should imagine the same thing will happen next week.

On Friday we opted for a takeaway curry. We decided against Viva Goa as although it is very good, it is not quite the same if you just want a standard curry. So instead we tried our other local curry house, Vrindavan. The reviews had all said that the food was good and the restaurant decor poor so it seemed the perfect place to order from. The food was really good - we had three different types of bread and they were all very tasty (and all deep fried I think; the two may be connected).

We didn't manage very much on Saturday during the day, but we went to a new Sydney suburb called Leichhardt for dinner with some of Sean's colleagues (and ex-colleagues) in the evening. Leichhardt is the Italian part of town and we had some nice Italian food - I had some really good mussels as a starter.

On Sunday morning we walked up to the Rocks and had a cup of tea opposite the Opera House and in the afternoon we went to Frenchs Forest (another suburb!) and played backgammon. In a seemingly novel experience for me, I came out up (+17) and Sean came out down (-21) so I was pretty pleased with myself.

Finally, I have run out of enthusiasm for updating the smoothie blog. If I wanted to do it properly I think I would have to

a) Spend a lot of time making / drinking smoothies when I didn't want to. (At the moment I seem to prefer fruit salad.)

b) Make the blog look nice, which is too much like hard work.

c) Learn how to take photographs. I am getting better, but I think I need to find out how to focus my camera.

I'll still post to it occasionally as I also wanted to use it as a kind of personal smoothie recipe book but I am going to try and divert my energies to taking pictures of food when we go out. (Until I get bored with that too.)

2006-05-17T18:14:00.000+10:00

Long time, no blog

We've been quite busy and so haven't had much time to post (no change there then), but this also means we've been doing lots of exciting things.

On Friday we went to our local Taiwanese restaurant, which is called Blue Eye Dragon. We had Pork and Prawn dumplings to start, followed by Calamari in Spicy Sanbei Sauce (I still don't know what Sanbei is) and Steamed Fish Fillets, which came in a kind of ginger and spring onion sauce.

Sean was a bit worried that the dumplings were undercooked but I thought all the food was brilliant. Now we have two great restaurants less than 5 minutes walk from our house.

Also on Friday, a large package had arrived. This was a long awaited birthday present of a Lego Millenium Falcon. Sean started straight away on Saturday morning.

In progress

Finished

He was finished by lunchtime, so we trotted off to the Powerhouse Museum and stopped for lunch at a local cafe on the way. Sean had scrambled eggs on toast and I had a halloumi, pumpkin and spinach salad. My salad was nice but nothing spectacular. Sean was similarly non-plussed by the eggs. There are lots of cafes in Pyrmont, next time we will try a different one.

I was planning on being disappointed before we got to the Powerhouse Museum: there had been a Kylie exhibition but it had finished the week before. What bad timing. However it was slightly less exciting overall than we had imagined.

The second most exciting thing was the Strasburg Clock. It was a photo of this in the guide book that had prompted me to go. It is a working replica of a clock in Strasburg and has lot of exciting features (like an orrery). I thought it was great but Sean wasn't very impressed.

The Strasburg Clock

The most exciting thing was a replica of the robot from Lost in Space. We didn't stay very long.

The robot from Lost in Space

We didn't go out and explore on Sunday. I think this was because we knackered ourselves out by going for a swim / run in the morning.

On Monday evening we went to a traditional Chinese banquet at the restaurant Billy Kwong. I didn't realise until we got there that it was in conjunction with Vogue and designed to promote the owner (Kylie Kwong)'s new book.

The food was all from the book, we had:

Grandfather pickled vegetables and Wontons
Salt and Pepper Squid
King Prawn and Mint salad
Crispy and runny eggs
Mussels in black bean sauce
Cod in soy sauce and something
Steamed chicken in some sauce
Duck

Sorry for the inexactness; we would have been able to bring a menu home (and I could have told you all about it) but unfortunately Sean was falling asleep by the time we got to tea so we had to leave.

We also missed dessert of a fruit platter and Fairtrade chocolate (Kylie is the Fairtrade ambassador for Australia and New Zealand) and a chance to buy a signed copy of the book (and make the recipes at home). I think we're going to try and go to the restaurant another night and see if we can get a book. If we do, I'll update you on what the dishes we ate actually were!

All the food was amazing and Kylie Kwong is clearly a very cool person - she's involved with everything: free-range, Fairtrade, sustainable fishing, organic produce. She said that it all forms part of her Buddhist beliefs that everyone has unique talents that they should use to help the community.

There was a girl at the table next to us and I thought she might be Augustus Gloop from Grab Your Fork (a food blog). I thought this partly because I have the suspicion that our paths are going to cross: I found her blog when I was looking for details about the Farmer's market in Pyrmont (she was there too) and also found that she'd been to Viva Goa just before we didn't. No post has appeared on her blog though so it can't have been her.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to going back to Billy Kwong on the excuse of getting a book and eating some more of Kylie's food!

2006-05-11T18:08:00.000+10:00

Dancing

I've managed 4 weeks of dancing in a row now, so it looks like it's set to become a permanent thing. It's reasonably tiring and includes the usual warm up involving painful stomach muscles exercises and so on. Still once you get on to learning the dancing it's much more fun!

The dance studios are right up the top of Sydney, just past the city, in an area called Walsh Bay / The Rocks. This is a very popular tourist area, it has a lot of old buildings including an early house preserved in the colonial style and the oldest pub in Sydney, in the shadow of the harbour bridge.

Dance Studio

It's a really good place to have classes as they are the studios of a professional dance company. The lessons are a money-making sideline ("the commercial side"). It means that there are always exciting things going on. Today there were some important rehearsals happening (hence "No noise in the corridors" signs) and also an audition for something.

I've definitely got a bit better by going for just 4 weeks - I'm finding it easier (possible) to pick up the routines. We did a hip-hop one today, which seemed really hard without the music but somehow seemed to just fit in with it when Ramon turned it on.

I particularly wanted to say a bit about Ramon, he is a really crazy character. He is definitely your typical flamboyant dancing teacher.

He has stories to tell us every week, which are almost always somehow related to the dancing we are going to do. For example, he told us a story about a woman he saw wearing crippling heels ("Sweetie, a drag queen could walk better than she was") and then later on told us to walk in a certain way for part of the dance ("Not like the lady I saw earlier").

Perhaps it is just that he relates his stories back to the dancing so we can remember the routine. He also likes to give us mnemonics at various points, for example any movement where your arms going anywhere near the legs is always "waxing" and many other things relate to adverts, particularly shampoo adverts.

As Ramon is instructing us what to do, he tends to be talking quite a lot of the time and sometimes comes out with inappropriate things, making his catchphrase "Did I say that?". For example "Take it easy today if you are pregnant. Did I say pregnant? I mean take it easy today if you are injured.".

I wanted to take a photo of him for the blog, but he came over all shy (in a way that only extroverts can do) and refused to have his photo taken on his own and grabbed the nearest dancer. This makes the photo quite remarkable as he managed to pick a bloke - statistically unlikely given an average of 1.5 per class and only three different ones seen in total.

Ramon (on the left)

2006-05-09T17:49:00.000+10:00

Local Indian Restaurant

On Saturday evening we were looking on www.eatability.com.au for somewhere to go for dinner and we noticed that one of the local Indian restaurants, Viva Goa, was rated very highly - I think it was the second best restaurant in our area! I booked a table for that evening.

(Viva Goa was second after Astral, which scores highly but is tres cher. We haven't been there yet - we tried once but it was full - but we're going to a special event there on Monday 29th.)

Viva Goa

Viva Goa seems like quite a strange name, but it becomes more understandable when you realise that Goa was a Portuguese colony. As such the restaurant serves Portuguese-Indian food, which is extremely exciting. I'm not whether this is what people eat in Goa, or whether it is just a theme.

We managed to remember a bottle of wine as the restaurant is BYO. A surprising number of restaurants in Oz are BYO and it is certainly no indicator of poor quality. I ordered a Cashew Feni sherbert drink, but unfortunately Cashew Feni turned out to be a liqueur. I felt a bit bad sending it back, but it had been underneath Mango Lassi in the middle of a list of drinks which were ALL non-alcoholic.

Sean had a braised lamb shank curry and following the theme, I had Chorizo curry! My curry was very exciting and tasty too. I also tried Sean's and I think I preferred his slightly, but they were both excellent. We had basmati (very fluffy) rice with it and chapatis which were very light. The portions were quite small so we managed the previously unthinkable and finished everything we were given!

In short, we will be returning and probably often! I will try and remember the camera next time and take some photos of the food. The bill (without booze) came to $50 - £10/head! I feel like we are finally at home here now we have a local Indian restaurant.

2006-05-07T17:09:00.000+10:00

Seems like a long time ago again that I last posted. The week days tend to be very busy. Typically we either get up at 5:45 a.m. and go to the gym (where Zoe swims and I go on the running machine) or we get up at 6:30 and get ready for work. I tend to leave the house at about 7:15 and the drive to work takes about an hour. On the way I listen to Australian radio which is outrageous and hilarious in equal parts. There is no way you would get away with saying some of the things they say here at 8:00 in the morning. The working day in Australia runs from 8:30 to 5:00. I tend to leave work beytween 5:30 and 6:30 getting home an hour later. Usually by the time I get in I am completely exhausted. Zoe has most often cooked dinner so we eat and watch some Monty Python DVDs, read or play some backgammon. I am usually asleep by about 8:30 on the sofa!

On the subject of backgammon eagle-eyed readers will be wondering why the score in the epic Zoe Vs Sean backgammon ladder super-series has not been published. This is because Zoe updates the blog a lot more than I do. Suffice to say that one of us has 45 points and one of us has 14 points.

Last weekend we went out for dinner on Friday night with some colleagues from work and had some colleagues from work round on the Saturday night to ours for dinner. Zoe cooked seafood pasta containing vongole, squid and prawns. It was very tasty. We also got through a fair quantity of red wine. I had a bit of a headache on the Sunday but the evening was really enjoyable.

I am currently reading 'The Ascent of Science' by Brian Silver tying together the practice, theories, paradigms, history and philosophy of science from Aristotle through Newton to the present day. It is a fascinating book and written in a quirky original style that I really like. I am learning a lot of new things - for example I never knew quite how fast molecules in a gas travel. The oxygen molecules around us on a warm day are travelling at 1030 miles per hour! I have just finished the chapter on the Newtonian revolution. Silver is now showing how the Principia helped spawn the Enlightenment.

Today we were going to go out and buy a lamp. We thought Ikea would be a good idea. Unfortunately when we got to my car we found that I had left the lights on and the battery was completely flat. We are going to try and get it charged on Monday so I will be on the train tomorrow morning meaning a very early start indeed!

Instead we walked into the city and, after much searching, found a couple of reading lamps. We need these to aim at us when we are talking on the webcam so that people can see us.

This post has been a bit of a stream of consciousness. Hope it all makes sense.

It wouldn't be a proper post from me if I didn't finish with a few backgammon positions.

These are all from the same game. Match to 11 Sean Vs Gnu I am playing black. I got all three positions wrong. What's right and why? How much respect should one afford a 5-point board?

Position 1

Position 2

Position 3

Answers in the comments box below!

2006-05-06T11:41:00.000+10:00

Farmers' Market Take 2

Last night as I was on my way to and from buying frozen fruit in the department store (I went to buy frozen mango and strawberries and found some frozen rhubarb as well), I noticed that there were lots of little tents being set up on the communal grass outside the casino (i.e. 2 mins walk from our house). The locals on the benches were looking on in amusement and the fitness punchers* must have had to go elsewhere.

They all had small chalkboards at the top and on each was written. "Sydney Morning Herald Growers Market". I was pretty excited - there were loads of tents. It looked like it was going to be a better market than the disappointing one we visited in Kings Cross and right on our doorstep!

Consequently we ambled over once I dragged myself out of bed this morning at a tardy 7:45am (Sean had been up for nearly 3 hours, although I feel I must point out that this discrepancy is partly owing to Sean getting some kip on my lap last night while I stayed awake reading Marx).

Our stated aim was to buy some pork sausages (as at Kings Cross), but the variety of stuff there was amazing and we ended up buying: bread, sausages, fudge, fruit (grapes, clementines, bananas), avocados, zucchini flowers (!) and a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald (it only seemed polite). I wanted to buy some raisin bread and croissants as well but there is only so much food you can eat. If we had a large freezer we would have bought loads of exciting meat, including venison and goat and especially salmon sausages.

I forgot the camera (as always) so we couldn't take any pictures.

What we bought

Zucchini Flowers

We came home, had some sausages and bread (pretty good) and then I had some fruit before starting on the fudge. I only meant to have one piece.

Empty fudge packet

The fruit and sausages had been excellent (although I don't understand why fruit should taste better when it comes from a farmers market - fruit is surely grown on farms and then shipped to places where it is sold, why should it be better if this is a tent rather than a supermarket?) but the fudge was amazing.

Since I had eaten it all and the farmers market was so close by, I decided to go back and get some more. It was about 11am now and when I got there a lot of the stalls had already packed their goods away.

I took the camera this time.

The market

A particularly interesting stall

I bought some dates. I had wanted to do this earlier, but the stall had been too busy. I also bought a date and coconut roll, which is apparently just dates and coconut mixed together. If it is nice I shall make some myself.

I also went and bought a jar of macadamia butter: the whole concept was just too exciting to ignore. While there I tried their lime curd. It was so nice, I almost bought some even though I clearly wouldn't eat it. But sense prevailed.

By this time I had been past the place where I thought the fudge stall had been and through most of the market as well and was despairing of finding fudge, although I didn't feel too bad armed as I was with new purchases. I finally found it and I was just in time as they had almost packed all their fudge away. The bag I had eaten had been a mixed bag containing chocolate and caramel, which were both gorgeous and another one (luckily only one piece) with macadamia nuts added unnecessarily. They didn't have any unmixed bags, so I bought two bars of chocolate and two bars of caramel. They may last me until tomorrow.

Final shop

* It appears that on all pieces of communal grass in Australia, especially early in the morning there are gangs of people in Lycra who exercise by taking it turns to be puncher and punchee. The puncher gets the standard boxing gloves, while the punchee gets a kind of round shield, very much like the round bats children play with on the beach that tennis balls stick to.

2006-04-27T20:13:00.000+10:00

Amusing gym story

We've just been for a swim / run in the pool / gym.

It was the first time that I've been swimming in the evening and also the first time that I've worn goggles. I have decided not to wear them previously as they never seem to keep enough water out. It seems that keeping some water out is better than none though so the goggles stay.

The pool is all lit up in the evening at the moment (it gets dark about 5pm) and that combined with the goggles made everything seem a bit eerie. I could imagine I was in a Hitchcock film and about to get drowned by my husband.

Sean had a good run, but unfortunately left his keys (the only pair we had with us) in the gym, which you can get to through the pool but has another lock on the door.

There was still a chap cycling in there, but Sean didn't want to disturb him, I think as this would break his exercise pattern. I don't really understand these things, possibly because I don't swim fast enough.

Instead we tried waiting outside the pool for someone to come past. This was pretty unsuccessful. After we got bored of this (it didn't take that long), I went to go and ask the cycling guy for Sean's keys back.

Last weekend when we went to get some post from the mailroom, Sean managed to walk straight into the door (all the doors are glass here). I did try very hard not to laugh but didn't quite manage it. However I am pretty sure that completely see-though doors would be illegal in the UK on health and safety grounds.

So, anyway, I strode into the pool to go and knock on the gym door. Only I didn't exactly stride into the pool, more into a glass pane that was where the door wasn't. I am quite pleased that I didn't walk into the gym door - heavens only knows what the cyclist would have though then. Sean tried very hard not to laugh etc. etc.

I was consequently a bit disoriented when I finally disturbed the cyclist but he was very nice about the whole thing and I retrieved Sean's keys.

One good thing though: at least we are in a country where it is warm enough that you can stand outside in a wet swimming costume in the evening when it's nearly winter and not feel the cold.

2006-04-25T11:18:00.000+10:00

Backgammon: Sean is back on form

We won't be playing backgammon this evening as everyone has wimped out since it is a bank holiday. However we made up for this by going to an all day tournament last Sunday.

The tournament was held at George's by the water, a restaurant in King Street Wharf. This is on the left hand side of Sydney, directly opposite where we live. The quickest way for us to get there would be to swim across, but it's not much longer (and a bit drier) if we walk down and cross at the bridge.

King Street Wharf as seen from our flat

The tournament runs every 6 Sundays or so and starts at 12:30pm. We very foolishly decided to have a nap on the sofa (too much swimming and running - see previous post) at about 10:30am and had to rush around in a panic when we woke up at 12:20am. Luckily we were still in plenty of time; the tournament didn't start until about 1pm.

We played 9 point matches in a 24 player field with buy backs. In order that the buy backs didn't hold up the rest of the tournament, these matches were only played to 7 points. Sean and I both went out in the first round (no change for me there then), but after having some tasty meze for lunch (Sean had fish, squid and lamb and I had the same but with Spinach pastries - spankopitta - instead of squid) we both bought back in.

The tournaments here are much more friendly and we were put on opposing sides of the draw both in the original 16 and the final 8 buy backs. I won a match! In only one game - I threw the cube back to 8 in a position something like this:

Black cubes to 8

I can't remember the exact position - it is a drop with black's checkers like this or better, but a take if they are a little worse. I have no idea what it was.

My next match went on a little longer, but I managed to roll my way through it. Sean started hovering nearby towards the end so I correctly surmised that he had won two matches too and was waiting for the winner.

For a long while it appeared to be the case that I always won when Sean and I met in a tournament but that seems to have fallen by the wayside. We played to 5 and Sean came up trumps.

To be fair I was not too upset about losing as the final was in a very complicated chouette format. As there had been 24 players, Jay the tournament director had decided to try and make a chouette format to determine the winner from the final 3. In the end Sean, Jim and Ian played a chouette, scoring wins and losses separately with the first to lose 13 losing and going out and the first to win 13 coming first. I'm sure Sean will have a lot more to say about this, but it looked unnecessarily complicated to me. Sean was looking to come joint 1st in his final game as captain but his opponent managed to swing the game around and so Sean came 2nd (his team mate went to -13).

Overall we had a lovely day and will definitely be going to the next tournament at the end of May.

2006-04-25T10:37:00.000+10:00

Exercise!

I hadn't expected to be going swimming again after last Monday as it makes Sean feel dizzy. However, while we were there, he investigated the gym and when we woke up early on Friday morning, Sean bounced out of bed and declared that he wanted to go running.

As the gym is by the pool, this works out very well as I am as disinclined to run as Sean is to swim. We went swimming / running on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then Sean thought he had better have yesterday off for his muscles to recuperate. We went again today (we are off work to celebrate the Australian dead).

In general as we get up unpleasantly early anyway we are going to try swimming / running before Sean leaves for Mount Druitt. We'll let you know how this goes...

In addition to all this swimming, last week I rearranged my working week so that I could take 2 hours out to go dancing on Thursday. There is a dance company near the theatre where we went to see the History Boys (up by the harbour bridge). They run about 5 classes every day including jazz, hip-hop, ballet, tap and various other modern dance. I went to a beginners jazz class. I did a bit of dancing when I was at school and was taken aback by how hard this class was. I will not be attempting an intermediate one. The class was really good fun and I'm definitely going to go back next week.

Last Saturday we walked over to Kings Cross to visit a Sydney farmers market. In particular we thought we might buy some pork sausages: they are considered a "speciality" sausage here, the sausages you find in a supermarket are all beef. Excluding some exciting looking Turkish pancakes, the market was small and a big disappointment. Still we then went and had lunch (mixed barbecued seafood) overlooking the river at The Rocks.

The other thing I have been doing in addition to exercise is eating. Inspired by this fantastic cake blog by Chockylit I have started a smoothie blog. I had originally thought I might try and follow some recipes and make some cakes but I don't really have time. Smoothies are very easy to make and form the basis of my diet while Sean is at work. If you want to have a look, you can find my blog here http://milkshakesandsmoothies.blogspot.com/.

2006-04-17T17:43:00.000+10:00

Long weekend

As Sean said in his last post, we started the long weekend with a visit to the Fish Market and the cooking of a crab.

After our large lunch we were falling asleep by 6pm so we went for a walk by Darling Harbour. We were just going to have a quick walk up the other side of the harbour where we haven't been yet but when we got there we noticed that Sydney Aquarium was open until 10pm so we went to have a look round. We saw loads of cool things, including a duck-billed platypus, a cool multi-coloured sea dragon type thing and lots of eels, fish and sharks. It also kept us awake until a sensible hour to go to sleep!

On Saturday, despite vowing we wouldn't, we had another big lunch (Cod from the Fish Market) followed by an afternoon of inactivity.

We both got two easter eggs for Easter, Sean got a Kinder surprise giant egg from me and a Lindt egg from work. I got a Lindt egg and a My Little Pont easter bucket from Sean.

My Little Pony Easter Bucket

We had to swap eggs early as Sean had no chance to hide his, but I lasted until Saturday evening before scoffing the Lindt egg. Pretty good huh?

On Sunday we decided to do some more touristy things so we went to Taronga Zoo. You get to the zoo by taking a ferry from Circular Quay (the main ferry hub) and we had discovered on Friday that you can take a ferry from where we live to Circular Quay. What could be easier? We also found that if we bought day passes (£6 each) we also got £2 off the Zoo entry.

The first thing you do on arrival is to take a sky lift up to the Zoo.

The "Sky Safari"

We saw a lot of exciting animals in the zoo, including visiting the penguins at least twice, seeing them fed and also seeing a really cool bird show.

Here are some animals we saw:

Camel

Giraffe and Zebras

Bear Cat. Is it a bear? Is it a cat?

Rhinocerous

There aren't any photos of penguins, despite the number of times we went to see them, as the camera ran out of battery.

The zoo is situated just over the river from the city, so it is still very much in the centre of Sydney. Here is a picture of some mountain goats set against a backdrop of the harbour bridge. Don't spend too long looking for the mountain goats - they don't seem to have come out too well.

Mountain goats?

We ate at the zoo, Sean had a pizza but I tried some traditional Aussie tucker: one of Mrs Mac's famous pies. It was pretty good.

Today we went swimming in the pool that is part of the complex. We hadn't even been to see it before today. It's a giant pool and best of all there was no one else there!

Pool

Back to work tomorrow.

2006-04-15T11:13:00.000+10:00

It's been a while since I last posted. Still, Zoe has been keeping you all entertained with ripping tales of clothes shopping and what fruit she had for breakfast.

We have had a busy week.

On Monday we went to see Keb Mo at the Enmore Theatre.

Keb was fantastic but the evening was slightly marred by Twat Man.

Twat Man was sitting on the row in front of us about 4 seats to the right.

Whilst everybody else in the Theatre had paid to listen to Keb Mo he had paid to spend the evening alternating between two activities:

talking very loudly to his girlfriend;
shouting inanities over quiet sections of the set such as 'Go Kebby', 'Wooah' and 'Yeah Yeah Yeehaaa'.

He did this through every single song.

About three songs in the person to our left told him to shut-up.

Two songs later the person sitting behind him threatened to kill him.

This worked for a short period of time before Twat Man, obviously overcome with pent-up emotion exclaimed 'Feel The Blues' and started singing his own harmony line.

None-the-less Keb was excellent.

On Tuesday we went to see the Rolling Stones on their 'A Bigger Bang' Tour at the Telstra Stadium.

The Set List was:

Jumping Jack Flash; Let's Spend The Night Together; You Got Me Rocking; Oh No Not You Again; Dead Flowers; Angie; It's Only Rock And Roll; Tumblin' Dice; Night Time Is The Right Time; The Place Is Empty; Happy; Miss You; Rough Justice; Get Off My Cloud; Honky Tonk Women; Paint It Black; Sympathy for the Devil; Start Me Up; Brown Sugar; Can't Always Get What You Want; Satisfaction.

More than enough classics there to make the evening a huge success. My favourite was 'Honky Tonk Women' but then it was always going to be.

Keef is till the coolest man ever. His face is certainly a testament to the effects of a career in the rock 'n' roll fast lane.

'Its good to be here Sydney. But then it's good to be anywhere'

There were 60,000 people watching the Stones on Tuesday. You can see us all below...

On Wednesday we were going to go to a meeting of the Australian Skeptics but it had been brought forward to the week before so we'd missed it. This was probably a good thing as we were absolutely exhausted after two nights out. We will go next time. One of the best parts of the Australian Skeptics website is Dr Bob's Quiz. I guarantee that it will challenge even the most knowledgable pub quizer. It will also greatly increase your Google skills.

Warning: This next section recounts crustacean boling and is probably not suitable for anthropomorphising, malnutritioned carrot-huggers. Cat - you have been warned. Just skip the next couple of paragraphs and think about kittens.

Yesterday we decided to have a big seafood lunch outside on our balcony. To this end we went to Sydney Fish Market (which was very, very busy) and bought some prawns, some rocket and a crab. I was a little nervous as to how we would get the crab home but the assistant just picks your chosen crab out of the box and puts it upside down in a carrier bag which seems to quieten it down a bit.

Here is a photo of our crab.

It got a bit more lively when we got it home so we put it in the freezer to stun it.

There is nothing a crab likes more after being stunned than being boiled. This is a scientific fact.

I had to buy this pot specially on Thursday. It was the largest one they had and was still only just big enough. You can see the crab having a whale of a time at the bottom of the pan.

After boiling you pull off the claws and legs, chop the body in half, remove the lungs and other nasty crab entrails and voila...

It was extremely tasty and well worth the effort. I think we shall have crab again next week.

On the backgammon front I have been trying to do some work on Blitz Doubles. I had half a notion that I would come up with the Sean Formula that would accurately predict early blitz cube decisions. I would become world famous and backgammon players would talk about me in revered tones. Sadly the area is very complicated - still the research I have done has made me understand far more than I did. I also understand the relative importance of various factors in the blitz better - particularly the importance of the quantity of ammunition available to the attacker (Bagai notes both the importance and general neglect of this topic in Classic Backgammon Revisited).

I played a great 11 point match against Gnu yesterday. It was one game long with me winning 16-0. Most notably all the cube decisions were correct (at least according to Gnu 2-ply). I am particularly proud of my recube to 16 which I managed to time just right. Admittedly this was mostly luck as I had no idea what was going on but my intuition must be getting better!

I will post the game separately with some analysis. I won't do it here as I know not everyone is quite as obsessed by backgammon as I am.

Work is going OK. It is very busy and we are still nowhere near where we need to be but we are moving in the right direction.

I think that's all for now.

Sean

2006-04-12T18:12:00.000+10:00

You learn something new every day

I've just worked out how to change the time zone so you can now see what time I'm actually posting at rather than the time in America.

We finished furnishing our flat last weekend - we made the final (i.e. main bed), decomissioned the old one (we've turned the spare room into a games playing room) and bought some coffee tables and garden furiture.

Our main aim had been to buy a barbeque but were unable to decide on one. The outside gas tap is in a rather unfortunate location on the balcony and apparantly all gas barbeques come with a standard sized (not long enough) lead. Sean thinks we may have to resort to a UK style coal powered barbeque.

We also bought a wine rack to store all the wine we bought and were wondering where to put it. There is a kind of decorative shelf in the hallway (you can imagine a large urn with dried flowers there); I had suggested that maybe we could get a stand and put Sean's guitar there but the wine rack fits well and looks good.

Wine on display

Here are some more photos of the new furniture:

Sofas and coffee tables

The games room

Our new bed

The balcony

The weather's beautiful here (although slightly windy); I've been working outside on the balcony today (on the new garden furniture).

2006-04-08T10:21:00.000+10:00

My birthday (2)

As I live a long way away for present sending, I got a lot of vouchers and money for my birthday. These needed spending so I took Friday off and had almost a second birthday. In particular, I thought, I could have my cake that I am owed.

I've been looking forward to going shopping here for ages, I think because I had been telling myself in the UK for a while that I mustn't buy any clothes as it will be summer in Australia and I will want summer clothes. But I haven't really felt I could buy any clothes here as we have been spending so much money on sorting everything else out: furniture, sheets and towels (I am quite amazed by how much sheets and towels cost) and "white goods" (fridge, toaster, kettle, iron etc.). So it was with real joy I set out on Friday to spend money on clothes that was specifically designated for the purpose.

I didn't get out especially promptly yesterday - I felt I ought to make an attempt to blog some of the stuff we have been doing and it took me a long time to upload the winery photos. I found a handy feature whereby you can upload more than one photo at a time - up to 5. So I tried it. It took longer than normal to upload (understandably) but then didn't add the photos to the blog, I tried again in case it was a glitch. No joy. I tried with only two photos and that didn't work either so I then had to upload all 5 separately like I would have had to do to start with. Grrrr.

By this time the post office was open (they don't open until 9am here unlike in the UK where they open extra early but then shut early too) so I went to fetch the wine. As we back onto the casino there is usually a line of taxis outside our back door. I approached one and proposed my plan to him - he drives me to the post office, waits while I get the wine, drives me back and wait while I unload it. I was a bit concerned that I would have to leave him with the wine while I carried it up a case at a time but I thought I would worry about that later.

The taxi driver reluctantly agreed to my plan and off we went. The queue in the post office was not too long (it was about 11:30am - just in time before the lunch break rush) but the two people in front of me both took an age.

I am not sure about the advisability of admitting to breaking the law in a blog. Let's say that suppose Sean had forgotton to sign over the slip from the post office for the one wine delivery that was in his name, I may have had to fake his signtature (not very well either). The lady in the post office didn't seem worried by Sean's signature though, although she was worried that I was collecting it at all. "Who is this?" she demanded, to which I could only reply "Sean" adding "I have his passport here", which seemed to make everything OK in her eyes.

She spent a long time shuffling about in the back room, during which I saw the taxi driver coming up to check whether I was still there, although he just sidled away when he saw I was at the desk. I was asked to explain how I was going to get the wine home and then some more shuffling ensued. Finally I was taken to another door where a hitherto unseen post office employee loaded the wine onto and trolley and took it out for me. It didn't look like the trolley would go down the curb so I ran across the road to the taxi with the crates one at a time.

On the way back I had a brilliant idea - instead of running up to the flat carrying the crates, I could get the taxi driver to drive into the car park to the bottom of the lift. Genius. The plan went off without a hitch, although the taxi was slightly too big for the car park and made a ding-ding-ding sound as it went along by banging the overhead pipes with the TAXI sign.

By the time I got out it was gone 12pm so I knew I had to be efficient in my shopping. I started with Harbourside in Darling Harbour, a slightly touristy shopping centre that I had walked through every day on my way to Starbucks without having time to stop and look at things I noticed. in particular an Aussie discount store (mainly cut price souvenirs and Australia T-shirts) had been offering fake fur stoles for $3 each. I had been debating this for a long time but I succumbed and bought a white one and a black one. Will I ever wear them? Who knows.

Fur Stoles

I did quite well in Darling Harbour and picked up a vest top, a dress made from Hemp (although I am assured by the label that there are no active ingredients and also, which I didn't know, that Hemp is much better for the environment than cotton) and a mini-skirt. Will I ever be brave enough to wear the mini-skirt? We shall see.

I also paid a visit to the British Lolly Shop. Lolly is just the Australian word for sweet. What we would call a lolly is known as a lolly on a stick. I thought I would buy Sean some sugared almonds and did so. I noticed some Bourneville - sadly lacking from Australian supermarkets even though they are choc (literally) full of Cadbury's Dairy Milk - and bought a couple of bars of that too. I noticed some condiments on a shelf: Coleman's mustard and various other English treats. Now Sean has been desparate for some HP sauce since we got here - he's even been in touch with people coming back from the UK and asked them to smuggle some over for him. I asked, hopefully, at the Lolly shop and they do sell it, they are just temporarily out of stock. So Sean may well be sauced up next week.

It was about 2pm when I headed into town. I am not sure why I can cope with Oxford Street and Kensington but not here, but the centre of Sydney seems to me to be absolutely full of clothes shops and so I was already feeling confused in anticipation.

I decided to simplify things by heading towards Ojay, which I had a voucher for. I had still not had my cake but I decided if I had spent my voucher I could pause and feel I had done well.

The belt

I passed a shop called Supre and went in. I had been admiring a belt in the windows as I passed it and decided to go in and get it. The clothing content was very typical school girl fashion (think Top Shop, Miss Selfridge) and contained a vast amount of clothing. I piled up my arms and went to the fitting room. In the end I bought two sensible tops for winter, a black pencil skirt, the belt and a long black strapless dress that was a bargain on the sale. A good result, but I felt I had worked hard for it.

Long black strapless dress

Determined now to reach Ojay, just so I could go home, I headed into Central Plaza. I meandered through some shops and stopped at a shoe shop, remembering that I had vaguely planned to buy some winter boots. Everyone here is already cold, I get kind enquiries after the state of my body temperature when walking around in summer dresses. It is still hotter here than summers in the UK.

All the shoes here are two sizes up so I had to ask for a 10. The only had one of the styles I liked in a 10 and the lady had to go upstairs to get it and gave me a 9 to try. It was slightly uncomfortable but I got the idea. The boots are very nice and the only drawback was that I had just got used to buying cheap clothes and at about £65 they seemed ferociously expensive. The kind sales lady reassured me that I wouldn't find them cheaper somewhere else and that was enough for me. I was now out of birthday money and all that remained was to find Ojay.

Boots

It turned out that I was not in Central Plaza as I thought, I had somehow got into the Queen Victoria building. We were told in a video we were shown on the wine tour that it had won some prize for best looking shopping centre and I can see that they may be right, however it did not contain Ojay. I went back the way I came, worked out where I went wrong, found a handy shopping centre directory for Central Plaza and then stumbled across Ojay almost by accident.

It was very different from the other shops I had been in, but in the same way as all the small clothes shops the assistants took clothes that I was waiting to try on and hung them up ready for me. Now I was laden down with purchases, I appreciated this even more. All the clothes were more expensive than the boots I had just bought but, determined, I tried a whole load of stuff on. I had an attentive assistant who changed sizes and so on for me and I was eventually left with a dress and a pair of trousers. The voucher didn't cover both but - what the hell - it was my birthday.

Fatigued, I made my way home as swiftly as possible. I failed to buy a cupcake yet again. Maybe another day...

2006-04-07T17:43:00.000+10:00

My birthday

My birthday started well. I got tea in bed and then lots of presents.

My best present was a playstation, along with an Australian version of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) - I think it's called something like Dance UK XL Party. Apparently it is not possible to buy the original DDR in Australia - if I miss it too much we will have to get it from eBay.

I also got some shiny new books, including "The Best Australian Essays 2005", "The Communist Manifesto" (I shall read this as a prelude to Das Kapital, which I have coming in the post) and a book called "Great Speeches".

I was very busy during the day working (with a quick half hour out at lunch for DDR). I had been planning on buying a cupcake from the cupcake shop to eat for breakfast but there wasn't time. Still, I thought, I owe myself a cupcake.

We went out for dinner and a play at 6pm - The History Boys by Alan Bennett in Sydney Theatre. Sydney Theatre encompasses a bistro where you can have two courses before dinner and then pudding in the interval (how good is that?). We turned up 15 minutes late (Sean had had trouble getting back from work) but ordered quite promptly.

The starters came very quickly - they were both cold and so had clearly been pratically ready already however they were both really nice. I had King Prawns with noodles and some other chinesey flavours and Sean had Pork Belly.

We had to wait a little longer for our mains (reassuringly) and they were both excellent when they came. Sean had Lamb Cutlets with Lamb Canneloni, which certainly looked interesting and I had sweetcorn and Mascarpone Ravioli with peas, bean and basil. Mine was possibly a little heavy on the sweetcorn flavour, but I don't feel I can really complain about that. Sean ordered some Chats (apparently just potatoes) with Rosemary and they were absolutely gorgeous.

After eating all my pasta and stuffing myself with Sean's potatoes I couldn't face a dessert, not even at the interval. Sean ordered some cheese that said it came with Muscatels. The only disappointment of the whole meal (apart from being too full to eat dessert) was when Sean asked for extra cheddar instead of the blue cheese and they said they couldn't as the cheese was already plated. There was much muttering about how this wouldn't happen in France over the cheese!

The grapes turned out to be semi-dried and absolutely gorgeous so I ate those in lieu of pudding. The service had been so efficient that we still had time for tea before the play.

The play itself was absolutely fantastic. I had wanted to see it in London but not got round to it. When I booked the tickets, they only had C reserve seats left, with a restricted view. Then the lady found me some B reserve tickets (slightly less restricted) so I snapped them up. The only restricted part of the viewing was missing the edge of a video that played intermittently in the background with non essential footage so it was no problem at all. C reserve would have been fine.

It was a very British play, which made it quite strange that we were watching it in Australia. The best scene was one where the teacher let the boys act out a brothel scene in French. (In French: "Where do you want to be today boys?" "In a brothel" "Hmmmm OK then but a brothel where everyone speaks in the conditional".)

If it comes to the UK again, you must go and see it as it is an amazing play. I think they should make a film of it: it will become the new Dead Poets Society.

2006-04-07T17:02:00.000+10:00

Backgammon: Sean's in the money

The tournament didn't go too well for either of us this week. We both went out in the first round (I had been 6-0 up in a match to 7 but it all slipped away from me). I entered another tournament of 8 players but Sean had had enough and started playing a chouette.

Charlie came along this evening and gave Sean $150 towards what he owed. Great, thought Sean. If Charlie had not paid, Sean wouldn't have been so keen to play with him in a chouette again but it looked like it was OK.

I won my first match in the second tournament. Woo! I checked with Sean - the chouette wasn't going very well, he was 30 points or so down. I started my second match. It was a very long one. Now the new venue is much nicer than the last one but also stays open until 3am. Good news in some ways.

By the time I finished (lost) my second match it must have been about midnight. I went to check the chouette. Sean's luck had completely reversed, he was sitting tight in the box and considerably up. I then watched a few games.

The most spectacular game was one when Sean was still in the box and the cubes had been shipped across a few times, most were on 8 except for Charlie who had taken an auto and doubled too early - he was on 32. Sean pulled off a gammon and won 120 points in a single game! He was eventually knocked out of the box but played on for a little while longer.

Sean ended up at the end of night (~2am - not such good news the next day) on around +120 or $2400 or ~£1000!!! He collected a bit of cash but also a lot of IOUs, including one from an Australian chess Grandmaster and a large one from Charlie.

He's considering not entering the tournament next week and just playing chouettes.

2006-04-05T17:30:00.000+10:00

Wine Tasting

As a joint leaving present and birthday present for Sean, Matt and Emily very kindly bought us some tickets for a trip on a wine tasting tour for when we got here.

We were originally supposed to be doing the tour on Sun 26th February, but this was the day just after we moved and we were very busy sorting stuff out with that so I called the Tour Operator and managed to rearrange for the Sunday after.

The coach left from Star City (a crazy giant casino-hotel complex), which is just out the back of our flat, so it was pretty convenient to get to. We according left 10 minutes to get there for what is a 2 min walk. There were a lot of coaches around (clearly these trips are popular) including a similar tour to ours with a rival company. We had been pointed in the right direction by the rival guide and caught the attention of a chap with a clipboard standing next to a departing coach. We explained who we were and he flagged the coach down quickly - it was our bus and we'd nearly missed it! I'm not sure what would have happened if we had - hopefully they would have let us rebook as the coach left 5 minutes early!

The coach took us up through the North of the city, through some nice looking suburbs such as Chatswood and then onto more remote parts. The landscape changed completely: open land everywhere you can see and signs warning of bushfires! It felt much more like we were in Australia proper rather than a metropolis.

We had a West Country (UK that is) coach driver, who gave us the usual commentry as we went along - explaining the names of towns and pointing out which bits of woods had burnt down recently.

One of the things that the coach driver pointed out as we went through rural Australia was the postal system. The post office refuse to deliver to house in the middle of nowhere, so everyone has to have a postbox at the end of the road they live on. We saw one road with about 30 different boxes at the end.

We made a stop on the way to the Hunter Valley wine region: historic Wollombi. I fully believe that this was a typical Australian town - there was absolutely nothing here - the main town "corner" consisted of a general shop, a cafe, a pub and a sign saying "Historic Wollombi".

Historic Wollombi

Apparently the main attraction was the fact that the pub sold Dr. Jurd's Jungle Juice, which you could try at the bar. We did so. It tasted not unlike port i.e. a sweet fortified wine. We didn't buy any.

We were back on the coach then, but not for so long (it had been 2 hours before Wollombi). Our first stop was at McWilliams Mount Pleasant, where we got a tour of the winery before a wine tasting with lunch.

McWilliams Vines

We learnt all about how the grapes are harvested (by hand or with a shaking machine), squished (a corkscrew and a press), filtered (another machine) and brewed (vats or barrels). Some examples of these are below. I was amazed by how easy it is you basically squash the grapes and stick them in a barrel.

You just tip the grapes into this...

The filter

Oak Barrels

Lunch was OK (but slightly meagre) - fish, potatoes and salad followed by a shared plate of fruit. We sat with the bus driver (from somewhere near Plymouth) and an American engineer and his family. He was working in Adelaide and they were visiting him.

The wines we had were somthing starting with a V (Verdhalo?), which was nice, Chardonnary, Merlot and Shiraz, which was also nice. The Chardonnay was typically Australian (i.e. sweet) and the Merlot was nothing special. We bought a crate each of the other two.

The second winey was McGuigan's, reputedly responsible for the rise in prestige of the whole of the Hunter Valley region. We undertook a tasting in more efficient surroundings here, sitting at a long table and being poured a new wine every 5 mins or so. We had Sauvignon Blanc (very nice - we bought a crate), Chardonnay again (no need to comment), Gerwurtztraminer (a bit sweet even for me who usually likes it), Merlot (I think), Shiraz (we bought two bottles as we already had a case of Shiraz - however this is the grape the region is best at growing) and Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. The Cabernet Sauvignon was lovely but £20 a bottle so we didn't buy any. We also had a dessert wine (nothing special) and a port (apparently still not up to Sean's standards but better than any others he has had while here). We bought two bottles of port.

We then were back on the coach to a kind of little shopping complex, with a winery, chocolate shop and various what I would term "gift shops". I was feeling a little sick by this point; we had been given chocolate to eat with the port and this may have been responsible but I blame the alcohol. Consequently I couldn't face drinking and more and watched Sean through the last tasting. He bought a crate of the Rose (I can confirm that it smelt nice) so we should now be set up for a little while wine wise.

I had also started to feel slightly lethargic, the way you do in a pub garden in the summer when you just want to sit there all day in the sun and drink wine. This is one of the feelings that I gave up alcohol to avoid and I am surprised that I noticed it after drinking what was at most 2 glasses (I literaly had a sip of each wine and threw the rest away - or donated to Sean if he liked it). In fact I think that alcohol + me = a large deal of lethargy (more than usual) so I don't think I am going to be taking it up again any time soon.

An indication of the fact that all was not right came in the chocolate shop where I looked at the chocolates and declared I wasn't interested. In fact all I wanted was a fruit smoothie, and I duly bought and drank down in one a Nudie smoothie (an Innocent equivalent but decidedly inferior - more on that in another post). I felt instantly better (psychosomatic?) and suddenly desparate for chocolates, particularly as Sean had bought some.

A suspicion voiced by the coach driver on the way out became true on the way home: we fell asleep. I had been despairing of the discomfort involved in coach journeys (it wasn't this bad when I was a child!) but now I remember how to get through them: sleep. you feel awful when you wake up but then you get to go home.

We were dropping 5 mins walk from our flat (slightly irritating as the official drop off point was right by our door), pretty exhausted. A good days work.

A final note: all the wine we bought has completely failed to be delivered (even though I've been in most of the time) so I've got to go and pick up 5 cases from the post office. This is going to be interesting.

2006-04-01T15:20:00.000+11:00

Division of labour

We have had a good day today, making drawers. As part of our furniture shop of last week we acquired 6 sets of them: 2 bedsides for our room (black), 2 bedsides for the spare room (beech), 1 bedside to go under my desk as a desk drawer (beech) and 1 tallboy (large set of chest of drawers) to go in our bedroom (black).

As they were all identical, we managed to establish a good factory line assembling them. Adam Smith would have been proud of us. My speciality was hammering: easy, yet rewarding. We now have to wait 24 hours for the glue to dry and when we get home tomorrow we can put things in them. We can't do this during the day as we are going on a wine tour of the Hunter Valley. I am a bit nervous.

Sean has been busy the last few evenings writing backgammon spreadsheets so I have managed to finish my economics book and read a novel. The novel was called "The Oxford Murders" by Guillermo Martinez. I recommend it to murder mystery readers in general and in particular anyone who thinks Maths is cute. In some ways it reminded me of the TV show we watched while we were in serviced accommodation called "Numbers". This is an American murder mystery series, where all the mysteries are solved by using "Math". Genius. I suspect this show will appeal to other fans of Diagnosis Murder.

The TV is gone now that we have our own place and I am much relieved. Sean had taken to watching a rather nasty reality TV show called "The biggest loser" where contestants battled against each other to lose the most weight and not get voted off. Pretty much everyone on there seemed to be continually unhappy. We watched some good things such as Rabbit Proof Fence (appropriate to being in Australia) a few episodes of The Simpsons and of course Numbers but I much prefer having my evenings back.

I'm clearly not going to get round to creating a panorama of the view so here are the photos I was going to use. You will have to either use your imagination or print them out and assemble them with sticky tape. As you go down the list here you are moving from left to right.

2006-03-31T16:54:00.000+11:00

The joy of the internet

Yes, we are connected to the internet again and it has not been an easy trip.

You will recall that I tried to start the whole process a week before we moved in, but we had the wrong type of line. Then an engineer came and installed a new line, but before he left told me that it was still the wrong type of line. Then lots of people in lots of call centres assured me that it was not the wrong type of line and I just had to wait for it to be connected.

Then today I phoned up to find out if we were any nearer to being connected and do you know what they told me? We can't be connected because

We have the wrong type of line.

So, being a resourceful chappess, I had to fall back upon plan two. Clearly a lot of people have similar problems here so you can buy a "wireless modem" which communicates via wireless broadband. Not ideal, but now I knew this was the only option I phoned up to enquire and on learning that I could connect today rushed out to buy a modem.

I was so excited by the fact I could finally stop sitting outside Starbucks looking lonely that I forgot that I had a shopping delivery coming. Ooops.

I realised on my way back at about 11:30am (the shopping slot was 9:30 - 13:30 and they hadn't been in the hour or so before I left) and picked up my speed.

I wasn't sure what they would do if I wasn't there to collect the delivery. My mobile hadn't rung, but did they have the number? I checked under the door to the hall - no "We called to deliver but..." note. I checked in our mail box, in case someone had helpfully picked up a note and put it there. No. By 12:30, I was starting to feel like the idiot I was for rushing out when I was supposed to be at home.

However, everything today has a happy ending and they brought my shopping at 12:45pm. I am reminded of an even more happy ending we had last week. We had been playing our second new board game, Descent (a dungeon adventure game, similar to Warhammer Quest for those of you that know about these things) on the balcony. Perfect, we thought. We had reckoned without the winds, which can come across the balcony in quite a gust and being on the seventh floor can distribute any vital light games cards that they pick up across a pretty wide area, not all of it in the communal part of our block. We felt pretty sick when we saw two cards floating off in just this manner. Being an astonishing optimist, I suggested we go and look for the cards and dragged a dispirited Sean with me. And we found them both! Quite a way from our balcony on a higher level leading to another block. Hooray!

A final note about the internet connection intended to reassure any software developers reading: I uncovered two of the most stonking bugs I have ever seen in released software while installing the clever wireless modem.

Firstly on the install screen it kept getting to a point in the progress bar (it varied but was about 15%) and then hanging. This, it turns out was because there was a pop up behind the progress window (impossible to access as the installer was full screen at the front of the PC - you couldn't even get to task manager). I had to click around at random on the screen to OK it.

Secondly, my first monthly payment was Â£0 as it was the last day of the month. But I then got an error saying that they couldn't take Â£0 from my credit card! The first suggestion from the call centre was to try again tomorrow when it would no longer be the last day of the month but they eventually said that I could get someone to register me over the phone.

Now we're connected I can get back to posting about things that are not to do with internet connections.

2006-03-29T10:54:00.000+11:00

Backgammon: Only points for turning up

After Sean's initial triumph, he had another success last week although this was not in the tournament. We had both been knocked out of the main tournament (there is no consolation) and We were playing in a $5 chouette (~2). People at the Sydney club don't seem to play for lower stakes; it's usually either $5 or $10.

The chap from New Zealand, Charlie, got a bit drunk and proceeded to lose many points, mainly to Sean. Sean ended up nearly $300 up! Unfortunately as Sean was the largest winner and Charlie didn't have enough cash, Sean only got an IOU. And this week Charlie wasn't there...

In the tournament this week, I went out so quickly (7-0) that I bought back in. There weren't that many people around (they only managed to scrape a 16 player tourney including several buy backs) and there weren't any chouettes going on so I thought I'd have another stab. I think I lost the first match partly because I took a cube on 4 when I was losing in the race something like 71-46 (or maybe by even more) but I'm sure I've been told that the race doesn't mean anything when it is that short. Maybe I'll have to learn some kind of wastage count.

I lost the second match 7-4. Meanwhile, Sean had also had to buy back in and so I went to watch his second match. He seemed to be playing lots of complicated games, with lots of blot hitting going on. I think this was mainly due to his opponent's playing style - I'm sure I saw him look disappointed when he scored a roll that made his 20 point (not dynamic enough). Sean was leading for most of the match, I think it was 5-1 when I went over and from 6-2 onwards looked like he had it in the bag. But his opponent won the Crawford game and then scraped a gammon at the end. We were both out. As there were no chouettes we got to go home at a reasonable time, so not all bad.

The venue changes next week and we stop having to trek out to Bondi. The backgammon evening will be held in a pub by central station and we should just be able to walk there in 20 mins or so. Cool.

News on the ladder - I started scraping my way back and then Sean crushed me with a couple of large wins (including an 11 point match). Score at the moment is 17-7 to Sean.

2006-03-27T15:31:00.000+11:00

Busy, busy, busy

We've now moved into our flat! We went shopping for furniture and things on Saturday and we now have 1 bed (we ordered this on Thursday last week so that we had something to sleep on on Saturday and Sunday!), 2 small desks for me to work on, 1 dining table and 8 dining chairs. We also have cutlery, sheets etc.

Tomorrow we get a further 2 sofas and 6 sets of drawers and our final bed is on order.

We keep finding loads of extra things we need but we are going to have to just pick them up as we go along.

We went to the theatre at Sydney Opera House on Friday to see a play called Doubt which was brilliant.

I'm still waiting for the internet to be connected and have about 5 mins here (I'm in Starbucks) until they cut my connection - until we get a proper connection I think all posts are going to be short and sweet!

2006-03-22T17:56:00.000+11:00

Junk Mail

I had a new working experience today - working without any furniture. Not just without a special computer desk, without anything. In particular: no chair, no sofa, no table of any description, no comfy bed to sit on, no cushion, no kettle to make tea and no mug to put it in even if I did manage to make some.

The flats here come unfurnished and when they say that, they mean it.

Now this is not just a case of failed planning on the part of Sean and myself. Although we picked up the keys to our new flat yesterday, we are not moving in until Saturday. On Saturday we plan to buy the necessary cushions, sofas, beds and so on to make our life there a happy one.

Today I was working in an unfurnished flat for two reasons. Firstly a guy was coming to connect the phone line so that the Telco (I assume this is an Australianism? I've never heard this abbreviation in the UK) can initiate the broadband process. Secondly, a fridge was being delivered. And even though I suffered a sore rear, neither were achieved very successfully.

The telephone line was connected, but when I asked the technician if it would support broadband the answer was no. Apparently although he connected a new line, a different technician has to come and change the new line to a copper line. Hmm. Neither the company I am (aiming to) use to get broadband access (AAPT) or the Australian equivalent of BT who are in charge of the lines (Telstra) seem to agree that this could be the case. After much 3 way telephone tennis (as plausible a sport as it sounds), the situation remains that AAPT think they are just going to connect the broadband up tomorrow. We shall see.

The other reason for lack of success is partly my fault as I forgot to take my mobile telephone. I refuse to accept full responsibility for this though: fridges used to be delivered before people had mobile phones! Anyway failure number two was that the fridge delivery people turned up, phoned my mobile and went away again. The buzzer system is quite complicated so I am not completely surprised. I now have to go back tomorrow and wait for them again. I will be taking my mobile phone and I may buy a cushion on the way. They say they are aiming for 9:30am though so I may be back in my (now viewed as remarkably more comfy) desk chair soon enough.

The fridge company said that the delivery company had left me a card under the door to say that they had been. This I find hard to believe. They would not have been able to get anywhere near my door unless I had buzzed them in and they would have been crazy to leave a card under the main lobby door that clearly leads to lots of flats. Just to check this theory, on the way out of the new flat I checked the post. I thought I would look foolish opening an empty letter box, but I had failed to reason this through in advance. An empty flat receives as much post as an occupied one, it is just never emptied! So I had a whole armful of mail, some of which was actually for us: a resident's newsletter, an invitation to join in a local forum on the area and a letter from the Telco saying that they were happily charging my credit card (they got that bit right then). Of the rest, many letters for a mysterious Duncan Browne (Sound familiar Ickenham boys? Another of Duncan's shady off-shore scams?), and much junk mail.

I think we are making a trip to Ikea to acquire the more essential furniture items on Saturday and we should be living in the new flat from then. You may remember that this was Sean's first choice of flat and not mine. However going back last might and looking at the view I have re-assessed. Panorama to follow when I have composed it...

2006-03-18T17:57:00.000+11:00

It's been another couple of very busy weeks for me hence the lack of postings. Work is very hectic at the moment. There is a lot to learn in terms of the mechanics of the contract, my team is quite large (22 people and set to rise) and we are entering the budgeting round for next year which means that I am wrestling with lots of spreadsheets. Lots of balls to juggle and not a lot of time to try and turn the site round in terms of performance. Still, it keeps me interested!

Apologies to those people who have e-mailed me who I have not responded to. I now have a Blackberry which is helping me keep on top of my emails much more effectively - if you receive a semi-literate response to an e-mail with no formatting then chances are that I have written to you on my new toy.

I am getting used to the drive to work - it now takes me about an hour to get home rather than an hour and a half. I think I have finally cracked the Sydney road jungle.

Zoe has already posted the highlights of last week. I enjoyed the commedian we saw. The Turkish restaurant was very authentic (the lamb tasted very similar to the lamb I ate in Antalya). Unfortunately we had to rush our main courses as we were running a bit late for the show.

Yesterday we went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant 2 minutes down the road from us. The lobster was absolutely fantastic. I may go back tomorrow and have the crab. All the seafood is cooked from live and brought out in a bag before cooking for your approval. Excellent. We had the lobster with a ginger and shallot sauce. Very tasty.

Today we stayed in and played the new game we have bought: Runebound. Its a bit like Talisman only much better. Zoe adores Talisman and she really likes Runebound. Personally I would rather play backgammon but Runebound is still fun.

On the subject of backgammon I feel I have to reply to Zoe's post. I do not study the game for hours. I don't have the time any more. I am just naturally gifted! OK - I study the game as much as I can but that is a lot less than I used to be able to. At least now some of the study is paying off in results. 10 -2, 10 -2, 10-2, 10-2, 10-2 ,10-2, 10-2 (to be sung repeatedly to Zoe to the tune of Amazing Grace). And I have a 100% win record in our games of Runequest. Not that I'm competitive or anything.

I promised to post some backgammon positions from our time out here - here are a couple of early cube decisions taken from our 19-point match.

The score (after 0 games) is: Zoe 0, Sean 1 (match to 19 points)
Sean (Blue) on roll, cube decision?

Pip counts: Zoe 142, Sean 110

I doubled Zoe took.

The score (after 0 games) is: Zoe 0, Sean 2 (match to 19 points)
Zoe on roll (White), cube decision?

Pip counts: Zoe 119, Sean 151

Zoe doubled I took.

Apologies if you are not interested in backgammon. I can only suggest that you take it up!

Please keep posting comments to the blog and e-mailing Zoe and I. It is really great to hear from you all.

Sean

2006-03-17T17:27:00.000+11:00

Backgammon: The Sean and Zoe Ladder

a.k.a. The Super Series

We have missed out on a couple of backgammon tournaments this week. We wimped out of the regular Tuesday evening session as we were both feeling tired.

Also last Sunday was a larger all day tournament, which is hopefully going to run monthly. We had to decline this initially as we were invited to Kim's in the evening, however we were going to go along during the day, play a bit and maybe have some lunch. However, after our flat finding mission on Saturday we had too many things that needed to be sorted out (forms to fill in etc.) to be able to make it down. There's always next Sunday...

In the meantime we are occupying ourselves with the Sean and Zoe Ladder. As you may be able to tell from the name it is a ladder between just the two of us! It is going to run to the end of the year when, I expect, I will be pleased to reset the counter to 0! I think in part this is a way for Sean to prove that he's better than me and that I just get lucky in tournaments (and quizzes).

We are using a kind of Fibs hacky score (it's not so complicated for only two players) of the square root (rounded up) of the match length. This gives extra weight to match wins over match length.

I am sorry to say that I did not get off to a good start. Until last night I was 8-0 down. Last night I won a quick 3 pointer (it was very quick: double and then gammon) - hooray! - but then Sean won one too. So the score currently stands at 10-2 to Sean.

If anyone has any quick tips that can improve my matchplay without too much effort, email them to me! I need a secret weapon to use against the fact that Sean spends hours studying!

I will keep you all updated on how the ladder progresses.

2006-03-16T16:47:00.000+11:00

Australian Comedy

Last night we went to see an Australian stand up comedian. We were a little worried before we went as Sean went to see an Australian comedian with William when he was last in Brisbane and found it completely impenetrable.

This chap (Carl Barron) had done a world tour, so we decided he couldn't be that Aussie specific and booked some tickets. The show was at the Enmore Theatre in Newtown. In fact I noticed that the tickets were for sale when I was buying Keb Mo tickets for the same venue. We're going to see Keb Mo on Monday 10th before the Rolling Stones on Tuesday 11th. That will be a musical week.

We drove through Newtown briefly on our quick tour of the Sydney suburbs with Gloria. Both of Sydney's universities are in this area, which apparently makes it very cosmopolitan. The two main roads we went down were both quite cute with lots of shops and restaurants - very different from high rise central Sydney!

We went to a Turkish restaurant beforehand. It seemed very authentic and the food was good (I had Yoghurtlu lamb) but it will sadly never replace the (now gone) Mezerama in Willesden. Two blokes tuned up some Turkish instruments for a long time while we were eating and then played them for a bit at the end, which was nice.

Carl Barron was not what I was expecting at all. He was very funny, with a good line in what I can only describe as pedantic humour. ("My father used to be very particular about how we spoke. I'd say 'Me and Tom are going to the beach' and he'd reply 'Tom and I are going to the beach'. So I'd say 'Good - can I get a lift?'" and so on.) He emphasised a lot of things with large gestures and seemed to make silly noises whenever possible.

His show was entitled "The best bits from my two DVDs" so I suspect the DVDs are worth watching if you come across a copy.

We are now all go for moving into our new flat next Wednesday. We will probably keep living in this flat until we get kicked out (the following Sunday) as it will take a while to sort out the internet and so on. We will need a trip to Ikea to buy some cheap furniture as well...