I popped into our local Apple dealer (ooh, that sounds dirty) earlier this evening in search of a new pair of earbuds for my iPod. Mine finally gave out about a week ago after almost a year of life. I'd been using my boring old black Sony earbuds since and was, sadly enough, missing the uniformity and recognition that came with the white earbuds. They're everywhere I turn these days and are almost like a badge, a secret symbol indicating that yes, I too am progressive and cool. (I am aware of how sad and school-cliquish this all sounds, but there's been so much written about the iPod as an identity technology... I could go on, but I won't.)
Anyway, back to the Apple shop. I went in fully determined to regain my white-earbud-denotes-iPod-owner status and sure enough, they had earbuds in stock (two general department stores I'd tried in town were all out). So my friendly sales assistant pulls them out from under the counter...
Him: "Look, I know they look cool and everything, but I really don't want to sell you these."
Me: "?!"
Him: "See, they're crap. They break easily and the sound quality is terrible. Plus, they're €39.99."
Me: "Oh...kay..."
Him (reaching behind counter): "See these Sennheisers? They're way better, more reliable and they're only ten euro. I know they're ugly... but you can't go wrong."
Me (still slightly baffled, isn't this an Apple shop?): "Yeah, fair point. I'll take them."
So now I'm the proud-ish owner of a slightly less pretty pair of blue and grey headphones, and more importantly €30 better off. My chances of being mugged for my iPod have probably dropped significantly too - blue and grey headphones must equal rubbish mp3 player, right?
(edit to add that I've just flipped through about ten songs on iPod with new headphones in and ohmygoodness there is no comparison in terms of sound quality. It's like my ears have popped after a long flight and I can hear properly again. Yay Sennheiser.)
30 March 2006
A lesson in salesmanship
On (and off) the wagon
It's all about the food here this week. After consuming grand quantities of oily meaty food and wine in Spain, and generally just overdoing it in the past month or so, I made the decision to start a two-week detox regime on Monday morning.
So: caffeine, booze, spices, dairy, flour, wheat, red meat except lamb, white rice, sugar and have I mentioned the booze? are all off the menu. This leaves tasty foods like rice milk, soy milk, rice crackers, soy yogurt, brown rice (are you seeing a pattern emerge here?), lots of fruit and vegetables, white meat, fish, dried fruits, pulses and a whole lotta water. Sample daily menu: rice milk and fruit for breakfast, home made carrot & coriander soup and rice cakes for lunch, small fruity/nutty snacks, and pan fried chicken and a massive pile of green veg for dinner. Plus about three litres of H2O.
The net effect so far (at least until half an hour ago when I caved and had a slice of a colleague's birthday cake) has been a loss of poundage, a surge of energy, and, less desirably, a frequent need to pee. I'm not sure how long I'll last on the full regime, but I'm definitely feeling the benefits of a less carb-heavy diet. I wasn't that unhealthy to begin with, but I'd given up resisting any and every foodie temptation that came my way.
Cutting out the booze also means no hangovers, which means no need to spend one's entire day in the foetal position on the sofa with one hand on the remote and the other alternating between a giant bag of tomato ketchup Lay's and our entire stash of chocolate mini eggs. Now, what to do with those regained hours...?
26 March 2006
Mucho bueno
We're back from our wee trip to Girona, tired, full and a little sunburned. Lots of great food and wine, not too much shopping, and some really beautiful old streets and buildings. I'd write more, but the clocks went forward last night and I'm starting to snooze at my keyboard...
22 March 2006
Dos riojas, por favor
We are headed to northern Spain early tomorrow, via the bright lights of Eindhoven (bleh, Ryanair), for four days of rioja, jamon, olivas, chorizo and possibly more cheap Pull & Bear and Zara than I or my little wheelie suitcase can handle. Of course I haven't actually packed a thing yet - blogging and refreshing my iPod are far more pressing tasks. I'm also suffering from serious packing indecision as it's set to be 22 degrees all weekend and my pallid knees are trembling at the prospect. Cropped trousers! T-shirts! Possible exposure of toes! It's all too much for a girl to take in.
We're back on Sunday, hopefully with photos and a tale or two...
19 March 2006
The wearing of the green
My experiences of St. Patrick's day have been defined by different things over the years. As a kid, everything was huge and exciting and I got to wear the St. Patrick's day badge my aunt had made me and watch our home town's parade. In my teens, I spent a couple of years drumming in the parade, which was far more fun but a lot more tiring, and my home-made badge had been replaced by ten-hole docs and a home-made tie-dyed t-shirt. The college years brought with them the Dublin parade, and all the added extras the city had to offer - firework displays, ceilidhe on St. Stephen's Green, rollercoaster rides at the Custom House - we took it all in.
By the time I left Ireland, the whole thing had escalated to a week-long festival culminating in a massive display of public drunkenness on the day itself. I took full advantage of the day off work but steered clear of the city centre. Most people I speak to back home are now doing the same.
Now, as an expat, I'm finding that I want to do something to mark the occasion, but the Irish pubs here are always packed and blaring the diddly-aye music for all they're worth. So this year, I went shopping for green party decorations and decked out our local as an Irish pub for the night. Oran supplied the music, Gabri looked after the shooters and we settled in for a night of sort-of seasonal fun. Not quite as authentic as home, but nowhere near as tacky.
15 March 2006
Post-gym grumbles, part one of many, I'm sure
Legs killing me. Brain fried. So this will have to suffice - a list, in no particular order, of Gym Personality Types:
1. The pretty girls. You know who you are. You wear colour co-ordinated gym gear, the more lycra the better. You have an impossibly sleek and shiny ponytail. You put on makeup in the changing rooms before your workout. Men have been known to drop 25kg weights on their feet as you bounce past. We hate you, but secretly we wouldn't mind being you. Just for a day.
2. The lurkers. You sneak up behind me as I'm about to set up on a weights machine and maintain that "you were there first". I don't think so, lady... but you're about five inches taller than me and you could probably take me in a fight, so I'll let you go.
3. The yoga-ers. You lot are impossibly toned and bendy and you don't sweat and you look so relaxed as you float by on your way out of class. Are you on drugs, or is it really that life-altering? Please do enlighten me.
4. The bodybuilders. Gentlemen. Please note that while lifting 25kg weights does make you a hard man, to a degree, it won't have any lasting effects if you maintain the "one rep, then break for five minutes to admire self close up in mirror" routine you've got going on now.
5. The power platers. Many of you also fit into category 1. Do you really think that standing on a vibrating surface for 20 minutes at a time, while contorting yourself into position after position, will make you fitter? If you ain't sweating, it ain't working.
6. The dressing room naturists. I've encountered many, many more of you here in Amsterdam than anywhere else in the world. I'm really very pleased that you're so happy with your body, but after four laps of the changing rooms a la nip while chatting on the phone, I think we've all seen enough, don't you?
(For the record, I fall into the "baggy t-shirt, hair scrape back, red sweaty face, headphones in" category. The category 1-ers generally look at me like I've got the plague... but whatever, I'm there for the calorie burn. And the abs... someday the abs.)
13 March 2006
Shamrock fever
Sadly, the day itself isn't a public holiday here but we're planning to get the evening started in style early enough. Our current plan is to hijack our friendly local and deck it out as an Irish pub for the night, complete with diddly-aye and rebel rouser music. No green beer though, but I'm sure Gab the barman will come up with some seasonal shooter or other to get us all in the mood!
It's funny how I've grown to enjoy St. Patrick's Day more since I've left Ireland. It held some charm for me while I was still at college, but by the time I was leaving for Scotland it was just another day off, and an annoying, traffic-diverted, public-brawling, shops-shut one at that. Here we get most of the celebrations but none of the rowdiness; plus we get to introduce our international friends to our many and varied customs and traditions on this most Irish of days. I'll have them all playing The Dawning Of The Day on that tin whistle by the end of the night, no doubt.
10 March 2006
These shoes were made for running
Check this out:
Tens of women in impossibly high heels took to the PC Hooftstraat here yesterday in Dutch Glamour's Stiletto Run. I had seen an ad for this a couple of weeks ago and was full sure it was a joke, but no, they pegged it the length of the street in their Jimmy Choos etc. for the chance to win €10,000. A 20-year-old athlete from Egmond won - I bet the money just about covers the medical expenses from the damage she's done to her ankles. Most of the time I can barely walk in heels, let alone run in them!
Not the magic number
Oran and I finally ate at Fifteen last night. I say finally because we've been sort of kind of half making plans to eat there since it opened over a year ago. By our standards of procrastination this isn't the longest finger we've ever put something on - we have yet to buy picture wire to hang the three Picasso prints Oran bought me for Christmas 2003.
Anyway. Fifteen Amsterdam is run by two Dutch guys but operates on the same principle as the original - the number fifteen refers to the size of the group of trainee chefs they bring in each year, usually from disadvantaged areas. Generally they have no knowledge of food or cooking, and the aim of the programme is to train them up to Jamie Oliver restaurant standard in less than a year. The first groups of trainees in both London and Amsterdam had cameras in their faces for the Jamie's Kitchen series; now it's business as usual.
While I'm all in favour of the concept and probably a tiny bit envious of the cooking experience these kids are getting, I'm not sure it works at all in practice. The Amsterdam restaurant tries to place itself in the "hip Amsterdam" category - this is reflected in both the decor and the prices - but the food we ate last night was nowhere near the standard I'd have expected.
The restaurant operates on a set menu basis - ostensibly to broaden the trainees' repertoire without putting them under too much pressure - so the only course where we had a choice was the primi piatti. First up, though, was an extremely bland salad of adichio (sp? it's a type of endive), marinated artichoke and something billed as salted cod which was rubbery and completely tasteless. So far, so underwhelming. At this point we were starving and washing the whole thing down with some excellent Seghesio zinfandel and grazing on the bread and olives we'd also been given (former okay, latter kinda fishy), so we weren't too put out.
Next stop the primi, where I'd opted for the lemon cream tagliatelle and Oran went for the red wine and pancetta risotto. The tagliatelle was surprisingly good - tasty fresh pasta and they didn't skimp on the lemon - but the risotto was horribly presented, overcooked, overcheesed and most of the tiny specks of pancetta (bilingual bacon pun!) we found buried in it were burned to a crisp.
The single biggest disappointment of the night was our main course. It had been billed as "rack of lamb with Sicilian tomatoes, broccoli and black olives" but what we were actually served were random bits of lamb meat, off the bone and completely lacking in flavour. There wasn't a single black olive on my plate, and the two or three lumps of tomato I had were barely warmed through. My broccoli wasn't so bad but Oran's had had the life and soul boiled out of it and tasted like it had been lying around for an hour or so before being served.
I think we would have made more noise about the main course had it not been for the dessert - a nut tart with vanilla risotto ice-cream. Both were delicious and proved that simple food works. I'm not sure how long this group of trainees have been on the job, but there's definite potential there if they're not forced to run before they can walk.
I'm probably coming off like a complete gastro-snob at this point. I'm not - I'll be the first to admit that I'm an average cook. The difference is that I know my limits and Fifteen appear to have thrown theirs out the window. Either they rebrand (and reprice) themselves as a training restaurant, or they increase the numbers of fully qualified staff in their kitchen. I give them another year.
6 March 2006
Bubbles burst
Dammit. Fifth at pub quiz! Questions we got wrong (brainy points for anyone who gets these sans Google):
- How many wheels on a Concorde?
- Who founded the Red Cross?
- What year was Michelangelo born in? (this one scored a free round of drinks)
- Which is the first country to have hosted the soccer World Cup twice?
- What Asian politician received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000?
Questions I'm proud we answered correctly:
- Who was the first actor to be featured on the cover of Time? (Charlie Chaplin)
- Which actor or actress has won the most Oscars? (Katherine Hepburn)
- Which two actors have directed themselves to directing and acting Oscars? (Laurence Olivier/Roberto Benigni)
- In which year did Microsoft release the first version of Windows? (1985)
Yeah, there's a pattern emerging here. We are a team of film geeks and geek geeks with comparatively little knowledge of the "useful" stuff (politics/history etc.) We did kick ass on the music round too though, for once! The obscure 1980s electropop tends to leave us stumped - thankfully this week was a mixture of Radiohead, Skunk Anansie, Boyzone and Texas. 8 out of 10!
Next week: hockey match. Oran and Andrew, you're on your own :)
Monday morning blues? Me?
Reasons to be cheerful, parts 1-3:
1. Hockey match this evening has been postponed due to a dusting of snow on the astro turf. This means a) no hypothermia and b) pub quiz!
2. The morning after the night before - lots of Oscar gossip and pictures (see here, here and here for your fill). I don't agree with Crash for Best Picture, but I'll save that rant for another time.
3. Leftover chocolate brownies from yesterday - triple chocolate (70%, milk, white) and pecan. Just the right level of decadence for 10.45 on a Monday morning.
(PS. Hi Tim, yes, it's me :) )