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By Kate, 21 April 2010 12:14 pm

The past week has been slightly difficult for me. Not because I’ve been stuck somewhere, but because of the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to go on my vacation. And I guess I shouldn’t really say ‘difficult’ because I’m not sitting in an airport waiting to see how long it’ll take to get a flight home. Those people have the right to claim difficult as well as various other things, probably involving a lot of cursing. But it’s been a battle of the voice of reason in my head and the voice that really just wants to see her friends after not being able to at Christmas because of another force of nature: snow.

Objectively, I sort of think this whole situation is a good one. Yes, it’s disruptive and annoying, and yes it’s going to take a while to clean up. But it’s forced people to look at the fact that shit they cannot control will happen, and they have to figure out a way to deal with it without just flipping out and acting like an entitled-to-everything 8-year-old spoiled brat who gets whatever she wants all the time.

It’s nature. It’s kind of the boss. When it says ‘jump’, you have no choice. And if we were a smart race, we’d look at this situation and say, perhaps we should have backup plans for things we don’t really expect to ever happen, and while I know a volcano has nothing to do with climate change, perhaps we should really start thinking about some of the effects which that, as an uncontrollable force of nature, might have and what we’ll have to do about it. Even if you for some reason don’t believe the climate is changing (I won’t go there in this post), it’s still worth a change in the way we handle things.

But my selfish inner voice is saying ‘GODDAMMIT! I realise I’m being unreasonable, but PLEASE, MS. VOLCANO, ERUPT IN A MORE DIFFERENT DIRECTION FOR ME. KTHNXBAI.’

I want to go to Dan and Kathleen’s wedding, and I want to go to the dive bar in Philly with Sara and Donnie and Liam and Bobby for pierogies and PBR, and I want to see my family and their beach house and Randle the dog, and I want to go to Dogfish Head with Lindsay and Dan, and I WANT MY MOTHERFUCKING VACATION.

I’m generally able to quell this voice of insanity, because I know it’s no use. Volcano will do what Volcano feels like, and humanity be damned. And really, more power to it. Volcanoes are freaking awesome, in the fullest sense of the word. Who am I to try to change the course of life, you know? Human frustrations are not top of the list for the cosmos in general.

In any case, they’ve lifted the flight ban now. Quite abruptly, but they’ve done it. I feel like we’re still not out of the water though, because of the immense backlog and the possibility that the volcano will decide to spew a whole lot more. Still, I’m now cautiously optimistic about my flights next week.

What irks me is that the first thing to happen is that the British media jumps on the government and the CAA and tries to blame them for the backups. It’s unbelievable! You get pissed when the government doesn’t do their job, then you get pissed when they DO do their job. What exactly do you want? It’s not anyone’s fault that this happened, it’s a VOLCANO. There’s nothing you or anyone can do about it, regardless of their rank or relative importance, so stop trying to find some kind of scapegoat. I think the government is doing quite an admirable job really.

And the CAA. You cannot get pissed at the CAA. It’s not like they were thinking ‘Hey, let’s inconvenience as many people as humanly possible just to see what happens!’ No. They were thinking, ‘Hey, we aren’t sure what the effect of this stuff will be on all these jet engines, so lets take them out of the air til we’re sure we won’t have people falling out of the sky willy-nilly!’ Sounds smart to me. I may have been upset if I couldn’t go on my trip, but I’d much rather be on the ground than plummeting to earth because all the engines on my plane failed after an airline decided that profit was more important than passenger safety. That’s why you NEED a CAA. Airlines can’t look at this situation objectively when so much money is involved, which is fair enough really, but people have to step back and let the safety people do their jobs.

I’m petrified of flying to begin with, so I’m more than happy to wait until the people who know their shit on the subject say they feel comfortable with going back up there. Risking your life for a trip to the beach just isn’t cool.

What people should really be complaining about is travel insurance that refuses to pay out, especially if they’re stuck abroad for another week because they can’t get on a flight home and have no money to pay for extra accommodation. Yes, a volcano is an act of god, but if you can’t count on your insurance to cover the unexpected, what exactly is the point in having it?

And they should also be complaining about other travel companies taking this as an opportunity to charge out the ass for rental cars, train tickets, ferries, and whathaveyou rather than trying to genuinely help people out. People are always quick to blame for the cause of something, but it’s really the effects of the situation that show the good and bad in people and companies.

In any case, Eyjafjallajokull, you just keep doing your thing. Humans will sort themselves out eventually. And if you decide I shouldn’t be going to the US, well then, I guess I’ll just have to go with the staycation option and try not to sulk too much til you change your mind.

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By Kate, 9 February 2010 8:14 pm

We just had a lovely long weekend in London visiting my friends Seema and Paul, who live near Canary Wharf in a little flat with an awesome river view. It was great to see them and have a bit of a mini break. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of London, but I like going to visit friends and I love some of the food you can find in the city. Jamie Oliver’s new chain of Italian restaurants have been lurking on the edge of my radar for a while now, and I heard a while ago that he’d finally opened one in London. Conveniently, it’s in Canary Wharf, about ten minutes’ walk from Seema and Paul’s. So on Sunday night, we went. Obviously.

Jamie's Italian, Canary Wharf

Now. Please excuse me while I once again sing Jamie Oliver’s praises. The man is a food deity.

Jamie’s Italian is a family restaurant. They don’t take reservations, so anyone can just walk in, immune to the hype a famous chef’s name might bring to the ability to get a seat in a restaurant. It’s not a fancy-pants establishment and it’s not meant to be. It’s decorated simply with a mishmash of different kinds of chairs and simple wood tables and there’s various fresh food all over the place. And it’s very affordable. The pasta dishes are no more expensive than Bella Italia (a big UK chain), and to be fair, they’re probably far better value judging by the quality of what I ate. I can’t honestly comment on the pasta, because I had meat, which was amazing, but more on that later.

We started with a carafe of the house wine, which is organic and delivered to them in environmentally friendly tetra pacs to keep costs down, then decanted for the table. It was great, and only £15 for a bottle-sized carafe. In the middle of London! Score! With that we got a bread basket that had about 4 different kinds of fresh, freaking amazing bread in it. I could have eaten tons of the stuff. There was crispy flatbread with rosemary, foccacia with garlic, rosemary and salt, breadsticks, and plain old white italian bread. All served with olive oil and vinegar, of course. We also got an artesian meat board of wild boar salami.

I could have eaten antipasti all night, but the thing I was really excited about was my main course. I haven’t eaten veal many times in my life, and not at all since I found out how cruelly they raise veal calves. So we’re talking years and years and years here. Recently in the UK, thanks to various crusades led on the celebrity chef side by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and on the production side by some awesome British farms, rose veal has popped into existence. ‘Rose’ because the meat isn’t white, because completely white veal requires the kind of horrible, boxed-up life most traditional veal calves lead. (For more info, read this article from a few years ago.)

I’m completely for rose veal, because veal can be a completely ethical thing to eat, and should be. Veal calves come from the dairy industry, which can’t use male calves, of course, so because of the drop in demand for veal raised in horrible conditions, many of these animals are just destroyed, which is an absolute waste and pretty horrible. The calves used to produce rose veal are not raised in a box they can’t ever move around in. Instead they have a good, healthy life where they can walk around, grazing, doing cow-type things, eating solid foods, and even be around their mothers (or stand-in mothers) for a while.

I like eating meat from animals that I know have lived a happy life, and I know that all the meat served in Jamie’s restaurants is pretty much guaranteed to be ethically produced. But you don’t find something like rose veal in your typical Italian chain restaurant these days. Jamie Oliver putting it on the menu at his place is a huge step forward for getting a variety of quality, ethically produced meat into more and more UK high street restaurants. At £15.95, the rose veal is one of the most expensive things on the menu, but that is a damn good price for the enormous, tasty, stuffed rose veal chop that I ate with relish and pleasure. It was so good I was literally sopping up the sauce with my fingers when it was gone. Seriously. Ask Scott.

Scott, by the way, had one of the specials, Porcetta, which is roast pork belly stuffed with all kinds of amazing things. It was just as good as my veal. I probably could have eaten both of them twice over.

Now, as we were going all out, we ordered dessert and coffee as well. I had the chocolate hazelnut cake and Scott had the lemon ricotta cheesecake. Both extremely tasty. And after such a big meal, I didn’t feel disgustingly stuffed like one sometimes does when overdoing it. None of the portions were that extra bit too big. If I had been feeling more gluttonous, I would have ordered more, because walking past the open kitchen on the way upstairs to the toilets revealed plates and plates of deliciousness just waiting to go out. (I love when the kitchen is open, because then you know there’s no shady stuff going on and you can see what the food is like before you even sit down.) And let’s just say it took all my will power to not yoink one of the enormous loaves of focaccia from the bread table and stuff it under my shirt to get it out of there for stuffing my face later in the night.

To top it all off, we were brought the bill in good time without having to chase someone down for it. This is so rare in this country that I nearly fainted.

There are many, many reasons why I think Jamie Oliver deserves the praise and attention of the world, but the essence of why I think he’s so awesome is his simple approach to a healthy obsession with food. He wants everyone to learn how to cook, and love to do so. His recipes aren’t fussy and niether are his restaurants (including Fifteen, which, while slightly more upscale, isn’t pretentious in the least. In fact, the whole idea behind that restaurant is about as un-stuffy as you can get.). He’s really just all about loving and respecting food and what comes around it—family, friends, life. The Jamie’s Italian chain is a great example of this philosophy, and I really, really hope it keeps growing. I know I’d be a regular if he opened one in Edinburgh.

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By Kate, 9 July 2009 7:11 pm

What's goin' on over in this pen?

Over the past two weekends, we’ve seen a lot of animals. Two weeks ago, we went to the Royal Highland Show, where there were a lot of large, happy cows, curious goats, fluffy sheep, and gigantic Clydesdales, one of which tried to read Scott’s map, and another of which was hoping a lick of the grass design on my shirt would produce the taste of the real thing. Poor guy. I did give him a pat on the nose, but I don’t think it was any consolation.

Do you have an apple?

I also got to make a fool of myself as a volunteer in a demonstration called Quack Commandos, in which the awesomeness of sheepdogs is displayed by getting one of them to herd some Indian Running Ducks in all sorts of directions and then getting 6 humans to try and do the same job. Needless to say, the dog kind of kicked our asses. But how many people can say they’ve herded Indian Running Ducks? I bet you can’t.

Sheepdog: takin' care of bidness.

Humans: not so much.

In addition to the animals, there was a crapload of free food sampling going on, some scrumptious strawberries and cream, and various other snacking. I also saw a guy scale a 40 foot pole in 17 seconds. And Scott drooled over big boy toys like combine harvesters and tractors, forgetting completely that we don’t have any fields to mow and a combine harvester is about one and a half times the size of our flat.

Regardless of this, walking around looking at animals all day just makes me want a farm full of them even more. I could make a lot of cheese and ice cream.

We can't carry that home.

Ok, I realise this is actually quite important stuff in animal husbandry and all, but it's still funny.

Puffin proof.

More recently, this weekend, we headed out to South Queensferry far too early in the morning for a Sunday to catch an RSPB seabird cruise. There were seals! And puffins! And cormorants! And about ten billion different kinds of gulls! It was pretty good, and it only rained for about 15 minutes of the 3 hours. My camera was no match for some of the telephoto lenses on that boat, but I got a few decent pictures of the seals, and I managed to get some pictures that at least prove we saw puffins. They’re really small!

Seals!

After the boat trip was over, naturally, the sun came out in full and we walked around South Queensferry for a bit, had a mediocre sunday roast in one pub and a pint in another before heading home. Lovely way to spend a day.

Sunny South Queensferry.

Somewhere in between these animal excursions, I went shopping for clothes, which I desperately need. Unfortunately, after failing to find anything I liked or deemed appropriate, I gave up and instead came home with three new CDs (M.I.A., Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Coldplay. Hooray new music!), a bottle of Cava (It was hot and I wanted something cold and fizzy.), and a new Tefal Jamie Oliver Professional Series stainless steel 30cm nonstick omlette pan. YES.

Retired (but still pretty hot).

Sex-ehhhhh.

To put this in perspective, I used this pan’s predecessor, a similar one, hard anodized instead of stainless steel,  just about every day for two and a half years. I don’t drive anymore because I live in a city, but I do cook all the time. So this is kind of like the equivalent of buying a new car. It will be used and used well. And DAMN it is nice. I like when cookware goes on sale.

Unfortunately, I still need clothes. This ‘no clothes, so let’s buy food/something for the kitchen’ thing is all too common of an occurance. I blame the fashion industry. But that’s another post.

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By Kate, 24 June 2009 12:32 pm

I realise it’s been about 2 months since I posted. I kind of stink at this.

Since then:

I’ve been to London where I raided Borough market for the first time, wandered around the city eating raw asparagus all day, went to the Tate and the History museum, and had some good times with friends.

Beer a-plenty.

We went to Germany for a whole week, and I did not send a single postcard, but did drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of giant pretzels and pork products. And also a lot of asparagus. ’tis the season. Pictures on my flickr.

We transformed our boxroom into a respectable (and green) walk-in closet, thus freeing up a lot of space in our flat.

I started Yoga. It’s good stuff.

We’ve seen three movies at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, including Moon, Mary and Max, and Away We Go. I managed to not abduct John Krasinski. I also did not see Sean Connery. All of these movies were really good. Especially Mary and Max and Away We Go. We’ll be seeing The Maiden Heist tomorrow night.

I have designed two websites, both sort of unfinished, but: For Bunny Sake Rabbit Rescue, Zero Hour Theatre

I have also changed the theme of this blog in hopes that not worrying about the design would allow me to worry more about actually using the thing. I’m going to start posting more in this thing. Or at least I’m going to try.

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By Kate, 15 April 2009 1:56 pm

DELAYED

We arrived in Melbourne, not at 7pm like we were supposed to, but at 5am the next morning due to a typhoon in Hong Kong (which was our long haul flight’s stopover). I won’t get into boring details, but spending 7 unexpected hours in Heathrow Terminal 4 after only 1 hour of your 24+ hours travelling time isn’t something I endorse. The only upside of the experience was the free food vouchers Qantas was nice enough to give us, which led to some much-needed lunchtime beers. Hours and hours later, Hong Kong was a blur of off the plane, through security, wander through various airport electronics shops, sit on the floor in a daze, back on the plane, take off through a massive rainstorm.

Melbourne showing us a lovely first morning.

To say we were tired when we finally got to Australia would be a gross understatement, but going to sleep right away would have screwed us up for days, so we dropped our stuff in the hostel and went for a walk in the gorgeous weather. The people of Melbourne were headed off to work and we were walking like zombies among them, but we couldn’t be happier about it.

Fish and chips in St Kilda.

At around 10am we decided we needed some kind of nap in order to function anywhere near normally, so we slept on and off til about 1pm and then decided to head out to St Kilda,the beachy bit of the city, for a late lunch and a poke around. We took a tram out and found a pub on the beach where we ate some fantastic fish and chips and had our first official Aussie beer while looking out at the water. We were REALLY on vacation now. And that lack-of-a-care-in-the-world feeling persisted from that moment til the end of the month-long excursion.

The roller coaster at Luna Park.

We checked out Luna Park while we were in St Kilda, but we were still too sleepy to consider standing in line to ride the old roller coaster. The thing is controlled by a guy who stands on the car operating a handbrake. He just goes round and round on it all day. Amazing! On our way back to the tram, we got some seriously amazing gelato. I had chocolate and blood orange and Scott had white chocolate wasabi. The latter was a taste explosion of the best kind, but hard to eat more than a few spoonfuls.

Fruit for miles!

Melbourne had a lot of fantastic things for a foodie and a beer aficionado. We went to the Queen Victoria Market which, in addition to a lot of random crap and silly souvenirs, has miles of fruit, veg, meat, fish, bakery, and deli products, most from local growers and producers, and all at really reasonable prices. On our last day, I also discovered a company called ReWine which sells unbranded wine from various wineries all over the region for reduced prices in reusable, refillable plastic screwtop wine bottles. You bring your bottles back for refills and it costs even less. Plus they let you try before you buy. I only wish we had been sticking around longer so I could go back for more. And I must mention the meat at the market. There must have been something like 20 different butchers, and we bought two huge rump steaks for $6 AUD (about £3GBP or $5USD at the time). We were definitely the envy of the spaghetti-cooking hostel kitchen that night.

So many cows, so little time. I don't even know what kind these are, but they were enjoying lounging about.

We also went to the Royal Melbourne Show, which is sort of like an enormous county fair. We saw so many different kind of cows—I didn’t even know that many different kinds existed—as well as all sorts of other animals. And in the main pavilion, we did a local beer tasting and sampled loads of local produce and specialties. This is prime stuff on vacation for me. I love seeing and tasting all the local stuff.

Apparently, we missed out on a lot of the big shows in the arena—sheep shearing, wood chopping, etc. We just couldn’t get our vacation brains in an organised enough state to sort out a schedule. But we had a blast anyway. We love animals! And we saw tons of them! (We were amused that they even had highland cows.) We even got wise to the Australian obsession with showbags, though we’ve yet to really understand the fuss. It seems that you pay for a bag full of mostly cheap crap and candy and get really excited about it. Every place on earth is entitled to their own wacky traditions.

The next day was the day of the Aussie Rules Grand Final. Australian Rules football, from what I can tell (which isn’t a whole lot when we’re talking sports), is a sort of mix between rugby and American football. It was invented to occupy cricket pitches in the off-season, so it’s played on a big oval. Melbourne is absolutely mad about Aussie Rules, so the excitement in the air was actually palpable. We didn’t bother getting tickets to the match because the cheapest ones were about $150 AUD, so we just planned to catch the game in a pub or something later on.

An appeal to the ladies. In Scots! (at the Immigration Museum)

We started the day at the Immigration Museum, which had a lot of great interactive exhibits for us to play in. The coolest was probably the different eras of ship’s cabin that people would have stayed in on their way to Oz. The other exhibit I found really interesting was the one about a Latvian family. Back in Latvia, they used to be weavers (or at least the woman was) and when they moved away, they had to leave all the equipment behind. So the woman recorded all the traditional Latvian weaving patterns from memory in one of her notebooks and eventually, her husband gathered up all the equipment he needed to build her a new loom. Then she was able to make traditional wedding dresses and things for all the other Latvian immigrants because she had remembered all the patterns. It was really impressive. I know I’m forgetting important bits of the story, but that’s the general line of it.

I do love you Jamie Oliver. And your restaurant too.

We went to Jamie Oliver’s Melbourne branch of Fifteen for lunch, which I had been looking forward to for months. We were oddly enough the only people there because of the Grand Final. They hadn’t been expecting anyone that day, but we were treated like royalty and the food was amazing. Scott had carpaccio and some kind of pea and bean risotto, and I had seared tuna to start and smoked duck risotto for my main. We were too stuffed for dessert, unfortunately, but we did get to watch one of the chefs in the kitchen preparing some crazy looking octopus tentacles.

Damn near half the city watching the Grand Final in Federation Square.

We headed to a pub after lunch to watch the first half of the game, then on to Federation Square—Melbourne’s answer to the Sydney Opera house in terms of landmarks—for the last quarter. They had a huge screen set up in the middle of the square and there were hordes of people there cheering for their favourite team. The Hawks (who were apparently the underdogs of the situation) won the game and everyone around us exploded. I couldn’t tell you exactly how they won or what really happened because I found it hard to pay attention to a game on a giant screen when there were so many people around to watch, but the experience was interesting in any case. As people filtered out of the square, we went for a walk across the river before our last dinner in Melbourne, which was something simple cooked in the hostel kitchen again.

This hot chocolate alone was worth the trip. Seriously.

I was sad to leave Melbourne, not only because it signified the beginning of a great holiday and an awesome adventure, but because I would love nothing more than to live there. I won’t lie, this urge has a lot to do with the Queen Victoria Market and the fact that the city has more restaurants and cafes per capita than pretty much anywhere else on earth. But it’s also the feel of the city. It’s not a big place, but it’s got everything you need in a small space. And sometimes the smallness of the space makes what they pack in to it all the more attractive. There are so many little shopping arcades that form a maze of secret passageways between the streets of the city and they all hide such great little shops and places to eat, not to mention the best hot chocolate I’ve ever come across. I miss Melbourne, and I sincerely hope I get to go back someday soon, and hopefully for longer than a few days this time.

More in this series:

Australia (Part 1)

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By Kate, 3 April 2009 10:45 am

Ben's upright tack piano on stage.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole, you’ll know that Australia has recently experienced its worst natural disaster in over a century. The bushfires in Victoria claimed too many lives and even more homes and businesses. In some cases, entire towns were levelled. And what’s even more frustrating about all of this is that parts of the disaster weren’t strictly ‘natural’ due to absolute scum-of-the-earth arsonists who started some of the fires.

Seeing Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on the BBC at a total loss for what to say about such a thing aside from calling it mass murder made me feel awful for him, and I rarely feel bad for politicians. But how do you even process something like that happening in your country? What can you say to all those people whose lives have been ripped up? We all know that W was no expert at finding the right words after Katrina either, but at least Rudd took some action for the citizens he’s responsible for protecting. He also promised that communities would be rebuilt with no limit on federal spending. Suck on that, FEMA.

In any case, I was happy to find out that Ben Folds has auctioned off his tack piano (and a signed photograph he took) as part of a benefit for the victims of the bushfires. The auction closed on the first of April, and I have yet to find any information on how much the piano went for, but when I looked a week ago it was at $4,000 with an estimated value of $10,000. If I were rich, I would have been all over that!

For those of you who weren’t massive Ben Folds Five fans, the tack piano is one of two pianos Ben played on tour as well as on some album tracks. It’s got tacks in the hammers which gives it a kind of tinny, metallic sound, and it was a treat to see Ben play it back to back with his normal piano. Unfortunately, I don’t have over $10,000 plus shipping costs from Australia to pay for such a thing, but it seems that someone does and a bunch of Australian families will be all the happier for it.

Another pleasant surprise in all this was that the auction was set up by Music for Relief, which was started by members of Linkin Park and has raised tons of money for the victims of natural disasters all over the world. I kind of hate Linkin Park and always thought they were a bunch of whingers, but this kind of thing is seriously commendable. I may never like their music, but I can certainly respect the work they’ve done here.

For those of us who can’t drop a few grand in an auction but still want to help out the Australians, the Australian Red Cross is taking donations for the bushfire victims. The appeal is closing soon, so please go and give a little. Australia is an amazing place. Donating some money (and asking other people to do the same) is the least I can do to help out a country that showed me an amazing holiday.

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By Kate, 2 April 2009 11:50 am

About a bajillion years ago (or 3 months, depending on how you look at time), I decided that the most awesome way to celebrate our 3-year anniversary would be to go to the Glasgow Science Centre and then to Wagamama to stuff ourselves full of tasty, tasty noodles. Because we’re stupidly busy with DIY and, you know, life, we had to put off the actual date of this excursion to two weeks past our actual anniversary. But no matter. I can become a zen master when there are noodles at the end of the tunnel.

So, Saturday, we got up and went for a full Scottish breakfast. According to something I’d just seen on TV, this put us way over our recommended salt intake for the day. But man! Was it tasty. Bacon, egg, sausage, haggis, black pudding, mushrooms, and a tattie scone. I don’t do that baked beans thing they love so much in this country. We don’t go for the full breakfast very often. In fact, usually we don’t eat breakfast like that unless we’re on vacation. So it wasn’t exactly a guilt-laden meal.

Fully satisfied, we got on a train to Glasgow. Once we arrived, I decided the easiest way to get to the Science Centre was by subway. Seeing as how this was only my third ever trip to Glasgow, I could have been wrong, but it was easy enough save for the fact that I wouldn’t want to walk through the area between the station and the Centre in the dark.

The Glasgow subway system is the third oldest subway in the world, and it’s tiny. The trains have 3 carriages and they’re just about tall enough for me to stand in the very centre. It seems like you’re on more of a model than a real subway train, but then it doesn’t need to be very big anyway, as Glasgow is not the metropolis that London or New York is.

The system is just one line that runs in a loop (it’s nicknamed The Clockwork Orange). I suppose the advantage of this, from a tourist’s point of view anyway, is that it doesn’t make a lot of difference if you get on the wrong loop, because you’ll just come back around to the right place eventually. And a full circle only takes about 24 minutes, so you really can’t go wrong. It only took about 8 minutes to get to our stop.

As a lover of Bill Nye the Science Guy and all such make-science-fun things, science centres always initially excite me. I say ‘initially’ because there are a lot of science centres that cater almost exclusively to kids, which pisses me off, especially when I’ve spent the money to go in without any indication of this from the staff. I want to be able to play with just as many of the cool science toys that the kids can without people looking at me like I’m stealing their youngster’s chance at a happy day. I don’t want to get that feeling that other people are thinking ‘whyyyyy is she here?’ because fuck that! Science is for everyone, not just little Timmy, drooling on the buttons that control the giant magnet.

Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised. The Glasgow Science Centre caters for all. And while the place WAS crawling with some kind of scout group, they weren’t so numerous that you couldn’t get at any of the exhibits without tripping over someone under 12. In fact, we never really had to wait to do anything. And there was SO MUCH to do.

They had the usual stuff about how light and electricity works and how the human body is put together, but they also had a lot of things I’d never seen before. There was a music maker thing that worked using beams of light and an LED harp, there were a few games that tested your reaction time, there was a giant Soma cube to put together, there was a bunch of stuff on cloning and stem cell research (Scotland will not soon forget that they produced Dolly the sheep). There was even a thing where you put together a news report about stem cells, which was basically for kids, but it was teaching them that the news is supposed to be impartial to either view on the subject being reported so that people get the facts, which I think is a valuable lesson. I played a computer game that simulated how hard it is to save everyone who needs an organ from the donor list. And there was a whole special exhibit on DNA and the human genome where I got to compare myself to a duckbilled platypus. Apparently we’re not very similar.

When we had our fill of science (and our stomachs were starting to rumble) we ventured back into the city centre and went to Wagamama for an early dinner. When we ordered, I told the waitress that I was allergic to shellfish (because you’re supposed to tell them so they know). Regardless of this, when our Duck Gyoza came, it was actually Prawn Gyoza. I knew this because I took a bite and thought ‘this is not duck’. They apologised and switched it and I, being preemptively cautious, took a benadryl. I wasn’t going to have one piece of shrimp ruin my Wagamama! And to be fair, the Duck Gyoza looks exactly like the Prawn one on the outside. Next time I’ll get Scott to taste my food.

Crisis averted (I got a tingle of an itch, but I think the benadryl shot any other reactions down), we sipped our Asahi Premium Black Lager and ate our duck dumplings. Then the noodles arrived and the slurping commenced. Scott had Chicken Itame, which is a spicy coconut thing with rice noodles, and I had Salmon Ramen, in which there was an enormous piece of salmon involved.  Scott had never been to Wagamama before, so I was happy to hear that his dinner was the best chicken noodle soup he’d had in forever. I wish they would open a restaurant in Edinburgh because I would be in there all the time. Takeout noodles for lunch? I think so.

We don’t know much about Glasgow and the stores were about to close anyway, so we decided to head back to Edinburgh early where we ended up drinking wine, eating chocolate cheesecake, and watching some of my Long Way Round DVDs (further increasing my undying urge to get our asses to Russia and Mongolia). The perfect anniversary? I think so.

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By Kate, 26 March 2009 3:56 pm

Loch Ard Gorge, Great Ocean Road

I kept seeing postcards in Australia with pictures of things like the opera house and a few koalas right next to each other, under the heading, ‘Australia: land of contrast’, and they’re not kidding. It’s a strange place. In so many odd ways, Australia reminds me of the US, especially after living in the UK for so long. The massive six-lane highways full of automatic cars, the sheer size of everything, the buffet restaurants, the space. These things all scream America. It’s a young country with a some similar problems (the treatment of Aboriginal people in particular reminded me of the issues that Native Americans face in the US). However, as Oz is still part of the Commonwealth, British influence shines through here and there.

But the Aussie attitude is ever more laid back and the culture more eccentric than that of the UK or US (in a good way, naturally). Australia is truly its own place. It’s very far away from the rest of the world, both in distance and culture, and this seems almost immediately obvious upon arrival. You get the sense that you’re in a familiar place that’s been flipped on its head. Perhaps because it’s so hard to grasp that you’ve made it all the way to the other side of the planet and yet people are still carrying on as you might expect them to outside your own door. It seems right and wrong all at once.

Grapevines at the Wine Centre of South Australia

Australia, while absolutely massive, is largely uninhabitable. Humans have put things in place to make the land live-able, but they still have to battle it out with nature, who clearly is not interested in helping out on the ‘sustaining modern human life’ front. As my friend Lauren who lives in Sydney said, ‘We shouldn’t even be here.’ The country is in serious drought and has been for a long time. It is dry and hot and dry and apparently never rains (we saw otherwise, so hooray for the farmers!). This leads to, among other things, massive water shortages, to the point of the council sending every home a shower timer, and raging bushfires, as we’ve seen quite recently. There’s also the gaping hole in the ozone layer that hangs out just overhead, causing major sunburn in almost no time at all if you aren’t a good friend of a thick layer of sunblock. Despite all of this harshness, the land produces some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables and the nicest meat I’ve ever tasted, and the lifestyle in general is very outdoor-oriented.

And the size of the country itself is something almost too amazing to wrap your head around. On the second in a chain of four flights carrying us back home to the UK, I managed to bag a window seat in the exit row. From so many miles above the earth, I could see quite clearly the expanse of Australian outback we were flying over on the way to Singapore. I felt like this view really tied up the Aussie experience. I’m glad I got to see it from above. And let me tell you: It. Is. Enormous.

Kangaroo at Australia Zoo

I mean, I knew it was enormous, but… it’s HUGE. I’d been seeing nothing but red desert for ages and I assume, being that far above the earth, one can see pretty far. And it’s all just red nothingness. Even the air at the horizon is red. The sun was on its way down and the desert seemed to fade into a lighter orange, then yellow, then magically into blue as if there were no actual horizon and the desert was just part of the extensive empty sky. Occasionally there would be a sort of track in the dust below, but I had to wonder where these tracks were going to or coming from because I hadn’t seen anything remotely like a point A or B for at least an hour.

I spent 3 weeks in Australia seeing something completely new and different almost every single day, and I still haven’t seen the bulk of it. This just serves to remind me that the variety of experience I have had here tips the balance in terms of value for money in a holiday. It also reminds me how impossible it is to experience everything I’d like to in one lifetime. There are billions of books to read, recipes to try, songs to hear, places to see. I’ll never pack them all in, but hopefully I’ll be working my way through them at the optimum speed–slow enough to relish the experience but fast enough to see as much as possible.

It’s hard to sum up such an epic vacation. And it’s been a while since we went. We took the trip in September and October of 2008. We saved for nearly a year and were probably planning it for longer. It’s hard to get over such a significant chunk of leisure time, even six months later. Our itinerary was ambitious, but not so hectic that we’d need a vacation from our vacation. We started in Melbourne and drove the Great Ocean Road and the Limestone Coast to Adelaide. We flew to Sydney and then to Brisbane where we spent some time with Scott’s family. Then it was off to New Zealand for a week, which is an amazing country deserving about ten books’ worth of reflection on its own. We didn’t have nearly enough time there.

(I’ll be posting about each leg of our trip over the next few weeks. Once those posts are up, I’ll link them here.)

Australia (Part 2): Melbourne

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By Kate, 8 March 2009 12:58 pm

Cliffs on South Ronaldsay.

Last weekend, I took Friday and Monday off and went to Orkney with my friend Ann as a sort of early birthday present to myself while the boys stayed in Edinburgh playing video games and drinking beer.

I am not a fan of flying. I am even less a fan of very small planes. But seeing as how pretty much no one in their right mind goes to a windy, cold, wet group of islands in the middle of the North Sea in winter, they don’t exactly send 747s on the daily runs to Kirkwall. So I spent an hour in a tiny, noisy Saab 340 being tossed around by said wind and convinced I would not make it to the ground in one piece. But in the end, as always, it was worth the terror.

We were staying in our friend Flossy’s house for the weekend. She’s teaching in Orkney for the year because she checked the ‘send me wherever you want’ box on the teacher training form. She was originally going to be around, but had to go off on a school underwater hockey trip (I didn’t know it was a sport either) to Manchester, so she just left us her key. Except she got to the ferry and realised she forgot to leave the key. We got a text saying she’d given it to a taxi driver to go hide near her door.

Immediately, we were thinking, ‘Great! Not only will the key be gone, but so will everything in the house.’ But this is where we got our first taste of island life. There were two taxis at the airport (out of about 3 on the entire island, or so I believe). When we gave the first one Flossy’s address, he turned to the other and said ‘Hey, isn’t that where you left that key this morning?’ Seriously. So the second driver told us exactly where he left it as though providing access to other peoples’ houses was something he was asked to do on a regular basis.

After settling in and deciphering the various maps left for us, we went for a wander into town. I think I might have frightened the girl at tourist information, if only because I asked her a question at a time of year when there aren’t many tourists around to ask questions. We explored the possibility of taking a ferry to one of the smaller islands, but eventually decided to rent a little red Ford Ka instead. There was a deal on where we got Friday afternoon to Monday morning for £64, so it would have been silly not to take it.

After lunch at the Albert Hotel (a haggis cheeseburger and a pint of Scapa Special), we stocked up on provisions at the local Tesco (Yes, even Orkney has a Tesco. I’m not sure if this is a good thing.) and went for a short drive to Stromness before heading home for some pizza and hot chocolate and an early night.

The next day, we set Radio 2 as our soundtrack for the weekend (starting with the Beatles singing ‘She Loves You’ in German) and ventured out into the cold, rainy wind in our little ladybug of a car to explore the western mainland of Orkney.

Maes Howe

Our first major stop was Maes Howe, ‘Orkney’s largest and finest chambered cairn’. At first we thought we’d be the only ones on the tour, but we were joined by two others in the end. You aren’t allowed to take pictures inside anymore, but we ended up getting a better view of everything than most probably do in the high season, if only because the barriers had been taken out to paint. We were able to get our noses right up to graffiti that’s thousands of years old.

Robert, our tour guide, was one of those people who is so happy to tell you what he knows about history and archaeology that he could probably make almost anything interesting out of sheer enthusiasm. He was also extremely good at running down the one-meter-high 14.5-meter-long passage into the tomb.

While the structure itself was pretty impressive, I’d be lying if I said the coolest part wasn’t the Viking graffiti. It’s all over the place and says things like “Haakon singlehanded bore treasures from this howe” and “Many a woman has come stooping in here no matter how pompous a person she was”. And, in the tradition of all graffiti, it’s uneven and runs off the sides of things and is mostly boasting (about axes and other such Viking things in this case). But it is strange to stand inside something so old that is essentially the center of a hill.

Ann and the Stenness standing stones.

Across the loch from Maes Howe, and our next stop, were the standing stones of Stenness followed by the Ring of Brodgar, which is apparently one of the biggest henged stone circles in the world. Way bigger than Stonehenge and, according to Robert, far more impressive. The stones at Stenness were fairly enormous, although there are only a few left. But Brodgar is huge. And the thing is, they’ll never really know what these things were used for. They can make educated guesses, and they may even be right, but I sort of think it’s cooler to wonder about it and come up with a bunch of options in your own head. And to be amazed at the fact that they managed to stand the things up.

The Ring of Brodgar. You have to be pretty far away to get it all in one frame.

There’s one stone at Brodgar they know was struck by lightning. The lightning blasted off a fairly significant chunk of the stone, which is lying next to the still standing bit. From this they’ve deduced that others may now be smaller than they originally were for the same reason. What we wanted to know was, were all these stones originally straight, square, and the same size? Because that would be even more impressive. But again, we’ll never really know.

Orkney makes a lot of money on things we’ll never really know. Our next stop was Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement that’s amazingly well-preserved. It’s easy to see that people lived there, but pretty much everything else they can say about it is guesswork. The steward on the site reckons that bringing people in from third world countries or tribal societies that don’t live life the way we do and getting them to have a look would probably give us better ideas of how spaces were used, but apparently no one has followed through on this thought. That’s too bad, because she’s probably right.

One of the houses at Skara Brae.

We were again pretty much alone on the site aside from the steward. She answered all our questions and pointed out the neolithic drain that led away from what were possibly the first indoor toilets. I figure if people were clever enough to build these houses and cluster them all together for protection and warmth and convenience and whathaveyou, they were sure to be clever enough to think of the indoor toilet. Againt hough, it’s very weird to look down on all these stone structures and think that people actually lived there so long ago we don’t really have the capacity to wrap our heads around the amount of time that’s passed since.

Skara Brae was just off a nice beach, which wasn’t actually there at the time people were living there. The water was much further out. We used the proximity to look for seals though. Finding them would be the aim of the rest of the afternoon. We failed miserably at that, but we saw a lot of nice beaches and another stone settlement we were able to walk through. And for some reason, Mr T was on Radio 2.

Back in Kirkwall, we did a bit of shopping before everything shut for the day. Many of the shops sell an odd combination of things (jewelery and winter coats? Body Shop products, knitwear, and homebrewing supplies?) and I can only assume this is because the town is too small to warrant many separate spaces for these sorts of things. We went back home for pasta then out to the bars for a taste of some island nightlife. We went to Helgis first where I had another Scapa Special and we watched Jo Brand do her Britney Spears dance on the Comic Relief dance show thing. It was a trendy sort of bar which Flossy said is usually quite touristy. Shortly after we arrived, a huge group of women dressed as if they had come from a wedding overtook the place. They got pretty loud, so we went off to try Torvhoug, which Flossy described as ‘Like a Glasgow wine bar’. They had crap beer on tap (no surprise) but real ale in bottles so I ordered an Orkney Blast. It was the kind of place where no one probably ever orders real ale, so the bartender took about 3 minutes to figure out how to enter it on the register. Seriously. The place soon filled up with a large group of drunk guys to counter the ladies night happening in the other bar. We sat in the back room where another group of girls was and the music was low enough that we could hear each others’ voices. The only real disappointment back there was the old school video game table console that didn’t work. After one drink, we went home for more hot chocolate and sleep.

The ladybug on our only day of sun.

Sunday the sun was out, amazingly enough. We drove all the way to the southern tip of South Ronaldsay on another seal mission. We didn’t see any. Visitorkney.com claims that there is an enormous seal colony there, but I would like to write them a letter that simply says ‘LIES!’. We had a walk on the cliffs anyway, and it was clear enough to see mainland Scotland in the distance.

Next, we drove out to the Tomb of the Eagles, which includes a bronze age dwelling AND another tomb. Orkney is crawling with the things. We were the only ones there. Kathleen, the daughter of the guy who found the stuff we were about to see, gave us about an hour-long personal history lesson. It was a little intense, but quite cool anyway because we got to hold some of the artefacts. Call me a cooking dork, but I was most impressed by some stones that looked like simple rocks, but were actually shaped and balanced to be held in your right hand and used a certain way, like for pounding stuff up. Kind of how a knife is balanced. It was just a rock, but it was pretty amazing. It’s also intriguing that most people were still right handed then. I wonder why.

The southern tip of South Ronaldsay. That's mainland Scotland behind me.

We walked out along the farm in borrowed wellies, squelching through the mud, and crawled into the tomb to have a look. Not as big as Maes Howe, but impressive nonetheless. especially since the site is run and maintained by the family that originally found it rather than by Historic Scotland. On the walk back along the cliffs, there was a sudden rainstorm, so we couldn’t exactly enjoy the view as the wind and rain was busy freezing our eyeballs. By the time we got back to the car though, the rain had stopped and there was a rainbow.

At that point it was about 2pm and we were really craving a proper Sunday roast. We drove back up to St Margaret’s Hope, the third largest town in Orkney, with our fingers crossed that there would be one little pub doing such lunches. Not surprisingly for low tourist season, it seemed we were out of luck. We found a little hotel pub which was full of locals huddled around the bar. The minute we opened the door they stopped talking and ALL turned around to look at us. Talk about awkward. I thinkt he barman felt a little bad for us, but we ate our food and got out of there pretty fast. The fish soup I had WAS quite good, at least.

Cows!

We were losing steam after all the walking around in bad weather, so we drove around a few other places on the east end of the mainland, still looking unsuccessfully for seals. We said hello to some cows then got back in the car just in time for a ridiculous rainstorm on the drive back to Kirkwall.

We hung around for the rest of the night, had a curry when Flossy got back and stayed up chatting for a while, the I read some more Bill Bryson and went to bed.

Monday morning, Flossy went to work, we dropped our rental car off, and we called a taxi to take us to the airport. And who should the driver be but the guy who originally hid the key outside. I’m not even kidding.

Our very small plane.

Saying the Kirkwall airport is tiny would be an understatement. There’s not much to do or see there aside from stare through the windows at the tiny plane you’re about to get on which is sitting next to an even tinier 8-seat plane that you are thankfully not about to get on. I tend to try to pamper myself in airports as much as I can since I hate to fly so much. If something awful were to happen on the flight, the last place I’d have wanted to be alive is in an airport. These days, you have to spend 2 or 3 hours before a flight milling around the places, so I figure if I spend some money on myself I can at least feel like I had a decent meal or something. That’s hard to do in Kirkwall, but I managed a nice bacon and egg roll and a cup of tea.

The flight back to Edinburgh didn’t get hairy until the descent. It was pretty windy and the plane got tossed around in every possible direction, making me thankful for the experience of being on bigger jets that aren’t quite so sensitive. When we walked off down the tiny ladder-steps, I could hear the dog they put on the flight barking like crazy from the hold. It was only a little west highland terrier who probably had no idea what was going on. Poor guy. It was bad enough with a window. I can’t imagine what it would be like without.

Anyway, seeing as how I did make it back in one piece with stories to tell and pictures to show, it was an excellent short break. I’d like to go back to Orkney in the summer, or maybe to Shetland instead, just to see it when there’s more going on.