I Wish
This came via email today. Sounds like a hoot.
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Got My Bag Back
How great is Sarah Dawn Finer?
She’s a Swedish singer who I saw in concert a few weeks ago.
A few months ago I tweeted her and said I would be coming to her concert. And she actually responded. I was more than a bit surprised since she only follows one person on Twitter, Oprah!
The day after the concert I tweeted her again, saying how much I’d enjoyed her show.
Today or yesterday she was obviously catching up with her correspondence and responded with a “thank you” tweet. How cool is that?
It was definitely a highlight from today which, otherwise, was spent at home doing nothing much at all, except occasionally falling asleep.
I think by tomorrow my body will be fully re-adjusted – though we do have daylight saving change-over tonight – in the meantime, I’m finding that occasionally I get quite tired fairly quickly and just fall asleep.
Oh, and waiting for my bags to arrive.
“We tried to call you on your mobile”, the woman from the courier company said to me. “Yeah well, the battery ran out, and both chargers were packed away”, I told her.
In the grand scheme of things, it was only a minor inconvenience having to spend most of the afternoon at home waiting for my luggage to arrive.
I woke early this morning and went to the supermarket at about eight o’clock to buy some food. After a month away, the cupboard was bare.
I couldn’t believe how many people were at Coles this morning. I, at least, had an excuse for being there so early and in such a desperate need to purchase food. For the others, you had a sense they were suffering public holiday withdrawal from the shops being closed yesterday.
I chatted on the phone with friends and made a few social arrangements for the next few days.
It’s been a really lovely experience over the last four weeks writing this holiday blog. It’s so nice to have a permanent record of my experiences and thoughts along the way. I read a few posts today and it took my back, even if I did pick up the more than occasional spelling mistake.
As an experiment, I also went back to my tweets and posted a “twitter version” of my holiday, with nothing but tweets and photographs taken at Katarinahissen.
We’re all a bit short of time, these days, and there’s nothing worse than someone banging on about his holiday or hours, though friends, family and workmates can expect to experience this over the next few weeks.
To ease the pain, I spent an hour or so creating a slideshow of my holiday snaps. The five-minute version of my holiday.
I present it to you now…
The musical accompaniment is Stockholm inatt by Peter Joback. And even though the lyrics and the images don’t match, or really actually make any sense in relation to the visuals, I never intended them to. It’s all about the mood. It’s about the vibe. It’s the groove.
Colonial Spice Dinner
To be honest, I had no idea Elizabeth Bay House existed.
Even though I’ve lived in Sydney for over fourteen years, now, it’s located in a part of Sydney I’ve never really done much exploring in.
Located down towards the water, and behind the intensity of Kings Cross, Elizabeth Bay House is a great building, modestly decorated, but with spectacular views.
Tonight, Colin, Tom, Andrew, and his friend, and I attended a Colonial Spice Dinner at Elizabeth Bay House.
Andrew had spotted the dinner in a newsletter he receives from the Historic Houses Trust.
In essence, it was a very nice dinner (based around the kind of food that would have been eaten by “the upper crust” in the early days of European settlement in Australia), with an accompanying, informal lecture about herbs, spices, and “The Spice Trade”.
Locating the dinner within that historical context, we got to learn a lot about herbs and spices, including what to look for and what not to look for when shopping. In our small group, the biggest surprise was the revelation that Allspice was actually a spice and not just a variation of the ubiquitous Mixed Spices.
The first course was a delicately spiced chicken and rice broth using saffron. Australian saffron, by the way, was later explained to be probably the most expensive in the world.
And then we had some poached whole trout, which was divine, accompanied by steamed baby potatoes with butter and parsley.
The Angove Riseling which accompanied this was very memorable.
And while we were enjoying this meal, the other half of the group of about forty people was upstairs learning about herbs and spices.
We all came back together downstairs for the second course which started with a rabbit curry with rice.
“It’s the first time I’ve eaten rabbit in years”, I said to Colin, as he remembered rabbits with less fond memories associated with difficult economic times in the past.
“Maybe it makes sense”, I thought to myself, that we should be eating rabbit again in the midst of the GFC.
Also as part of the second course, we had cutlets with a rich brown gravy, accompanied by fruit chutney, dutch carrots, spinach, and cauliflower. I thought the cutlets were excellent. Very nice.
We also all agreed the desert was terrific. Vanilla creams accompanied by an orange and muscatel salad crystalized ginger and rose meringues.
And in the midst of it all, we were in a beautiful building once owned by the Macleay Family, and now owned by the Historic Houses Trust. These days the building is modestly decorated in the style of the era in which the family lived there, though with bits and pieces from different eras which may have been indicative of the time.
In the context of its time, it must have been a rather spectacular building. Now, it’s still quite spectacular, except that it’s hidden down the back of Kings Cross/Potts Point.
What a great night…
The flight to Darwin
“People share far too much information in public, these days”, I thought to myself tonight, as I sat and waited for the flight to Darwin.
To my immediate right, there was a bloke having a deeply personal conversation. I tried not to listen.
To my immediate left, there was a woman offering “mentoring advice” to another. I disagreed strongly with the advice she was offering, which seemed built more on her own experiences, rather than offering anything of direct value to the younger woman she was sharing with. The mentor seemed to spend more time talking and offering advice, than listening, as far as I could see.
The one time I shared anything significant in public was on a bus about a decade ago a couple of days before Gloria’s death. It was those once-in-a-lifetime conversations that couldn’t wait for a more private place. It was then or never.
But as I sat and listened to the people in the lounge tonight, I wondered if they couldn’t have waited for somewhere more private to air their “dirty laundry”.
Or maybe I’m just a sticky-beak who listens too closely to other people’s conversations?
On the four-and-a-half-hour flight to Darwin, I spent a lot of time listening and observing what was going on around me.
I was seated in the fourth row, just behind Business Class. I always prefer aisle seats on long-haul, so you don’t have to worry about getting up to go to the toilet.
Of the twelve people in front of me, I noticed only two in Business Class were drinking alcohol. “Oh no, just a still water” was the most recurrent response I overhead to the waiter’s polite questioning. A couple of them also refused meals, and not one person took up the offer of a bread roll.
“What’s wrong with these people?”, I thought to myself. If I was in business class, I would have taken everything on offer, and likely asked for more.
Even the woman next to me in Economy declined a meal and an alcoholic drink. “Oh no, just a still water,” she said.
She spent almost all the flight scrolling through Instagram. At first, she had two phones going through social media. Later, she watched a movie on one and scrolled through Instagram on the other. Despite the hours and effort that had gone into creating the posts, she scrolled through them at a rate of knots—a word of warning for anyone who posts on social media.
It was about then that I decided Business Class is a waste of money. I’ve only ever flown Business Class once, thanks to a couple of friends who “upgraded me” as a gift. Every other time I have decided it wasn’t worth the money. I often get those offers to upgrade points, but decline, because I can never justify the extra $200-$300 it costs.
Looking ahead to Business Class, there was definitely more attention paid to the passengers. The waiter, who bore a remarkable resemblance to NSW Premier, Dominic Perrotet was more inclined to say “Is there something I can interest you in?”, than “Do you want the chicken or the rice”? The food looked better than ours in the paper boxes. And the wine was flowing. But since most people are more inclined to say, “No, just still water”, I wondered what’s the point.
International Food Tour of Perth
You know how when you meet someone and they introduce themselves, but within five minutes you’ve completely forgotten their name? That’s how it was with one of the blokes on the International Food Tour of Perth which I undertook today. Thankfully, I knew he was the father of Justin, our tour guide. We shared a few interesting stories throughout the day, including memories of condensed milk. He also told me a little of the background to these tours which are reasonably new in Perth.
The idea came from a visit to New York last year, and a tour called “Food On Foot”. He spoke with a real passion about the tour; it must have had a real impact. He and his family have been passionate about food and wine, and his son Justin had spent about half his life working in hospitality. And so when Justin returned to Australia after living overseas for a while, it seemed like a logical connection between his working life and his interests. On top of that, Perth has probably been crying out for something like this.
It’s a decade since I lived in Perth, and to be honest, I don’t have great memories of a particularly strong food culture here. Sure, there’s Margaret River and other places like that. But I always remembered Perth as a bit of a surf and turf kind of town. Memorably from a couple of years ago, Perth was also a town I began to associate with overpriced meals and particularly overpriced coffee.
But Perth seems to have changed a little bit in the last couple of years. You can see it instantly as you walk through the city: the town is far less Anglo and far more culturally diverse than it was ten years ago, even two years ago. This is reflected in many more interesting places to eat, and, thanks to legislative change, a far greater small bar culture. So in some ways, it sounds like Justin and his aunt (who co-owns the business) have tapped into the wave of change.
Today’s tour covered a range of food establishments around Perth, ranging from the older established businesses (an old Greek supermarket) to more modern ones (enjoying Banh Mi and Vietnamese coffee, and a toasted sandwich at a laneway hipster bar). The tour was well-paced. Justin (the guy in the cap with a beard) was a really good tour guide, displaying both knowledge and passion. Highly recommended.
I would definitely go if it wasn’t -43C in Stockholm at the time!
Actually, there has been a heat wave. It is 4!