The Great Book o' Ninjing

To get myself into some kind of Christmas spirit, I decided it would be a good idea to make some Christmas cookies. While the idea was sound, there were a few obstacles...

First of all, I didn't have any cookie cutters. Because – surprise! - I didn't take any with me. A few weeks before Katti had written in her fantastic blog Tea, Cake and Sandwiches (http://teacakeandsandwiches.blogspot.com, if anyone wants to check it out) about the Ninjabread Men she had made with these incredible cookie cutters shaped like ninjas. And I have to admit I was quite jealous, because as some of you know I myself am no stranger to cookie cutters with, let's just call them less traditional shapes. So anyway, I decided I wanted Christmas cookies, and I went looking for cutters. At the first shop that seemed likely to have some, I asked one of the saleswomen and she looked at me, a little embarrassed, and said “yes, we do, but only these...”, pointing at – the Ninjas! And guess what - I bought them. Again: surprise!

So that was the easy part over. The actual making of the ninjas involved a lot of work and quite a bit of improvisation, but then again, creating a ninja out of nothing is never an easy task and will almost always require hard work... 

 

My first problem was the simple task of measuring stuff. It sounds easy, until you have to hunt around for something to measure stuff with for half an hour, and then convert everything into ounces, because the energy drinks my flatmate drinks are measured in ounces, which is fine, until you get to the butter... There was a lot of guessing going on.

Another thing you might need when making cookies is a rolling pin or something shaped approximately like a rolling pin. Now if we had had someone living in the flat who occasionally drinks wine at that time, it really wouldn't have been hard to find a bottle that's reasonably large and completely round, but we didn't, so it was. I ended up wrapping my deodorant bottle in greaseproof paper and using that, which was a pain in the behind because it's quite small and therefore takes ages to get the dough rolled thin enough. But it is possible to do it, believe me!

my version of a rolling pin

 

Then there is the oven. It looks like a normal oven, very unthreatening and in fact just like what you would expect an oven to look like. But it's not. It's weird and unusual, and sometimes it tries to kill you and eat you. The first thing you should know about that beast of a kitchen appliance is that it really likes its oven trays... 

You can not get them out or in without a good deal of yanking and shoving, usually moving the whole oven a few meters while you are fighting the thing. Then there is the thing with the heat. I am used to ovens heating whatever you are trying to make from the top AND the bottom. This one doesn't. You can either have heat from the top OR the bottom, but not both at the same time. It took me a while to figure that out, which is why the first batch of ninjas were wearing night time camouflage on their backsides... But we ate them anyway, and they were quite nice.

Traditional ninjas. Notice the spare parts...

These are slightly less traditional in their clothing style...

 

Bondi! Mwahahahaha....

Alright, so it's been a while; what's new...

I moved! Again... Staying in a Hostel in Sydney over Christmas and New Year's is not something a backpacker without a job (but I'll get one soon! I hope...) can afford for long. I paid $19 - $25 for a dorm room per night – between Christmas and New Year's it'll be $70! Although I'm not sure if that's for a dorm room, but still... Come on! So now I've moved to a flat in Bondi.

Yes, Bondi, the one with the fancy beach and everything! I'm about 30 minutes walk away from the beach, though, so it's not quite as fancy, but hey, I can walk to the beach in half an hour! It could be worse...

I'm sharing the flat with two other people, Sarah, a Brazilian girl I met at Chili Blue (the hostel where Lisa, Jessi and me stayed for a while), and Mario, who is also from Brazil. I might even learn some Portuguese... Mario is going back to Brazil soon, and then another Brazilian girl will move in, and I have been told she is a fantastic cook – which is good, because the only thing Sarah and me have cooked so far has been rice with corn and ketchup. That was more for reasons of not having anything else in the kitchen, and it was raining outside, so we decided not to go food shopping and have rice instead. It wasn't actually as bad as it sounds...

The other night, though, must have been Monday night, when I was still staying at Sydney Central Backpackers, another hostel, I had a really nice dinner. Gavin (from England), Tani (who I was sharing a room with and who is from Aberdeen – coincidence? Yeah, probably...) and I made sausages, mashed potatoes with garlic, gravy with onions, asparagus and mushrooms – or bangers and mash, as the guys called it. And I have to say, even though I was a bit suspicious of Aussie sausages at first (this being an ex British penal colony, after all), they were actually quite nice, and with the potatoes and all the rest it made quite a meal. Quite a lot of a meal. We did have beer, though, so it went down well... German beer, actually – good, old Oettinger!

Oh, and in other news: I broke down and bought a Netbook... Yeah, I know, that was pretty quick, but as I was sitting in the Internet cafe, having just paid $2 for one hour, and typing on an icky, sticky keyboard, I decided that spending a few bucks now would probably save me some money (and a lot of grief) in the future... So now I have my own wee baby computer, and it's such a relief! The only problem now is: we don't have internet at the flat. But there's a lot of nice, comfy cafes around where you get a free connection – which
is not going to be good for my caffeine intake, but there's always a catch, right?

The thing about not having internet is that I started to write the post offline... and that was 2 days ago. So this is what happened next...

Well, nothing really. At first. Most of Friday was spent trying to find a nice place for the internet thing, and I did, eventually, find the perfect one: Curious Cafe on Bronte Road. The cafe has a living room kind of feeling, the coffee is good and not too expensive, and best of all: the wifi connection is really stable, you can access it without any problems, and it doesn't keep kicking you out like some other places (I mean the connection, not the people). This is going to be a heavy blow for McDonald's, which was the previous place to go for free wifi... So I spent some time bringing my computer up to the level where I want it to be, meaning Firefox instead of IE and Open Office instead of a toned down version of MSOffice...

The plan was to then go home, get everything packed away, and go down to the beach, which I haven't done once since I moved here, shame on me... But when I got home I got talking with Sara and by the time we thought about the beach again it was starting to get dark. So, I still haven't been down there!

Yesterday Tani, Gavin and I finally got around to doing something we've been postponing for a while: walking the Scenic Walk from Spit Bridge to Manly. We had originally planned to do it on Wednesday, but then the whole rainy thing happened and literally drowned our outing, so we've been waiting for a good day for a walk. Well, I say a walk, it's more like a hike in some places... It's 10 km from Spit to Manly, and if you keep up a good pace, you can probably do it in 3 hours. However, all three of us discovered our fascination for lizards - Gavin most of all, I think he took pictures of every single lizard we saw. And some of them are brilliant, because he has an awesome camera. He also has The Zoom... Very handy when you're trying to find out what the people on the yacht in the bay are up to. And yes, we might have turned into perverts, but spying on people with The Zoom is fun!

Anyway, lizards everywhere, and there are some huge buggers running around that place! Some of them were easily 80 cm head to tail. Of course, as always, you can't really tell from the pictures.

But the walk was lovely, there were some great views, and it's always fun to have an English guy and a Scot constantly having a go at each other. Unless, of course, they gang up on ze German... Since I am “the Beer Wench”, as Tani so kindly called me the first time we killed some beers together, the two guys have been wondering where they can get a dirndl and dress me up properly. We'll see how that goes...

By the time we got to Manly, we were all pretty footsore, and the mean part of the walk is that once you get to Manly, you're still nowhere near the ferry terminal. So, more walking, but through a really nice neighbourhood. If I had a lot of money, I would definitely live in Manly.

We took the ferry back to Circular Quay, the ferry terminal in the city centre, and from there walked through the Botanic Garden (at a very fast pace, because they were about to close for the night), and since it was just about to get dark, we saw the flying foxes again – another thing that Gavin became completely obsessed with. The Zoom had its next big appearance...

Somehow we managed to limp all the way to Central Backpackers, where we cooked another dinner: bangers and mash, again! Oh, and this time I took pictures! In all fairness, we still had half of the sausages left over, and the previous cooking experience was such a success, so we just went for it again, and it was GOOD. Also quite a lot, again, but then we had just walked 10 km... Anyway, we ate the food, I did the beer wenching, and a good time was had by all.

Blogspot sucks!!!

I had a really nice, long post written (offline), and the only thing left to do was to add all the wondeful pictures I've been taking... and it won't let me! Bastard! Apparently I can no longer upload pictures from my computer. If this problem persists, I'm gonna have to move this somewhere else...

Anyway, I'm just going to post the thing without the pictures, and maybe I can squeeze them in at a later date...