Sydney Stories - Week 11

Hello,

Winter is slowly settling in. The minimum temperatures are getting below 20 deg C. The weather is becoming "pleasant".  I don't know if its the chilled breeze the fragrance from the eucalyptus trees is a bit more noticeable these days. The walk to and from the train station is a bit more enjoyable now.

The looong weekend is just about to get over. The first two days were quite uneventful. Was warming the couch pretty much the whole time on Friday and Saturday. On Saturday went to a cousin's place for lunch. They had prepared bisi bele bath. Had it after a long time. It was yummy.

Finished reading up on Angels and Demons. Good timing in fact since I finished it on Good Friday. :-) Interesting book - definitely a page turner. Now am eager to watch the movie. Have started on a new book called Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra. Book loaned by my cousin.

On Sunday (Easter Sunday) a colleague of mine named Abhijeet and I decided to meet up in the city for a walk in the park. Reached the city at 2 pm and started our walk from one end of Hyde Park. The timing was good that we were able to see an  Easter procession. A rally with people from different nationalities (holding their respective flags) were walking around Hyde park. The interesting part was the rally was lead by an ass..oops should I say a mule? Apparently a Christian tradition. From Hyde park we proceeded on to the Royal Botanical gardens. It was an interesting garden. The key highlight was "heaps" of bats hanging upside down in the trees. (Heaps by the way is Aussie slang for "lots".) I have seen 1 or two bats here and there but never a cluster of them like this. It was an interesting sight.

One end of the botanical garden leads into the Opera house. Walked around the Opera towards the Harbour bridge. We initially thought of walking on the bridge but ditched it in the last minute. Looks like Easter sunday is a subha muhurtham day here. We saw 3 or 4 weddings that got over and the couples were being photographed with the Opera in the background. One of them was even an Indian couple. The photographers were asking them to do all the weird poses. Had a lot of photographs taken of me at various vantage points. Wonder when my mate would be uploading them on the web. It was a good long walk from 2 - 6 PM. After the walk headed back to my friend's room (the same hotel where I stayed initially). Had Thai for dinner and returned back home at around 10 PM.

Today (yes Monday was a holiday too) did a bit of cooking (more about that shortly). Finally got an opportunity to play tennis. Caught up with a Russian dude who lives close to me. He offered to give me a ride to the Parramatta tennis club. Had a good hour of tennis. This guy works in the same office building as mine. Now we are considering having a hit sometime during the week as well. Let's see how it goes.  In the evening went to my uncle's house for dinner. Had a nice south indian dinner - poori, masala, ven pongal, masala vadai with chutney and kootu. The kootu was something different - prepared without any onion or garlic. Have brought some back home for later use.

Over the weekend did a bit of experimentation in cooking of course. This weekend it was bhaingan bartha, pad kee mao (thai style flat rice noodles with chicken and basil leaves) and shitake mushrooms with bok choy in oyster sauce. Learnt a trick in making omlettes this weekend. The trick is to make the "batter" as thin as possible. Usually I beat up 2 eggs, mix up the onions, mushrooms and chillies and make it in one go. The omlette comes thick, sometimes burnt. Nowadays I make 2 separate omlettes with the same quantity of eggs and veggies. The result was restaurant quality. :-) Another trick (which I learnt from the web of course) is to add a bit of turmeric, cumin powder and garam masala (apart from salt and pepper). You gotta try this out. :-) Incidentally the garam masala which I've been enjoying for a while now is a Fijian brand. 

Thanks to the loong weekend caught up on a couple of movies - only Hindi this time. Saw Karthik Calling Karthik and Taare Zameen par. Beautiful movies both of them. KCK seemed a little dumb initially but the plot and the whole movie made complete sense at the end. TZP was brilliant, I wonder we - current day parents will get a message or two out of this.

On the home front, Nandha has got his passport. Now am waiting for the person handling the visas for my company to get back from her wedding vacation. Couple of more weeks to start the next process. It's getting there.

All in all a good week and weekend.

Have a great week ahead.

Chetty