Sydney Stories - Week 62

Hello,

Hope you had a good week.

Fairly uneventful week, so thought will type about few general happenings around here.

Working in Sydney seems to give me a lot of opportunities to attend vendor sponsored seminars. Most of them are typically marketing pitches, but there is some good information (and food) I get out of them. I haven't seen this trend either in Phoenix or in Melbourne. Maybe they both were not big enough cities??

There was one such seminar held at Westin Sydney. It simply reeked of grandness. The seminar happened while we were seated at the lunch tables and the food kept coming as someone was talking. The food was exotic of course. The entree was one huge tiger prawn "decorated" with some veggies and greens. They took care of the vegetarians as well since there were quite few of us with Indian origin. I almost thought it was the only dish and started nibbling at the bread rolls at the table. Luckily the mains were served as well - some bland baked chicken dish. The dessert was again an interesting collection of chocolates which looked too good to be eaten. :-)

A recent trend that is picking up probably in the last year or so is the concept of group discounts. Apparently this business is growing big time these days even faster than Google. There are several such companies, Groupon, LivingSocial etc. They go around the city trying to find shops, restaurants willing to sacrifice some profit to gain some publicity in this fashion. I haven't tried one myself but was tempted on a few restaurant deals definitely.

This weekend went to an Indian restaurant in Homebush (Taj Indian Masala). Had the best chilly chicken ever out of India. Have been staying away from "Indo Chinese" food in restaurants out here in Sydney after some bad experiences. Looks like I can let my guard down a bit on this one. 

Apologies

Hello,

Apologies for all those emails in the last few days. I have been updating the blog with my stories from previous weeks.

You shouldn't be getting a blast like this again from my Musings. :-)

Chetty

Sydney Stories - Week 61

Hello,

With the start of the blogs, I've become compulsive to look at the "Stats" every day to see how many people stumbled across this page. Interesting statistics actually. It used to reach out to about 20+ people earlier and now I have 10 "followers" on my muses. Either people are too lazy (or not that tech savvy) to sign up or just don't bother enough. However the "Chetty's Kitchen" seemed to have attracted a few people unknown to me till now.

Figured out a way to transfer all my earlier stories via email to the blog and save it with the original date of posting. Should get all the old stories in the next couple of days.

The rains over the weekend (which is still continuing BTW) slowed our weekend down drastically. There was just 2 things I didn't do - take Nandhitha for swimming and play tennis. It made a huge difference to sleep in that extra 30 minutes in the morning.

Cricket cricket everywhere...couldn't believe I actually flipped the channel to see what was happening between India and WI. Don't know where this is leading to, but I get a baaad feeling. ;-)

This weekend happened to chat with one gentleman at Nandhitha's tamil school. He moved to Australia about 25 years ago as a high school student. Interesting to see his viewpoint about this country. I had to dampen his enthusiasm with some of my settling down stories. He immediately retorted - oh Victoria (state) is like that. It's crazy. ;-) Of course, this is a good country, provided you have what it needs to be here - PR.

On the way to work the other day the lady sitting next to me started shivering suddenly. After a few minutes she told me that she is going to pass out. I had no clue what would be an appropriate response at that time. I asked her if there is anything I should do. She just said - "Look I think I am going to pass out am just telling you just so you know." Someone nearby prompted me to ring the alarm to reach the guard. Very quickly the guard arranged for assistance to come out to the exact coach in the next station which was about 10 minutes away. I felt a bit odd not knowing what I should be doing in such a situation.

Oki Doki. Have A Great Week!!

Chetty

Sydney Stories - Week 60

Hi,

Thanks again for your b'day wishes.

As you can see, starting this week the Sydney stories will be delivered via a different channel. A friend of mine - Aravind Swamy had suggest this idea long ago. For some reason I just kept putting it away. Now as I turned 35, realized that it's time for a change. So here it is - not 1, but 2 blogs. I've dedicated one just for food and food related topics. I think its so important that it deserved that special attention. :-)

Damn - Cricket Season!! This week I literally had to request my lunch gang to change a topic of discussion. You might already know about my comprehensional capacity for Hindi and my LOVE for the game of cricket. When animated discussions happen in Hindi on cricket....well I don't need that stress during lunch!!! I hate to write about it, but don't seem to be left with much choice. This week, I breathed cricket, played cricket and worst of all I even WATCHED cricket. Truly an interesting week!!

My birthday was quite unique as it happens to be every year. This year, the uniqueness was when I had to eat lunch twice. A group of people from work went out to lunch to a Spanish Tapas. The food kept flowing in, all varieties of nibbles. Quite tasty each one of them (almost). I tried a mussel for the first time (from the shell). Probably not something I would try again. At the end (??) I had a very naive question - Great entrees (appetizers) so where are the mains? Just that we were about to pay the bill when I was asking this question. ;-) Being my b'day I didn't want to starve myself. Escaped out for a quick Pad Thai at my favourite Saap Thai. My DAY was made. Went to Sambal the Malay restaurant for dinner. Nandhitha had her "Chicken and Fries" from the Mcdonald's next door. Luckily they allowed to have it in the restaurant.

Today we had been to a unique train ride at a place called Galston. I could recollect the first time the train ride was introduced in the Anna park in Salem. It was fun to go around sitting ON the train (not in the train). They had some strict rules that a passenger should be wearing fully covered shoes. I heard some kids were turned away because they didn't have proper foot wear. The kids had a blast going round and round. It was a sudden trip and couldn't organize my camera on time. Hopefully some of my friends will share some pictures and will post them.

Hope you find this new format convenient. If you choose to get regular updates, please feel free to stalk me.

Have A Great Week!!

Sydney Stories - Week 59

Hello,

Hope you had a good week and end.

I get a weird feeling when I go to a rest room and the automatic sanitiser sends off a puff. Is it trying send me a signal? ;-)

Monday morning fever seems to be taken a bit literally by a few people. The labour rules in NSW is such that for a leave for 1 day one doesn't need produce a medical certificate to claim a sick leave. Becomes very convenient. Some take this a bit further to "show" that they are not abusing this facility. They take 2 days off and produce a medical certificate (which apparently doesnt seem to be too difficult to obtain). Oh well...am sure there is a strong reason for this.  :-)

The week zoomed past as usual and the weekend zoomed faster. 

Weekend went to an Indian restaurant in a suburb called Homebush called Taj Indian Masala. One of the "concepts" in Sydney with some restaurants is they have different versions of their own restaurant. This one I am talking about has a fast food outlet in a shopping mall. They have a pure vegetarian version in Harris Park and then a veg/non-veg restaurant usually fully licenced. The later is usually called "Fine Dining". Food was quite good with whatever we ordered and the best part was it was about 30% cheaper than other restaurants of similar kind. 

Today we had been to a relative's gruhapravesam. The priest was showing off proudly a newly "found" slokha  (that he read from his notes) for overall well-being of everybody. I used to think that usually all these old ones pretty much had every slokha under their tongue. I guess there is always something new to be learnt whatever profession it is. 

Alrighty...Have A Great Week!!

Chetty

Sydney Stories - Week 58

Hello,

A fairly quiet week, Business As Usual (BAU) as the IT professional Aussies say. Came up with some interesting graphs on Friday to assess how various teams were performing. As luck might have it one of the senior client managers was walking by and he peeked into my monitor and was surprised that someone actually looks at graphs (to analyse how things are) these days. Thankfully I was not on my gmail page then. ;-) 

Friday had a unique Thai lunch with one of my newly found friends. A Wiproite who happens to be Nandhitha's friend's dad. He is a hard core vegetarian and I was surprised when he used to claim that he loves Thai food. To prove his point he took me to a vegetarian Thai restaurant in the city. I am not sure if I would go there again, but certainly was an interesting concept. It was actually a vegan shop where all they had was tofu and veggies. I ordered one of my usual favourites - Pad See Iew. It had everything minus the chicken and more importantly the fish sauce. Chicken was substituted with some form of tofu - acceptable. However lack of fish sauce - it seemed to lack something basic. Is that what people call "soul"??? Looks like one can get realization through food too. ;-) That restaurant was trying its best to allure people to turn vegans. They had quotes from famous personalities starting from Da Vinci to Einstein and more. However, I remember reading somewhere that while Leonardo might not have eaten meat, he does kill animals for his varied experiments. 

This weekend happened to witness a "political drama" here. There was a general body meeting for electing this year's office bearers for the main committee of the Tamil school that Nandhitha goes. I had no intention of going there but did go on a request from my neighbour. Apparently my neighbour's friend was contesting for the post of "President" and hence trying to gather troops for his support. It was a hot saturday afternoon and about 80 people had turned up for this. The "meeting" started with a downpour of complaints on the outgoing president and the committee. Am sorry this is a volunteer role that someone is doing in his/her free time. Dont see how anybody can have any right to question anybody here except of course if there was any mishandling of funds. Which BTW, is a decent amount for a volunteer organization - about 20k. So far I hear there was never a competition for the post and usually selected unanimously. Anywhere there are more than 2 people, factions are formed. This time there were 4 schools joined together against our school. One team offers water to the participants and another provided sweet, karam for the voters. No points for guess who won. ;-) So much for an ego massage. 

Tried out a very decent and basic mee goreng. Uma and kids had a heavy snack outside and was not in the mood for dinner and me took this opportunity to experiment. The trick was with the sauce, kadai and small quantity of noodles. The small quantity allowed to get the noodles fried well with a bit of burn as well. The sauce mix - tomato sauce, kecap manis, sambal paste, soya sauce and oyster sauce. As for the kadai, I think I wouldn't have got this effect with a non-stick kadai had to use a iron kadai to get the burnt flavour.

Oki doki, that's all for now. Have A Great Week!!

Chetty