Observations from a nation that runs on time!

Bikes parked in public areas are not chained – apparently petty crime in Japan is non-existent.
By 2025 there will be a new bullet train that can go as fast as 500ks an hour (the fastest in Japan now runs at 300ks an hour.
In Ginza Tokyo, 1sq meter of property costs US$300,000.
Traffic lights (at the top of the pole) are placed horizontally.
There are very few rubbish bins in the streets – rubbish is disposed of at home. The streets are very very clean.
No-one wears sunglasses (except for the young generation).
Gardens and parks are immaculately maintained.
People are very very polite, no-one complains at bad service etc.
Public places (museums etc.) are closed the day after a Public Holiday (and this is very annoying for tourists).
They love flora – there are pots of flowers everywhere.
I was surprised at the number of imported cars.
People go out of their way to help, they are very kind.
There is no talking on mobile phones on the trains, and in fact you are asked to turn your phone to silent on the shinkansen (bullet train).
They cut the crusts off sandwiches (and not just for toddlers).
They appear to love eggs….cooked or raw….
I was surprised to find the Japanese can bake.
They also love their pickled vegetables.
For all the cleanliness, the Japanese have an apparently primitive attitude to smoking. In fact smoking is still allowed in restaurants.
Turns out heated toilet seats are a necessity. And who knew one needed instructions to operate a toilet seat?
Even though you clearly don’t speak a word of Japanese, the Japanese continue to talk to you in their native tongue. This is very amusing.
The Japanese are so respectful, they even bow to inanimate objects, like the bus as it leaves the station. (I think I even saw someone bow to an escalator…)
Packaging is an art form.
Slurping food is expected.
Plastic food is everywhere, so don’t worry if you can’t understand the menu, just point to the plastic meal in the restaurant window.
Tokyo is a sea of black suits, they are more conservative than I thought.
There are vending machines on virtually every street corner. In fact, one small town I swear I saw about 6 vending machines on the same street on one block alone.
Icecream from a vending machine!
Hot coffee from a vending machine – would you like milk with that?
I was astounded at the number of Italian restaurants, and pleasantly, they can make a pretty good pizza!
I never got used to seeing books and magazines read from the back.
Food is everywhere. I kid you not, restaurants are everywhere you look.
127 Million people, 10% live in Tokyo and the entire nation runs on time!

Granny Smith Green

I love the colour green. So for a long time I've known exactly how I would renovate my bathroom.

After four long long months, the bathroom and toilet renovations are finally complete. For the last 6 weeks I had only really been waiting for the vanity top to be made and installed. It finally went in on Tuesday, so I took a few photos to mark the occasion. It will probably never be this clean again.

Having designed it all myself, with advice from my builder along the way, this is the end result. I made a couple of mistakes that I won't highlight to you..but overall I am really pleased.









PS your eyes don't betray you - there is no door to the shower.

Triple 6

Today is the 6th October. Nothing unusual about that. Except, for my family, this is a very unusual date. I have four brothers and no sisters. Three out of my four brothers have partners. The phenomena of this day is that all of my sisters-in-law share their birthday on this day. Yep, every single one of them was born on the 6th October.

Apparently the odds of that are something like 1 in 48 million....



(Jenna wasn't born on the 6th October - she just has to blow out the candles.)

Ten little fingers, ten little toes

There is a new addition to the family. Marisa, my brand new niece arrived 10.40 last night. Mum and baby doing well, and she is just gorgeous. Auntie Nina very excited.



I love you already Marisa!

Out with the old

My blog posts are definitely getting few and far between these days. Work is all consuming and just too demanding at the moment. Tomorrow morning I am off to Melbourne for a week after just having got back from Sydney, and Melbourne the week before that. Hopefully it will all be over soon and I can get back to doing stuff I really want to do, like baking. However, if this blog is still alive by the end of the year I will be very surprised. Let's wait and see...

Tomorrow also sees the beginning of my bathroom renovations, so this post is to show you the 'before' shots of my bathroom before it gets demolished tomorrow. I arranged for the work to start when I won't be home so that a) I don't have to worry about where to have a shower, and b) so I don't have to come home from work and see the mess created.

I am very excited about what the bathroom will look like when completed, but I am afraid that it will not be finished for weeks. I don't even want to think about it. Anyway, for now I will focus on the fact that I don't have to look at the ugliest green tiles I think I have ever seen, ever again. See for yourself.

Chocolate, Icecream and Espresso

My new laundry would have to be the tastiest sounding laundry around. The floor tiles are Chocolate, the wall tiles are Icecream and the bench top is Espresso. Yum!

Yes the laundry is almost finished, just a couple more small things to go. Here are the photos. I love it!

Old Laundry

Some ridiculous hours are required at work at the moment, so this blog is definitely being neglected. However, the laundry renovations have started at my place, and so the upside to the hours I have been putting in at work means I don't have to look at the state my house is in for the duration.

Here are shots of the old laundry which has been completely demolished:

Retaining wall

The work on my retaining wall is almost complete. And what a pleasure it is to look outside my kitchen window to see a decent brick wall, instead of one that is falling apart.







Next.. the laundry!

Moonta & Wallaroo

On the weekend me my friend M and her daughter, went away to the Eyre Peninsula. We rented a cabin at the caravan park at Wallaroo. I had never been to the Copper Coast despite having lived only an hour and half away (from Port Augusta or Adelaide). And, I can't believe how much I enjoyed it. I came away from the weekend feeling extremely ignorant in my knowledge of the region's history. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was a booming region where people were given free passage from the Cornwall area in the UK to work in the copper mines. There was an incredible museum at Moonta that use to be a school. I can't believe how many relics of times gone by remain. Worth a visit for sure. Here are some of my photos from the weekend.


Marina at Wallaroo








Note the 'mounds' on the ground behind the plaque...so tragic. The plaque says "To the memory of the children who fell victims of epidemics due to insanitary conditions in the early mining days. 1969."

The Pyrophone Juggernaut

P came to visit and given it is the MAD MONTH OF MARCH in Adelaide, it was only appropriate that I organise a few Fringe shows to head out to.

Saturday night we went to see House of the Holy Afro. A show best described as "Afro Celt Sound System" meets "Ministry of Sound". Or if you don't know who they are, African music on acid will draw a pretty clear picture. http://www.houseoftheholyafro.com.au/

Sunday we spent a lazy day at a BBQ at mum's house before heading out to some comedy - Best of the Edinburgh Festival.

Monday (thank God for Public Holidays), we went to Grange Kiosk for coffee, Glenelg for some lunch and then we headed out to Semaphore Beach for some fish and chips and to see a free fringe event - The Pyrophone Juggernaut. More on that shortly.

Tuesday night we topped it all off by going to see Arj Barker. Professional comedians have real talent. They get on stage and drivel crap for an hour, and yet manage to keep the audience entertained the whole time.

Back to the Pyrophone Juggernaut... a "tightly choreographed percussive symphony spectacle". It was weird, but oddly entertaining. It looked a bit like a pirate ship from the future, and when the sun went down the show started. The musical instruments were metal and plastic pipes of different lengths placed to look like a massive organ; and wheel rims and other manner of metal objects. Blow torches were used to fire up through the pipes generating different sounds, among other effects.

At this point I think it best that the photos do the talking:















I love the Fringe, but soon, the Fringe will be over, Womadelaide truly done with for another year and the Clipsal madness forgotten, and Adelaide can wake up in 11 months time to start the March madness all over again.

Garden pickings

I got all of these lovely items out of my garden today.



I couldn't be more proud of these few measly items. I just wish the rest of my garden wasn't dead, and that I had more time and nous to grow more things.

The King of Fruit

The king of fruit for me, would have to be the fig. There is nothing more luscious. And today I picked the last of the peaches on my peach tree and picked the first half dozen figs from my fig tree. How divine. And I don't want to share them with anyone.

20 things about me

20 things you probably never knew about me (and probably don't need to know):

1. I didn't speak a word of English until I went to school. Now I am disappointed in how little Italian I know.
2. Bad grammar and spelling really ticks me off. And yes, if I have it wrong I do want to know about it - correct me!
3. I dry reach at the smell of sambucca, because once in my younger day I drank way too much of the stuff.
4. I have this fear that my long term memory is permanently damaged because I started drinking at an age well below the legal age.
5. I have a chipped front tooth.
6. I am long-sighted in the left eye and short-sighted in the right. They balance each other out so I don't need glasses. I suspect this is my own fault because I used to read with one eye closed under the bed covers as a teenager.
7. I once dreamt that I married Bob Hawke and recently dreamt that I went out to dinner with Kevin Rudd. I've had dreams about wars like Iraq air bombing Australia. And dreams that I was a man driving down a road in Antigua. My weird dreams are really really weird.
8. I have a fear that I will never have children, but I don't even know (at my age) if I even want them. Maybe the fear is that I will never have the choice.
9. I have three sisters-in-law. They all share the same birthday. Do you know what the odds of that are?
10. The house I live in is house number 3 that settled on the 30th November on my 30th Birthday. There are also three 3s in my home phone number.
11. I once had a collie dog named Lester. Neil Finn wrote a song about his dog called Lester.
12. I hate the movie Forest Gump.
13. I've met Ben Harper. I never felt so privileged.
14. I really wish I could play guitar.
15. I don't like scary movies, I don't like disney movies and I don't like sci-fi or fantasy movies. I am over action movies for the sake of action movies. At the end of the day, I just like a good drama.
16. I don't read sci-fiction books or romance books.
17. Besides learning how to read and write, I now think that one of the best skills I learnt at school was typing.
18. I don't like dish washers and I don't want one in my house.
19. I really hate it when people assume that because I'm single and have no children that I have plenty of time on my hands and that I lead a quiet life. Yes I have the privilege of not needing to compromise, I can do what I want, when I want and how I want. Doesn't mean I'm not busy and struggle to fit everything that I want to do in a day, week or month just like anyone else. Actually, if I achieve a lot, it's just because I'm pretty good at getting shit done. And if I had kids, I would still be good at getting shit done, because that's what I do.
20. And finally a work foible... if you want me to do something, I need to understand why, because if it doesn't make sense to me then you are obviously wasting my time. So I will incessantly ask you 'why' until I get an acceptable answer (even if the answer is "it will just be easier if you do it"). I know I am annoying when I do this.

An elephant's best friend

I was just visiting 'Dooce' and she had posted this video. I had to do the same, it is just beautiful:

Happy New Year!

Hello and Happy New Year to you all.


Sorry I haven’t posted in a while – the first week of my holidays was fairly uneventful and I was away in Melbourne for the second week. So of course, this post is about my Melbourne trip.

I flew in on the 29th and was planning on staying with my friend Lina for a couple of days before moving into an apartment with my friends from Canberra. Lina lives in South Melbourne and so Monday afternoon we walked to the Eureka building to observe the Melbourne skyline from the tallest building. The lift up was moving at a fast 9 meters per second. The height was frightening.





That night we had a lovely meal at a Vietnamese restaurant, the chilli quail entrée being the highlight of the meal.

Tuesday we went for a drive to Geelong. I had never been to Geelong before and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.





Wednesday afternoon I checked into the apartment and had a nap whilst waiting for my friends to arrive. That night we headed to Prahran for a Thai meal and then over to Lisa’s Aunty’s place for New Year's Eve celebrations.

New Year's day we had breakfast in St Kilda and I also purchased another pair of havaianas (I need another pair of havaianas like I need a hole in the head). Then we all headed to Albert Park to spend the day at Lina’s mum’s place as she had extended a New Year Day’s lunch to my friends as well as me. It felt like we had just finished off cake and coffee before we were being told to stay for dinner, which we did! The food was great and plentiful.

Friday’s only objective was to get to "Books for Cooks" book store on Gertrude St, Fitzroy. The ad said "Browse the day away in Australia's only specialist cookery book store with over 25,000 new, out-of-print and antiquarian books in stock". I couldn't imagine anything better. We got there only to find it closed until the 6th January. This was probably a blessing in disguise because I also need another cookbook like I need a second hole in the head! We ended up just wandering around the streets of Fitzroy. We stopped for a coffee and Lisa and I thought we might have a small snack so I ordered a slice of apple struedel. I’m not sure if the staff thought I needed fattening up, but I ended up with the entire slab of struedel instead what I thought would be a quarter of what was on display.



For dinner we decided on a Spanish restaurant, but I've lost the business card so can't give you the details. The dessert was amazing! Churros with chocolate dipping sauce, yum! And I should point out that this wasn't the first churros with chocolate that we had eaten over the few days in Melbourne.



Saturday was simply fantastic. First we went to a café in Prahan (Amici’s) where I was served the best coffee of the trip, and Frank reckons his scrambled eggs with mushrooms were potentially the best he had ever eaten. A good start to the day. Lisa and I then headed off to see Billy Elliot whilst Frank attended a wedding ceremony. The musical was amazing and after the show I met two of the stars. Meeting ‘Billy’ himself nearly had me in tears (I’m sure I’ve mentioned on this site before that I am pathetic!). After all the excitement and not having had lunch, we all munched on “Lord of the Fries”, an infamous kiosk in Melbourne where you get great hot chips and you can choose from a variety of different sauces/toppings.




For dinner Saturday night I had booked us in to eat at “The Press Club”. You might have heard of the owner/chef ‘George Calombaris’ who sometimes appears on Ready Steady Cook.

http://www.thepressclub.com.au/main.html

We decided on Kerasma ‘C’ – a six course tasting menu as selected by the chefs on the night.

The meal was exotic to the eye and amazing to taste. The most 'interesting' course to taste was the cracked wheat soup (soup of trahana and mastic), but the highlights (for me) were things like the cumin roasted beetroot and the coffee ‘kafe’ pannacotta.

Once again I was quite pathetic when George actually walked into the restaurant to check on proceedings. I stopped short of introducing myself, but I really wanted to.

Sunday entailed making our way into the city to undertake a spot of retail therapy, saying goodbye and flying back home. But as you can see from this post the focus of the Melbourne trip was definitely on food. We all agreed however, that it had been one of our most successful trips yet. Love you guys! Thanks for an awesome time.



NB. All shots taken on either my point-and-shoot or Lisa's!