Fulham Folk

The boy and I successfully moved into a proper flat in the weekend. Having gained a job in West London, it opened a new part of London to us to flathunt in and it has worked out perfectly. Yes, we forgo the North and have gone South West.

We had our first taste of the South West by staying in Putney for 10 days with Tania, a lovely kiwi we found thanks to the wonders of the internet and then on Sunday, the hottest day of the year we moved to Fulham.

I cheated and the front view is from google streetview as I couldn't be bothered going outside. We're the orange brick place, the 1st floor window is our lounge.

Welcome to our lounge and the view out the bay window. It's your typical sort of Victorian (I assume) terrace lined street. The lounge isn't that typical of London really, most flats these days seem to prefer changing the lounge into a bedroom to make a flat cheaper/earn the landlord more money (Tufnell Park was like this). Our lounge gets plenty of sun and as you can see, is quite large. We've got Sky TV for all those pointless shows you find yourself watching for no reason although Oren has mostly been watching the neverending football. The large blue couch out of view and the six seater table are my favourite features - I guess after 2 years without a table, it's still a novelty to me. I have visions of dinner parties.

Speaking of dinner, our kitchen is just as large as our lounge too. It is at the opposite end of the same floor. In between is the bathroom then our bedroom beside the lounge. Fritha and Erinae have "loft" rooms upstairs.

Our room at the moment is really hot, it's been two weeks of high 20s which has been quite the difference to my 2007 Summer of the worst flooding in history. In a way, it's probably good I've been at work being paid to sit in the airconditioning. Note the purple valance and headboard came with the flat, and yes we know it doesn't match.

One of the best parts of course is that the my work in Hammersmith is about 20-25 minute walk and if I want a change of scenery, I can walk to work through the cemetery just behind the terraces on the other side of the road. I'm hoping to have a proper wander in there at the weekend and take photos as it's quite unusual! We're also about 10 minutes from Fulham Broadway station and shopping centre, so we're well connected whilst feeling like we're in the 'burbs. (it just happens also that Hell Pizza is about 5 minutes further down the road from there too!)

Everything is working out quite nicely, it's great to finally have somewhere to call home and settle in. I've even booked a trip to Valencia for the end of September so we have something to look forward to as the cooler days start arriving - although it's very hard to believe at the moment!

We Went Down to Oxford Town

Recently (well it was two weeks ago, I've been slow to update), we took a day-trip by train to Oxford, which is where Jo lived when she was here in 2007. It was nice to see Jo's old haunts and it gave us chance to use our shiny new railcards.

Greeted by the Ox of Oxford

Posing with the Ox

Oxford is basically known for two things: being really old, and having one of the best universities in the world, and we pretty much spent the day walking around looking at those old buildings, like this one:

And this one:

And these ones:

Aaaaaand this one:


In the afternoon we stretched out and relaxed in the sun on the banks of the River Isis, which is actually just the River Thames on either side of Oxford, for some reason they call it Isis where it flows through the city. There were loads of rowers practising on the river, which is a pretty stereotypically Oxford-ish thing to do.


I was having a nice time, until a tough-guy goose came to show his authority.

"Hey, that goose is getting awfully close."

"GERROFF MY LAWN!"

I don't like geese, they're aggressive and they hiss at you.

To finish the day we took a bus out to nearby Abingdon, which is where Jo actually was living. It is a very nice little town.

Homecoming.

Euro-Visions

I'd like to talk about the Eurovision song contest which was on last weekend. In New Zealand we sometimes see and hear brief snippets of Eurovision, but never really more than a few seconds' footage of the winner, so this was my first chance to see the whole thing (the finals at least), not really knowing what I was getting myself into. Now, I knew that the contest is celebrated for its fairly cringeworthy songs and general cheese factor, but I really was not prepared for just how extreme that was. However, it didn't take long for me to realise that it was much more fun to embrace it and get behind those crazy Euros.

Your typical Eurovision song entry falls into one of two main groups: the hyper-dramatic power ballad and the high-energy dance-pop number. Personally, I prefer the latter, as they are usually more fun and most of the ballads take the whole thing a bit too seriously.

One of the main things I did not realise about the contest was just how political it gets. No one is allowed to vote for their own country, so everyone tends to give lots of points their neighbours and political friends, even if they are completely terrible songs. Fascinating really.

The pre-final favourites were Azerbaijan, Greece and Belgium, but this year's winner was Germany with a song called 'Satellite' sung by a girl called Lena who had a bizarre accent that sounded almost Australian. It doesn't really fit into either of the categories I described above, but maybe that is what set it apart on the night. Check it out:



It wasn't the worst song of the night, but I don't really like it. My personal favourites were the really weird and tacky ones like Moldova's neo-fusion rave-up, featuring a sax solo that will gnaw at your brain. Also it has some classic badly-translated lyrics:

There's no other time to make
In happiness you have mistaken
We have no progressive future
I know your lying nature.

Serbia also had an impressively crazy entry called Ovo je Balkan (English: This is the Balkans). I think they may possibly have been angling for the vote from the other Balkan countries. Sample lyrics: "Balkans, Balkans, Balkans! This is the Balkans! Come on!" Their song at least actually had a bit of an Eastern European flavour to it, and the music was apparently written by the same guy who did the score for the film Borat.

For the record, the UK came dead last, behind even Iceland who everyone hates at the moment. It was fair enough though, the British entry was just awful.

Domestic Goddess?

I've decided to hijack the blog to post about one of my favourite pastimes - cooking and baking! My mother probably thought she would have never lived to hear me say that. Look Mummy - I'm all grown up! I can't knit or sew, but this is a start right?

Thankfully I have a more than willing subject to try out my cooking whims on. About 8 months ago I decided I was sick of being scared of vegetarian food as being boring/plain/tasteless/somehow difficult to cook and started experimenting. Experimenting really meaning - making stuff off this useful website: Healthy Food Guide. We've got some tried and true favourites such as Bean Burgers (which I can't make at the moment until I can justify buying an Argos food processor) and Bean Chilli which are now staples, but I wanted some new. So I searched for inspiration and found Carrot and Lentil Patties and tonight I made them.

I tend to alter recipes a little, if I'm a bit too unadventurous or unsure of an ingredient, or it's out of season or I just don't know what the hell it even is so I'll write out how I did the recipe as we go along.

So firstly - the mix! (not looking particularly appetising at this point!)

In here we have:

400g can of brown lentils drained and rinsed

2 grated carrots (around about, I nibbled on about 1/4 of each one).

3 spring onions chopped as finely as blunt knives allow

About a handful of fresh coriander leaves torn up (again, the knives here are terrible...the recipe originally called for parsley but we had to rely on our Sainsbury's Local, which only had coriander but it's okay cos we love the stuff)

Rind of half a lemon (we used the other half for our salmon treat the other night)

The recipe tells you to mash it with a proper masher, but I made a mess attempting that and decided if I was going to do that - I might as well just get my hands in there. So proved to be a much better solution, although I still managed to get this mix all over the kitchen anyway.

The next step would be obvious to most people (not me when I was 19 years old in my first flat and calling my Mum around six o'clock every night going "HELP! HOW DO I MASH POTATOES?") - you add one egg and really as much breadcrumbs as you need to make a mix that you can manipulate into patties. We needed breadcrumbs the other week and had to also go to the Sainsbury's Local for that (think Four Square but better, much much better) and all they had was coloured breadcrumbs. Yes they dye them like orange so they'll make your food look cripsy if you're using the crumbs to coat something. It's another reason I need a food processor. I assume a normal supermarket might have normal breadcrumbs? I hope so, England, I hope so.
And then, as I already alluded - we shape them into their namesake:

Then, the hardest part of all really - cooking them and hoping they don't stick or fall apart on you as normal with any homemade patties. You're supposed to spray them with cooking oil, and I'd recommend that from bean burger experience, but we just had normal oil. We went to borrow our flatmates can but it expired in 2008 and looked like a spray you'd use to clean your glasses with. Medium heat pan, make sure it's hot, spray those patties or throw in some oil and put them in. Now you're not really cooking them that much, just heating them through and giving them a golden touch.


I followed the serving suggestion which was a side salad and some tzatziki (guess where we got that from...). The salad just slightly cheats on the "vegetarian" meal as we stuck anchioves in there but our excuse is that a) we had a huge pot of them to use up before their best before and b) they're so delicious. Our salad was your typical sort of thing: cherry tomatoes, red and orange peppers, spring onions, iceberg lettuce and those fishies. This was the finished product:

By the way Oren ate it and his happiness at the end, I think he liked it. I did too but he didn't agree with my visions of salmon or spicy versions in the future. Can't improve on perfection...?

It's the good thing about not working I guess, having the time to sit down and think about new meals to have as it's always good to try something different even if it doesn't turn out good and you make Oren promise "never to speak of this meal again." I'm hoping that the next flat we move onto we'll have a bigger cupboard and I can start building up my baking collection again as I'm still yet to try make a cheesecake and feel that's one thing really holding me back from becoming a domestic godness.

One last thing - we picked up a Maggi mix in Germany for currywurst (yes it's in Germany!) and a few days after we were back tried to recreate Berlin. It wasn't too bad I thought! Just missing the curry powder. One day our herb and spice rack will be up to it's former Winchester St glory.

Big Kids

A couple of days ago we headed down to Regent street to visit the famous toy store Hamleys, who this year are celebrating their 250th birthday (yes, the store was started way back in 1760!) The Regent street location isn't the original building but is the flagship store nowadays, and it is apparently the biggest toy store in the world.

Big spinning logo disc thing from the fifth floor.

Hamleys is pretty amazing, although admittedly a lot of the newer generation of toys didn't mean anything to me (what is this whole Ben 10 thing? And apparently there are like 500 pokémon now, madness). Still, there were plenty of timeless and nostalgia-inducing things too, such as a huge jigsaw puzzle section (£150 for an 18,000 piece puzzle - tempting!) and masses of Playmobil, which I hadn't seen for years.

They even had construction-themed stuff like we had as kids.

When it comes to good, clean fun, you can't beat marbles, and there sure were a lot of them, though none of the kids running around the place seemed too interested in them.

What a marble-ous place.

There were also sections dedicated to Lego and soft toys, both of which were excellent.

We found a Jo-sized Lego Buzz Lightyear...

...And a bigger-than-Oren-sized camel, only £1,500.

Phillip the giant polar bear, a steal at £600.

Bobby Bears, complete with badge and ID card.

Cousins of Rex.

My favourite toy was this awesome R2D2 Play-Doh cutter, as it combines two of my favourite things - Star Wars and colourful putty - and because it is something of a throwback to a simpler kind of toy that you don't see much now. If it didn't say 'Clone Wars' on it I could probably have mistaken it for a toy from the '80s (man, I really sound like an old nerd, don't I?) For some reason it was in the "girls' toys" department, though it is clearly a toy for MEN.

Just look at how much fun this kid is having.

In a somewhat related trip, after Hamleys we walked to Trafalgar Square to see the new installation on the Fourth Plinth:


It's a giant, four-tonne ship-in-a-bottle of Lord Nelson's flagship from the battle of Trafalgar, the awesomely named HMS Victory. Pretty much puts all the models at Hamleys to shame.

Tufnell Parksters

In the last update we mentioned moving into a new flat, and now we can prove it, with pictures! It is a lovely place in Tufnell Park, North London, which is a very nice area; quiet and somewhat suburby but also not too far from some quite happening places (Camden Town is pretty close, and the big transport hubs of King's Cross and Euston are not far beyond that).

If I were to hazard a guess I'd say that our building is Victorian-style, but I'm really no expert on that sort of thing.

Our house (our room is in the open bay window on the first floor).

Our street.

Our room gets lots of light and it already feels very homely, possibly because we've already covered the floor with piles of our junk. Seriously, I don't know how we can make so much mess when we only own 20kg of stuff each!

Our room.

We don't have a washing line at the flat, and rather than buying a cumbersome drying rack we made our own out of string. Take that MacGyver!

Clean again.

The flat also has a small garden out the back. It is slightly overgrown at the moment, though there is a cleared patch with a barbecue that you can't see in the picture below. Beyond the garden there is a bit of greenery and a few trees, which makes for a pretty nice view from the kitchen, especially if my friends the squirrels are out and about.

Our garden (the middle section between the two fences belongs to our flat).

I really like it out here, it is a nice place in a nice area with very two very nice flatmates. Unfortunately we are only here until the middle of June, because it would be pretty ideal to stay on here. We think we'd like to stay in North London anyway, as it has made a positive impression on us both.

In other London news, we have now had three very warm days in a row. The sun has been shining and there is a distinct smell of spring in the air. Wonderful.

Living it up in Berlin

Sunday was our second adventure to Europe. We nearly didn't make it due to some very poor navigation skills on my behalf. London at the best of times can be impossible to find yourself in, but combined with it being 3.15am and operating on 3 hours sleep it was even worse. But by sheer luck, we were just able to get to Stansted and make our flight to Berlin.

After an uncomfortable nap on the plane, we both awoke in Berlin and decided to head straight to the zoo. I don't know if it was just us being useless or if it's intentional, but you don't get given maps when you get in and the zoo is deceptively large. So it was a case of us wandering around and stumbling upon various animals. We managed to waste most of the camera freshly charged battery in the zoo just because there was so much we wanted to take photos of.

Knut had his Italian girlfriend Gianna there (on loan from Munich) so we were spoilt by two polar bears. It was great to see elephants and these crazy penguins (where most of the battery went). All the zoo signs were in German and sometimes I don't think the translation to English was particularly correct or what we know them as in New Zealand so a lot of it was a guessing game but we saw heaps of animals and creatures we had never seen before and probably never would again. For lunch we had chips and shared a beer, it would be typical of Germany that beer was cheaper than buying a cola.

Late afternoon we headed to our hotel to check in. I had found this hotel online by random google searching and the use of a travel review site, and it was good as people said it was. Seriously, usually I have nothing nice to stay about hotels other than it's a place to sleep, but this place was part of the experience in itself. If you're ever in Berlin, come to the Michelberger.

We then met up with my friends from Düsseldorf who were also staying at the hotel, Tina and Kate who were the main reason we had decided to go to Berlin. We were happy to see them as well due to our very limited German (read: none). They made sure to take us to experience Berlin the proper German way by having currywurst, the local delicacy and Berliner Kindl Weisse, the local drink. Basically the currywurst was a sausage in a spicy tomato sauce topped with curry powder and served with chips, and the Berliner Weisse is an unusual beer drink which tastes nothing of beer and in this case was flavoured with a cherry syrup. It reminded me of those little flavoured ice packets we used to suck on as kids. Afterwards we found our way to a cafe which had a huge menu and did lots of different...well, everything. On the coffee front they claimed to do a flat white but disappointingly for Oren, it was mostly milky foam on the top. Which is the way they do coffee in Germany anyway. That night Oren and I had a gig just down the road for the American band The National which was absolutely fantastic before we finally got into the most comfortable bed ever (c'mon, just check out that photo!) for some well earned sleep.

In the morning we headed towards the city centre to Hackescher Markt where we had a big breakfast that meant we didn't even require lunch later on. Both times I've been in Germany I've had the most amazing large breakfasts, I love the importance they place on it. Kate navigated us through the various tourist traps in our next two days in Berlin and we took touristy photos. The bonus of having them there meant we could get the token couple ones in.







As you can tell, the weather was not kind to us. I'm starting to wonder if the hemispheres have mixed up their seasons. But weather aside, I just loved the feel of Berlin, it wasn't as overwhelming as Paris and felt more welcoming in a sense. It amazed me that all the graffiti everywhere just felt a part of Berlin, like art, where is everywhere else it's seen as something that must be eradicated as soon as it's been completed.

Dinner that night was at an Indian place near our hotel, which was pretty delicious. In our first week in London we went out for Indian which was quite a different experience to New Zealand Indian, and this was different again. The onion bhaji was very different visually but deliciously familiar. Tina and Kate had already told us German's don't do spicy so we knew the dishes would be fairly mild for their tastes.

That night was the reason our Berlin trip happened as Tina and I must be able the only Third Eye Blind fans still left since 1997 and once we heard they were playing, thought we MUST go. We were not disappointed, I don't know if it was just the nostalgia value or having Tina with me, but it was absolutely awesome. Seriously I felt like I was a teenager again. Now I understand why all those middle aged people go see these bands that had one single 30 years ago.

Sunday was another delicious breakfast and touristy wanderings, and pizza at our last dinner together before departing our seperate ways. The pizza was massive but so delicious.



With hugs to Tina and Kate, and promises of meeting up soon, it was back to London (well nearly, we spent a miserable night in Stansted first). On our return we moved into a temporary flat in Tufnell Green yesterday, one tube stop from where we've been staying with friends. We're here for a month and hopefully in that time will try sort ourselves out! At this stage, I'm already planning our return trip to Berlin what with it's International Beer Festival in August...