02.19.07
Posted in Family & Friends, Food at 4.47 pm by niltiac
The Year of the Dog is over, long live the Year of the Pig!
To celebrate Chinese New Year, we had friends over for a get-together last night. This is the first time we have entertained guests in our new flat so it was very exciting! I am hoping to do more entertaining this year.
To start, we had lots of dim sum – spring rolls, prawn won tons and so on. I didn’t make them from scratch but Waitrose (a posh supermarket in the UK) had a good selection and they were really quite good. For main course, I cooked Chinese noodles with mock duck, Chinese greens and mushrooms, seasoned with Chinese wine, soy sauce and sesame oil. I based it on a Kylie Kwong recipe but couldn’t resist making my own modifications and I thought it worked really well. For dessert, we had a few Chinese treats (glutinous sesame balls and fortune cookies) and a delicious sherry raisin cake, which was not Chinese at all but was mighty good. The cake recipe was from Olive (a UK food magazine) and involved butter, ground almond, polenta, flour, eggs, raisins and sherry. Yum! There was ample wine, beer and juice to wash it all down with.
It was fun just relaxing with some good food and having interesting conversations with friends. It wasn’t a large gathering but we don’t have a large flat so it was probably about right.
The Year of the Pig is meant to be a year of great prosperity for most signs. I am a Dragon and this is what my horoscope says is in store for me this year.
Dragon, this year is your chance to alter your luck! You have many possibilities and fortune in front of you. This is the year of much happiness and celebration for all Dragons. In fact, these celebrations will be impossible to avoid. You will have many happy events all around you, everywhere you look! From celebrations within your family to those offered by friends and acquaintances, it will literally be a year of joy. You should strive to celebrate any and all positive tidings that come your way. From weddings to job promotions to smaller, less noteworthy affairs, everything should be celebrated. In fact, it is important to know that all types of celebrations will be of benefit to the Dragon.
This year is your chance to alter your luck and to fight back in strong, positive measures. In your future are many possibilities of good fortune. On the other hand, your status and name may be in peril, so you must work to manage these issues with talent and grace. If you evade well enough, you will find an amazing life filled with riches and good fortune right around the bend! Do not ignore what is right in front you, and be sure to put the proper importance on these issues, otherwise you could end up in a courtroom or face an onslaught of other severe penalties.
Your Palace of life (Life Constellation) is without a top-level powerful star in 2007, and unfortunately, the minor stars that are in residence, ‘Star Hong Luan’ and ‘Star Yue De’, are not helping matters any. This being said, you do have many other lucky stars arranged around your Palace of life(Life Constellation), and they are scattered everywhere. Be careful until you arrive at your end goal, and do not waste your energy on arrogance, as you may have trouble lurking around the corner. There are people in your circle that you trust, but be cautious, as you may have to deal with a disloyalty.
The possibility of such a disloyalty seems to come from the unlucky star ‘Star Yin Sha’, along with the unlucky star ‘Star Xiao Hao’. Combined, these two stars could bring about a myriad of failures, the degree of which could fluctuate among all Dragons. In 2007, the Year of the Pig, many Dragons will face a negative blow to their status and name. It is essential to watch on what you say, who you say it to, and where you store private information. Be positive that your private matters remain private!
Remember to focus on celebrations of all types this year! The happiness of these functions will help to dispel the poor and depressing forces within your Palace of virtues.
It’s convenient that the horoscope seems to be saying it’s a year of both success and failure for me; they’re clearly covering all bases!
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02.11.07
Posted in Family & Friends, Film, London at 8.39 pm by niltiac
The weather has been miserable the past few days and I have been laid low with a nasty virus. To break the tedium of work and home, without actually having to spend long outside or in a smoky pub, what could be better than the movies?
My boyfriend and I met Natalie, Jess and Andrew yesterday to see Amelie at the Prince Charles Cinema, off Leicester Square. It’s a cinema that typically shows movies six months late and knock-down prices but it also runs lots of fundraisers for charities and this one was to raise money for Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth.
I saw Amelie at the cinema when it was first released, a few years ago now. It was just as charming and whimsical as ever (sometimes a bit too charming and whimsical). I enjoyed it though; it was exactly what I felt like as it was an activity that was both sedentary and not too taxing on the brain!
Amnesty had a short ad before the film, which was a parody of a home shopping channel selling AK-47s. It was a good concept but it was very heavy-handed and the ad went on for several minutes when it could have got its point across more subtly in less than half the time. Of course, it’s an important cause; the international arms trade is out of control.
Afterwards we had coffee and a bite to eat; a perfect Saturday afternoon.
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Posted in London at 8.19 pm by niltiac
It was a match on nobody’s sporting calendar, bar the Aussie expat community in London and the Danish TV viewing public.
Australia v Denmark played a friendly match in the Loftus Road Stadium in Shepherd’s Bush last Tuesday night. I thought it would be fun to go along and Natalie and Steven K joined me to cheer on the men in gold. Nat lived in Denmark for most of last year so she had a double reason to go.
Shepherd’s Bush is the very heart of the Aussie expat scene in London (which I’m obviously not part of since I couldn’t even find my way from Shepherd’s Bush Tube to the Walkabout before the match). So although the game was ten thousand miles from Australia, it was very much a home match for the Socceroos. Judging from the flags and the scarves and the chants of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie”, the live audience was nearly 90 per cent Australian. Still I reckon that more Danes watched the match in total, since it was screened on Danish TV and I can’t imagine that any Aussies watched the match on TV. The advertisers who surrounded the pitch with Danish ads obviously made the same calculation.
There was a great atmosphere at the ground, I think in part due to the fact that Australians don’t take football/soccer terribly seriously. We loved the fact that we got through the first round of the World Cup last year (losing only to the eventual champions, Italy) but that’s just a general interest in sport, not a passion for football in particular. The main thing is we were all there to watch the game, not to have riots with hooligans from rival teams, like the Europeans do. (I don’t mean to tar all European football fans with the same brush but hooliganism is a big problem; Italy is currently toying with the idea of holding matches without spectators after a cop was killed at a match).
It was my first live football match (and I could count on two hands the number I’ve seen on TV) and it was pretty exciting. Unfortunately we didn’t play so well. We didn’t have a full team – Tim Cahill (who I met last year the Armani show) was there but players like Mark Viduka were not. Our offence was pretty good but our defence was not so great and the goalie failed to prevent most of the Danish attempts at the goal. We did actually shoot three goals but two of them were disallowed; I’m not sure why but it’s possible they were offside. In the end, we lost 3-1. I’m sure that’s because the only beer on sale was Carlsberg (a Danish brand).
(An aside: The beer was on sale only before the match and at half-time and even though the bottles are plastic, you still can’t take them up to the stands. I blame the behaviour of English football fans for that one).
I’m told that Princess Mary of Denmark, who is Australian by birth, was expressly forbidden from barracking Australia in this game. I’m sure she didn’t really care but it would be irksome to be told who to support! The Danish coach probably ruffled a few feathers in Australia by saying that Tasmania wasn’t really part of Australia anyway.
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Posted in London at 8.06 pm by niltiac
My snow dance worked! A few days after my last post I woke up to find the world was covered in pretty, white stuff. Hurray for snow! Then last week we had an even heavier dump of snow! Compare the two photos taken from my living room window a fortnight apart.
Transport was screwed and many schools shut for the day. It was tempting to call in sick and go tobogganing in Hampstead Heath (one of the few hilly places in London). I didn’t though; I’m freelance and I have to earn a living. (Unfortunately now I AM sick for real!)
In my part of London, the snow was still on the ground in the evening after work (though it had melted in central London) and there were still patches the following morning.
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The Year of the Dog is over, long live the Year of the Pig!
