Along Regent’s Canal in Camden
Professional jealousy?
Photo Friday – Canal-side wisdom || 30th July, 2010
Along Regent’s Canal in Camden
Professional jealousy?
Eating my way around the Middle East || 28th July, 2010
Or, Variations on a theme of veggies and rice
One of the things I love most about the Middle East (and Morocco for that matter) is the quality of the vegetables. Ripe and vibrant and so thick they’re amost meaty. In this chilly, drizzly, frost-prone island I call home a large percentage of food is imported, and consequently picked early for processing and transport, force-ripened and often watery. So it’s a treat to travel and sample food from better climates.
One day in Jerusalem we picked up a few mangoes in the souk on our way to the Holocaust Museum. As vividly as I’ll remember the images and stories I saw there I’ll remember the ripest mangoes I ever tasted, fragrant skin so soft we peeled them with our teeth as we walked up the hill to catch a bus back to the Old City.
I’m surprised as I look back through my photos that I didn’t take many of the food — maybe my firing tastebuds were obscuring my photographic eye. Although I neglected to take photos of the array of fruit and vegetable stalls in the markets, I did whip my camera out a few times before tucking into meals:
Unbelievable roasted and salted aubergine in Caesarea, Israel
Dinner buffet at a Bedouin camp in St Katherine’s, Egypt, before climbing Mount Sinai. Delicious. And yes, I was naughty but the bread was irresistible
Clear vegetable soup in Aqaba, Jordan…
…and yes, more rice and veggies
The remnants of dinner laid out for us at a Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum, Jordan. This was perhaps my favorite dish…the seasoned rice was amazing
A rich red tomato dish in the rose red city of Petra, Jordan
(The bread wasn’t mine this time!)
The noticeable lack of pictures from Israel is mostly down to the fact that I didn’t have much of an appetite there… perhaps adjusting to the heat. Still, I’m not quite sure how I ended up with no shots of falafel and hummous… or watermelon for that matter, which I ate every day for breakfast… a lesson learned for future trips, I hope.
Farewell, Wesabe || 27th July, 2010
I’ve mentioned before how invaluable I’ve found Wesabe in coming to grips with my financial situation. So when I came home from my trip, in particular need of watching my money, I was taken aback to see the notice on the site that Wesabe will be shutting down at the end of this week.
Wesabe was one of the few (free) sites out there for users with non-US dollar accounts, with a level of granularity that I understand other, similar sites haven’t matched.
But although I’ll miss geeking out over its pie charts and bar graphs and tag clouds, using it has put me into good habits that will continue on without the site.
I don’t know why I was ever one of those people who thought I could make extra payments on credit cards with what’s left at the end of the month to clear the balances faster, because let’s face it, there never is. So now I’m an adherent to the pay-yourself-first method of budgeting and I knock off a chunk of my debt on pay day. Although I still try to have something left over to make a small extra payment, it’s ok if I don’t because I’ve already made a dent in it that month.
I have a basic spreadsheet (we’re talking Microsoft Works wizard-generated basic) with three tables — income, fixed expenses and variable expenses. Fixed expenses obviously covers stuff like rent and bills. The variable starts out with a combination of things I expect to be paying out for that month and blank categories that I fill in as I spend, like eating out. That’s been crucial, because I would often check my bank balance and see I had x amount left and feel ok to spend, forgetting that certain bills had yet to leave the account. So now I don’t bother looking at the balance — I check what the spreadsheet says is actually available, which keeps me reined in as it edges lower. It’s a simple thing, but a different way of thinking that makes a big difference to how my finances look each month.
So I’ll miss Wesabe and uploading transactions for tagging, but now that I know my spending habits in detail, I feel like the training wheels are coming off. That won’t stop me from keeping an eye out for the open source version, though, or dropping in on the wesabe groups that will remain active, to keep motivated and pick up tips.
A photographic journey || 26th July, 2010
I didn’t do a Photo Friday post last week because I was still in the process of uploading my trip photos to Flickr and was overwhelmed by the idea of choosing the first picture to post here. So I decided to approach it differently and pick one from each stop we made. Even that proved difficult — I did after all upload more than 1,700 photos! So let me take you on a little photo journey, featuring just a handful of my favourite snaps:
Jerusalem
View of the Old City from the Mount of Olives
Spices in the Old City souk
Caesarea
Ruins of coastal city built by Herod the Great
Bethlehem
What stuck me about Bethlehem were the stunning views…
… and the steep, narrow winding streets
Herodium
(also spelled Herodion)
Palace and fortress built by Herod the Great c.26 B.C.E. in the Judean hills just south of Jerusalem, with spectacular views out to the desert and the Dead Sea
Jericho
Sea of Galilee
Jordan River
Ein Gedi
Male ibex fighting in the cliffs of the nature reserve
Mount Sinai
Wadi Rum
Petra
Amman
I include this purely because strangely it’s the only photo I took in Amman. I was tired and preoccupied with the last-minute shopping we needed to do before flying home, but it’s still hard to believe I didn’t think to take shots of the vibrant downtown area with its clothes shops and fruit markets and street stalls selling everything from pens to hair products to prickly pears.
This was such a hard edit to do, but it was a great exercise in picking out photos to print and enlarge for my walls. I can’t wait to put together a large framed collage. The rest of the photos are up on Flickr, here.
My latest food obsession || 25th July, 2010
Since becoming a gluten-free, soya-free vegan I think about food a lot. What I can eat, what I can’t. I read the ingredients list of everything before I buy it. And when I find something especially delicious that I can eat I get fixated. Hence my post-work detours to Morrisons in Shepherd’s Bush solely for banofee syrup sponge or my forays out to Fulham for pizza (so gutted the Hell Pizza there closed). And so I found myself on a bus to Camden yesterday afternoon because I’d spent all week daydreaming about the cornbread stall at Camden Lock.
Camden Market is a great place for gluten-free vegans — many of the food stalls cater to veggies, gluten-free stuff is often marked, and there are several Vietnamese restaurants as well as Inspiral Lounge (which is on my to-try list). Vietnamese is a staple of my diet — all rice noodles and rice-paper spring rolls — but the arepas have stolen my heart. Arepas are a traditional Venezuelan/Colombian dish — fried, grilled or baked thick corn pancakes stuffed or topped with yummy fillings. As a recovering cheese lover, the grated cheese is tempting, but once I took a bite of an arepa stuffed with black beans, plantain and roasted vegetables (aubergine, courgette and peppers) I didn’t miss the cheese.
The signage at the Arepa & Co. stall says the plain cornbread is available for sale to take home, although when I asked about it the request was met with surprise. I bought five at £1 each and they generously threw in a sixth. That will keep me in yummy lunches at work for the next couple of days.
Arepa & Co. is in the middle of the cluster of food stalls by the London Waterbus Co. dock. There’s also an Israeli falafel stall and a West African stall, which despite taunting me with the propect of curry goat and rice, also offers vegetable dishes. Turning right, around the dock, there’s a Moroccan stall with vegetable tagine. Plenty to keep a gluten-free vegan happy after building up an appetite wandering around the endless twists and turns of Camden’s vibrant street markets.
I washed my arepa down with a large cup of fresh lemonade (another current fixation) from one of the many juice stalls. And if I hadn’t been so full I would’ve visited the Thai coconut dessert stall (sweet little bites made from rice flour, coconut and sugar) — next time.
P.S. I just found out there is an Arepa Cafe on Queen Street West in Toronto…more reason, along with Magic Oven (gluten-free pizza and pasta), Mimi’s (Vietnamese), and The Big Carrot (juice bar with gluten-free sandwiches and snacks)…as well as my friends of course
to look at booking another visit soon…Savouring a taste of life on the road || 19th July, 2010
Bold tan lines. Loose waistbands. Unkempt braids. Piles of dusty laundry. Bone tiredness.
I got back from the Middle East a week ago but I haven’t quite emerged from the post-trip daze of an active two weeks quasi-backpacking through three countries.
Even though it was only two weeks, as I suspected when we got to Amman, Jordan, our final stop, returning home would result in a bit of reverse culture shock. After climbing and scrambling ancient ruins in 35+ degree heat, sleeping in the desert, striding through vibrant souks, haggling over everything, taking four hour coach journeys every couple of days… falling back into the home-Tube-office-Tube-home cycle has been jarring. My unpacked suitcase is still in the middle of the floor, a subconscious nod to my wish to hold on to the just-returned feeling, before the repetitious routine reclaims me completely.
I previously posted our planned itinerary, and it did in fact go largely as outlined, except day 7-8, when we got caught out by the Sabbath (carelessness on my part) in Ein Gedi by the Israeli side of the Dead Sea. Since there were no buses that would either take us to Masada or down to Eilat, it was fortunate that we’d made reservations at IYHA hostels in both Ein Gedi and Eilat — a quick call from the front desk allowed us to cancel the Eilat room and stay in Ein Gedi a second night.
We were staying in Ein Gedi because the Masada hostel was full and as usual when things don’t go to plan, it turned out even better, because we got to stay across the street from the Dead Sea — floating in its warm salty water and smearing on the thick black mud found in rocky crags on the beach rivals any expensive spa treatment — and next to the nature reserve, where we watched groups of ibex navigate their way down steep cliffs to drink water from the stream and cooled ourselves in crystal-clear waterfalls.
Obviously I’ve been asked repeatedly what my highlight of the trip was, and Ein Gedi was definitely a high point, but there were high points at every stop — in Israel I loved being in Jerusalem and by day 2 was joking about moving there to learn Hebrew; the ruins at Caesarea were impressive and the source of fun text message hints to friends back home that we ended up in a police car (the police generously gave us a lift to the train station at night when we couldn’t find a cab); the bustling streets of Bethlehem in the West Bank were wonderfully evocative; the panoramic views across Israel from the steep hill at Herodian took my breath away; the deep-blue Sea of Galilee was an unforgettable sight. In Egypt the wonder of following a Bedouin guide up Mount Sinai in the middle of the night, with only starlight and, when it emerged, the moon, to light the way was equalled by watching the sun rise over the mountains from a prime east-facing perch at the top. In Jordan both Wadi Rum and Petra surpassed my already-high expectations of the magical sun-drenched beauty of the multi-tonal rock.
And as well as having great company — an outgoing friend with similar travel interests, an easy laugh and a wonderful sense of humour — we met some kind, generous and fascinating people along the way, from the 19-year-old girl in the first of her two years of compulsory army service we met taking the train from Caesarea to Tel Aviv; to the Canadian couple we encountered in Wadi Rum who were approaching the end of a 6-month trip driving a jeep from Cape Town back to England; to the students at a camp in Sinai about to embark on a two-month trek studying biodiversity in the desert; to the American woman who approached us on the street in Amman having heard us speaking English and talked about her public health internship as we drank fresh sugar cane juice and haggled with market sellers over scarves.
Those two short weeks will stay with me for a long time, a goldmine of memories, emotions and well over 1,500 photos that are gradually making their way to Flickr.
Mideast adventure awaits || 25th June, 2010
It’s finally the night before and I’m packed and finishing up reading first-century historian Josephus’ account of the Roman-Jewish war. We’re flying into Tel Aviv and heading straight to Jerusalem. Hard to believe that 24 hours from now I’ll likely be sitting on a hotel roof terrace looking out on the Old City.
Back in two weeks!
Elephant Parade || 20th June, 2010
Since none of them were placed on my regular work-errands-socialising route, it took a while before I came across any of the more than 250 vibrantly painted elephant statues dotted around London as part of the Elephant Parade open-air art exhibition to raise awareness of the conservation of Asian elephants. Today was the end of the street exhibit; they’re being moved to a couple of collective displays before the campaign wraps up with an auction on 3 July.
Here are a couple I came across around town:
More on my Flickr set here.
My new baby || 19th June, 2010
Finally, after much procrastination, research, circular debating and a touch of budgeting guilt, this beauty is mine:
I’ve wanted a digital SLR for a long time, and become increasingly envious of people I see using them, but I could never justify the cost. But I just couldn’t bring myself to head off to a tour of historic sights in the Middle East without one.
(So smudged already…)
I’ve missed the sensory experience of shooting with an SLR, holding the camera, composing a shot through a viewfinder, adjusting lenses and focus, the whir of the shutter. I can’t wait to start using it!
Photo Friday – Open Garden Squares || 18th June, 2010
Living in West London I’m always curious about the locked gardens dotted around that are only open to residents of the houses that surround them. I always think of the film Notting Hill and the scene where they jump the fence into one of the gardens. I used to say that when I moved into this part of London I’d live in one of the streets with views/access. What’s that I’ve been saying about plans and expectations…
Anyway, once a year Open Garden Squares Weekend offers us mere mortals who can’t afford astronomical mortgages/rents the chance to not only peek over the fences but actually go into the gardens. Every year I say I’d like to go then forget about it, but this time a friend who usually does the same thing got us organised to do it.
More photos in the Flickr set here.
