The Sauce

The Final Countdown

2009-10-21T19:33:00.001+01:00

Things have been pretty quiet here after our last last trip away to Croatia.

We haven't really done much except count down the days till we leave, which is made all the more easier by the turning weather.

Things are already starting to pick up though with the amount of time available to do things decreasing. We have made a list of must-dos before we leave and have to schedule things in, while also organising banks, phones, bills, and money.

It's not too bad at the moment, but the coming weeks will be quite stressful for us, which means coming home will be another holiday that we need.

But with the weak pound at the moment I can't afford to take too much time off work.

Croatia

2009-10-06T13:42:00.017+01:00

We recently went to Croatia for a week long boat trip through some of the many islands on the Dalmatian Coast.
These tours are very popular so we had book well in advance, and we decided to go for the "older persons" option.

Saturday
Gatwick -> Dubrovnik Airport -> Dubrovnik
Checked into our guesthouse then went and got a pizza from a nearby pizzeria that was pretty cheap and tasty. After a short afternoon nap we walked into the Old Town for dinner. We had intended on going to a 'popular' vegetarian restaurant called Nishta for dinner. Unfortunately they were closed all weekend because "the Chef had injured himself", so we had to settle for a nearby restaurant that offered us free wine and Prosek. I managed to have a platter of olives, ham, cheese and octopus for a starter then a whole fish for mains. Average.

After dinner we attempted to walk off some of dinner before heading back to the guesthouse for bed.

Sunday
Dubrovnik
Went back into the Old Town and had a swim at the "city beach" (a concrete pier next to the port) and then got some lunch.
After lunch we decided to go and check-in to our cabin on the boat (the Meridijan), we were very surprised by how nice it was and how big our room was. Once we had unloaded our bags we went up on deck and met a few of the other passengers and sat in the sun for a while.
Later in the afternoon we were treated to a brief introduction to our crew and some rules by the tour company rep and then we sat down to a sumptuous meal of... limp soggy fried fish. This was to be a recurring theme of our trip: good times, shit - boat - food, especially for the vegetarians (Amanda, Lisa, and Lee were all vegetarians of some description). Deep fried battered cheese anyone?
After dinner we hung out with some new friends - Jason & Lisa from American and Sweden, and Grant & Lee from SA - and talked shit for several hours.
There was a broad mix of people on the boat - oldies from Canada and USA, young Australian lasses, several British lads, and then a bunch of us couples in the middle.
That night/early morning, the British lads got very drunk and caused a ruckus on deck, culminating with one of them telling one of the older passengers to "Fuck off" when he got up at 2am to ask them to be quiet and then the same guy falling down some stairs and busting his chin open. Suck to be him.

Monday
Dubrovnik -> Korcula
Boy, were the old people pissed...
Breakfasts were at 8am every day, so we were forced to get up early if we wanted to eat, and this was also when the boat would be motoring to our next destination each day.
After a few hours travel we stopped in a quiet cove for a swim and I was the first to jump from the top of the boat, which was 2 levels above the main deck. The water was very warm and flat.
We stayed in the cove for lunch, then set sail afterwards for Korcula.
Korcula is apparently the birthplace of Marco Polo, it has a lot of stray cats and a cool cocktail bar on top of an old medieval tower. We then had pizza for dinner again.

Tuesday
Korcula -> Hvar
Hvar was the biggest island and city on the trip (excluding Dubrovnik), it is also the "Celebrity Island" or "Party Island".
We walked up the hill behind the town and got some great views and photos from the fortress on top, we then went and purchased a mask and snorkel so I could look at things in the water and some snacks for the boat trips.
We had pizza again again for dinner on Hvar, and this was the most expensive ("Party Island"!!) and worst.
After dinner we made our way back to our boat, which was sharing a single berth at the port with 8 other boats. We had a few beers on board and got to laugh at a bunch of moronic - Australian - kids in the boat next to ours before calling it a night.

Wednesday
Hvar -> Trstenik
We were forewarned by the captain, that this was a very small village that did not contain many restaurants or things to see and do. As soon as we got there, we walked up to the Grgic winery which sells vinegar disguised as wine. From there we walked back to the village and went for a swim at the local pebble beach.
At dinner time (we didn't have pizza), a group of us went to one of the restaurants, it was quite an experience - the food took about an hour and a half to come out, with Jason getting his starter (olives) after his main. Luckily the food was excellent (especially the Sea bass) and the waiter came out after the meal and insisted we join him in a (free) brandy.

Thursday
Trstenik -> Mljet
Got to the village and walked around it a bit before going for a swim then having lunch. After lunch we walked into the national park and hiring bikes to ride around the salt lakes and also swimming in them.
We had pizza for dinner.

Friday
Mljet -> Sipan
Sipan was another small village like Trstenik, except this time the restaurants were more expensive. Just after we landed several passengers attempted a mutiny to get the captain to takes us straight back to Dubrovnik (instead of waiting till the next day). The captain denied their request, so they organised a Toga party on the boat instead.
Amanda and I walked around the village and we found a nice little sandy beach that I could swim in before we had dinner at one of the cheaper places (no pizza sadly).
The toga party was great fun, with most of the passengers wearing their week old dirty sheets and enjoying themselves.

Saturday
Sipan -> Dubrovnik
I would say over half the passengers had hangovers and we also had about half a metre of swell on our journey back which caused the boat to rock a lot. Pretty funny seeing (or not seeing) the people who didn't actually make it out on deck until we had docked.
Once docked we made our way into the Old Town for a swim and a walk before going to Nishta for dinner with the other vegetarian couples only to find that it was closed all weekend for a wedding. We were cursed with eating mediocre food. As luck would have it we found an excellent restaurant nearby that had the best range of vege dishes so far, and we all enjoyed ourselves.
After dinner, we decided we should probably learn something while on holiday so we went on a walking tour around the Old Town focusing on the Croatian War of Independence and the Siege of Dubrovnik. The guide was very good and we learned a lot (that I have now forgotten).

Sunday
Dubrovnik -> Gatwick
We had to be off the boat by 9am, so we had to be up even earlier to make breakfast, say some goodbyes, then leave.
Surprise surprise we went back into the Old Town and walked around the city walls. While up on the walls we spotted nice looking beach about 10 minutes walk away, so once we descended, and grabbed an ice cream we made our to it. Had a swim at the beach and lay in the sun for a while before walking back into the Old Town and having pizza for lunch (sick of fucking pizza).
After the last pizza we will eat for a long time (hopefully) we grabbed our bags and went to the airport and then fly back to the UK.

We had an absolute blast in Croatia, we met a whole load of great people that are now our friends (on Facebook) and had a nice relaxing time. After talking with other people who have also done the Croatia-on-a-boat-thing, it seems as if its the luck of the draw with getting a good chef and hence decent food. I can thoroughly recommend Croatia to anyone thinking of going, unless you are a vegetarian then I would only recommend it.

Most of the local people we encountered could speak some English and all of people we talked to in Dubrovnik had a decent grasp of it, which made things easier for us ignorant tourists. They even had a Peruvian pan flute band playing in the Old Town when we first turned up (there must have been a giant guinea pig outbreak), and there were ice cream shops everywhere.

More photos.

The rain in spain falls mainly on the plains

2009-09-15T20:36:00.007+01:00

We flew into Barcelona on Friday evening after a shortened day at work and pretty much just went to our hotel (via bus and metro) and watched some Barca TV (well I did anway, Amanda read her book). Lance, Karen, Ana, and Chris turned up about half an hour after us.

Apparently there was this guy called Gaudí, who was some fancy architect. It turns out he designed a lot of the prettier Barcelona buildings, and we checked a few of them out through the weekend.

We got up early (story of my life) and after walking to and then through La Rambla, we caught the metro to Casa Battlo. This was the first Gaudi building we saw and it was definitely different to most others. He chose to use as few straight lines as possible giving the exterior and interior lots of wavy curved surfaces. I would have hated to be one of the builders.

After paying a stupid amount of money to look through the interior we then went and checked out Sagrada Familia, which is a Guadi designed church. It has been under construction since 1882 and won't be finished before 2026. The front has the appearance of melted wax. I guess its art.

To complete the trifecta of Gaudi works for the day, we headed to La Pedrera, but this time only took some photos from outside.

It was getting pretty hot by the time we left La Pedrera that we decided to hit the beach. We went and changed at our hotel then caught the bus down to the city beach. We spent over 4 hours there and I realised that it was my first swim at a sandy beach in over 18 months. Time flies. We spent most of the afternoon either swimming, lying in the sun, drinking beer or sangria, eating, people watching, or a combination of them. People watching was fun as a lot of women had no issues with being topless, so sunglasses and awkward staring were definitely required.

After the siesta, we headed back to the hotel to wash up before heading out for dinner. We found a place that sold all the requirements (paella, tapas, and sangria) and settled down. We could tell it was a quality place, because it had pictures on the menus. After 8 jugs of sangria between the 6 of us, the waiter strangely cut us off, so we left and went to bed.

Lance, Chris, Karen, and myself got up early the next morning and went to FC Barcelona's stadium - Camp Nou for a tour. The stadium is huge, and we got to walk through several parts of it, although the home teams changing rooms and the grass were off limits. It was still cool to be in such an enormous stadium.

After we got bored of the tour we left to meet Ana and Amanda at Park Guell, which is another Gaudi designed installation. Sadly it started raining which made walking through the park a pain. After we had had enough Ana and Chris left to catch their flight, and the rest of us found another "quality" restaurant for more tapas.

After the meal, Lance and Karen left to catch their flight and Amanda and I had a jacuzzi on the hotels roof, then bought some food from a supermarket and chilled out in our hotel for the night.

We got up the next morning and sorted all our bags out, packed a lunch (with food from supermarket) and check out of our hotel. From the hotel we walked down to La Rambla and then the beach via Port Vell. Monday was a little colder than the previous days with a strong wind blowing some menacing clouds that I chose to ignore.

We sat on the beach and ate lunch and I had a quick swim. The clouds got worse.

It started raining. Not pissy english rain, but proper "God is smiting me" thunderstorm action. We got soaked running 100 metres to the bus stop.

After about an hour we got back to our hotel where we could change into dry clothes and hoping to wait out the worst of the storm before we had to go to the airport.

We got the airport in a quiet patch of dryish weather but then the flight was delayed a little due to more storms affecting planes visibility. Luckily Amanda was nicely doped up so she didn't care too much.

Barcelona is a cool city, but like Rome you get the feeling that most locals can't stand foreigners. I could go back, but maybe with a spanish speaker with me so they can catch what the locals are saying about us "english pigs".

The beach and its topless women were my highlight, but the Gaudi architecture would have been number one if it hadn't have been so expensive.

Photos here.

New York, New York

2009-09-07T08:31:00.009+01:00

Took an 8 hour flight from Heathrow to New Yorks JFK airport, and one we had gotten through the ridiculous customs checks (retina, face, and fingerprints), we met up with Ben who was coincidently in NYC at the same time as us. From the airport we grabbed a taxi into Manhattan in order to check-in to our hotel and finding a bar.

We had a quick look through Times Square then went on a hunt for a bar, we found one not too far away which looked OK and saddled up at the bar to order our drinks. Unfortunately not too far away from Times Square means expensive drinks and our simple domestic beers were no exception. But the bar staff were friendly especially when they start talking about Fallout 3 in front of me, well, then, it was all on. Poor Amanda and Ben had to sit there and listen to us talk geek until the bar closed.

We got up reasonably early the next day and headed to the Stardust Diner, where the wait staff sing. All well and good for a late lunch or dinner, but at 9.30 in the morning it worked better than coffee to wake us up.

From the diner we caught the subway down to near Ben's hostel in Chelsea. From there we subwayed down to Ground Zero.

Ground Zero is pretty boring, especially in the rain. Its basically one huge construction zone at the moment and there is nothing to see other than cranes and containers. I couldn't even get a feel for the events that took place there.

From Ground Zero we walked towards the Financial District which houses (among others) Wall Street, New York Stock Exchange, and the Federal Reserve (which got robbed in Die Hard 3). Nothing much to see there except the feet of some tall buildings. Got photos though.

After walking around there for a while we stopped in at a food hall thing quickly for a drink then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and down into DUMBO for a beer before heading back to Manhattan.

After leaving the bridge we subwayed to Union Square. Its not a very big square and we weren't there to look at it at all, we were there for Dogmatic, a gourmet hot dog shop. Awesome food, the best we had while we were in NYC (although it didn't have much competition).

After the hotdogs (plus chips and handmade soda) we walked North up Manhattan island and checked out some famous buildings:

By this time we were all pretty worn out so I decided we should go to White Castle for dinner. Unfortunately I got us pretty lost as I had the (wrong) directions in my head. So we ended up eating at some average Mexican franchise and then Amanda and I went back to our hotel and Ben caught up with some other friends. I found a couple of NFL games on TV at our hotel, so I was happy.

Sunday turned out be a scorcher of a day and we got up early and went out to Liberty and Ellis islands. It was great to be out in the sun and on the sea (albeit on a ferry) and the two islands are very cool. Liberty island of course holds the Stature of Liberty which is a dam impressive sight seen up close (I didn't know Eiffel worked on it) and we took a lot of pictures both for ourselves and for other tourists. Ellis island was the original initial destination for all immigrants attempting to enter USA, it holds a lot of stories and history and is definitely a worthwhile destination.

After getting off the ferry back in Manhattan we subwayed to a not-so-famous restaurant called White Castle. One word - Scheiße!. I did try two different burgers - the normal hamburger, and the (NEW!) pulled pork slyder. Both crap. I will not go again.

Anyway, we left WC and subwayed up to the Rockefeller plaza in order to up to the Top of the Rock, which is a publicly accessible (after payment) observation deck 70 stories up in the air. This is my highlight of the trip, we could see across to Brooklyn, New Jersey, and all of Manhattan. Central park looked very cool from up on top of the tower. Check out the photos (link at bottom) for some of the multitudes we took.

We ended up having a brief rest stop at our hotel before venturing out to Dangerfields, a comedy nightclub on the Upper East side once owned by the legendary Rodney Dangerfield.

Ben's friends has been offered a "deal" while walking through Times Square - buy 5 tickets for the price of 2($30). Sounds a pretty good deal until you to the club and notice that there is a 2 drink minimum per person and the cheapest beer is Heineken at $8 a bottle. Still, we had a great time with the comedians who performed. Most of them talked to and made fun of the audience and they had it so easy - other than us ( a group of 5 kiwis), there were two German nanny's sitting near a Polish guy who was sitting next to a Russian girl. Behind us was a group of 3 mothers with their 3 adult sons from Jersey who were on a "Mother Son day out". You could not pick a better audience than that.

After Dangerfield's we all headed for our respective hotels due to exhaustion.

We didn't have too much planned for Monday as we knew we would be exhausted (and we were) so we had a slight sleep in then checked out of our hotel before walking towards Central Park by way of some cheesey souvenir shops.

Central Park is awesome, especially on a sunny day like it was that day. Its easily the coolest city park I have been into and its huge and totally surrounded by large buildings. We caught up with Ben for a short while as we strolled through it, and tryed to play with the tame squirrels. After a while we had to say goodbye to Ben and walk back to our hotel to pick up our bags before we flew out.

Manhattan is huge, and thats only one of New York City's boroughs. You could spend two weeks there and not see everything you want. I would very much like to go back,even if its just to eat another gourmet hotdog.

Photos here

The week that was

2009-08-25T17:19:00.002+01:00

Just had an insanely busy week:

Friday - Went to Dublin
Saturday - Dublin
Sunday - Home from Dublin
Monday - Taking first load of things to new house
Tuesday - Went to see Wicked the musical
Wednesday - Farewell boys night for a friend
Thursday - Leaving drinks for the same friend and his fiancée
Friday - Packing up and sorting out room ready for the move the next day
Saturday - Watching All Blacks win and then moving house
Sunday - Cleaning up old place then getting drunk at our new local (German bier!)

As you can tell, not very much time for myself and my xbox at all.

Dublin

2009-08-24T16:17:00.006+01:00

A week ago, Amanda and I went to Dublin to get a taste of the city and visit a friend who recently got married. In a helicopter. Over Las Vegas. You can't make that shit up.

Anyway.

We flew into Dublin on Friday night and Sam (friend) picked us up and we drove back to her place about 10 minutes from the airport.

We then proceeded to get drunk, very drunk. We met her her flatmate, his weird friend, and her new husband Richie over the night before going to bed close to 6am. Some of the Irish accents are incredibly tricky to understand, especially when inebriated, most of the time I was just smile-and-nodding.

We awoke late on Saturday and had some late brunch then Sam and Richie drove us to Kilmainham Gaol which has a history through the Irish Republics history. The tour of the gaol was far more interesting than I expected, as it covered the different uprisings that helped form the republic from being under British rule.

After the gaol tour the Sam, Amanda and I walked to the Guinness Storehouse, where we completed another tour. This time the tour was not so good, its basically a prettied up popularised brewery tour. We did get a free pint of Guinness at the end of the tour though.

We drank our pints at the top of the building while enjoying the views of the surrounding city then went for a whistle-stop tour through some of Dublin to see the sites, such as:
Christ Church Cathedral
Trinity College
Temple Bar
and the Quays

By this stage we were tired and hungry so we stopped at an average burger joint for dinner. Richie meet us after dinner and we drove back to Sam's place via the best off-license I have ever been too. They had the largest range of beers I have ever seen outside an actual beer importer. I picked up some Samuel Adams, just because I could.

We then spent another night sitting around a table drinking and talking, except this time we went to bed before 2am. Just.

Sunday:
Sam and Richie had to go to a Christening in the morning and they were kind enough to drop us off at the Hill of Tara on the way. The HoT was apparently the seat of power for the King of Ireland back in old-times, and has some cool history and a few strange shaped earth mounds.

We spent just over an hour there before Sam and Richie picked us up and took us for a drive to Howth for a walk along a sandy beach and some lunch.

It was great to see sand for the first time in over a year and actually walk along it, pity it was a windy day otherwise I would have had a splash in the water. Instead we sat down in a pub for fish and chips and a cheeky pint.

After lunch we had to get to the airport for our flight home so Sam and Richie kindly chauffeured us there as well, and away we went on a jet plane.

Photos.

Paris in the Summer

2009-08-17T12:49:00.002+01:00

Saturday July 11th
Got up at 3am(!) to taxi to Kings Cross in order to catch the 5.25am Eurostar train to Paris. Not fun being up that early. We caught the early train because it was only £59 each to get there, which is generally quite good compared to peak times.

Once we got into Paris we braved the urine infested Metro system and made our way to our hotel in the Latin quarter. Unfortunately we were too early to check in, so we left our bags there and then rushed to start a 3 hour walking tour of Paris.

The tour was cake (bad), mainly because all of the sights (Eiffel tower, Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, etc) are all spread out, so a single tour past those places would take all day. Instead we saw things from a distance, several kilometres away. Luckily it was free and we had no qualms walking away at the end and not tipping the guide.

After the tour, we made our way back to the hotel where we could finally check in, shower and have a small afternoon nap that stretched into the evening. When I looked at my watch and noticed the time we panicked a little and had to quickly form a plan for the night.

The hotel room had a few tourist pamphlets of things to do and eat in Paris, and it had an advertisement for Harry's New York Bar. This is quite a famous bar and was where the Bloody Mary was first made.

We walked across Paris to get to the bar, but it was worth it. It was a little on the expensive side for a cocktail but when you factor in that a Bloody Mary consisted of a glass of vodka with a splash of tomato juice, it wasn't so bad. They also had a piano player pumping out some jazz hits while we had a drink or two. We stayed a bit too late at the bar and had to walk back to the hotel because the metro had closed for the night.

Sunday 12th July
Got up early and metroed to the Arc de Triomphe which is in the middle of a rather large roundabout. The monument is pretty impressive but the scores of gypsy women begging are not.

After the AdT we walked to the Eiffel Tower which is truly a marvel of engineering and rivets (a lot of rivets). We didn't go up the tower because the lines were too long but we walked around it and took some photos and got hassled by the people selling cheap junk to stupider tourists than us then made our way back to the hotel for another rest stop before heading to another walking tour - this time to Montmartre and Basilique du Sacré-Cœur.

The walking tour was operated by the same people as the previous one, but this time we had to pay 10 Euros each before leaving. This tour was a little better than the free tour, but it was still mostly crap. We started off outside the Moulin Rouge which is in the red light district of Paris. We then made our way up and around MontMatre stopping at places featured in the move Amelie and looking at a number of space invader 'street art' before getting to the top of MontMatre and looking through Sacre Coeur.

After leaving Sacre Coeur we walked back down the hill past some more time-filling things before the tour disbanded at the bottom of the steps up to Sacre Coeur where we were once again surrounded by guys selling cheap crap to stupid tourists, this time: friendship bracelets. Those guys were too big and scary to be my friend.

We then metroed back to the Latin Quarter and had a meal at a tourist trap restaurant that sold beers for almost 10 Euros each. On the plus side I did get to sample Escargot (like black garlicky shrimp), frogs legs (like skinny fishy chicken wings), and Foie Gras (delicious). This meal was more expensive than I would normally pay, but it had 3 of the 5 things I wanted to try whilst in Paris.

Monday 13th July
We got up early again (getting sick of this) and made a beeline straight for the Eiffel tower, we got there about 15 minutes after it opened and already the lines were huge, so we joined the shortest one. After waiting about 45 minutes and finally getting close to the ticket office did we then realise we were in the line for the stairs, all ~700 of them.

We walked up every single one of them took a lot of photos and enjoyed the view on a great sunny day and then walked back down them all. We only went up to the second level and considered going up to the top, but the line for that elevator was about as long as the lines down the bottom and we had other things to do. So no champagne for us.

We left the Eiffel tower and walked to the Louvre. This was probably my favourite part of the trip (behind eating), there were a lot of awesome artworks and sculptures to see. We spent about 3 hours in the museum and saw less than a quarter of the total contents and what we did see was at pace.

We saw the popular exhibits like the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and some others suggested by our free audio guide. There are some great pieces of art in the Louvre and I highly recommend it to anyone that visits Paris. Although be prepared to push through people at the more famous pieces to get a photo.

We left the Louvre and made our back to our hotel then to a nearby cheap resturant so I could try Steak Tartare. Its not so good, on the plus side it was another thing I had wanted to sample. Amanda had a nice salad.

Tuesday 14th July
We finally got a sleep in, and enjoyed it. We stayed in bed and watched the Bastille day parade and the accompanying fly-over by 20 odd French Air Force jets and planes from through the ages.

After checking out of the hotel we went to the Père Lachaise cemetery where Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Frédéric Chopin (among others) are buried.

We spent about an hour walking around the cemetery (which is huge by the way) and then went and did some souvenir shopping before heading back to the hotel to collect our bags and hop on the train back to London.

Paris was pretty fun, but we did a boatload of walking that I would not want to repeat any time soon. So far, its second behind Rome of the best places to see, but unfortunately with popularity comes beggars, junk-vendors, and tourist traps.

You got to take the good with the bad sometimes.

Photos:
Mine @ Picassa (55)
Amandas on Facebook(192)

Adventures in food: Pizza Burger

2009-08-03T21:28:00.003+01:00

Well I did it.

It took me about 2 hours to prepare, cook, and assemble, but I think all in all it was worth it.

Ingredients:
2.4 Kg mince
2 tomatoes
1 onion
1 jar of gherkins/pickles
BBQ sauce
Hot sauce
400 gram bacon
1 ball of mozzarella
2 x 12 inch pepperoni pizzas
Spices for mince (onion salt, garlic, Italian herbs)

Photos here

I managed to tenderly cut the monstrosity into 8 pieces to share with guests, I could just finish a slice by myself, while others polished off one and a half easily.

Lessons learned:
2.4 Kgs of mince makes for a lot of dry burger (I might have cooked it too long) so next time I will need to either make thinner patties or add more sauce, bacon, cheese, salad to moisten the beast up a bit.

More bacon.

The pizzas I used were thin crust, deep dish or pan pizzas would be the best because the innards just destroyed the bottom pizza.

If I decrease the mince and therefore decrease the height of the burger it might be possible to eat it with fingers instead of knife and fork. I feel dirty using utensils to eat a burger, I am from the coast bro.

Next
I heard of a kebab wrapped in a pizza and then deep fried. Might have to give that one a go, although anything using a deep fry is pretty much out. I also heard about chocolate covered bacon, which sounds easy and tastilicious.

Adventures in food: BLT

2009-07-27T20:22:00.004+01:00

I got pretty bored at work today so was shopping around looking for websites that sell and ship bacon (as I do) and I got progressively hungry (as I do) and decided that I would have a BLT for dinner.

A couple of friends and myself have vowed to make the Pizza Burger, and I thought I should give the pizzas = bread theorem a trial run before the big day so I decided to make the Pizza BLT.

Main ingredients assembled.

I went for some home made peppered bacon (smoked bacon + liberal amount of pepper).

Constructing the masterpiece.

Right before the lid goes on.

The completed BLT.

There was more cheese and marinara sauce (from the pizzas) than I expected.

It was actually reasonably tasty and a hearty meal for one, although now I need a nap.

And a run.

Adventures in food: Inamo

2009-07-27T20:07:00.002+01:00

Last week a couple of newly married friends - Allison and Patrick - stopped by London on their honeymoon travels and Amanda and I caught up with them over dinner.

We want to a Japanese restaurant called Inamo, which is a moderately expensive place with a very high tech menu and ordering system. We had so much fine just playing with the table top computers that it was hard to notice the very good food.

A sample video from youtube is here: Video

We took some photos and they are available on Amandas Facebook Album, chances are if you know Allison and/or Patrick then you also have facebook.

Birthday dinner

2009-07-18T11:37:00.004+01:00

As it was my birthday on thursday I decided to do something special (and expensive). Amanda and I went to a Gordan Ramsey restaurant called Maze Grill as a method for me to ingest Kobe beef. Unfortunately they don't sell Kobe beef but instead Wagyu beef which is the type of cattle Kobe originates from. The cows themselves are pretty pampered during rearing and as such is more expensive than your usual steak.

The doors of the restaurant. Someone is paid to open them for you.

We started off with a couple of cocktails at the bar before being ushered to our table and the impressive wine list and a small speech from a waiter about the different types of beef they sell. I had already decided to get Wagyu previous to making the reservation but the other steaks did look enticing. This is also where I find out that the Wagyu cost £90 for either a 10oz (280 grams) sirloin or a 8oz (226 grams) rib eye. Thinking very little of sirloin, I ordered the rib eye cooked "blue", the waiter looked down his nose at me and after a brief stare down suggested that I might like to try it at least medium-rare due to the steaks intense marbling, I felt like such a small town hick and relented.

A few minutes later when he bought out our entrees (roasted tomato soup for Amanda and octopus things for me) he notified me that they had no rib eye left so instead I would get a 12oz (340 grams) sirloin. This unsettled me as I generally consider sirloin to be prole steak but I held my toungue as Wagyu sirloin would probably be better than normal supermarket sirloin.

Amanda with her soup. It was pretty tasty.

Me and my octopus concoctions, they weren't that good.

My god, the waiter knows his stuff. The simple sirloin is now the best piece of steak I have ever had. It is bought to the table on a wooden chopping board with a roasted garlic bulb and the separate side dishes. It was cooked perfectly and marbled fat gave the meat a very rich flavour. Amanda had some fish that she wasn't too fond of.

Us, just before digging in.

The steak

Digging in.

After dinner the waiter bought out a small chocolate mousse with a candle in it which was a nice touch.

I then paid the bill of ~£240. The single largest 2 person meal bill I have ever paid (and hopefully will ever pay). We then walked to the tube station in the pouring rain to finish the night.

In conclusion, I have to rate Maze Grill as the best and most expensive restaurant I have so far visited. The wait staff and food were excellant, possibly because we were quite drunk and giving them names like Al Pacino (he had a weird hunch and a weirder voice, should have been Marlon Brando but we were drunk), Pete (he looked like the character from 2 Guys and a Girl), and Jerry (he looked like a young Jerry "The King" Lawler).

If you are in London and want to go to an up market steakhouse, this is the place to go, without a doubt.

Paris by train

2009-07-18T11:36:00.001+01:00

Le coming. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week.

Alton Towers

2009-07-07T19:56:00.002+01:00

My flatmates and I (excluding Amanda) went to Alton Towers on a week day.

I did not take the camera but we had a pretty good time even though I can't prove it. Considering it was a week day and not school holidays it was pretty busy with us waiting up to 45 minutes for a single ride.

Most of the rides were awesome and well worth the wait, we had to pay a bit extra to fast track past the lines for one of the rides to ensure we got on it within our allocated day but it was worth it.

Alton Towers is a huge place with rides being places into separate section and each section roughly 15 - 20 minutes walk (or 5 minute gondola ride) between them so you have to rush if you want to ride different rides across the park.

I still think Thorpe park is cooler but am not bothered about trying out Alton Towers.

The Races

2009-07-07T19:18:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago a whole bunch of us went the Royal Ascot Horse races.

After the hilarity with lost tickets (not ours), most of us got in on time and had a good day.

We all got dressed up (suits, ties, black leather lace up shoes and the girls all wore dresses) and watching some little guys ride some horses around a circular track while predicting monetarily who would win.

We had a great day of tomfoolery, betting, drinking (of course), and judging other people acting like idiots.

Here are some pictures, sure to make the older folk gush.

Download festival

2009-06-24T20:11:00.002+01:00

Lance and I had a great extended weekend in Donnington watching alot of bands perform at the annual Download Festival. I was very impressed by most the bands we watched, especially the headlining acts and some of the smaller ones.

There was a lot of bands that I wanted to see because the chances of them touring New Zealand are very small and in that respect I was very very happy.

I didn't take any worthwhile photos because I left the camera in London and there isn't many photo opportunities at a music concert unless you are right up the front (which we weren't) and getting moshed on.

Suffice it to say, my opion of British music festivals has slightly changed from the Reading fracas, and thats mainly because the facilities were a bit better and we knew what to expect.

My opinion of - British - youth has not changed however, they are and always will be fucking idiots.

Blog post coming

2009-06-10T22:09:00.005+01:00

[Update] Post written.

I had a great blog post over halfway written yesterday detailing what we have been up to and where we have been. Unfortunately I got hit by the didn't save bug and lost everything I had typed. I have re-written most but it will take patience and time to get the post in a finished state.

I am heading off the Lance to http://www.downloadfestival.co.uk/home/ tomorrow till Monday so deal with it or you can kiss Mike Patton's ass.

I will be updating my twitter page reasonably regularly over the next 5 days as I can do that from my phone. So check that if you get bored.

Rural Engerland

2009-05-26T19:38:00.010+01:00

Over the last month we have completed several road trips to various spots around Southern England. This is good for a couple of reasons:

We can't come all this and not see England
We can't (realistically) judge the UK on spending time only in London.
It was good weather for travelling.

Our first trip was a Sunday drive to a small village called Turville. We drove through some very small back roads on our trip and almost got lost a few times but we eventually made it.

Its a quaint little place with less than 30 houses, one pub and a windmill. As the wikipedia article says the village is semi-famous with the windmill being one of the shooting locations for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The windmill is sadly private property but you can still see it as it overlooks the village from a near-by hill.

We had lunch at the pub and relaxed in the sun before heading back to London and the traffic.

Photos.

A couple of weeks later we hired a car with Andrew and Rae and went for another drive, this time to the gayest town in the UK, Brighton.

We got up early and trained to Gatwick airport to pick the car up, this put us some way out of London, and so was only a short drive, putting us in Brighton just after 9am. Most things weren't yet open so we grabbed some breakfast from a seaside cafe and enjoyed the sun, sea air, and the local people and custom.

After breakfast we walked along the beach towards the pier which would be open by the time we got to it.

Once at the pier we walked along it to the end, taking in the different things along the way like the small theme park, the game arcades, the bars and the seafood vendors.

Once we got to teh end Andrew, Rae, and I went a on a couple of "thrill" rides to say we had done it then pretty much turned around and walked back down the pier. It is an odd feeling being on a roller coaster above water and being far from land.

After leaving the pier we walked through some of Brighton and checked out the famous Royal Pavilion and then the Lanes. We didn't spend long there and we didn't see half of what Brighton has to offer, but we got a small taste which was enough to say we had been there.

After Brighton, we drove West along the coast towards Portsmouth and stopped at a beach along the way. I was dying for a swim and a paddle and had bought my togs especially for the occasion. Sadly the tide was out and when we finally got the water after walking on rough stones (I have lot my tough kiwi feet) the water was freezing so I didn't submerge or even splash around.

We got something to eat and took some pictures and headed back to London in the late afternoon ready for the next day.

Photos.

The next day we once again hooked up with Andrew and Rae and then went to Bath via a small part of the Salisbury Plain.

We got up early again and took off to Stonehenge. We got there at the reasonable time of around 10am and it was already packed with people. After paying the rather steep entrance fee and getting a "free" audio guide we made our way to and around the monument.

The audio guide is pretty bogus but seeing the stones at least once is a must-do. We even managed to subtly mock some of the tourists behind their backs while we were there.

After getting a decent amount of photos at Stonehenge, we continued on towards Bath.

We first grabbed something to eat then went and paid more money to check out the Roman Baths which gave Bath its name.

I was not too impressed at how much it cost to go look at some water and some old stuff, but more conservative members of the party were happy to go there, so it was decided.

After the baths we went to Sally Lunn's house (where the bun of the same name originated) and was upset to find out the original version didn't have icing, sultanas, or even sugar. Nevertheless we bought 4 of them.

Photos.

Better Berlin than never

2009-05-14T19:52:00.002+01:00

So we went to Berlin over a month ago and I haven't posted about it.

Oops.

Its been so long I have pretty much forgotten what we did there. Berlin is now one of my favourite cities. Its a great mix of history and modern architecture. I also ran the Berlin Half Marathon.

As we all know Berlin had a lot of issues, mainly being the heart of Nazi Germany during WWII and the Berlin wall. If you walked around Berlin, without knowing it was Berlin, you probably wouldn't even know it. As like most other Germans that are deeply ashamed of their past, and have not done anything to draw attention to it. Understandable.

We saw a decent amount of the main city via a free walking tour plus we got to walk around Sachsenhausen concentration camp which is pretty shocking.

As I said, I ran the half marathon which was probably harder than I thought, I managed finish in just over 2 hours, but it took almost a week to recover. The things we do.

I managed to taste a very good bier as well. Acquired taste I'm told, unpolitely.

Photos!!!!

Dedicated follower of fashion

2009-03-26T19:52:00.002Z

Today I joined up to twitter, which is a micro blogging service, that enables me to not post updates on another site.

This site has features like small SMS size updates only and being able to be updated from various place such as Facebook and my cell phone.

Feel free to bookmark my twitter page or become a follower or whatever lame jargon it uses for you guys to keep track of what I am or are not doing.

I haven't looked it into too much other than signing up and testing my ability to update it, so I don't know what it can do, although if you listen to any body in the IT/marketing/advertising adminisphere here its the next best thing since email.

sw9 9qg

2009-03-19T22:29:00.002Z

With the addition of London to Googles already large Street View database you can now see where we live.

We have the two bins out the front with '9' painted on them.

The top two windows are our bedroom, the bottom bay window is the lounge.

Its an old photo as it doesn't show the nice pink sign nailed to our front wall.

Exciting.

Status update 80085

2009-03-02T19:40:00.003Z

Its been a while since I have posted anything meaningful (assuming something meaningful has been posted at all) and there is a reason for that. I have gotten into the habit of only posting when I have done anything remotely interesting and then I wait 2 weeks out of laziness.

Today I will remedy this. At least for this fortnight.

On Saturday we got up early after a rather late night drinking and watching France beat Wales in the six nations to see the Chiefs lose to the Sharks in a weird game. lance came over in the afternoon and we played Street Fighter 4 for about 6 hours, then he left and I went to bed. Good story.

As I said, its been pretty quiet around here lately, as we have been saving a bit of money and discussing an end-game for this European period.

We have a list of must sees before we came back, and hopefully we will get there before the year is out.

First up is Berlin (Germany again!!). Berlin is supposed to be an awesome city with a lot of things to see, I'm hoping too see some of them while running the Berlin half marathon. Should be interesting as my usual exercise is carrying a box of fried pigeon home from Chicken Express around the corner. I managed to tweak my hamstring last week and its made training tricky to say the least. If it doesn't get better by the time I get to Berlin I'm just going to have to Buck Shelford it and run through the pain. Granted a hamstring is not a torn scrotum, but as the author of this I am allowed to make inaccurate comparisons if I want too.

I might post something within in the standard 2 week buffer, but then again I might not. Don't hold your breath.

Anas birthday in Riga = The perfect boys weekend

2009-02-12T20:05:00.008Z

Riga, Latvia, a city and country with a long history of abuse at the hands of both Russia and Germany. A country until very recently has had one of the fastest economic growths in the EU. A city that is the only source of growth in the country while the rural areas starve.

It was only -not- fitting then that Ana wanted to have her birthday in a city that the same day we arrived was witness to anti-government rioting.

While the economy was quite strong still (it was pretty much 1 GB Pound = 1 Latvian Lat) prices for things were still quite cheap. E.g. it cost us 9 Lats for a 20 minute taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, 2 Lats for a pint of good beer, and 20 Lats per person per night at the hotel.

We drank our fill every night.

Beer.

Joe, Alistair, Chrissy, Karen, and Lance drinking.

The only problem with trying to drink and eat a lot is the terrible customer service. Orders will regularly take 30 minutes to be delivered including drinks and sandwiches. Unless you go up to the bar and order it yourself or ring ahead.

There is a lot of culture and history in Riga with museums and points of interest dedicated to remembering the different occupations of hostile forces, we didn't do any of that, although some of the girls did. Instead we went shooting and drank more.

We did partake in a self guided walking tour on Saturday (1 day after the riots) and were watched everywhere we went by riot police with automatic weapons. Especially when we walked towards the Presidents palace and past normal troops, undercover agents, and dog squads.

Shooting
This was conducted in an old Soviet fallout shelter and consisted of us paying 40 Lats to shoot 5 rounds from each of:

Expensive? Yes. Fucking awesome? Hell yes!!

My target showing Glock, AK, and shotgun hits.

The groups target hits.

Andrew and I decided to pay extra to fire a couple of other guns:

Shooting a large revolver just like Dirty Harry is not something I could say no to if I had the chance. Unfortunately the cheapskates loaded the revolver with .38 specials, which is a cheaper, weaker round than the magnum. It still generated a lot of kick and muzzle flash.

We had a pretty good meal on Saturday that was still cheap and then hit a few bars to celebrate Anas birthday.

On Sunday we went bobsledding.

Yes.

Bobsledding.

It ruled. I do not know how people could do that regularly because it is very rough on your back and neck. Its like the roughest roller coaster you have been on and then as you go around each corner, someone punches you in the side of the head. I loved it.

We didn't do the full Olympic track (video), instead we started a bit further down but still managed to get up to 100 Km/hr while cornering. Nuts.

When you get into the sleigh the instructor tells you to keep a strong back and neck like an I, when you are subjected to 4 Gs of angular acceleration on some corners you can't stop your backing from becoming a C.

Andrew and I admiring the start of the track.

Our winning time of the day.

The instructor, Kyle, and Andrew, and me starting our run.

The bottom.

Aimee, Ana, and Chrissy in the sleigh.

You can see the fear in the girls eyes.

I found Riga very cool but also very depressing if you look under the surface of things. The fun and dangerous activities make you temporarily forget about how bad the locals have and still have it.

Still, most of us had a grand old time.

Salzburg again again

2009-01-05T21:59:00.001Z

Photos are included with Kaprun, but start here.

We didn't do much once we got into Salzburg, except check in and relax a little bit.

We found a cheap pizza place for dinner that was quite kooky but tasty and inexpensive.

Sunday
We all went up to the castle and had a good look around most of Salzburg.
For dinner we went to the Sternbrau, which is an old brewery/restaurant, it was incredibly tasty, with dishes such as deer stew, pork knuckles and coalfish. Plus their beer was pretty good and hearty as well.

Monday
We had another sleep-in and then went on a Bavarian mountains and salt-mines tour. The tour consisted of us driving through some mountains then doing a tour of some salt mines which were mildly entertaining for the fact that we got to ride some short slides down into lower levels of the mines.

That night we all got dressed up (or as much as we could with what clothes we bought) and went to the Stiftskeller at St Peters Abbey for dinner and concert. This was quite an expensive but fun thing to do. It was a 3 course meal and between each course we were provided with different music written by Mozart and performed by a string quartet and two opera singers. I am glad we went.

The main course meat was called 'Capon', which was described as a special chicken. Little did we know that its actually neutered old rooster. Lucky it was very tasty then.

Tuesday
We walked around the farmers markets near the hostel and then pretty much flew home. We bought a few things like some chilli cheese and some good food while we were there as well.

Kaprun

2009-01-04T16:37:00.007Z

We spent 7 days in Kaprun over Christmas. The plan was to do some snowboarding and then relax and do some other activities that were listed on the tourism website.

Photos.

Saturday
In order to get to Kaprun we had to train from Salzburg to Zell am See, then catch a bus or taxi from there to Kaprun. When we arrived in Zell am See it was showing very hard, like thumbnail sized flakes. Snow fights ensued. It's awesome blasting someone in the face while they are trying to put their pack on. Honorific.

We grabbed a taxi from Zell am See to Kaprun to save on hassle and checked ourselves into our hotel. We then read through all the brochures and literature we received from our tour organiser and attempted to suss out snowboard hire options.

Our accommodation was half-board (breakfast and dinner included) and there is a distinct separation at meal times between half board guests and full board guests. Full board get better service, better food and better atmosphere in a dimly lit room and cosy booths. Half board get to sit in a big brightly lit room that reminded me of a wedding reception except no one was getting married, you had to pay for what you ate, and their was no hot bridesmaids to stare at over your glass. The food was average for the most part, unless you are a vegetarian, then you got a selection of pickled vegetables and spaghetti.

Sunday
We managed to suss out a 4 day hire and 2 day lesson "deal" with the tour organiser and this was to be our first day of snowboarding. Let me say this now, snowboarding is not a cheap pastime. Snowboarding requires pretty good core strength and some of us lacked that which made it difficult standing back up after falling over (which happened a lot). Don't even get me started on trying to use the button lift with a snowboard.

The instructors were friendly enough and most of us survived the first day with our confidence still intact and looking forward to the next day. It was a very early night that night.

Monday
As it hadn't snowed since we arrived the learners slopes were pretty icy and not too good to learn on, so our instructor decided to take us up onto the glacier (Mount Kitzsteinhorn) as the snow was softer and easier to ride on.

The learners slope on the glacier was way steeper and windier than the previous slope and scared a couple of the girls. Visibility was pretty crap as it was still snowing and we were riding through cloud. Halfway through the day Amanda and I decided to call it quits as we weren't having fun continuously falling over and being cold so we left the group and went back to our shower. It turns out in the afternoon the conditions got worse and one guy broke his wrist going down the "learners" slope.

Tuesday
While the others went back to the mountain to snowboard, Amanda and I relaxed and then went up and took some pictures. We met the others for lunch then went back down the mountain and walked around Kaprun.

Wednesday
So as not to completely waste my snowboard hire, I decided to leave Amanda to her own devices and went with the others to Schmittenhöhe to get some decent rides under my belt. We had a good morning of riding the beginners slopes and then I decided I had had enough and left them to it.

Wednesday is Christmas Eve which is also when Austrians celebrate Christmas so we had a better meal for dinner, then we all retired to our respective rooms to call our families in NZ who were just getting up on Christmas day. After the obligatory phone calls we had a couple of quiet drinks to celebrate some more.

Thursday
We had organised before coming on the trip to do Secret Santa between the 6 of us. River was kind enough to randomly select each persons target for us. We all went our own way after breakfast and met up on the summit of Kitzsteinhorn for the unwrapping. This will probably be the only time I will ever open presents at over 3Km above sea level.

We had organised a sleigh ride the day before so we rushed to that, only to get to the meeting point and find out it was more of a cart ride, and the gathering dusk did not help our picture taking.

After the sleigh ride we went back to the hotel for dinner and then we all played cards, drank cheap red wine and apple schnapps.

Friday
A couple of the others decided to hire snowboards for the day and went back up onto the glacier. Amanda and I decided to head into Zell am See and take a look around. Unfortunately it was still a holiday so all of the shops were closed so we walked around the lake for a little bit then headed back as it was far to cold to spend any more time than we needed to outside.

That night we headed to Piesendorf for some hilarity. As it hadn't snowed since Saturday, a lot of the mountain was closed so we could only ride the innertubes and zipflbobs. We had some great fun though, you can get some serious speed up on zipflbobs before you get speed wobbles and crash.

Saturday
We left Kaprun and made our way (slowly) back to Salzburg. We checked ourselves back in to the hostel from our previous stay.

Salzburg stay details coming in next post.

Salzburg again [Updated]

2008-12-19T15:08:00.006Z

Just got into our hostel in Salzburg after training from Nuremberg.

We spent one night in Nuremberg to check out the famous Christmas markets.

A cool 2 story merry go round.

Some type of currywurst, except it was fried chicken kebabs instead of sausage. Tasty.

A section of the market.

Gluwein.

We got into Nuremberg at 11am after an 8am flight from London. We managed to stay awake until 7pm before we crashed out and slept through till 10am the next morning.

We were shattered but I don't think the multiple glühweins we had or the Eierpunsch (that was very strong) at the end of the night helped at all.

Am looking forward to the bar opening here and happy hour starting.

Update
Well the bar opened and we got trolleyed with a bunch of Aussie kids doing a Top Deck tour of Europe. By the time the rest of our group turned up I was drunk enough to walk outside in a t-shirt when the temperature was less than zero.

Some moron and a drunk Austrian dude who was trying to pick up ladies by giving them his cool belt.

Australians.

Me, Amanda, Rae, and Andrew drunks.

The morning after was not so kind to some of us.

Pity we had to get on a couple of trains to Kaprun.

Jorvik

2008-12-17T08:34:00.002Z

A group of us went to York on the weekend to explore more of what England has to offer.

We trained up late on Friday night with some road sodas, after a pub dinner. We got into York after midnight and walked in the rain to our B&B.

Saturday it was raining too. Then it snowed.

We went and checked out:

We did the ghost walk at night in the snow and cold but it was reasonably entertaining, then we sat down for a nice hot curry.

Sunday lightened up a little, and stopped raining although it was still very cold.

We went and looked at Cliffords tower - the only piece of the castle still standing and then some of us went to the Castle Museum.

Overnight, the river had risen up and flooded a lot of riverside property. Apparently this is really common, we got some funny photos of this. Part of the ghost walk involved us walking near the river and leaving from a riverside pub, that was about 2 - 3 feet under water the next day.

I don't really feel the need to go back to York.

Photos.

November to remember

2008-12-15T19:35:00.005Z

After the lull of October it was a quite a change to get back into being busy again and November provided some highlights for us.

Autumn rugby internationals
We travelled to Edinburgh and Cardiff to watch the All Blacks beat Scotland and Wales. Both trips were lots of fun with different groups of friends going on each trip.

Edinburgh was a little wet but we flew up there and stayed in a very nice and somehow cheap hotel for a couple of nights. Instead of going out and finding a pub after the game we ended up playing card games and drinking in our huge hotel room. Murryfield is a huge stadium and it was packed out. Very cool atmosphere and no troubles whatsoever in getting too and from it.
Photos

We booked a package tour to go to Cardiff: "luxury" coach to and from Cardiff, plus match ticket, and accommodation for Saturday night. The accommodation was not luxury and was very dodgy. We even met the cleaner who was obviously not a very good listener (twice). I didn't think too much of cardiff (after 1 night), it seemed like a standard big city. Millennium Stadium is awesome, easily the coolest rugby stadium I have been in. I was told by a scarily large drunk welshman, that the real Wales is outside Cardiff. He also told me he loved me, and one of his friends (who was just as big) thought it wise to tickle me... I did not stop him.
We went into a pub after the game and got to witness the Welsh humour and hospitality first hand. Every one was so friendly to us that it seemed strange after coming from "fuck off I don't know you" London. I'm thinking about going back to Wales (but not Cardiff).
Photos.

We watched the Ireland game with some of Amanda's friends in Chiswick then caught up with some other kiwis after the game for some drinks.

We stayed home for the Munster game (school night) and also had a quiet one for the England game, as we were gearing up for thanksgiving the day after.

It didn't take place in November but we also went to watch Australia play the Barbarians at Wembley stadium. Sadly it was not a great night: bad pitch conditions, dam cold, several Barbarians who had no idea what Barbarians rugby is, and a pie stand not selling pies. Australia deserved to win though.
Photos.

Thanksgiving
As mentioned, we held the second annual Graham's Thanksgiving Feast at our place on the Sunday after traditional thanksgiving. I put on the turkey, stuffing, and gravy. Amanda made pumpkin pies. I request everyone else to bring a plate each.
We had:

Maple bacon turkey with pigs in blankets and gravy
Stuffing
Candied sweet potatoes
Mashed potato
Roast potatoes
Broccoli and Cauliflower bake
Non-meat option for the vegetarians

Then dessert:

Pumpkin pie
Pecan pie
Apple crumble
Cream and Ice cream

Every dish and meal was absolutely fantastic, the meal and afternoon was perfect. Pity we didn't have any Americans to make it authentic.
Photos.

Winter Wonderland
Amanda booked us in for ice skating in Hyde Park one night. I was very sceptical right up until I stepped onto the ice. I have pretty bad coordination at the best of times, I can't dance (unless you count shuffling), I can't skate, and I haven't roller bladed in years (because I am straight).
It was a whole lot of fun, we didn't fall over at all (I came close a couple of times from speed wobbles). Plus once we had finished there was a German Christmas market to purchase mulled wine and hot chips from.
Photos.

The sound of silence: October

2008-11-17T19:34:00.002Z

October was a pretty quiet month for us. In fact there is only two things worth writing about and even then they aren't anything special.

First off we went to Thorpe Park.
80% of the flatmates took the day off work on a Wednesday and we drove to Staines to check it out.

We decided to go on the Wednesday to avoid queues and children, we managed to do that for the most part even though there were several school groups there, we didn't have to queue for very long to get on any of the open rides.

Youtube has a few POV videos of the rides, my favourites were the Stealth, Colossus, and the Nemesis Inferno. They are the main coasters, the rest of the rides are spinny, droppy, or turny rides that aren't as cool as roller coasters.

One thing we couldn't avoid were Chavs, so many chavs. I managed to get Amanda on a couple of rides but for the most part she didn't join in the more "scarier" rides.

The weekend after Thorpe park we hosted a Halloween party "slash" house warming. Not much to say that the pictures can't. Pretty messy. I had the unfortunate luck of mopping the floor the next day.

Combined photos of both.

How to spend money on beer

2008-10-11T15:40:00.005+01:00

The trip to Munich for the 2008 Oktoberfest was an absolute blast. We drank a decent amount of beer (not as much as others) and had a wide variety of currywurst (I did anyway).

We left the house on Friday morning at 5.30am and finally got to our hostel in Munich after 3pm. Thanks in part to our cheap flights that included a stopover in Berlin, some 'discussions' over train tickets at Munich airport, and the airport being 45 minutes from Munich.

Once we had checked in we went for a wander around the surrounding neighbourhood for some refreshments. We found a street vendor selling currywurst so I talked the team (Lance, Karen, Amanda, and myself) into having some. We then found a quiet bar and settled down for some bier.

Price per litre: 6 - 7 euros.

We stayed there for a good couple of hours then decided to go someplace else. We were shocked to find it had gotten dark and rained while we were in the pub. We found a bar/cafe and decided to have some dinner. I had currywurst again, the others didn't. We HAD to have a bier with dinner as well.

Price per litre: 6 - 7 euros.

After dinner we went back to the hostel to sleep, we had planned to get up early on Saturday to try and get into a bier hall as quick as we could. At about midnight the rest of our group (Ana, Chris, Andrew, Rae, Janine, and Jason) turned up from different flights.

We got up at 6am and had a quick breakfast at the hostel then took the U-Bahn (underground) to the Oktoberfest grounds. We got to Theresienwiese just on 8am and went to one of the bigger halls to line up. There were queues outside every hall and Ana said we would have the best chance of getting into Hacker-Festzelt as it seats about 10,000 people. At about 10am we found out that the hall had been full since 7am. Awesome.

We eventually find a smaller hall (Weinzelt) that has some tables on a balcony with some free space so we sttle down there and order some bier. This hall only sold weissbier in half litres, fine by me. We ended up spending about 7 hours at this hall because there was no way we would get in anywhere else, there lines outside very entrance of every hall all day. We did manage to get some snacks in, like pretzels, chicken, and some tasty candied nuts.

Price per litre: 13 euros.

The Weinzelt had no where near enough toilets for the amount of people they let in so we had to ask to leave (they had closed the gates) and hope they let us back in after we had gone to better toilets. On the occassion I went, they wouldn't let us back in, until Amanda (who was inside) talked the doorman into letting us in.

We were all pretty jaded from lack of sleep and too much bier so we decided to hit the trail and find somewhere in Munich to have dinner. Ana took us to a resturant called the Ratskeller under the Glockenspiel and we got our first stein of the weekend.

Price per litre: 7.80 euros

After dinner we all crashed out pretty hard.

On Sunday we decided to go on a walking tour of Munich. It was touted as a free walking tour, but they prety much guilt trip you into tipping them at the end, so we had too. The tour covered the glockenspiel, Hitlers bier hall putsch, King Ludwig and the origin of Oktoberfest, several subtle Holocaust and WW2 monuments, amongst a few other things. It was quite fun and informative.

After the tour we accompanied the tour guide to a bar where they had a deal on for anyone that went on the tour - a bier and stew for 6 euros. Not that tasty but cheap and hearty.

I thoroughly recommend doing the free tours in any city that has them, you definitely get your monies worth. After the tour and following stew, Andrew and Rae took off to catch their flight back and the res of us went to meet Ana at the 'fest to see if we could get back in.

According to the photos, we did get back in, and had a blast. I wasn't too impressed when we initially got there because everyone was plastered except for us. But after the first stein, we were singing and dancing on the tables with everyone else. We got into the Lowenbrau tent which is one of the bigger ones and we ended up sitting near a big group of Kiwis and Aussies who were very drunk and almost comatose.

Each table has a waitress/bierfrau who sorts out orders for food and drink. They are usually middle-aged heavyset women who can manage to carry more than 10 full stiens at a time. They also act as bouncers when fights break out. I saw a couple of fights and the women got straight in and pulled the idiots apart with ease. You usually tip pretty high so they come back often and give good service. It works, our hostess got nicer and nicer as the day wore on, maybe its because we got drunker and tipped higher too.

Price per litre: 10 euros

We stayed in the tent until we were kickedvout because it was closing. So all decided to get a snack (currywurst) on the way back to the hostel. We lost Karen for about 15 minutes when we forgot the cardinal rule of toilet pairs (girls hould go in pairs to the toilet to prevent dirty drunks from grabbing and hassling). Once we found her and some of us had gotten some food in to settle the stomachs we headed for home.

Amanda and I woke late and just managed to check out on time. No one had hangovers (apparently german bier doesn't give you hangovers) to slow us down. We decided to head back to the 'fest to pick up some souvenirs, go in a ride or two and take some photos inside the other halls.

Ana and I went on the biggest coaster which was very fun. Especially considering its a temporary ride - everything at oktoberfest is, it all gets dismantled and taken away after the two weeks of festivities. We picked up some post cards, souvenir steins and shot glasses and even a toffee apple before leaving to catch our flights back to soberville.

We have already started making plans to go back next year.

Photos can be viewed here.

We came, we saw, we can't remember parts of the weekend

2008-09-29T21:37:00.003+01:00

A quick update to say we made it back in one piece and we had a great time.

Not to rub it in or anything.

Some things are just funnier drunk.

Full update coming :)

I can almost smell the hops, or its my morning breath

2008-09-26T05:02:00.002+01:00

This is probably the closest thing to a live update this blog will ever have but I thought I would do a small post while I wait for Amanda to get herself sorted out.

It is just after 5am in the morning and in less than 20 minutes we will be heading out the door on our way to oktoberfest in Munich. Yes - Chris - it is in September.

Should be a hoot.

I will be back to report how things went on the other side of a few litres of bier.

Ain't no pizza huts in Rome

2008-09-21T20:09:00.008+01:00

Theres not much I can say that will do Rome any justice. It is simply one of the most beautiful cities in the world (architecture-wise only). It is also a pure tourist town so most locals speak at least a little english which makes things easier for most.

We went to Rome a couple of weeks ago for 3 days. It was one of those holidays where you are left wanting more and are eager to go back just to look at the same things again. We had perfect weather (hot!) the whole time and hardly any issues.

While I could bore you all with the text-based details of what we saw, I think its best if I just point to some photos and say "have at 'em".

Some thoughts though.

Rome was the first city I have been to that had a type of eatery called a bar-cafe-restaurant-gelataria. In other words every place tried to cater for everything. Most cafes served alcohol and most bars also served ice cream. Weird but conveniant if you could afford some of the prices.

We tried to squeese in the most important sites in our three days, these included:

Our hostel was a true hostel. I have been in hostels before that seem like hotels. This was a true hostel - 6 bunks to a room, foam matresses, no A/C (this was particularly rough in the heat at night, as the fans just didn't cut it, I had to shower before I went to bed and once I got up because of sweat, tasty). It did provide free breakfast and a "pasta party" each night.

Breakfast was stale cereals and almost sour milk.

The pasta party was everyone from the hostel crammed into the small kitchen ladeling out pasta from a big pot. More pasta than party.

You don't have to book tours before you go, we manged to get in on a cheap tour once we got to the Colosseum for less than some of the tours we found on the interweb.

Tours are almost a requirement for the bigger palces like the Colosseum and the Vatican, as you get to jump the normal queue and you get told some of the history and story for each place.

Water in Rome is free for everybody and is also surpisingly clean and cold.

I met the nicest local I have ever met in Rome. We were walking along a street and he stopped on his bike and started telling me about a certain building I was looking at. Very nice guy.

If you haven't been to Rome, go to Rome!

The Sistine Chapel was my personal highlight, it is absolutely breath-taking. Followed closely by St Peters Basilica. Those Catholics sure know how to decorate.

And about those photos: Have at 'em!

Lucerne 2008

2008-09-15T10:15:00.005+01:00

Photos

This was one of my favourite holidays so far, right up there with California in 2005 and my first trip to Auckland when I was a kid. We went on the August bank holiday weekend to give us an extra day of sight seeing and it was worth it.

Friday

We flew out from Luton again (which sucks) into Zurich. We then took a train to Lucerne, by the time we got there its was after 10pm and I needed a beer or vier (four).

Our hotel was pretty ghetto, Brendan and Rachels room stank of wet socks (not found) and needed to be aired out every time they went into it. Ours was average in that sense but for what we paid for it, it was pretty cake.

After we checked in, we walked around a little bit before have a couple of drinks in a bar close to the hotel. Most places were closing or closed by the time we decided to have a drink so we were short on choices.

Saturday

The hotel fees included breakfast so we took full advantage. It was pretty crappy weather so we decided to go to the Swiss Transport Museum as it was an indoors activity. Although we had to walk there which defeated the reasoning a little.

The museum itself is like a high-tech MOTAT (obviously) and is very cool for all ages. It is a quite a large complex and a lot of the buildings are spread out. To alleviate this, they provide push scooters for kids to ride on. This also included us. Great fun, we formed a scooter gang and scared some of the kids away by riding in a pack (in flying V formation).

The museum has several simulators, an imax theater, and a planetarium. We watched a show in the planetarium about the zodiac which I really enjoyed (not sure about the others). One simulator that was cool was a fighter jet. Two people sat in this pod that rotated in every direction, they also had full control of how it rotated. Onlookers could also see what going on via an external camera and screen to show how the jet was flying. There was a line to this at all times and I had no patience, so Lance and Brendan lined up for it. They only had to wait 30 - 40 minutes...

The mueum had things separated into sections - trains, cars/motorbikes, tv/radio, flight. Each section was housed in a separate building, and each had a couple of standout attractions. Although the train-cargo simulator was pretty boring. The tv/radio section had a full tv news desk set up along with a mixing desk that allowed you to select cameras, camera transitions, pre recorded segments, and the ability to control how a fake news show would run. Pretty fun.

We spent most of the day at the museum then walked quickly back to the hotel in the evening between rain showers. We found something to eat around the hotel and had some traditional swiss fair - schnitzels, meatball/dumpling things, and macaroni cheese. Some of the meals could have been ripped off from another culture but the menu said they were swiss food and we were ignorant tourists. Bed was an early destination although I stayed up watching the Olympics in German.

Sunday

Today was a perfect day to go up Mount Pilatus as it was very fine and sunny. We started off with another large breakfast at the hotel. We also take a bunch of croissants from the breakfast buffet with us up the mountain to save money.

Here is a map that shows some places we visited on the way up and down the mountain.

We started off with a 1.5 hr ferry ride from Lucerne to Alpnachstad across Lake Lucerne which was absolutely magnificent with its picturesque views.

From Alpnachstad we first waited in line for 30 minutes then hopped onto the worlds steepest cog railway. It gets up to a 49 degree angle at some points.The railway took about 30 minutes and took us to the summit of the mountain.

We then walked around the summit and got some great pictures then had our pilfered breakfast lunch. We also watched some paragliders who were jumping off near us. Crazy bastards.

We then took the gondola down to Fräkmüntegg to test out the summer tobogganing. It ended up being pretty tame. Only one track, you can't pass people so if you catch the person in front of you you have to slow down to their speed, and its a long wait to get on it. We only went once each, but we talked the girls into going on it.

As the mountain was closing up we jumped back on the gondola down to Kriens (at the foot of the mountain) in order to catch the bus back to Lucerne.

Once back in Lucerne we had some pizza, pasta and rösti for dinner then went back to hotel early for some more German Olympics coverage.

Monday

Monday was our designated sight seeing day, as we had not yet checked out most of Lucernes main attractions - Chapel bridge and Water tower, the Crying Lion monument and Speigallabyrinth and some others.

We had another large breakfast at the hotel, checked out and took our bags to the train station to lock up.

We then walked around the above places and took lots of photos.

In the afternoon we trained back to Zurich and headed to the airport.

We had to fly back into Luton sadly so we didn't get home until after 1am ready for a 9am start the next day. Awesome.

Thoughts

After going to Lucerne in Winter and now Summer I must admit I prefer it in Summer. Sunday was definately an awesome day on the mountain, with not many clouds we could see right down into Lucerne and the neighbouring towns and villages miles away. Sure there was no snow but the breath-taking views and watching the girls go down the toboggan run at slower than walking pace made up for it.

The Swiss Transport Museum was very cool as well, especially for us guys, we could just geek out at some of the exhibits.

The only downside was flying via Luton which adds 2 hours onto travel times just to get there and back.

Amsterdamage

2008-09-02T20:23:00.005+01:00

I meant to post this a week ago but certain events - laziness - conspired against me and I had to wait till a spare day to 'borrow' some internet access to get this online.

Friday
We took off from Gatwick airport on friday evening later than scheduled and then flew through quite a bit of turbulence before landing at Amsterdam airport. Amanda did not enjoy the flight at all ergo I did not enjoy the flight at all.

Once we landed we then jumped on a train, then a tram then walked to our hotel. Amanda had found a deal on the net called 'The Mystery room' oooooo. It meant we paid less than the cheapest room but didn't know what room we would get until we checked in. It turned out we got an executive suite, which sounds fancy but was the second cheapest double room. We had a wall separating the bedroom and bathroom.

The hotel itself is situated in an upscale part of the city and our room overlooked one of the canals as well as The Hard Rock cafe. Once we had checked in and taken our bags up to the room and passed the obligatory post-travel bowel movements, we went for a walk to find some supper, as it was close to midnight.

We walked around for a little while taking in some late night sights before sitting down at an Irish pub. This Irish pub sold Belgium beers. It was over before it even began. I had a couple of Duvels and Amanda had a weisbier or two. As we still hadn't eaten I convinced Amanda that we should pay €3.50 each for a hotdog. It was awesome.

Saturday
We rose early and headed down to a yee olde dutch pancake house I noticed on our walks the previous night. The hotdog was cheaper. Normal dutch pancakes are rather large, but you only get one. I got a pancake with bacon baked into it and Amanda ordered one with banana, which turned out to be baby food. Each pancake cost us €8.50 each. They were about the size of a dinner plate.

We then bought some hop on/hop off canal bus tickets and jumped on one of them for a trip. Each canal bus is sort of a tour guide in that there is a recording telling travellers about the parts of the city as the canal bus travels through it. Informative.

We got out at Centraal Station and walked down Damrak which is a very tourist-centric area of town. As we walked down Damrak we had a look into Febo which is a fast food place but all the food (variations of croquets) is purchased via vending machines.

We also went into a Sex Museum. It was quite a hoot. A lot of it was about the history of sex and porn in the Netherlands and around the world. There was a lot of pictures and things from the late 1800s right through. They also made good use of motion sensors, dotted through the museum were scenes that came to life when someone went near them, from a flasher hiding in an alcove, to a hag making a grab for you, all the way up to a guy behind a window that pisses at you, it was quite cool and gave a few people some scares.

After the museum we continued walking further south and ended up in a part of the Red Light District (by accident), some of the girls were working and it was odd to see prostitutes openly for the first time, especially in the day time. All the girls/goods stand behind glass doors, and a purchaser just walks up to them, negotiates a fee and service then enters into a small room with a bed. Or so I hear.

We then jumped onto another canal bus and travelled back to the hotel via the harbour and the west side of the city. We bypassed a fast food place and bought some pommes frites with currysauce before going back to the hotel to get changed for the nights activites.

After leaving the hotel we jumped back onto a canal bus and went to check out Anne Frank House. There was a large queue standing in the rain when we got there, but we managed to bypass it because Amanda had bought tickets online. Anne Frank House is a must see for anyone going to Amsterdam, it is very well presented and worth every penny of someone elses money to go see.

We walked back to the Damrak afterwards and found an Argentinian steak house on the edge of the Red Light District to have dinner. They are everywhere, I picked one on the same street as two others. It was also the best steak I have ever had. It was only 300 grams but it was so juicy and flavorsome.

After dinner we went for a walk through the Red Light District, it was very strange. its fully marked out for red lights and most of the windows have red lights in them. There were a lot of girls in a lot of windows. Most of them were stunning, especially the ones lucky enough to be on the main strip. In our walks we managed to find an alley with transvestites, and an alley with large black women. Some of the alleys were so thin you had to walk down shoulder first just to get through.

After those fun and games we walked back to the hotel - which was longer than expected - via one of Amsterdams famous coffee shops. I got baked. We then walked back to the hotel and watched american television with dutch voice overs for awhile, then crashed out with the munchies. I was not stoned enough to order room service.

Sunday
We got up later than Saturday and went to another pancake place, this time to not have pancakes and then walked to the Van Gogh museum. Once again we skipped the long queue (internet tickets) and went straight in. We took the audio tour around the museum and learnt all about how 'great' Van Gogh was. I admit I don't know art, or what some people call art anyway, but I think Van Gogh was a hack. All of the other works in the museum - his inspiration as well as works inspired by him - were far better and more enjoyable than his.

After the museum, we went to the House Of Bols for a tour. Bols genever is a dutch liquor, it was the precursor to Gin but without the green grassy taste and affections of house wives with nothing better to do. The tour was quote cool, it detailed how it was made, how cocktails are made with it, as well as giving you taste and smell tests with all of the different flavours.

At the end of the tour we each got a free cocktail made for us as well as free tastings of any Bols liquors we wanted. They even had kiwifruit.

After the House of Bols we had to bail to the airport, where we picked up some Bols Genever and some cigars. I thought our flight to Amsterdam was bad, the flights back was worse. As we were over Britain our plan was ordered to turn around and go back to Amsterdam due to an emergency in the control tower at Heathrow. We then landed back at Amsterdam but were not allowed to leave the plane. It turns out someone had pulled the fire alarms in the tower and they were letting planes back in and we took off again, this time to land safely at Heathrow (Terminal 5) only 3 hours later than scheduled.

Conclusion
Amsterdam is cool, I recommend it to anyone. Although there are a couple of things to be aware of: british men, and british women. Amsterdam was full of Stag parties and Hens parties, either cruising down the canals on hired boats or stinking up the bars with their accents and poor choice in beer. Amsterdam was still cool though.

Photos available here.

Too much of the lessness

2008-08-16T10:27:00.004+01:00

There seems to be a recurring buffer of about 2 weeks from when I did something - worth blogging or not - and when I post about it. Its similar to what happened after the Janet Jackson ft Justin Timberlake Superbowl half time fracas. After the breastastic performance, both the Grammy and Acadamy awards shows initiated a 10 minute difference between the live goings on and what any tv viewers saw.
2 weeks isn't anywhere near 10 minutes, but a buffer is still certainly a buffer and I am egotistical enough to think I don't need to answer to anyone.

After the birthday sequential collection of 7 days (not a week), my contract had expired and I decided to take a couple of weeks off and reflect. This involved sleeping in, playing xbox, going to see movies by myself, and generally not doing much.

The planned 2 week holiday is it could be called turned into a one week holiday then a week of pacing up and down the stairs in boredom.

The first week Amanda and I went to see Liam Finn play. It was a very cool show and made up for the skilless performance of The Mars Volta the week before. On several songs he manages to produce a 5-piece band sound with himself and his accompanying singer (Jimmi Barnes daughter). BBC have a good quality version, or youtube has a lower quality copy of one of his better songs. One talented dude.

During my holiday we got word that we had been evicted and had a month to find somewhere else to live. The day we had to be out was the day after we get back from a trip to Switzerland, and wasn't leaving us much time to move our things out.

The landlords father had died and his mother could no longer afford their half of the mortgage payments on the house so he needed it back to do it up then sell it.

I wasn't in any rush to find work, because I had been "promised" a position at a friends business. As my luck ensured, the job was cancelled and I had to look elsewhere. So now I was homeless and jobless.

The friend who originally promised me the job managed to find something else for me the week after so it wasn't all bad. We also went flat hunting (well some of us did) and found a place that most of us liked. We made an offer on it and was successful.
We move in on the 26th of August.

Im not looking forward to paying my share of the bond + first months rent. Which is looking to be in excess of 1200 pounds. For a four bedroom house.

I guess I need to keep working in order to afford it.

Thunder in Paradise

2008-08-03T20:13:00.003+01:00

Unlike Hulk Hogan, we weren't in Florida.

This whole trip started with a conversation I had with another freelancer last year one day while we were "working". He was telling me the history of Sealand and how you could become a Lord of the small principality.

Fast forward several months and I stumbled across an article that some guy wrote about the Maunsell Sea Forts (which Sealand is one of) and a lot of pictures he took. In the article he provides a link with a company that provides boat tours to the forts. This was also during work time.

Being a bit of a technophile I decided this is what I wanted to do for my birthday, and Amanda "happily" obliged to sort out the booking.

Fast forward another couple of months and we are up at 7am on a Saturday and on our way to Victoria Station to catch the train to Herne Bay.

Herne Bay is about 80 minutes from London by train and the group of us had some laughs on the way across. Most of us didn't really know what to expect from the boat trip as I had not given any details to them. Hilarious.

Unfortunately I picked one of the worst weekends to go, because it was very windy and choppy at Herne Bay which meant it was even worse out on the open sea where the forts were.

When we got to the arranged meeting place on the beach we paid our monies and got offered wet weather gear by the girl helping us. She said it gets quite wet out there so we decided to accept her offer. Everyone got kitted out in jackets and leggings.

As I mentioned most people didn't know what to expect, I had an idea but I didn't know how wet we would get. Some people thought we were going to be on a ferry and halfway through the trip stopping at Sealand which has a cafe and bowling alley. I don't know where he got that idea...

As soon as we left the beach we were heading straight into the wind, and every wave we hit, sent water into our faces. Every now and again we would get some massive air off a big wave and the landing would hurt. I was very glad to take my sunglasses as we were getting some good speed up and the sun, wind, and water burn were making it hard for people without eye protection to keep their eyes open.

The boat driver would not take us out to the forts because of the conditions so we stayed pretty close to land and checked out some other things instead such as a seal colony and a harbour of a neighbouring town. Nothing special really but getting to each of those places was very fun. Ferry ride indeed.

Near the end of the trip the driver decided to take us to look at some ruins or something (we never really got an explanation).

This turned out to be a bad mistake.

As we were nearing the ruins we hit a rather large wave that happened to be bigger than the boat. We pretty much nose dived straight into it and took on half a foot of water. Both from the sea and from our pants.

Amanda and I had the good luck of sitting right at the front and took the full force of the water on our faces. Everyone got soaked from the wave (we were all already wet from the rest of the trip) and most people fell off their seats from the sudden stopping.

Here is an artists depiction of the boat vs the wave.
There were a couple of minor injuries like sore wrists, a couple of bruises and wet butt cracks. Two phones also perished from water damage on the trip as well, most likely from that last wave.

After the driver semi-apologised we headed straight back to the dock and finished the trip.

After we took our wet weather gear off we headed to a beach side cafe for some lunch and to dry off. We found one with a sheltered courtyard and cheap beer and had a big lunch. After sitting in the sun for an hour or two we had all pretty much dried off so we headed back to the station to go back to London.

A few of us slept on the train ride back. Holding onto a speeding boats hand rail for dear life is very exhausting.

Once we got back to London we had a BBQ at our place to finish the day, but it was not a very late night. Obviously.

Photos are here.

The birthday week that wasnt.

2008-08-03T17:05:00.005+01:00

I normally chastise people who think they can get away with having a birthday-week instead of just a birthday. This year even though it was unplanned I ended up having one, sort of.

It started on Friday 11th July when me and the boys involved in the Euro 2008 betting circle went to a pub to spend the winnings. Had a good time drinking then went to a late night sushi restuarant for some buffet sushi that I didn't really need.

I got home at the respectable time of 11.30ish to find no one else home. Just as I was getting ready for bed there was a knock at the door. It was Amanda and a Toni. Toni had walked Amanda home from the pub because she could barely stand of her own fruition.

I thanked Toni and Amanda made a bee-line straight for the toilet and locked it.

I won't detail what happened exactly, suffice it to say Amanda was in the toilet for nearly two hours. Here are some highlights:

The freezer door was open for awhile
The taps were also on for awhile
I haven't sworn at anyone more in my life
Drunk people can lock doors but not unlock them
After a few attempts at knocking the door down I managed to screw the lock so when Amanda finally tried to unlock it, it didn't work
Hammer beats glass window
Ryan came home and finished the door (and window) off with a good kick.
I don't like cleaning pieces of glass up at 2am in the morning.

Saturday was a write off. I believe a popular term for lieing in bed hungover is called "marinating".

On Sunday Manda and I met up with a couple of friends in Hammersmith for a pub lunch. It was very much quantity over quality. But I do enjoy ordering more than I can physically manage.

Tuesday night, Amanda and I went to T.G.I Fridays for a brthday dinner. Unfortunately she forget to bring the camera so we have no proof to how much I ate and drank. They serve cocktails in goblets, and several types of ribs. Heaven.

Wednesday night Lance, Chris, and myself went to see The Mars Volta play at the Roundhouse in Camden. It sucked. The sound mixing and singing were amateur at best.

Friday was my last day at work (my contract had expired) so I had a few drinks with some people from work afterwards. I found a place that sells Sierra Nevada which is my second favourite American beer. Its very similar to the Monteiths range from NZ.

Saturday was the planned boat trip, which is described in the next post.

Sunday was sleeping.

Prague - What vegetables?

2008-07-09T19:07:00.005+01:00

2 weekend ago and a week after the grass re-birth, 10 of us went to Prague for a couple of days.

Prague is a real mans city - cheap and plentiful beer, large servings of meat, and hardly any vegetables. In fact most of the vegetables I saw were either pickled or were chips.

We flew from Luton airport (which is probably the lamest airport to get to in London, and has the lamest Burger King in the world) and got to our hotel in the New Town in Prague around midnight.
To get to Luton, I had to tube to kings cross, train to Luton airport station, then bus to the airport. Then the fucking burger king decided to match my low expectations of english customer service. I shouldn't have been surprised.

The Republic of Czechoslovakia Republic is the first republic I have been to where I didn't know a single word of the local republic language. After spending a couple of days there, I still don't. Although google translate tells us that "Ahoj" means hello, I do not feel confident enough to actually say it without wearing a cup in case I offended the recipients goat.

We got up early and had a typical european breakfast (ham, salami, cheese, and bread) then walked down to the river that runs through the middle of the city. On the way I took note of beer prices, the cheapest I saw was 16 crowns ($1.4 NZD) for a pint (500mls). As we got closer to the tourist areas the prices rose significantly, to about 100 crowns ($8.5 NZD) for the same beer.

On Saturday we checked out the Prague castle, the best/only museum in prague, several pubs, Petrin Hill, another couple of bars, and a brewery for dinner.

The Czech Republic has a pretty rough past - the German occupation and slaughter of jews during WW2 as well as the soviet invasion 1968 and subsequent adoption of communism to name a couple. There are memorials al over the city to remember the people that died because of these and other events. Coming from NZ its hard to understand some of these atrocities when the worst we have had to deal with is who gets the foreshore. Plus I am just plain ignorant most of the time.

Saturday night was a communal dinner at a brewery we found, it was a long day of lots of walking and not enough drinking, so I got things into gear by ordering a couple of 1 litre steins with dinner. Dinner consisted of a portion of meat (pig knuckles, steak, selection of sausage, chicken, or a combination of them), starch (dumplings, chips, or potato pancakes), and if you were lucky - vegetables (half a mushroom, 2 cobs of baby corn, or sauerkraut). The Czech diet is good for a weekend but living there would be tough without a consistent supply of good vegetables. You would have to look pretty hard for any greens.

Some of us went for walk after dinner to find another bar. We couldn't find one. We found the strip clubs. We ended up drinking at the bar across the street from the hotel. Czech absinthe is not as good as french absinthe.

On Sunday we got up early again and had another hearty breakfast this time with more coffee to combat a few hangovers (not me, because I was smart and drank water before bed time. Rich taught me well) and more meat.

We then walked up to the old town, via Wenceslas square named after the 'Good King' from the christmas carol. Wenceslas square is the spot where a couple of university students set themselves on fire to protest communism in 1969. Old town is pretty cool, although while we were there most of it was taken up by a giant Euro 2008 (football competition) screen and hoardings.

We checked out the astronomical clock then walked to the jewish quarter for a quick squiz. Most of the places wanted money so we didn't go in.

We then made our way back to the hotel via Charles bridge.

We then flew back to Luton where we split up. Some people went home, the rest of us stayed in the airport to watch the Euro 2008 final that had started as we landed. We had BK from the same crappy place and was disappointed for the second time that weekend.

Got home around midnight (bus, train, then tube). We were well shagged gov'nah, innit.

Photos here.

Das Grass

2008-07-08T18:53:00.004+01:00

You might remember a couple of posts back, me bitching about those unnamed grass assailants.

Well after the All Blacks destroyed England for a second time we decided to put some elbow grease into it and dig up the grass.

Ryan (flat-mate) bought some turf during the week and river, manda and myself took off the existing grass and dug up the dirt underneath.

We then put the new turf in and patched the rest up with the better sections of the existing grass.

Its hard work digging up shitty dirt, especially when you find bricks, rocks, and chunks of concrete 6 inches from the surface. Dam lazy builders.

We filled up about 15 rubble bags of soil, grass, and stone. 5 of them were rocks and bricks.

Thanks to river for helping out when we didn't ask for it, and to Andrew for bailing when he heard we were about to do some work.

The grass no longer looks yellow and crappy. In fact it is a lush green colour with plenty of length on it. Time for a mow soon.
I can also promise no one is allowed to walk on it for a long long time.

Summers here!

2008-06-15T17:16:00.002+01:00

And with it comes hayfever. I have had the worst hayfever in my life in this country. The usual pollen outbreak gives me hayfever then the dust, dirt, and grime kicks you while you are down, gets in there with its two cents, and to top it all off Brits have a distinct love of air conditioning, maybe bevause the climate sucks here. But AC doesnt help my already molested nose.

No more whining I promise (at least for this post).

Manda and I took the opportunity to destroy my nose some more and go on the London eye. She had been wanting to do it since she got here and Last sunday was perfect for it. We had to queue up for about 30 minutes to get on it, but it was fun (even though it was my second time)>it is definately a recommended tourist destination. We could see our neighbourhood from it.

After the London eye we went and checked out an odd art exhibition called the Telectrascope. The story goes its a hole drilled between London and New York (Brooklyn). People can look through it and see people on the other side and wave to them. Interesting idea.

Amanda took some pictures.

I really dig the mix of modern and steam powered technology, its what I was looking forward to seeing the Nautilus in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Instead, some idiot decided it could fit down the canals of Venice.

Londoners had to pay ₤1 each to get close to the viewing portal, New Yorkers got it free. Im guessing because its in Brooklyn and no one would go otherwise, "Oh! take it easy paison!".

On a completely unrelated note. I have sourced a very good replica of a steak and cheese pie. Obviouslt it can never be the real thing, buts its close enough to warrant multiple tastings. And its only ₤4.50 (~$11) per pie! Bargain....

Big rugby weekends

2008-06-15T16:37:00.002+01:00

Well, there has been a fair bit of rugby on each weekend, sadly it means getting up at 8am to watch it. But somethings need to be sacrificed (sleep) to support your team (even if you are supporting the Crusaders).

I was going to do a post on the twickenham 7s but I left it too long and I forgot what I was going to write. I have uploaded a few pictures for it here.

We normally make a semi event out of the rugby each morning by getting each attendee (there are several) to bring a breakfast food item and then between games we have a fry up of bacon and eggs. It is a good way to start the weekend and combat any friday night drinks hang overs.

One such day (that we have pictures for) of was last weekend where we had a big one to celebrate the start of the international season. Plenty of sport on throughout the day:

All Blacks v Ireland - rugby
South Africa v Wales - rugby
Czech Republic v Switzerland - football
Portugal v Turkey - football
2 Churchil cup games (USA, Canada, England A, Scotland A) - rugby

It was a long day, even when I paced myself by drinking water, most people either left early or had a nap in the afternoon.

The poor poor grass got devastated worse than Wales did. It will be roped off at the next gethering to let it recover.

May Update

2008-05-27T21:29:00.001+01:00

Well its been over a month since I have posted anything, hands up who saw my slackness coming?

Its been a strange month and a half with two deaths, a funeral, sunshine, bbqs, alcohol, gardening, and rain.

The first death was "my flatmates - ex-girlfriends - father" who died of Cancer. Ryan (flatmate) was required there so
I volunteered to back him up and we plus Amanda and ex-flatmate Jo planned a road-trip down to Worthing/East Preston for the weekend thereof.
This is covered lower in the post.
The friday of the funeral we heard news that Lances brother had fallen unconscious and been taken to hospital.
He died not long after from a brain anurism. Bevan was a pretty decent chap and will be sorely missed by his wife, family, and friends.
It was a shock to everyone here how quickly his passing transpired.

Bex and Dustin (and Nate) came and went (again). The stopped over for a night on their way back to the states at the tail end of their 5 week holiday.
They cooked us burritos for dinner and we got furiously drunk. On a school night.
It was good to catch up with them and hearing their stores of their trip.
Traveling with someone who - thinks he - has ADD doesn't rock as much as it sounds.

Andrew (friend from Gissy) turned up at the start of May. Which happened to be a long weekend and actual sunny weather, so we spent most of the first day watching rugby inside and drinking. I can not recall what else we did that weekend but I'm sure it was awesome and alcoholically lubricated. Andrew slept in the guest room (dining room) for several weeks while he has been sorting out employment and flatting options.

The next weekend Andrew, Manda, and myself met up with a couple of friends and spent the afternoon in Hyde park. Even though it was overcast but warm (yah Hamilton weather!) it was still packed with people. Its a pretty big park, with a lake in it (that you cant swim in!?) along with horse runs, and sports fields. We played frisbee and hackey and people watched.

That evening we met up with Ana and Chris and had a curry in the famous Brick lane.

Photos

Going to the funeral was fun. The funeral itself sucked, but the trip itself was good.
We went down in Ryans bosses old BMW on Sunday afternoon. We got to see some real live countryside and fields. It took about 90 minutes to get to East Preston and we drove to Jo's parents house (where we were staying) and she made us a nice lunch (delivered on a tea trolley) outside in the garden. I was almost expecting Timmy or Fanny to come running out of the bushes.

We then went to the beach and I went for a swim, it was pretty nice apart from the stones (instead of sand) and we relaxed out a bit including going to the pub near the beach for a pint or two. That night we had chinese with Jo's parents and had a reasonably early night.

The monday we went into Worthing where Ryan needed to do a little work and the girls decided to go shopping. Yay. We went to a nice pub for lunch on the river Arun. Fast forward through the funeral. On the way back to london, the car broke down, so Ryan called AA to pick the car up (and him) and Jo called her friend/boyfriend to pick the rest of us up. Hilarity.

Photos

There have been quite a few bbqs already: some for special occassions - rugby, birthdays, sun - and others because there was nothing else to do. We have also done a bit of gardening out the back to make it more habitable for us. I sadly don't have any before photos but it looks pretty good now. Ryan, Manda and I laid some new turf down, then we had a hack out the neighbouring hedges before I took some branches off our tree with a handsaw and beer in my belly.

Here are some random photos of our exploits so far:
Ryans birthday bbq
Random ones - Ignore the latter ones.

We went to the sevens on the weekend, post incoming.

Thanks to Amanda for bothering to take, then upload photos.

Snow way bro

2008-04-07T21:17:00.005+01:00

Amongst the seedy feelings of dehydration and too-much-alcoholiness the day after the pub crawl, several things happened.
1. It snowed, decently.
2. Someone rang me at 8.20 that morning, I turned my phone off and went back to sleep
3. When I finally got up, I made a snowman.

My original plan of making it ontop of my flatmates car was dashed when she didnt wake up until late afternoon, after the poor old bugger melted and then slipped off.

Turns out I wasn't the only Victor Frankensnow. There were a few others, all better than my creation: Bruce Willis Jr.

You can't spell monopoly without "no my poo"

2008-04-07T20:45:00.005+01:00

On Saturday several of us embarked on a Monopoly pub crawl. As far aa I know, none of us finished it.

26 pubs, one drink at each, 1 day to do it.

We started at 11am on Saturday morning, and should have finished at 12am that night, spending 40 minutes (including travel) in each pub.

40 minutes is not a lot of time to get to a pub and get a drink so the schedule was very tight and needed to be stuck to in order to get round everywhere.

I can tell you with some degree of certainty that we did not stick to it, especially in the later stages of the night.

From post-calculations, I think we made it to 20 pubs. Right about the time I ate my fifth hamburger of the day, we decided to head for home before anything repeated on me.

As one would imagine, a lot of photos were taken, none of them are flattering.

Me and Mr Freeman

2008-04-07T19:43:00.004+01:00

When I was younger my daddy used to tell me stories about his youth. Stories about the war, stories about growing up on a farm with no neighbors, growing up with no shoes. These days he doesn't talk as much, no nuggets of wisdom, nor fatherly advice. With such a loving childhood that I had, it is hard to imagine how things turned out the way they did.

If anyone didn't guess, the above paragraph is a rushed imitation of Morgan Freeman.

Lance, Karen, Manda, and I went to Madame Tussauds a weekend ago. While it was both packed and expensive, I thoroughly enjoyed the visit. The wax models looked great up close, sadly in photos they look very shiny and waxy (obviously). The museum is well structured, with different rooms having different themes: movies, sports, royals, music, etc.

There was plenty of opportunity to take stupid photos.

We spent a couple of hours at MT then we headed to Harrods for a quick look, that turned into a 5 hour marathon (for males). Harrods is rather large and rather expensive. I do not feel like I need to go back again, ever again.

The quotient of velocity and distance keeps on slipping

2008-03-25T19:00:00.003Z

It has been a while since I last posted and a lot has happened since the weekend in Edinburgh. I have been meaning to post (I promise, you know how things get, etc etc) for several weeks, but something or other (or nothing) kept coming up and putting a halt to that thought.

After roughly weeks of unemployment I have found it hard getting back into the swing of things. Especially "communication" which I apparently have a problem with. But if day dreaming and asking google numerous questions each day isn't communicating, I don't know what is.

Some of you might know that I re-re-recently went back to NZ for three weeks for some sun, fun, and food. If you didn't know then I guess I missed you and I apologise. Im pretty sure I caught up with everyone I could within time restrictions.

It turned out Amanda and I did roughly 6000 Km while I was back. Which is an average speed of:

velocity = distance / time
velocity = 6000 Km / 480 hrs
velocity = 12.5 Km/hr (You get marks for showing your working)

It took us 33 hours to get back to London, with 3 different transit stops of about 1.5 hours each along the way. It took us 4 days to recover.

The week after we got to London and had recovered from the jet lag, we got news that Mandas mum had passed away. Luckily Manda got to say goodbye before we left even if it was at the airport. Amanda wanted to spend as much time with her as possible (understandably) before we left so spent most of our last week in NZ in Vegas with her which was cool.

Unfortunately Mandas mums passing was right at the start of birthday week with Manda, Lance, Karen, Bex and 7/365th of all people having a birthday within 7 days it was very hectic and hard to stay focused with what had just happened.

For some odd reason (my ego) it took me almost 2 weeks to find work when I got back. And then I just ended up going back to the place I said I wouldn't go back to after I went back after saying I wouldn't go back there again. And yes I checked that sentence and it is accurate.

It hasn't changed, except now I'm out of the dungeon and sitting with the permanent staff and even have my own email address instead of freelance30.contract@..

Bex came back for a couple of days with Dustin and his buddy Nate and all hung out for most of it. We all went to a Mars Volta concert on their last night here which was awesome. If you like their music that is, poor Manda was a tad bored.

Easter is usually when everyone flees London for somewhere nicer, because we didn't know where we would be financially at this stage we had to turn down an invite to go to Italy (like I would go there anyway, dam campers). Instead I semi-organised a tourist weekend for us.

Friday we slept in then met up with some friends and went to the Dali Universe, it was OK, some neat sculptures but thats about it. I wanted to go to the aquarium as well but going to something like that on a public holiday is crazy.

Saturday we went to the Science Museum which was awesome (for me) except for all the little bad mannered kids. I even had to tell one off. Science is fun. We had Pizza Express which is famous for its dough balls with garlic butter, but it was decidedly average.

It snowed in London on Sunday morning but we were sleeping and missed it. There was two large football games on so we stayed in and had a BBQ with the flatties and other friends. I got quite drunk and didn't lend a hand at all. Then I subjected people to a bad horror/comedy/musical called Poultrygiest, it really is as bad as it sounds.

Monday we managed to catch the snow, but its not very photogenic so we can't prove it. It didn't snow enough to make snowballs unfortunately. We were meant to go to Madame Tussauds wax museum but I was too lazy to book online and when we turned up the lines were far too long us to be bothered waiting. My bad. We went and watched Vantage Point instead then had dinner with Lance and Karen.

Its been a very different 3 weeks, hopefully it now calms down and I can get back into my routine of going to work (but not working) and procrastinating with the "communication" and "affection".

Haggis and scotch

2008-01-30T18:42:00.000Z

Photos

In celebration for her birthday the previous weekend Ana organized a trip to Edinburgh. That is how she rolls. Keen for any excuse to get drunk in a foreign country I agreed to lend my outstanding wit to all those on the trip.

We flew out from Heathrow on Friday night, managing to be only 90 minutes behind schedule. The week before there was a crash on one of the runways, they are still clearing the wreckage off it more than a week later. Because of this one runway was closed so there was a backlog of flights. They dont tell you this until you are through gates and waiting. Customer service!!

We got to our hostel just before midnight then some of us went for a drink. And it was only A drink because bars close at 1am. Even I was disgusted.

The next morning we got and went down to the hostel cafe for a buffet breakfast (except you were only allowed 6 items). One of those items was haggis. I got a plate of bacon, eggs, tomato, toast, and haggis. I had never had it before and if someone else hadn't asked what it was I wouldn't have recognised it.

Haggis is great! Its like a spicy meaty stuffing. If you like pate and stuffing, you will like haggis. "But its made in a sheeps stomach" you might say. So what, sausages used to be made in pigs intestines. And its still not as gross as what you ladies put on your face to make you "more beautiful".

Our hostel is very close to the Royal Mile which is a piece of road between Edinburgh castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburghs Old Town.

After breakfast we walked up Royal Mile towards Edinburgh castle and then into the castle itself, after paying 11 pounds entry. McBurn! The castle was mildly entertaining with alot of buildings, cannons, and other tourists. I watched a demonstration in the barracks that talked about soldiers back in the 1700s. The guy also explained how the terms "sideburns" and "getting drafted" came about which was very educational.

After a couple of hours at the castle some of us felt the urge for drink so we went to a pub, narrowly missing the kitchen being open. We still get a beer and a scotch each though.

In the afternoon we went on a "Whiskey Experience Tour" which taught us all about how scotch whiskey is made. It also detailed the history and regional versions of the drink. We got a free drink and glass as well. Did you know all of the flavour in scotch whiskey is derived from the type of barrel it is matured in? I do now. Unlike bourbon where all the flavour is derived from the fermented fecal matter used to make it.

After much farting around, indecision, and almost-arguments we settled on a pub that could fit everyone in for dinner. We spent a good 6 hours there, drinking, eating and laughing. One of the points for discussion was the vending machines in the toilets, they sold condoms, lube, vibrators, hand-cuffs, pheromones, and blow-up sheep. A very odd assortment. All of the guys chipped in and bought a blow-up sheep for Ana for her birthday present. The sheep was only available in the mens toilets and included a convenient orifice for storing your keys while carrying it. At least thats what I think it was for.

We headed back to the hostel for more drinks but found the bar had closed early due to staff shortages so Gowyn and I went looking for somewhere else to drink while everyone else went to bed. It was only 11pm. We found this underground rock bar that had some live music. We only caught the last couple of songs but it was a nice change from talking all night. After the music finished we headed back to the hostel.

Managed to wake up just before checkout and once that was completed most of us headed back to the bar we were at the night before for breakfast. And it was another hearty one consisting of 5 types of meat (if you count egg).

After breakfast we stumbled down the Royal mile to check out the Palace of Holyroodhouse. We took the audio tour through it which was quite informative. The palace is used by the Queen each year during summer, the palace is closed when she is there.

We then walked back up the Mile to Mary Kings Close which is a popular tourist attraction. The wiki article gives a pretty good description. It was pretty cool, we were taken around by a girl who was in character the whole time as a poor parlor-maid. She told us of the nasty places her family lived as well as how the plague spread around and the interesting ways they had of "curing" it or preventing it. Gardyloo!

The flight back to London was also through Heathrow and was delayed by about 20 minutes. Edinburgh was fun, although we were only there for 2 days and only stayed in the Old Town. There is alot more to check out when I go back next time. Which wont be far away now that I have the taste for haggis.

Tumble weeds and Unemployment

2008-01-28T15:22:00.000Z

The year started off well when I got work as soon as I wanted. That was short lived when I found out I was only needed for 3 days instead of the full week my agent had promised. He is now my ex-agent.

So far that is all I have worked this year, no one has any short contracts that I could squeeze in before returning to NZ in February. Makes for a very boring life.

And that is the exact reason why I haven't posted anything for awhile, who wants to know that I walked up and down my staircase approximately 37 times each day. Or that there are 53 individual planks of wood comprising my bedroom floor. Exactly.

Both are prime numbers.

I was concentrating so hard on coming back to NZ in February that I completely forgot about a trip to Edinburgh last weekend for Anas birthday. Update to follow.

Christmas 07 Epilogue

2008-01-06T19:44:00.000Z

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It did not take any of us much to get pretty drunk on new years eve after all the traveling and farting around we did.

I received an email from BA asking me to fill in a survey about our flight experiences. While I had considered sending them a strongly worded letter, I realized I am too lazy to do so, but a survey was within my energy expenditure limits. I gave them negative scores. I feel so strong.

After everything bad that happened, I'm still keen to go back to Switzerland and see it again in Summer, primarily to ride the big luge down Mount Pilatus.

Lucerne was definitely my favourite city.

I want to be a Sound of Music tour operator. Maybe I could wear my pink shirt while I work?

No I don't.

Danke schön und Gute Nacht

Christmas 07 Day 9: Lets get the hell out of here

2008-01-06T19:30:00.000Z

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Definitely no more top bunks for the rest of the year!

Lame #8 I woke up to a text message. From British Airways. Our flight had been canceled.

In grumpy moods Bex and I said our goodbyes to the others who were staying in Zurich for New Years and jumped on the bus to the airport.

Side note: We had to be at heathrow at 1.30pm to meet Bex sister, Allison who was flying in from San Fran. Our initial flight would have put us at Heathrow at 12.30. Which would have been perfect.

Once we got to the airport the staff were very helpful, and let us choose a replacement flight -
An 11am flight to Gatwick, or a 1:15pm flight to Heathrow. We chose the Gatwick flight as it would have still given us enough time to get from Gatwick to Heathrow before Allison got in.

We got the flights sorted out, checked in our luggage, and made our way to the gate ready for boarding.

Lame #9 Due to some hydraulic fluid leak, we took off about an hour late. The friendly staff didn't notify us of this until the time when the plane was meant to take off.

Lame #10 While we had left Switzerland this one still counts. Before we were due to land, the Captain notifies us that the runway needs to be fixed for some reason so we had to circle Gatwick for an extra 20 odd minutes.

Once we landed, Bex and I were the first into the airport and through passport control. We had to wait a little while for our bags. Then we raced to the BA tickets desk to make them sort out transport for us to get to Heathrow. Thankfully they gave us free tickets on the bus.

While we were waiting for the bus Bex and a message from Allison saying she had gotten in early. We were still about an hour away from getting there. Of course she was early.

We finally got to Heathrow, about 2 hours after we had originally planned to get there. We were all tired and angry but it was good to see Allison again. Then we rode the tube for an hour to get home. Traveling sucks.

Christmas 07 Day 8: To Zurich!

2008-01-06T19:09:00.000Z

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At least it was my last night in a bunk....
We checked out of the hotel and jumped on a train to Zurich. It took 50 minutes and we arrived before noon.

We had a little trouble finding how to get to our hostel. In the end we had to take a tram south for 15 minutes then walk another 10 minutes to find it. Not much information anywhere on how to find your way around.

The hostel was another youth hostel (like Lucerne), except it was very stark, it looked and felt more like a hospital than a hostel. At least it had a bar.

We weren't allowed to check in until after three, so we ended up stowing our packs in the lockers at the hostel then heading to the old town.

The old town was semi-interesting, a bunch of old buildings and churches. It was more interesting than my dry description.

Sometime in the afternoon we decided to stop somewhere to eat, and found a small cafe that had a table big enough for all of us. Most of us ordered toasted sandwiches and coffee, but I ordered "2 frankfurters mit brot" and a milkshake.

Lame #5 My meal cost me 20 francs, which works out to be NZD$23! The worst part as well, is that "2 frankfurters mit brot" is exactly what it sounds like: 2 hotdog sausages and a slice of bread. For 20 francs.

Lame #6 Once we left the cafe it started raining. Our first bad weather of the holiday and it was in Switzerland.

We went back to the hostel and checked, and wouldn't you know it, I had another top bunk. Oh joy. We took our stuff up to our rooms and then had a few beers and relaxed a little.

Had McDonalds for dinner (only in Switzerland did we eat there), then went and had a few more beers before bed. Bex and i were dure to fly out the next morning so I got stuff organised by checking in online to speed things up a little.

Lame #7 The hostel had Heineken on tap, if you bought a small one you got it from the tap. If you ordered a large they just gave you a can. That didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. But by this stage I had stopped questioning Swiss logic.

Christmas 07 Day 7: Lucerne (Spiegels und Käse)

2008-01-06T18:38:00.000Z

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Who invented bunks anyway? Last nights sleep was exponentially worsened by a small hangover from the previous nights hotel room party. I guess I should be thankful no one tried to throw the TV out the window.

We had nothing organised for today so it was just going to be a "do whatevers" day. Some of the others wanted to check out the Chapel Bridge and Lion Monument. So we followed.

According to Wikipedia, the Lion Monument commemorates the hundreds of Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution. Behind the monument is a glacier museum. The story goes that there were glaciers where Lucerne now rests, and the museum contained rocks and holes and the like to prove it. Can you tell that it didn't really excite me?

The museum also had a "Hall of Mirrors", which was really cool. It had a mirror maze as well as some distortion mirrors outside. I took a lot of photos and some of them are in the album online.

After the museum, we all kind of split up. Bex and I went to go shopping but sadly shops were only open till 4pm on Saturday, so instead we bought some beers and starting early.

For dinner that night we all went out and had a traditional Swiss fondue. Two pots of melted cheese plus bread, potatoes, vegetables, some chicken, and beef later and everyone was feeling decidedly sick. I think we each ate at least 750g of cheese each. Some (me) had more than others because I can't not eat anything in front of me. We couldn't wait to get out of there, it was an early night for all.

Lame #4 Fondue is very expensive for what it is, especially when you have to order side dishes to go with it unless you just want bread and potatoes. The meats especially, costing 6 francs for 8 cubes of chicken. Plus the menu or waiters don't tell you until you are all looking at them confused as hell.

Christmas 07 Day 6: Lucerne (Mount Pilatus)

2008-01-03T17:48:00.000Z

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Another awesome sleep on the top bunk...
Hotel didn't have a bar, so we picked up a baguette for breakfast from a shop on the street.
We all meet at the train station to meet for our trip to Mount Pilatus. Everyone else had pre purchased food to take with them, because food wasn't provided, so Bex and I grabbed some baguettes and pretzels to eat.

Lame #2 The tour had been over-booked that morning, so some of us had to ride in a taxi to the mountain. We were also getting lunch provided as part of the tour price. The bus we got on as being used for another tour at the same time so we ended up stealing peoples seats when they got back on. They weren't happy.

Mount Pilatus is only about 10 minutes from Lucerne to the base, then two cable car rides to the top which take about 40 minutes. It was pretty cool because it was really cloudy on the ground, but you go through the cloud and come out into brilliant sunlight and snow. We could not see any of the ground (because of the cloud) from the top but we still get some cool photos.

We had Raclette potatoes for lunch. This consistered of a bowl of hot melted cheese and a basket full of small boiled potatoes and a plate of pickled vegetables. Not exactly gourmet. Apparently its a traditional Swiss meal.

We walked around the top for a little while before I convinced people to come sledding with me. The mountain has a 1.4Km sled track down part of the mountain, unfortunately we had left it to late to go all the way down, so we just mucked around at the top and created our own fun.

Lame #3 We were all supposed to meet back at the base of the mountain to catch the base, except it was going to be late, so some of us took teh taxi back to town and the others waited.

Bex and I ate our pre purchased baguettes for dinner then we all crammed into one hotel room for drinks. Which turned into more drinks when Bex and I did a mission to get more alcohol.

For the team.

Christmas 07 Day 5: Train to Lucerne

2008-01-03T17:35:00.000Z

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Last day in Salzburg so we made the most of it by doing nothing exciting. After checking out of the hostel we wandered around Salzburg and some markets for a little while. This was the first day shops had been open since we had been there. No boxing day sales for us.

There was no direct train to Lucerne so we had to go to Zurich first, then take a 50 minute train to Lucerne.

At lunch time we jumped on our train to Zurich, its a six hour beast and rather boring. Bex and I had to go into a different cabin because there was too many for one. Luckily we got put in with an Austrian couple who taught us a little german using their sons picture books. In German a hammer is "hammer". I win! The others got a nice guy that couldn't speak english and couldn't pick a bar of soup out of a line up of 1. Aimee ended up sitting in the aisle because the whole cabin stank.

Once we got to Lucerne we immediately went to our hostel to check in. It is important to note that all of the lame things on our holiday happened while we were in Switzerland, it has thus been renamed to Shitzerland.

Lame #1 The hostel had decided to give us two double rooms (with double beds) and one room with double bed bunks. Yes Double bed bunks. We actually booked a room with four single beds. So we had to do some chop and changing and I got dumped on the top bunk again, this time I had to share it.

Once we had sorted out that fraccas, we went for a stroll around Lucerne. All of the shops were open till 9 so we had a peek in some. Then went to find some inexpensive dinner. We ended up getting McDonalds. Shitzerland is an expensive country. After dinner some of the more manly travellers grabbed a few beers at a local pub before hitting the hay.

Christmas 07 Day 4: Salzburg (Boxing day)

2008-01-03T16:55:00.000Z

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Sleeping on the top bunk sucks. We got up at a respectable hour, grabbed some breakfast from the hostel and left for another exciting day.

First up we wandered around Salzburg a little before checking out the fortress looking down on teh town. We took a cable car/tram thing up instead of walking (lazy we are). It has some awesome views of the city and surrounding mountains and countryside. Apparently it took over 600 years to finish building the castle, but I was more interesting in starting snowball fights because I am a child.

After we came back down from the fortress we grabbed something to eat then waited for a new bus adventure. This time it was The Sound of Music Tour!! I can't say as I was excited as the tour guide but whatever.

We visited a lot of familiar (if yo have seen the movie) places. The movie is based on the play not on the book written by Maria Von Trapp, or the German movie based on the book. Apparently hollywood (as it does) took alot of liberties with some of the places. My favourite being the mountain that Maria is picking flowers at the start of the movie. Somehow she heard the convent bells ringing and rang back to it in about three minutes. The mountain is over 2Km high, and the foot of it is about an hour bus ride away from the convent on the other side of a few hills and the city itself.

Another classic "whoopsy" is related to the same mountain. At the end when the family hike over the mountain to escape the nazis to get into Switzerland. I guess they should have paid attention to their Geography lessons because on the other side of that mountain is Germany and Hitlers castle. Switzerland is in fact 500 miles in the opposite direction. Wonder if they sang when they got executed? Dark humor indeed.

The tour guide was interesting, he loves the movie and possibly men. Anyone of the older generation would find him funny and entertaining.

At teh end of the tour we stopped for a break and I had some apfelstruddel (apple strudel) with vanilla sauce (custard). It vas good yah.

Once we got back we had some dinner at the hostel and more beer.

Beer is a recurring theme through out the holiday.

Christmas 07 Day 3: Salzburg (Christmas day)

2008-01-02T20:31:00.000Z

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Due to our hangovers, tempers were short. And someone didn't appreciate a pink shirt his mother had bought him for christmas. I looked like a gay mobster.

We had some breakfast at the hostel and then walked into town to pick up the bus to take us sleigh riding. It was a 2 hour bus ride into the mountains too a place called Ramsau which apparently is really famous in cross-country skiing circles. On they way we drove past Hitlers Eagles Nest castle, its awesome but closed during the winter.

The sleigh ride was awesome, we travelled on two horse open sleighs with blankets on our legs. It was a perfect day with clear blue skies and not too chilly. We went around a plateau 1000m above sea level and got some great pictures.

I attempted to start snow fights any chance I got, sadly some of the travellers were too mature for that activity and didnt fight back when they got hit. There were some great shots though.

After the 2 hour sleigh ride we got something to eat in Ramsau and I had goulash (an Austrian meal). I like stews so this was good, especially on a cold day with some gluwein.

After the meal we roamed around Ramsua for a bit and threw snow and ice at each other then jumped back on the bus to go back to Salzburg.

We had booked a table at a really old restaurant in Salzburg for dinner, so we got semi dressed up and walked into town from teh hostel. Dinner was pretty good, I managed to get another goulash without meaning too, this time it was veal. It was quite a merry old time, with everyone talking and taking the piss out of each other.

After dinner some of us had a beer back at the hostel which was strangely quiet compared to the night before and then went to bed.

Throwing snow at unsuspecting ~~girls~~ people rocks my possum socks off.

Christmas 07 Day 2: Salzburg (Christmas eve)

2008-01-02T19:59:00.000Z

Useful links:
Christmas photo gallery
Other posts

Got up at 10 after an awesome sleep and had to check out before we were kicked out. We had some hours to spare before our train so we wanrdered around Stuttgart for a while and got some more gluwein and hot dogs for refreshments. And more gluwein.

The train to Salzburg was 4 hours long but went by reasonably quickly due to snacks and good books.

It was dark by the time we got into Salzburg and we had a little trouble finding the hostel, but we got there in the end and checked ourselves into our 6 bunk room. I bought ear plugs for everyone.

We then went down to the bar (yes a bar, with cheap beer) and got dinner, then drinks. By the time Christmas day rolled around (midnight) we are tore up. Andy had picked up a bunch of girls from Ashburton and we were dancing with some random asian guys on the tables.

The local lager tasted just like everything other mass produced lager in the world, and teh dark was sadly not much better. I really like the wheat beer though. By the way, in Austria, a Radler is what they call a shandy.

We ended up heading too bed shortly after, all except Andy who slept in the hallway after getting up to go to the toilet and forgetting his swipecard. The question that remains unanswered is why he didnt knock to get one of us to let him in. Some people are just too nice, or stupid.

Christmas 07 Day 1: Stuttgart

2008-01-02T18:30:00.000Z

Useful links:
Christmas photo gallery
Other posts

Got about four hours sleep thanks to Anas jerk flatmates. Most of you know how grumpy I get without my required 10 hours sleep a night. We stayed at Anas because it was easier for us all to get to Stanstead by 5am. The taxi that picked us up was dodgy looking but we were all too tired to care. Once we got to the airport we zombie walked around till it was time to take off.

Got into Frankfurt Hahn airport (cheap one) at 10am local time then jumped on a sauna bus (it was dam hot) to the train station. It had snowed, things were looking good for a white christmas. Bex got a scary eye from a chick on the bus. She stared at Bex as she french kissed her boyfriend. Bex thought it was creepy, I thought it was hot.

We walked around the train station and a little outside while we waited for the train, then took off to Stuttgart for a first night of the holiday. I showed the germans how to be a man be walking around in a t-shirt. They were voved (wowed - w has a v sound in deutsche).

Our train to Stuttgart was better than the bus and took us through some white countryside. Its cool being on a train that blitzes past cars on the highway. Unlike NZ where they travel at about 70Kmph.

After we had checked into our hostel and showered we went down to the christmas markets. They were very busy, luckily after living in London they were manageable. As it got later it got colder so we had to drink some gluwein (mulled wine) to keep warm. I got to sample curryworst (chopped sausage, covered in tomato sauce and curry powder), which was pretty dam tasty. European sausages are far better than kiwi ones. No offence. I also got some pommes frites (fries) as supper, covered in mayo, mmmm.

After the early start everyone called it a night by 8pm, except Bex who was visiting her friends.
Sleep was deep and blissful that night.

Holidays 07: Christmas with the Krauts

2007-12-22T07:54:00.000Z

Another awesomely racist post title.

My contract finished on Tuesday so I have already started my holidaying with activities such as - sleeping in, eating, and not wearing any pants.

We went out to a friend of Marcus' last night for some christmas drinks and pretty much just ate cheese and crackers and drank some potent mulled wine (made with vodka). If you could guess we both had crappy sleeps and weird dreams, cheese is a very common - made up - hallucinogen.

The plan was to not get much sleep on Friday night so we ould sleep early on Saturday as we have to be at Stanstead airport at 5am. Stanstead airport is also about an hour away from anywhere, so we need to get up around 3ish in order to get out there on time. There will be some cranky flyer's tomorrow I'm sure.

We are away for 8 days traveling through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. To peoples astonishment we are back in London on the 31st for New Years Eve, but are meeting Allison at Heathrow.

It might be tricky to do updates while I'm away but I will take my trusty notebook to jot down some notes and reviews of beer and food.

I bought another phrasebook the other day, this time is was a "Western Europe" one, it combines French, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Italian, plus another 6 odd languages into one booklet. Knowing my luck I will either lose it, or mispronounce a word and call someones mother a one legged duck.

Merry Christmas!

Holidays 07: Brugge Reloaded

2007-12-11T20:19:00.000Z

Friday
Belgium is a strange country (compared to New Zealand). It has one beach, two languages, and two awesome primary exports.

Being the alpha-geek that I am I went to Borders before we left and I grabbed a French phrase book so I could at least order a beer without looking too much like just another ignorant tourist.

Unfortunately being the jump-to-my-guns "boy" that I am, I forgot that Brugge is in the dutch speaking region of Belgium. The only dutch I knew is Dillons buddy, and Kaffir - which I sure as hell ain't using in public.

Luckily Brugge is a tourist haven and most of the retail and hospo staff know english and can conceal their contempt for us english swine. After a few good strength brews, I couldn't care less what they said.

We left home just after 4pm on Friday and got to the Hostel in Brugge at 2am. This included:

Tubing to Liverpool Street train station
Taking train to Stanstead airport (way north)
Flying to Brussels Charlois airport
Bussing to Brugge train station
Walking to Hostel
Climbing into bed that had previously been slept in by an obese midget.

Saturday
We got up far too early (morning) the nest day and grabbed some breakfast. Belgium is big on meat and cheese and I had a salami and cheese sandwich for breakfast. mmm

After breakfast we got ready and headed out to check out the city. Brugge is a city that a normal person would describe as quaint, I will use the adjective "cobbletacular" - a portmanteau if you will. I think I saw one street that was not paved with cobble stones, that matched with the narrow streets, old stone buildings and large churches made the city seem very err.... quaint.

A lot of people ride bikes in Brugge, especially the older generations. It wasnt uncommon to see an old biddy in her sunday best cruising down a cobble stone street on her bicycle. Even if it brought to mind dirty nun jokes. Although some look like they apply their makeup with Homers makeup gun. Yes karma will get me.

We spent most of the day wondering around Brugge, checking out the Christmas markets, drinking, eating, drinking, taking photos, and predictably - drinking. I hate making cliche jokes such as the previous one, but sometimes keeping it simple is best. Although a classic moment to summarise it would be. When we were all sitting in a bar in the early afternoon I had finished my third of the day and gone to the bathroom, everyone misinterprets my rosey cheeks for being drunk and Ana asks Bex "will he make it to dinner?". Indeed, like I would pass up the opportunity to eat!

The restaurant we went to had been recommended to us by someone at a bar. It was crap. Who eats pate without bread or crackers? The dam belgiuminiums, thats who. Plus the waiter was the most arrogant jerk I have ever been served by. I have had better service at McDonalds, in Brixton, when I bought a hamburger, and only had pennies, during the dinner rush.

All schtick aside, Brugge is great. With the number of beers I still haven't tried, the different toppings on fries, I still haven't tried, and the number of beers i still haven't tried (sorry). I will definitely be going back.

Sunday
We got up a bit later on Sunday, had breakfast, got organised then headed to the train station to head to Brussels. Aimee and Andy had already left early to check out an Ice Sculpture show that apparently was really good. The train to Brussels (an hour away) cost us 7 euros each and we got into Brussels well past beer o'clock.

We had a walk around the main tourist attractions - the Grand Place, and the statue of a little boy pissing. The Grand Place is an understandable attraction, but the kid? I don't know... I guess he should get credit for being able to pee with all of those people watching, but it looks like he is just showing off, with his hand on his hip and that shit eating grin on his face. Foreigners.

After the required tourist activities was out of the way we headed to a bar for a beer. Advice if you go to Brussels:

Take money with you, the ATMS are few and far between,and some will swallow your card ("for your own protection")
People speak French in Brussels, they don't hide their dislike of english tourists.
Grimbergen Blonde is not a good beer.
Its not as good as Brugge
Actually read the French phrase book you bought, so you don't look stupid in front of the hot french speaking waitress.

We only spent about 4 hours in Brussels then we had to cruise out to the airport on another train (this one cost 2.80 each). Then flew back to Heathrow at 7pm.

I can't wait to get back and get my beir, frites, and chocolad on again.

Holidays 07: Brugge

2007-12-09T21:07:00.000Z

Update: Photos uploaded to Picasa.

Just got back from Brugge.

That place is awesome.
A bigger update will follow but here is a couple of photos to whet le appetite.

The Belfry in the middle of Brugge

Taken from the top of the belfry looking down at the christmas markets.

The christmas markets and ice rink at night time, after it had closed and only drunken idiots are still walking around.

Some say respect is earned

2007-12-06T18:00:00.000Z

Below is just another brick in my wall dealing with charming Project managers.
Viva la females!!!

ellie@flatline.m:	can you ask ric to go online please
ellie@flatline.m:	also have clarified the competition page
ellie@flatline.m:	gonna be a couple of days .net work
graham@enlighten:	I believe Ric is no longer accepting MSNs
ellie@flatline.m:	tell him to turn it on
ellie@flatline.m:	honestly don't mess around - i am not in the mood
ellie@flatline.m:	tell him without a phone it is a requirement
graham@enlighten:	It might be better if you send him an email, did you get Jakes email?
ellie@flatline.m:	yes i did
ellie@flatline.m:	just had big meeting
graham@enlighten:	I am not messing around
ellie@flatline.m:	unlucky for you - you and ric will be dealing with me
graham@enlighten:	Thats fine
ellie@flatline.m:	if you try and make things hard - i will just get angry with you. your choice
graham@enlighten:	I have no idea what you are talking about
ellie@flatline.m:	yeah yeah
graham@enlighten:	If you want to tel Ric something, email him. I am not a secretary
graham@enlighten:	You are blowing things out of proportion
graham@enlighten:	Please follow the process Jake outlined
graham@enlighten:	It will make all our lives easier
ellie@flatline.m:	FYI - the buglist is complete
ellie@flatline.m:	we are not using bugzilla
ellie@flatline.m:	i simply asked you to ask ric to go online
graham@enlighten:	And what was my response?
ellie@flatline.m:	something
graham@enlighten:	Good bye Ellie

Holiday Season: Part Un Section Deux

2007-11-28T08:10:00.000Z

This is how much turkey was left after dinner and I finishing carving it up.

Holiday Season: Part Un

2007-11-27T21:42:00.000Z

Early Christmas
So things kicked off on Saturday with an early Christmas Party hosted by Lance and Karen, and starring myself.

Lance asked us to bring a plate each, so I came up with the awesome idea of making ambrosia. Its tasty, its easy to make, and its got marshmellows in it. A breakdown in communication occured when I didn't check with Lance how much we should actually bring. Well, I think we ended up taking about a gallon of it (~ 3.7 litres). We ate about 300 ml of it. Piece of advice: don't use tinned fruit, especially strawberries, or grapefruit.

Those two did an awesome job of cooking. We had a five course meal and a reasonable amount of alcohol:

Cheese and crackers
Yum cha (steamed dim sums)
Kebabs (on skewers)
Roast chicken, ham, potato salad, and pasta salad
Trifle, mouses, the aforementioned ambrosia, jelly.

There was a shortage of plates and cutlery.

Belated Thansgiving
This was the day Bex and I had been looking forward to for awhile. Turkey is addictive. We went and picked up all our groceries on Saturday afternoon. Once again my eyes were bigger than mine and everyone elses stomaches combined and I got a 8.4Kg turkey (feeds 10 - 12 apparently).

The packaging said the turkey had to be left out for 48 hours to defrost, this was not an ideal solution as we needed to start cooking it in less than 20 hours, so I put it into a bucket of cold water and let it sit. Every couple of hours (except overnight) I changed the water because the turkey was chilling it.

By the time it had to go into the oven at lunchtime on Sunday it was mostly defrosted, and I thought it was good enough. I then had to prep it. This involved removing the giblets and almost phallic neck, then rinsing it and finally drying it with paper towels. Once that was done I placed lemon quarters and garlic cloves in the cavities and Bex poured mixed herbs on top (which I then rubbed in). I then covered it in foil and threw it in the oven.

The turkey took about 5 hours to cook, and somehow it was cooked perfectly, I even put some bacon on top for abit of flavour. I had to empty the tray (which was the biggest we had in the house but too small for holding a turkey) of oil and juice. With about an hour to go I placed some mini pigs-in-blankets around the bird and cooked it uncovered to give it some colour.

Bex organised it so we did the turkey, stuffing and gravy, and every else could bring vegetables and deserts. Luckily the right people were on the ball and we ended up with a cracker feast.

After dinner we had desert which consisted of ambrosia (from the previous night), icecream, and chocolate brownies.

After the meal, we all sat down and pretty much stared at the Tv for 4 hours. From memory people left at intermittent times, some fell asleep, and not many talked.

At least he didn't get drawn on.

I remember thinking I should head to bed then looking at my watch to see it was only 7.30. Soft.

Why I won't get a drivers license here.

2007-11-20T19:50:00.000Z

I saw this on the way to Brixton a little while ago.

Someone parked a bag of sand under that Audi A3

Holiday cheer

2007-11-20T14:15:00.000Z

Its been about two weeks since I last posted and I have been inundated with spam email but no requests for more posts. Oh well, this can be my own private journal where I monologue about my feelings and stuff and junk.

We have some big BIG plans for Christmas and December. Luckily we have two very organised Gisbornites here, namely Ana and Aimee. Who put in place some cool things for us to do.

First though, Lance and Karen are having an early Christmas dinner at their place this weekend because they are in NZ for Christmas. Heres your warning if you didn't already know.

Then on Sunday Bex and I are going to cook a Thanksgiving roast. We initially planned to go back to Bodeans BBQ and have it there, but "I decided it would be cooler if we cooked it ourselves" - translates to "Graham forgot to book a table, and when he did, it was far too late".

On December the 7th, several of us (Bex and I included) are heading to Bruge to check out the Christmas markets and drink some cheap Belgium beer. I can taste the Bellevue Kriek already.
This is a weekend trip and we get back to London on the Sunday night, nicely pickled and hopefully not too cold.

The real cool (pun intended) trip is when we go to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for Christmas. We have a very detail itinerary thanks to Ana which includes things like an 8 hour Sleigh ride on Christmas day as well as doing the Sound of Music tour in Salzberg. Yeah I'm doing a tour of a stinking musical, so what. Yes mum I will get pictures.

Bex and I fly back on New Years eve to meet Allison at Heathrow airport for some Londinium based antics. Most people ask why we are staying in London for New years, can't be as bad as Hamilton.

If you are one of the unlucky few who know they should be buying me a Christmas present, I urge you to think twice. Shipping is ridiculous in and out of London, as well as the fact the postal service have been striking recently because their jobs are threatened by progress, technology, and who cares about customer service. So instead, please donate all set aside present-monies for Ronald McDonald house.

Yes I am serious.

Customer Service

2007-11-09T15:29:00.000Z

Short version: it sucks.

I now have a new phone number because of it:
For Englanders: 07515 421222
For everyone else: +44 7515 421222

Possibly more coming once I have drunk several large bottles of drain cleaner.

London Babysitters club: The Sittee strikes back

2007-11-01T22:21:00.000Z

Update (4.11.2007): Photos added for extra comedic effect.

Tuesday we decided to do some other stuff that neither of use had done yet, it was quite easy to pick seeing as I'm a recluse and Bex is a FOB.

At roughly noonish we headed to Trafalgar Square, Wednesday was no where as nice as the previous day and we had to wrap up in coats to keep warm but still look cool and stylish in our english cultural ignorance.

Trafalgar square is a large open area (like a square) that commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), a British naval victory of the Napoleonic Wars. The original name was to have been "King William the Fourth's Square", but George Ledwell Taylor suggested the name "Trafalgar Square".

That might have been ripped word for word from this article.

The square is dominated by Nelsons columns, and some rather strange fountains with naked boys and dolphins. Going off the percieved gayness of the phallic-like column and the naked boys, it must have been a rather strange battle.
Any more thinking on that topic is beyond the scope of this one sided discussion.

Looking down on Trafalgar square is the National Gallery, another "free" museum, except this is an art museum that contains a lot of quite old paitings dating back from the 1500's through to the 1800's. This is art that I can make sense of, except for a few more explicit pieces, where it seemed the artist just wanted to paint a nude woman because everyone else was doing it.

There is artwork in there from Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Monet, Rapheal, amongst others. Name dropping is fun. The only down side of it is that its easy to get lost, because the exit signs are placed on random doors. I guess there was so much classic art in there they decided to go for a modern art-esque navigation structure. Like an M.C Escher drawing.

After the National Gallery, I thought I should show Bex the NZ memorial. The only thing in our way was my memory and its lack of retention. So instead we headed to Green park so I could try and retrace my steps from when I went with Lance, like a victim of amnesia but without the cool action sequences and a crappy screenplay.

We walked through Green Park and went and briefly checked out Buckingham Palace, then walked up the side of Green Park till we got to Hyde Park corner where I remembered where the NZ memorial is. Bex was stoked, its very cool memorial based on the Sotuhern Cross. All Australia has are some gates. Ha.

That night we had made plans with Lance and Karen to go to dinner and I picked a place I had noticed the previous night to go to. Some would know not to trust me with that kind of decision.

A Physics teacher I had in high school told me once that if you state your assumptions before outlining a solution to a problem and your working is correct you can never be wrong. Of course this doesnt work in practise, but at least I passed my exams.

So here goes some problem solving:

Assuming Bodeans BBQ is the best place to eat in London (and as far as my experience goes, it is).

It is therefore Ironic that I have travelled $2000 around the world to realise that I could have just stayed in San Francisco and avoided paying £2 for a can of A&W root beer.

Solved.

Bodeans is GREAT, I had already decided what Bex and I were having, and she didn't really have a say in the matter (plus I was paying, I r alpha male!). We started with a teaser platter for two which consisted of Quesadillas, crab-cakes, chicken wings, and shrimp. For mains we shared a Caeser salad and a combo platter of spare ribs, a 1/4 chicken, and heap of pulled pork (with fries and coleslaw). To add to this mountain of meat-based sustenance, I ordered a plate of Burnt Ends for the table because... err... why not?

The only thing we managed to finish was the starters, there was so much food, so much meat. We ended up taking the remnants of the feast home and I had a couple of good lunches out of it. The next day I felt like I was hungover, all that protein had destroyed me and I had to suck down alot of water before I started feeling better.

Starters

Mains

Bex has now dubbed it The House of Sin, we are going back there for Thanksgiving.

London Babysitters club: Part 1

2007-11-01T21:21:00.000Z

Update: Fixed the smoothie story, so it makes sense.

So Bex got in on Monday night and I took two days off to ease her into the over-rated hecticness of the big L. On Tuesday we went to the London eye, and we couldn't have picked a better day. It was one of the finer days we have had in awhile and we got some great photos. I totally recommend the Eye (on a good day) as you can see an awful lot of the urban sprawl as well as some popular landmarks.

After the Eye we walked across the Westminster bridge to check out the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Old buildings with spires where old self-important people argue about mundane things and waste away my precious taxes. Poor buildings, they deserve better.

After that I thought I would show Bex some of the shopping highlights that she can't afford to go to (I'm such an asshole). We got out at Green park station (by Buckingham palace) and walked up to the famous Piccadilly Circus then down Regent street towards all of the fancy pretentious shops (like the Apple Store) that charge too much for too little tangible products. I ended up getting a new cell phone and giving Bex my old one so she didn't get burned by global roaming charges talking too all her friend (singular used on purpose).

We then headed for home after getting a smoothie each and me getting some kfc. The smoothie I got was called a cheeky monkey but actually said cheeky darkie when ordering. Luckily Holmes isn't broadcast in the UK.

I then went for a run and had a workout and Ryan my flatmate came home just as I finished and invited us to the movies to go see Eastern Promises. Its not as good as History of Violence (same director and leading actor).

We had a pretty busy day, and that lucky cow didn't suffer any jet lag. I let her air bed down while she slept, in jealousy.

I didn't.

Or did I?

Package Delivered

2007-10-29T22:42:00.000Z

To all those that are fortunate enough to know Rebekah, you will be pleased to know she arrived safely albeit sadly at Heathrow airport and is now unpacking her stuff into her assigned storage areas in my room.

I forgot to take a camera with me so I had to get an artists impression of the scene:

Sadly the image doesnt convey the amount of baggage she had or the actual enormity of my muscles.

Explanations

2007-10-24T17:49:00.000+01:00

Some of you may be wondering why I had my picture taken with a guy dressed up as Master Chief, some may just plain not care, or some of you may not even read this like I assume.

Anyway.

Lance and I went to a show called Video Games Live. With out using the lame marketing lingo used in the site, it is basically a choir and orchestra playing video game songs and themes.

Sounds lame? Yes.

Is it lame? Hell no, I thought it was pretty dam cool, they had a big screen above the stage showing footage or video of the games that the current song was from (except for any Square Enix games), plus they had a few cool segments added in.

Some of the more famous songs (Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy) were all introduced by their respective composers. The event was sponsered by Microsoft so not surprisingly the big finale was a section on all 3 Halo games music with accompanying cinematic footage.

They had a couple of competitions during the show:

The first being a live version of Space Invaders were the player had to move the ship by strafing (sidestepping to non-gamers) across the stage with the action being shown on the big screen. He won an xbox 360 plus games.

The second was a Frogger battle between two people, using standard controls. The winner getting xbox 360 elite.

Definately worth going to, apparently they are coming/have been to NZ and I recommend any cool person to go to it.

I might post some blurry pictures later.

To all the doubters

2007-10-23T09:20:00.000+01:00

I. Am. A. Stud.

Yes. The cheesey grin is purposeful.

Do jewish women tape their nipples?

2007-10-18T09:32:00.000+01:00

I really need to start carrying my camera round with me, or have one of those cool spy cameras that look like a button or a baseball cap.

I was walking to work today (I'm at work now :o) and a guy walks in front of me, travelling in the same direction. I look up and notice hes wearing a jewish cap (or kippah).

I didnt think much of it until I noticed a shiny piece on the side, so being a nosy judgemental prick, I speed up to follow him.

It turns out the shiny piece was a small piece of tape to keep the cap on his head.

I silently cracked up and slowed down to not arouse suspicion, wouldn't want an angry jew bringing the wrath.

Then I started thinking, theres got to be a whole [funny but not racist measurement metaphor]-load of jews in the world (roughly 14 million). Thats quite a niche-market for a company, considering how popular becoming bald is getting.

Sure, not all jews wear kippahs but if they had a good marketing department they could create spin so as to charge more. I thought of my own:

Kippah Stikkah: Even Moses couldn't part your kippah from your head.
We use only the best kosher adhesives.

That probably could be construed as racism.

The two weeks that was

2007-10-16T20:26:00.000+01:00

I thought about posting last week, but I thought that it would be too soon after the tragedy that occurred in Cardiff. I think every word typed would have dripped with regret/sadness/disappointment/anger. Pick a stage of denial and most of us probably went through it.

Luckily, I'm over it now, most people that I have talked to about have been polite even if I know they are thanking their god/s that we are out (especially those bloody limeys).

Now we can move on and concentrate on more important things in life, first I will need a few years to think of something...

For the game I had a few like-minded supporters around to celebrate in the coming victory. It ended up a very mixed night, we all got drunk, someone got pissed off and left straight after the game, and someone throw up in several rooms of the house, and I couldn't understand why no one else wanted to watch a Steven Seagal movie.

Being the sad sack I am, I haven't watched any rugby since the "event". I had semi-plausible excuses:

On Saturday Lance, Karen and I went for a nice romantic dinner to a French restaurant down the road. The meal was on the whole pretty good, I can now say I have tasted skate. If you have tasted ass soaked in fish oil, then you have tasted skate. Luckily the entree and desert, and wine was good.

Carrying on the theme of me being the third wheel, the three of us went to the British Museum the next day. Its a huge museum and totally free, except for one exhibit. It has a huge open court in the middle of the museum to link all the sections together. If you are a big fan of pottery, especially the black and red figure styles of ancient greece then you would love it. On the other hand if you think microwavable, dishwasher safe, tupperware is much more practical, then you might get bored pretty quick. After walking around the museum for what seemed like days we went home and I couldn't be bothered watching rugby with Safas so I watched a Western starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson (Seraphim Falls). Oh yeah and are way too much fried chicken and ribs. mmm ribs.

I will probably watch the final, we are having some rowdy safas here for it on Saturday, and I will no doubt be home without an excuse. The good thing is they always bring lots of beer, even if it is crap.

Lance and I are going on a date on Monday (he says it isn't a date, but it so is) to a show. It should be good fun, and I will try and remember to take my camera to get some action shots for your viewing pleasure.

800 pounds = I dont want to know in NZD

2007-10-02T21:59:00.000+01:00

So I finally paid back the people I owed money to (getting set up expenses, rent, prostitutes, etc) and decided to splash out and buy an electronic friend.

The only problem is the electronic friend needs a TV in order see the interactions between us. I wanted a Samsung 23 inch LCD, I got a LG 22 inch. Im not dissapointed, its a great quality screen. It performed very well for my "signature screen test" and was even better once I plugged in the XBox.

The Tv cost me 300 pounds, the XBox plus compulsory accessories and must-have games cost me close to _cough 400 pounds.

To top off the - money hungry - entertainment of the weekend, Lance, Karen, and I went to see Incubus play at the Brixton Academy (10 minute walk down the road). This was my first concert in England and other than the English people there it was very good. Incubus are great live.

This is the only picture that didn't turn out totally shit (other than the odd balloon in the center).

Food lovers note: There is good curry place around the corner that makes my new favourite dish: Lamb pistachio paneer massala. Its like a Korma but nuttier and is made with fresh green chillies mixed through. They have never heard of Malai Koftas though :(

Padded seats

2007-09-26T20:01:00.000+01:00

Last night Lance, River, and I went to our first football game ever in this hemisphere where the water goes the wrong way down the sink.

River spotted tickets a few weeks ago and asked if we wanted to go see - The - Arsenal at home to Newcastle in the third round of the Carling cup. Obviously the answer was yes.

We all met at Green Park tube station (one down from my work one) and then took the Picadilly line up to Arsenal station. There are two stations near the Emirates Stadium, but they had closed one of them, so everyone was taking our line to Arsenal station.

It was quite packed.

Once out of the station we had short walk (still took 15 minutes in the crowds) to the stadium.

We picked up some ridiculously priced chilli-dogs and chicken balti pies for dinner. I must give the pies credit, they are the best I have had so far. They actually llooked and tasted like a real pie.

You are allowed to take your own food into the stadium. Im not entirely sure about drinks, but Lance and I had our bags searched, and the guy in front had some cans of soda confiscated, so no cans allowed at least.

We had to climb a couple of flights of stairs to get to our seats, but we were early (on time) so had no problem getting to our seats.

Yes, the seats are padded.

The game itself was good, sadly Arsenal didn't play their first string players but they still managed to hold off Newcastle and score two late goals for the win.

Before the game we thought that it would be full of drunk english hooligans. So Lance and River ordered some Arsenal shirts online "to fit in", and I bought a red shirt (to not get raped). Nothing could be further from the truth. It was very much like a rugby game in NZ except with signing/chanting. The most aggressive thing we saw was some guy just in front of us stand and shake his umbrella at the referee after a call against Arsenal. They were lot of security guards around, and even more around the section where the Newcastle supporters were sitting.

The chanting was strange, NZ isn't known for its sporting fixture atmospheres, the best one I had been in before last night was the Maoris vs Lions at Waikato stadium, and that was due to the Lions supporters signing.

They were alot of chants, some general Arsenal ones, some directed at certain players, some directed at the small corner of the stadium dedicated to Newcastle supporters, and some directed at Tottenham (I wisely didn't take my Tottenham jacket with me).

I didn't actually understand many of the chants, it could have been my poor hearing or it could have been the fact that most englishmen have forgotten how to pronounce any words in the language they invented. Some examples:
ooarya - Who are you? (directed at the Newcastle supporters)
rudoomy - Red Army! (I only figured this out once we left)

I now understand why a lot of people leave the game 10 minutes before its due to finish. With 60,000 people all vying for the same tube, bus, or train it turns into a traffic jam outside the stadium. It took me nearly 2 hours to get home after the game.

All in all, I would definitely go again.

The Sauce

2007-09-22T19:01:00.000+01:00

My soon-to-be-ex apartment really is depressing, it sucks the life out of me. Some days I need to check in the mirror in case my skin has turned gray and I start calling things "my precious". Luckily I have turned into an alcoholic instead, at least the barmaids look happy to see me (or my wallet).

Its far too easy to drink here, with not having to worry about driving home and pubs within crawling distance from work and home and anywhere in between, as well as all the sporting events on, its a recipe for liver failure.

I spent the last couple of nights with people from work at random pubs.

Thursday was some guys leaving party who I hadn't worked with so I didn't know him at all. It was reasonably fun, got to talk to a few of the people I work with regurlarly. I left earlyish so I could catch the second half of some football that I had orginally planned to watch. I didn't pay any of my or anyone elses drinks. Score.

Friday was even better. Three of the chinese contingent at work organised Chinese themed drinks at work: Tsingtao beer, mah jong, and fortune cookies. Apparently karoake was orgnised but didn't happen (if you don't think karaoke is big in chinese culture, ask Lance who we (he and I) walked in on singing at her parents place, she was embarrassed). Anyway. I didn't have any at work "because I was too busy working". But they invited for a drink down at a pub afterwards so I obliged.

Its important to note, I was the only contracter there for most of the night. All of the high-ups were there too so I kept my head down and drank the free beer. I got to meet some more of the 150 people that work at Dare, most of them are pretty cool.

Any of the more amusing conversations I had was with this drunk woman who was very forward when I first met her. "Who are you" was the first thing she said to me, I normally respond to rudeness like that with a stupid answer, so I just said "nobody" to play it safe.
After awhile we start talking about Dare (what else do we have in common) and I start criticising some of the processes they employ. AFTER that rant I ask what she does.

Shes the Managing Director.

He shoots, he scores.

Luckily, she was pretty drunk so hopefully won't remember come Monday. That is unless she is as good at her job as everyone says she is. And she was the one paying for the tab at the bar.

For anyone that hasn't been here before let me enlighten you on beer.

By and large, its crap with the popular beers being Stella, budweiser, carling, and guiness. Other than Guiness these beers are called Lagers and are all served cold, fizzy and from a tap. Not as cold as NZ but good enough. I don't like Lagers, I think they taste like horse piss and would only drink one if I didn't get an option.

The other beers are Ales, these are great tasting (think Pilsners, Hoprockers, or Reds in NZ) but unfortunately, served at room temperature and flat.

Its a hard decision: cold horse piss, or warm yummy.

So far the only way to solve this decision is to drink as much of both of them as possible.

I am Joes liv..........

Violenza Domestica (Epilogueo?)

2007-09-22T18:14:00.000+01:00

Its been almost two weeks since my flatmates woke me up with their dirty laundry and the air is still thick with tension. "You could cut it with a knife".

Ediana moved back in on Thursday.

I should have called her Beth, wonder if she would get that reference. Maybe if I gave her some eggs..... and a black eye.

I got quite "tore up" last Saturday and managed to get home at about 1ish where I chugged back some water and went to bed. Sounds pretty ordinary and boring, right?

The next day Tarcisio accuses me of peeing in the oven. Apparently there was a puddle on the floor, the oven door was open and there were a couple of wet tea towels lieing around. I am 99.9% sure that it wasn't me, sure I was pretty drunk, but to pee in an oven? And not remember?

I didn't have a hangover the next day (thanks water) and I felt pretty good all day.

The accusation coming from a guy that gets drunk, beats his girlfriend, and can't remember the next day.

If you think about it (and allow the metaphors), pee is liquid like soup, it goes in a pot on the stove. Number Deuce is the more solid of the body's evacuants and (in most cases) is similar to a fresh loaf or biscuit (hence the sayings that I won't repeat).

As my above logic dictates, if I had have peeed anywhere in the kitchen, it would be sitting in a pot on the stove and their would be some fresh scones in the oven to accompany it.

Thats the last of the potty humour. I promise*.

I am moving to my new place tomorrow afternoon (before the game). I can't wait, those guys seem far better (I have hung out with them a couple of times) and should be fun watching the rugby with a South African (especially in the semis) and football with a Frenchman (at least hes not italian).

*I don't promise.

How to loose 2 flatmates in 10 minutes

2007-09-11T19:56:00.000+01:00

I tossed around quite a few titles for this post, in the end I forgot the good ones and settled for this lame reference to a bad movie that I haven't watched all of (and won't).

The last week has been pretty quiet on the western front, I did play some football last monday down at Crystal Palace which was good. Hopefully that will be a weekly occurence.

The main content of this post will be related what happened on Sunday night/Monday morning.

I went to bed quite late on Sunday after getting some rugby and shopping action in (almost bought a tv, in hindsight im glad I didn't). I put some earplugs in to get a good sleep and settle down.

At about 12.15 there is a rather rough knowck on teh dorr and Ediana (female flatmate) calls out my name.

I sit up and take the earplugs out and the door opens to Tarcisio (male flatmate) holding Ediana up by her hair.

I was totally dumfounded, she was in her pajamas and he was wearing only jeans. He let her go when he saw I could see them and she ran into my room and hid behind me saying she wanted me to protect her.

What

The

Fuck

!

She said he was drunk and they were arguing. He followed her in and grabbed her so I got up and pushed him away. She ran out of the room and he chased her out, so I grabbed him (im in boxers and t-shirt, luckily I dont sleep nekkid) and started yelling at him. He was so drunk I had to speak slowly to him (like an australian :o). I managed to stop him and semi calm him down while she looked herself in the toilet.

I went back in my room and put some pants on and as soon as I do so he starts trying to kick the bathroom door down. I rush back out and swear at him again and he stops. Who knew my words held such power over a drunken mongol?

I start asking him why hes lost the plot and he starts ranting about how shes an illegal immigrant and she shouldnt be here. I shouldn't have asked.

I send him into his room and get Ediana out of the bathroom, Immediately he comes out and starts swearing at her in Portuguese, she manages to get him to switch to English so I get to know what they hell the problem is.

His arguement was "Fuck you", hers was not much better and she was sober. This arguement took about 20 minutes. I was tired and getting cranky with these children. She wanted to go upstairs and "get the blacks to come down and beat him up" thats good christian morals there. I told her if she did that this little white boy was calling the police, luckily she feel for the bluff (I don't know the number).

He said she wasn't allowed to stay here and she said she would stay in my room, shes funny. I told her that she has to get out because there is no way shes staying in my room.

She goes into my room and continues crying, I follow her in to talk some sense into her and I send him to his room, she said she has no friends and no where to go. She calls a friend. Shes going to stay the night here then move go there in the morning. So much for having no friends and no where to go.

He leaves his room and goes into the kitchen, she makes a break for it and locks herself in the bedroom, he rushes back and trys to take the door off its hinges. I get him to stop then go back into my room to find a phone number for womans refuge. He has another go at the door, idiot. I go back and swear at him to stop again. He does.

I get her to come out and start trying to calm things down. Again. She decides shes going to sleep in the bath and I convince him to let her get some bedding peacefully. He complies. He must at least be smart enough to realise that even with my extensive running-from-fights experience, he would lose if he was dumb enough to start one.

Finally things got calm, I went back to my room to go to bed, as if i was going to sleep... She comes in and says shes going to sleep in the room with him. Thats another awesome u-turn.

I close my door and go to bed, I don't care, crazy brazilians.

The next day she is gone and I start looking for other flats to live. Theres no way I'm staying in a shitty goverment flat with an aggressive drunk.

Luckily I found a good flat around the corner from Lance.

I have not given notice here, partly because hes back on the drink and partly because I'm a pussy. Maybe tomorrow.

Im such a great judge of character.

Fin.

Crabs and aerosol based paint

2007-09-02T17:37:00.000+01:00

Before I get onto the topic of the post I want to issue an apology, it seems I wrongly assumed NIN covered a Johnny Cash song. JC actually covered the song before he died. Sorry Trent :(

Yesterday Lance, Karen, and I (I'm such a third wheel) headed to an art gallery near Covent Garden to check out a - free - exhibition called: Warhol vs Banksy.

I'm sure everyone has heard of Andy Warhol, if not let wikipedia enlighten you. Banksy is an english graffiti artist famous for both his commentaries on society and culture ass well as anonymity, wikipedia knows who he is too.

Im glad it was free. All of the works were original, but not the best ones. Warhols famous campbells soup painting wasnt there, but some really lame pencil drawins he did on refill were. Big whoop. His drawings of the beatles were there, as well as his prints of Ali.

Banksy had several paintings there as well as some of his graffitti. They actually had a section of metal wall as well as a door he had "vandalized".

After the exhibition we went to Brick lane - which is famous for its countless indian restuarants - to check out the Tiger Beer Annual Chilli Crab Festival.

This was one of those "festivals" where you stood in line for 40 minutes to get into the venue (it was free) only then get into another queue and wait for over an hour to get any food.

There was Tiger beer available for purchase at 3.20 each (so much for corporate sponsership). There was frequent Lion dancing, Martial arts, dancing, and musical demonstrations to entertain the people that werent dumb enough to stand in line.

Theres two guys in that lion, once they finished they took the head off and bowed, they were both sweating profusely. Notice the guy in the front wearing the dark red t-shirt. I must have taken about 15 photos of the different things on the stage, one handed, holding a beer in the other, zoomed in to get a good shot. All apart from the ones on the blog have his bald spot front and center. You can actually see it better if you scroll down.... I shouldn't mock it, the hereditary hair-loss gods might smite me.

This was the best action shot I had, I think hes doing a jumping siide kick.

I couldn't figure out if she was meant to be a pea-hen or a pea-cock. Logic could dictate either way. Pea-cocks are the more splendid creature compared the normal pea-hen. But shes is a she.

Luckily one of Karens friends had gotten to a good place in the food line that meant we only had to wait 90 minutes to get some chilli crab.

Apparently chilli crab is a popular dish in Singapore, the ones I had at Stinking Rose were better and they were bought out to you. This crab was 5 pounds worth of sauce, claws, and shell. Oh yeah and a bread-roll. There wasnt much meat in there but it tasted pretty good after the long wait. I forget to get a picture of it sorry.

That was pretty much the extent of my weekend, it was good to relax after a hectic week at work. Working for big clients is the same no matter what part of the world you are in.

Reading Festival (music, smoke, and faeces)

2007-08-27T18:36:00.000+01:00

This was an experience.

We took the train west to Reading on Friday morning and got there at about 10-ish it took us roughly 90 minutes to walk to the venue and find a place to put up our tents. All the "smart" people arrived the previous day to get a good spot so we had to cram in next to other people.
Unlike usual, Lance and I were woefully unprepared for the three days, especailly when the sun came out, when the sun went down, and we realised you needed your own toilet paper.....

I was warned beforehand about the rampant theft/violence/debauchery that goes on at these things so I kept as much valuable stuff at home (camera inclusive). This might have been a good case of unwarrented paranoia. It was fine though, there was a lot of drunk british idiots, but no problems at all.

The music itself was pretty good, with the bigger bands on later and more popular.

Food and Drink

The food was on average pretty decent except for the price with a large range of choice available: roast, burgers, chips, curly fries, nachos, pies, burritos, donuts, shakes, and ice cream to name the few off the top of my head. I ate most of the items above.

There was a lot of alcohol to be purchased at the festival. It was BYO to the venue (with heaps of stalls being setup on the roadside selling it) but you couldn't take any into the arena (where the stages were). There were about 4 bars inside the arena though, and there was no shortage of beer. They must have made a shitload of money, each paper cup cost 3.20 (pounds) each and you could get a 10p refund if you took the cup back for recycling (people were walking around with metre tall stacks of cups). Plus they had warm beer amnestys were you could swap cans of warm beer for cold ones for free. Pity the beer is crap unless you really like DB bitter (which is what Carling tastes like).

Waste

English people aren't familiar with rubbish bins, there was heaps and heaps of rubbish everywhere. You had to cook it aside in order to sit down on the grass. There were alot of rubbish bins too. it must have something to do with the general obnixiousness of the british teenager/young adult. I'm so old.

Outside the arena (where the tents were) the toilets were communal long drops. Big steel tanks with toilet stalls on top. As usual when people get drunk they tend to miss which i can handle but Lance walked into a stall where someone had a missed with a Number 2 and bent a fresh biscuit on the seat. Yum.

Lance and I decided early on to walk into Reading township and take McShits each morning, which was a good idea because they actually flsuh and came with TP. I didn't bother taking a shower or standing in line for over an hour to do so.

Inside the arena they had plenty of urnials for the guys which was good (even though you still had to queue) until they overflowed and the ground got muddy (and not the good kind of mud).

Night time
Most of the acts finished at about 11.30 each night and people went back to the camping areas (and there were a lot of them) and kept drinking, yelling, swearing, pissing, and swearing. I'm sure any body there couldn't say one sentance with out at least one swear word in it. Fucking idiots. Fog descended on Reading each night, combine that with the campfires people lit and you got very watery eyes before you got to your tent. It looked like a shanty town in some areas with people trying to seel you cigareete or drugs as you walk passed and other people having swearing competition. Real crazy stuff.

Tunes
I have already touched on some of the music but here is what I actually saw in a bit more detail.

Friday:

Gogol Bordello
Gossip
Jimmy Eat World
Kings Of Leon
The Living End
Ash

Saturday:

Eagles of Death Metal
The Shins
Bloc Party
Red Hot Chilli Peppers

Sunday:

The Used
Funeral for a Friend
Fall out Boy
Lost Prophets
NIN
Smashing Pumpkins

And here were my favourite acts:

Smashing Pumpkins - awesome, even if Corgan has found god he still cranked the classics like Zero, Cherub Rock, 1979, and Tonight Tonight. They played about 4 new songs and did some cool jamming as well.
NIN - I'm not a big fan but these guys went off, great show ~~and a good cover of Johnny Cashs - Empire of Dirt~~ - oops its their own original song. Cool effects behind them while they played as well.
The Living End - Being one of the only bands from our corner of the world I had to show some support (even if they are Aussies). And it was worth it, they had a very small crowd but they put on an awesome show.
RHCP - They started off bad, with some technical problems 5 words into their first song - Don't Stop. But the improv jams by the band (minus singer) were great. They sound FAR better live than their soft studio performances (my opinion).
Eagles of Death Metal - These guys were just plain cool, with the front man talking to the crowd between songs and running up and down the stage.
Fall out boy - While they are pretty poppy I did enjoy the two or three cameos singers they had come out for some songs, including the singers of New Found Glory and Gym Class Heroes. The bassist is still a douche bag.

That should do my initiall planned small post on Reading. There is still alot I didn't cover like the long trip home, the lack of Geography in british schools, and the one person we offended and her arguements for being offended -that is a classic story.

Oh yeah, don't do drugs kids.

Go Mooloos!!!

2007-08-27T18:34:00.000+01:00

I heard from a reliable source that Waikato trounced North Habour to win the Ranfurly Shield.
Good shit.

Football

2007-08-19T21:32:00.000+01:00

Finally got to watch a soccer game. Ha, Manchester City beating Manchester United. That wasn't the game we watched though, but funny nonetheless. River and I headed to a Portugese bar to watch Chelsea vs Liverpool. With Portugese commentating.

Somehow 8 beers and chips only cost 17 quid. I guess not all barmaids are schooled in basic addition.

Graham the tourist

2007-08-18T21:29:00.000+01:00

I finally had a chance to be a tourist today.

Lance and I started off by ging to Argos where I had pre-ordered some bedding (sheets, duvet, pillows, etc) this took about an hour. They forgot my order half way through and it go busy. Argos is a department store where you order things in a catalogue and then they bring it to you once you have paid for it. A very strange way of doing things, but customer service here is very shit.

Once we droped all the stuff back at my place, Lance and I donned our "ignorant tourist" shirts (I did anyway) and headed to check ou the borough markets. There are markets everywhere but these ones are apparently good (according to Lance). They sold alot of food - anti-pasto, sausages, produce, breads, sweets, fish. It was quite a fancy market, and very packed.

We got a bratwurst each and then headed down Queens walk, which follows the Thames east and is very popular with tourists and homeless people alike.

There is alot to see when walking next to the Thames, and I have forgotten most of it.

The second London bridge isn't that impressive (the first was bought and shipped to USA somewhere)

There is a decomissioned warship called the HMS Belfast that you can pay good money to board and have a look around.

We found a big place called Hays Galleria which has a neat sculpture in it. This is one of many photos I took in here.

The town hall is also on the riverside, the guitars are some type of exhibition that had been organised. Each guitar was designed by someone then a famous musician or band had signed them. Interesting but very snobbish.

The tower bridge is pretty cool, its right next to the Tower of London (obviously) and is a big attraction.

This is the middle of the bridge that gets raised when I big ship has to pass through. Its not raised at the moment.

This is some handsome devil, with the Tower bridge behind him on the left and the Tower of London (part of it) on the right. Obviously they pale in comparison to the perfect specimen in the foreground.

Around the Tower grounds were lots of things to do that were related to the 17th - 18th century. Tourists could try their hand at archery, crossbowing, jousting (not on horseback). All of the workers were dressed as serfs (peons, proles, etc) and looked not at all respectable in their tight tights.

One funny sight were these characters, the woman is wearing some type of mask/helmet with a bell on it. She was arrested for being a nagging wife. The guy in the wicker madonna bra is the husband, he had a sign on his back saying "ruled by his wife". If only you were living back then huh dad?

We walked around the tower for awhile, but didn't go in because it both cost money and we hadd other things to do that didn't cost money.

We then went to Tottenham Court rd which is an electronic gadget place, I was at home. I had to buy a power cable so I could power my laptop without using an adapter.
Boring. We went into a Virgin Media World store - they sell cds, dvds, games, books, and alot of each.

We found this guy in the interative game room. Pretty cool, can you also spot the Singstar machine in the background. Some moron was singing badley when we first walked in.

From TC road we continued walking down the Thames, past the London eye towards Big Ben and the houses of parliament as well as Westminster abbey which is close by.

I could post alot of photos of these but I am lazy after posting all of the others ones, plus I intend to go back to each of these places for more in depth study/photo-taking.

We also went and checked out (as much as we could) Buckingham palace.

The sculpters were very talented.

And the New Zealand memorial, by this stage it was raining so I didn't get many photos. The memorial is cool, the posts-things are positioned roughly in the shape of the southern cross, and there is something NZ-specific imprinted onto each post.

That was a very long day of walking, we finished it by going to a Mexican restuarant for dinner.

Editors note: There were alot of Canadian Tuxedos around.

Who dares knows more

2007-08-17T08:06:00.000+01:00

I have now worked almost half the amount of days I have been in London.
So far the work has been pretty straight forward, basic send-to-a-friend forms and email forms. On Friday they got the point that I wasn't just some schmuck and extended my contract for another month. So I am now full employed at *** a day till the end of September.

Its always a good feeling when you have to show their head of IT how to do something.
As well as re-write somoene elses work in a quicker time than when it was originally written.

I am jumping ahead of myself, "my place of employment" are pretty interesting to work for. There are about 40+ contractors in the Lower Ground (basement) floor where I work. All projects have a producer, technical lead, and a number of contractors on it. The contractors (if the y have mad skillz) do all the grunt work and the permanent staff take the credit for it.

Every contractor has to fill out timesheets for the days they have worked, these are so easy. You just need to say how many hours you have worked that day and get someone to sign it. Easy as that, no need to individualise what exact projects and steps you walked each day. Its almost laughable that they can afford to do that with what they pay us, especailly when I have to wait a couple of hours for answers on simple one minute queries about what I am working on. Its their money.

On the first couple of days I didn't have a swipe card to get into the building and then onto my floor (heaps of checks) so it was a pain in the ass to move around (especially when I was summoned to the upper floors for meetings). Luckily some of the important people get annoyed that I couldnt meet them on time ( I had to wait for people to let me out of my floor) that I got a swipe card. I can now go wherever I want at any time of the working day. Freedom.

Strangely enough, there are some really cute girls that work here, I think they are the "Creatives" and not programmers like me.

The English love their pointless job titles.

Recruitment agencies and landlords

2007-08-14T18:06:00.000+01:00

Well, to Lances dismay I closed two deals today.
I start work tomorrow at a place called Dare Digital and have found a place to live within 2 business days of being here.

I am living in a place called Stockwell and is about 2 minutes walk from the tube station that has a line running right to where I will be working.

After only two days of stress I got most things sorted out.

Hoorah.

Everybody who has heard about it is pissed.

London

2007-08-13T20:00:00.000+01:00

This place is huge.

I have been here about 4 days now and it's still pretty overwhelming. I have got the handle of riding the tube. Its pretty easy as long as you pay attention to which way each car is heading and which station you need to get out on. I haven't gotten it wrong yet.

One thing you notice as well (if you have a strong sense of smell) is the smells, the tube and tube stations all have an acrid soot/smoke/engine dust smell. This is noce enough to congeal on all surfaces in the cars as well as up your nose (tube snot). We went to the movies last night to see Transformers, and that place had a nice tang of body odour to it. Granted it could have been me, but I'm sure I would have recognised my own brand.

I have had no problems job hunting. I was contacted by 4 recruiters before lunchtime on Monday. Had an interview with one that afternoon and scheduled another for this afternoon. They all seem keen to get me to work for them.

Unfortunately, the house market is terrible. I have had no luck finding anywhere decent to live, I could sepnd all day looking through flat-share listings and get where I am at the moment - nowhere. Im sure lance is starting to get antsy...

I have not taken any photos yet either, keep forgetting to take my camera out with me. Lance is hopefully finishing up on Wednesday and has mentioned that we might do some tourist things on Thursday and Friday which will be fun-ish.

The weather has been better than I expected, with Saturday being very hot and sticky indeed (great after just stepping off a plane...), but has slowly turned bad and is currently raining.

I am hopefully getting my bank account setup today, I have been living on 9 pounds since I got here, with Lance and Karen being nice enough to spot me some cash-money when I needed it.

McDonalds Hamburgers taste the same.

Transit status

2007-08-11T16:54:00.000+01:00

I have landed in London and am currently at Lances.
Apparently Telecom were meant to to courier me a new phone to take to London because my current one does not work and they know that.
Yippee, so I am out of phone contact until tomorrow (local time) when I pick up a temp pre-paid mobile.

Backdated SF update

2007-08-08T17:51:00.000+01:00

On my last full day in SF Allison and I went to SFMOMA - Museum of Modern Art - to take a look at a Matisse exhibit that was apparently pretty good.

I have decided modern art is like babies, either you think its pretty/good, or you think its ugly/crap. Some of his sculptures were good where as others it seems as if he just said "Screw this" and gave up. What cracked me up though is the descriptions of the bad-looking ones - "Matisse has taken liberties with anatomic proportions" / he just got lazy halfway through.

For dinner we went to a sushi place in Richmond, which was pretty good and cheap.
After dinner we had a few drinks and met some interesting people at a launch-party for a friend of Allisons Design studio.

Some New Yorker (that studied in Otago) thought I was Australian, then rubbed my arm and winked at me.

I didn't sleep that night.

Cheese

2007-08-08T07:51:00.000+01:00

The day started off nice and uneventful. A package arrived for me so I got to open a present, I noticed it while I was still trying to sleep then I couldn't get back to sleep so I got up to open it. It was a hoodie I ordered from good old thinkgeek.com.

Allison is really busy with work at the moment (I have great timing for holidays) so I stayed out of her hair and took advantage of her unlimited DSL until lunch time.

While I was asleep the guy who was supposed to call about the giants tickets finally called and said they were gone but he had "better ones" for the same price. He dropped them off at about lunch time.

Barry Bonds had hit his record-breaking homerun at last nights game, so I guess alot of people had a lot of tickets to sell. Its funny, San Francisco LOVES Barry Bonds (obviously) but the rest of the states hates him.

For lunch we went up to Haight street ("cool" district where Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix used to live and is now cool for rich kids from the East Coast to come and be homeless for awhile) and "grabbed a slice".

We went to a place called "Escape from New York", they serve about 6 different kinds of pizza at about USD$3 a slice. Its the cliched US style - thin crust and hardly any toppings but really tasty. The slices are huge too, each probably being the equivalent of over a quarter of a normal pizza.

After lunch we went to Best Buy to pick up some cables for Allison so I could show her how to hook her laptop up to her televison to watch "backups of her DVDs".
Strangely, I did not purchase any dvds for myself.

That afternoon, Allison spent working again, and I mucked around.

At about 6ish we left for the game, we grabbed the muni down to the park (it pulls up right outside) for $1.50 each.

Our tickets were legit and we found our seats before getting any food and/or drink. I'm not sure what the dude must have been smoking but we had pretty crap tickets. The furtherest away from home plate and sitting on bleachers. The stadium was not even close to being full.

Once we found our seats we got up and bought our entrees: a beer each (USD$8 each) and a hotdog each. I got mine with sourkraut (pickled cabbage mmmmm).

For our main course Allison got an unsalted pretzel with cheese and I got Nachos Grande. The container has ridculously heavy, after eating most of the chips I realised why. The bottom half inch of the tray was a salsa/cheese chowder.

It ain't real cheese either. My stomach was not happy.

We left the game early (it got boring and cold) and caught the muni back to Allisons place. On the walk from the station to her apartment we stopped in at Safeway to buy the obligatory candy. They make Dark chocolate MMs now, they rock.

PS. Too much fake cheese = mud butt.

Kevin Smith at Comic con

2007-08-08T07:46:00.000+01:00

WARNING! contains foul language that could offend mothers.

Thanks Steve.

The wrong order

2007-08-07T07:20:00.000+01:00

So after some mucking around (on my part), showering (on my parts), and a beer we made a plan for the night. Dinner and movie, sounds like a date huh? It wasn't Amanda.

Allison rang a guy off craigs list... (I know what some of you are thinking, and yes) to try and suss some tickets to a giants game. We would have gotten new ones but Barry Bonds hadn't hit his 756th homerun (which makes him the highest scorer of all time (got the roids!!)) so all teh games were sold out. Luckily a guy was selling nosebleds for reasonably cheap and told us he would give us a ring at 5. Dam Bush supporter, he didn't ring.

We ended up giving up on him and going out for dinner... to the Stinking Rose. People who have cared to listen to me talk about Sf before will know what it is. For those that don't or have amnesia like Jason Bourne - its a restaurant totally devoted to garlic and dishes with garlic in them. Their motto: "We season our garlic with food".

Allison had half a crab and I had half a rack of baby back baby back baby back ribs. It was a great meal, especially the crab. We shared our meals but they only gave us one pair of shell-crackers so I ended up cracking the crab in my teeth. Luckily I have Thompsons Teeth:

After dinner we headed off to the Metreon to watch Sunshine. A scifi flick from the maker of 28 days later and 28 weeks later, and starring the guy from those two movies. It was a pretty good movie, some nice effects, average acting/dialogue, some stupid illogical science (gravity apparently exists when there is oxygen in space), and some tasty gore. Not much of a review I know, but I thought it was worth watching. The movie has just come out and the theatre was quite packed.

Hopefully you have worked out the meaning of the post title. If not then watch
No Reservations.

The eagle has landed

2007-08-06T22:40:00.000+01:00

Well we flew into San Francisco airport 30 minutes early. Going through Customs in SF is like midweek at Mt Ruapehu, its so quick and easy.

The flight was pretty average, Air NZ have on-demand movies so I watched Shooter (good), Apocalyptico (good), and Spiderman 3 (pretty good).

Allison was there to pick me up and we made a beeline for In N' Out Burger on the way back into the city.

I haven't showered yet, I need to, but at least the weather is warm.

Side Note

The 4 vodkas in quick succession at Auckland airport made the good-byes easier, sort of. They definately didn't help me sleep on the plane.

Welcome, I hope you enjoy the Itinerary

2007-08-03T00:50:00.000+01:00

This will be the new home of The Sauce, its a bit nicer than the original (especially posting) but will hopefully contain all the off-the-wall, irreverent, spontaneous, witty, adjective-y humour that almost won myself a Webby award (can't back that up).

Anywho...

Itinerary

I am due to fly out of Auckland at 19:10 on Tuesday 7th August. hint hint...

I supposedly arrive in San Francisco at 12:25 on the same day.

Cue 4 days of junk food and homeless people.

I fly out of San Francisco at 13:55 on Friday 10th August.

And.. land in London/Heathrow (after a short stop-over in Frankfurt) at 13:25 on Saturday 11th August hopefully onto Terminal 2.

Warning

2007-08-03T00:45:00.000+01:00

Just a heads up to:

readers with young children
people who think I'm innocent/polite
anyone opposed to cussing

While I will try my hardest to make this blog is entertaining as possible without dropping the F-bomb, most of my posts will be affected by my mood or state of drunkness (or both).

You have been warned, and I understand if you no longer buy me Christmas presents.