Tea in Sydney

All I wanted to do, on the single non-chaotic day I had in Sydney, was to have tea in the Queen Victoria Building.  

Forgot what the cookies were behind the counter, but this picture has peppermint tea and two scones with jam and cream. Perfect.

Go Play Your Video Games

Photograph taken at the Museum of Technology and Transport, Auckland, NZ. 

You see, kids, when we were your age, our video game consoles were heavy and big, and all of the games came in  these hard plastic containers and we have to plug them in if we want to play. None of those things were connected to the Internet, and all the controllers were connected to the unit, so we didn't have any of those motion-sensitive wireless thingamabobs that you get to use nowadays... 

(...Yeah, yeah, I got on the Lana Del Rey bandwagon a few months too late. She's an oddity to me, but I think that we'll all be wailing to this song like we did with "Someone Like You" by the end of this year. Trust.) 

Housekeeping.

Please pardon the lag in posting; we're currently fixing our photo-album situation and lining up fresh new posts for your enjoyment.

In the meantime... how about some ice cream?

Magnolia Ube Ice Cream, from Star Market (now Times) at Kamehameha Shopping Center in Honolulu. 

My Reflection

Picture taken at the Museum of Transport and Technology, Auckland, NZ. 

When I started this blog back in May, I had a stack full of JPEGs from Australia and New Zealand that I sincerely promised to post on a near-daily basis. As good as my intentions were, however, most of those plans came to nought when I got swamped with other things - in particular, work, fiction-writing, and constant updates for Domesticity. 


Then graduate school happened.

We Have Pie

While we're mourning the demise of Domesticity - and, um, investigating questionable sightings of Meimei enjoying cocktails in Puerto Galera with a certain Hollywood actor scheduled to shoot a movie in Manila this month - we bring you this long-unpublished entry from the Domestic Travel archives. 


Special thanks to Picasa Web Albums for helping to bring this blog back to life. 

My favorite Australian fast-food chain is Pie Face.

They have meat pies on the menu (steak, mince, and chicken, in various forms) with appropriate sides (gravy and mash) and fruit pies for dessert (cherry and apple), but on this day - at the Kings Cross branch - I decided to go with their Tandoori Vegetable pie.

This is exactly what you need on a nippy autumn day: a crisp crust, warm filling, and a little Indian bite that practically doesn't need any ketchup. Never mind that the filling is practically made of lentils and other beans, because that stuff is awesome.

I did consider checking out Harry's Cafe de Wheels, too, but Pie Face had already taken care of my savory pastry fix by the time I found the Harry's location in Wooloomooloo. And a real pity, too.

The only other pie-related bummer here: not getting any of the sweet fruit pies, if only for all the pastry-related jokes I could get out of them. ("Yeah, I went out to Kings Cross for tarts. What about?")

Once Again: Milford Sound

This is an example of what I would call an existentialist approach to nature. 

It's not just the environment itself, but the ponderance of the self in relation to nature and vice versa. Here you are, in the middle of a vast ocean, surrounded by mountains that are half-glacier and half-rainforest... and even though you are not exactly a child anymore, you are still looking at something bigger than yourself, which wasn't created by any man or beast in existence. 

You can try to explain it all with science, with physics, with projections... but there's no algorithm in the world that can give you the answer to all the questions in your head: the ones you wished you didn't have to ask about God and man and the universe at large. 

Then you realize that, no matter what you've been told all your life, you're not the center of the universe... and yet, in spite of whatever nature throws at you, you're still alive - as if you have been granted permission to live.

Why, yes, I am about to give a quiz on educational philosophy...

Milford Sound Facts

From Wikipedia:

Milford Sound runs 15 kilometres inland from the Tasman Sea at Dale Point - the mouth of the fiord - and is surrounded by sheer rock faces that rise 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) or more on either side.

Lush rain forests cling precariously to these cliffs, while seals, penguins, and dolphins frequent the waters and whales can be seen sometimes.

The rainfall creates dozens of temporary waterfalls (as well as a number of major, more permanent ones) cascading down the cliff faces, some reaching a thousand metres in length. Smaller falls from such heights may never reach the bottom of the sound, drifting away in the wind.


Not (too) related to Milford Sound: Ben Folds covering "Such Great Heights."