June 29, 2001
11:31 AM dublin time
as soon as we arrived in bangkok we made our way straight to the kho san road - the backpacker area - and from the minute we got there the majority of people around us were backpackers - dreaded, tie-dyed, bearded, beaded, saronged and sandled backpackers - and instantly the human urge to fit in kicked in and i started to find myself actively browsing through the stalls of floppy embroidered tops, shell necklaces and tiedyed sarongs - things i'd never want to wear at home. I began lusting after anklets and wanted to decorate the end of each leg with thousands of the things.
i think aonghus and myself escaped lightly from bangkok. everything is so cheap there, it would be easy to get carried away and end up with a complete backpackers wardrobe that would never be worn again. i satisfied my anklet desire with a very tasteful delicate silver chain but only managed to persuade aonghus to buy a single string of blue and black beads for his neck [very fetching in my opinion]. i also sucumbed to a wonderful pair of orange trousers - fantastic trousers that i failed miserably to describe to my family in an email home, and will attempt to do a better job now;
imagine a pair of trousers that are way too wide for you. now slit them along the outside seam of each leg, attach four ties at the waist where they were slit, now tie the back two ties around your belly, and the front two ties at your back. and that's pretty much them. they look kinda like a sarong, but in trouser form. and i think they're just fab!! i'd seen them on a couple of people around kho san and just had to have them! there were, however a couple of unanticipated problems with my new purchase...
the first was in going to the toilet - it's pretty damn awkward to say the least, but i've managed to perfect a method that just might work, even in grotty irish pub cubicles.
the second was less to do with the trousers and more with the material they were made of - a lovely vibrant orange - very like that which the buddist monks over here wear. the problem was that it had been dyed and then never washed and it turned my legs bright orange - which gave me quite a fright - i thought it was some mad reaction to my malaria pills! but i gave them a quick hand wash and they should be safe to wear now!
[link]June 25, 2001
02:04 PM dublin time
this crazy thai browser just ate my mail - well, here i start again...
we're still in bangkok and enjoying it now that we've gotten the hang of taking it slowly and not trying to move too fast. literally. it's just too hot, and way way too humid. and our room in the guesthouse we're in is on the 5th floor, makes for a sweaty ascent, and makes one thankful it's air conditioned when you reach it.
my favourite things about bangkok?
the people, who're all really friendly - the kids are still curious even though the place is crawling with westerners - maybe it's my height [people are quite short in thailand] and my red hair. at one place some school kids asked if we'd be in a photo with them.
the food - there's street stalls everywhere and they cook up a dish of pad thai fresh for you, and all for just fifty pence!
the buildings - the temples are wonderful, very ornate, and they really remind me of some of gaudi's stuff in barcelona, though i guess he must've been inspired by thai stuff rather than the other way round.
my least favourite things?
trying to cross the road - on our first day we were waiting for about five minutes before we eventually gave in and got a tuk tuk to where we were going.
the insects - i'm eaten alive my mossies, and that's after i spray myself with DEET far too often!
the humidity - i'm sweating far too much - i can rub layers of salt off my forehead. my fingers are slipping off the keyboard as we speak.
the slow slow internet connection - but that's not usual - we just picked badly this time.
June 21, 2001
02:25 PM dublin time
sawat dii from bangkok.
we're only just here so you should count yourselves oh so priviliged to be hearing from me - we haven't even eaten yet. so far it's just been a couple of long plane journeys [but a bit of sleeping helped shorten them] and one long bus journey [but the barry manilow songs on the radio definitely helped shorten that] and we've booked ourselves into a slightly grimey but luxouriously air conditioned room with bath for an extortionate four quid a head a night. [actually i won't be sure if that's cheap or dear till we get the chance to shop around]. and then it was straight to the internet cafe [we really are geeks].
now i'd better go get something to eat before i collapse. hopefully i'll actually have something to report before the next entry.
so long for now.
[link]June 18, 2001
03:34 PM dublin time
i've squeezed in a couple of minutes between list checking and packing and spending £87.14 in boots to write what'll probably be my last blog from ireland for the next year or so. the celebratory goodbye drinking sessions are nearly over - we've done three - only two to go. jobs have been left [which is why updating here suddenly beacme less frequent - i'm not sitting in front of a computer seven and a half hours a day any more]. any last minute advice? though the comments aren't working and haven't been for a while, so maybe i should take them out altogether. i've definitely got no time to look around for other ones though. no time to do anything webpagey really. better get back to packing.... [now is five pairs of socks enough? and i wonder if that jumper is warm enough? and does this match my.....]
[link]June 15, 2001
12:06 PM dublin time
mopsy reminded me of a lovely easy hot 'n' sweet winter snack recipe i should post. it's for cinnamon toast, it just takes a couple of minutes to cook and it's totally delicious.
cinnamon toast[link]ingredients
bread
butter
caster sugar
cinnamoninstructions
toast the bread on both sides. butter generously on one side. mix together a couple of table spoons of sugar and a small teaspoon of cinnamon [more or less depending on your like of cinnamon]. sprinkle the sugar/cinnamon mixture on the buttered toast. put under the grill for a couple of minutes - until the sugar starts to bubble. lovely with a mug of tea, but be careful not to burn your tongue.
June 14, 2001
03:11 PM dublin time
saw the beta band last night, and during the show i came up with a wonderful [possibly beer induced] description of them, but of course this morning all i can remember is something about me thinking their songs reminded me of traditional irish stories [and the way a traditional irish story teller or sheanachaí used to learn the story be rote and ream it off, and if they got interrupted they had to start from the beginning again] in a kind of 'stream of conscousness sort of way.
that and the thought that a big bought of mad drumming [with all four band members drumming at once] is such a cheap and effective way to get the audience going - there's nothing like a good strong repetitive beat to bring out the primal appreciation of music in one.
ooh, and they played musical instruments. not so unusual you might think, but i mean 'musical instruments' like the game 'musical chairs', played at children's birthday parties where everyone runs around swapping chairs [i think there's also something involving there being one less chair than there are children, but they didn't play it like that last night]. and i guess you could say they played musical musical instruments then.
twas a good gig anyway. good enough to make me forget the agonising pain in my feet - the result of wearing new shoes all day. [yay new red shoes]
[link]June 13, 2001
12:11 PM dublin time
on my main page i have a link to this page in the form of 'my last three weblog entries' and i don't know if anyone has noticed, but the i've been giving the entries titles there in the form of song lyrics. the last one i thought of 'the picture kept will remind me' from the pearl jam song 'don't call me daughter' has just reminded me of a ridiculous story that i just might have to tell. it's my theory of what 'don't call me daughter' [or, as i like to think 'don't call me dodder'] is about.
apologies to any pearl jam fans. or any daughters. infact apologies to everyone for this story - it is most ridiculous.
[link]
once upon a time eddie vedder [the lead singer of pearl jam] had a friend who was absolutely crazy about geography. what he most loved to do was look through atlases looking up countries and cities and rivers and mountains and such like. he particularly loved finding places that no one had heard of and one day was delighted when he found in his atlas this little obscure country called ireland and in ireland, a little unknown town called dublin and in dublin a little unheard of river called the dodder. he was over the moon.now eddie's other friends, naturally enough thought this obsession with geography was a little weird. they used to tease the geography guy and think he was incredibly silly - looking up strange places like ireland and dublin and dodder. 'you're so silly looking up these strange places like ireland and dublin and dodder', they'd say, 'that we're gonna call you dodder'. and because he was eddie's friend, eddie too became known as dodder.
a couple of years passed and eddie had gotten so used to being called 'dodder' that he almost forgot the reason behind it. but when eddie's geography-loving friend was in a terrible accident and lost both his arms and both his legs it all came back to him. of course he was totally distraught and when his friends started saying things like 'what's up with you dodder' and 'are you alright dodder' he just couldn't take it any more and would say to them 'don't call me dodder'.
and that's how he came up with the song 'don't call me dodder'.
11:10 AM dublin time
despit [or perhaps because of] the fact that i have a million more important things to do, i managed to sort out some more photos [33 no less] for your viewing pleasure. they're some pictures i've been snapping over the last month or so - a lot of close ups of flowers - some of our trip to the powerscourt gardens - a couple of our dinner as it's being cooked [i really love food] - and a few random others.
it was a total pain in the neck to get it all ftp-ed up though coz i was doing it from aonghus' dad's laptop which only has dos ftp, and i kept forgetting to change my local directory and repeatedly overwrote several index files. i think it's all sorted now, but if anything looks a bit peculiar please do tell!!
[link]June 11, 2001
12:18 PM dublin time
i came home to waterford for the weekend and am having to spend some time doing final cupboard clearouts before we head off. there's clothes that i haven't worn for years and years, books and notes from when i was still at school, at least three old broken walkmen and a helluva lot of dust. i love getting ruthless though - just throwing loads of things out - i need the shelf space for all the stuff i'm keeping til we come back from australia.
but i'm heading back up to dublin tonight for the start of the final rundown of goodbyes [we're only going for a year people].
a friend went to canada to study last year and had to visit relations all over the country to say goodbye before he left. when he came back for christams he had to do the round all over again - seeing as he was back from faraway places - while his sister who was living in ireland hadn't seen the same relations since before he left, and probably still wouldn't see them for another while.
[link]June 08, 2001
12:39 PM dublin time
it has been suggested that a good method of increasing one's hit count is to mention 'boobs' a lot. i just want to say that i would never go so low as to deliberately drop words like boob, in an effort to increase traffic, and people that do talk about boobs all the time are just pandering to an unwanted element.
boob mentioners begone!
[i'll tell you if it works *wink*]
[link]June 07, 2001
10:23 AM dublin time
hurray for lycos. i registered this site with the usual list of search engines/directories a couple of weeks ago, and at last one of them as noticed me. so off y'all go and search for me. but only using lycos.
or if you're really bored, you can have a quick flick through the pages and randomly pick words to form a [preferably strange] sentence and see if lycos can find me with it.
eg. meagre rockabilly piercings or smuggling spaghetti champagne.
yay! it works! there goes my morning!
[link]June 06, 2001
10:45 AM dublin time
good luck to my lil sister d [and all her friends] who started their leaving cert this morning. i don't envy you. i've just one complaint though - where's the glorious leaving cert weather?
every single summer i had to sit exams the sun would be blazing but now it's miserable and cloudy. i checked the forcast for dublin online yesterday and then compared it to the melbourne forcast - 13C in dublin [in the middle of summer] and 17C in melbourne [and it's the middle of the winter there]. diculous-have!!!
[link]10:10 AM dublin time
i'm going to start a big scanning spree tonight - to try and get all the last couple of months photos at least onto the server [if not actually on the webpage] before we head off. so maybe, if i've any time, in the next couple of days there'll be some updates on the photos page. but i'm not promising anything - it's a mere two weeks until we leave and i've a fair lot of stuff to do. the first [and only] thing on my list so far is 'start making lists of all the things i have to do' [but that's the fun bit - i love making lists].
[link]June 05, 2001
04:49 PM dublin time
we used to have iced gems at our birthday parties too.
they were much littler than that though.
i think.
11:27 AM dublin time
this tuesday's recipe addition to dwyersrestaurant.com includes an orange and almond cake. dad used to make that for my birthday when i was little, and it was totally yummy. my sister eileen's birthday is three days [and three years] after mine, so we used always have a joint birthday party, and just one cake, but with each half iced in the colour/flavour of our choice. i think i'd have orange and eileen would have lemon. or maybe it was the other way round.
i love birthdays. espeically mine. pity i have to wait another five months for it.
[link]June 01, 2001
04:47 PM dublin time
i stumbled upon morfablog - a blog written totally in welsh, and so have decided to go as gaeilge for a bit.
ní tagann morán daoine anseo in aon chor, so cheapaim nach chailim níos mó léitheoirí leis an gaeilge. más tá aon gaelgóirí amach ansin ag leamh is féidir email a thabhairt dom más mian libh - chun mo gramadach nó mo litríocht a ceartaigh.
ach tá sé ró dheachair do chuid smaoineamh agus scealtaí a léiriú as gaeilge nuair nach bhfuil do chead teanga atá ann. tá mé ag tosnú i bhfad níos mó abairt ná atá á chríoch agam. [ach táim ag baint taithneamh na faithííííí]
[link]03:14 PM dublin time
i think i'm dehydrated
[link]01:48 PM dublin time
i was just taking a look at the usage stats for here and dwyersrestaurant.com and it's amazing the number of hits we're getting from people searching for nigella lawson and chocolate cake or icecream or biscuit recipes. jeez louise that woman is popular. or else we're the only people who mention her online [dad has an adapted recipe for her upside down apple tart on his recipes page].
and her new tv series is a bit odd - i'm not sure i like the way they're trying to portray her as a 'normal person' - pretending to catch her on film sneaking out to the fridge in her pyjamas the middle of the night for a huge slice of chocolate cake - it's a bit blummin patronising. and [as ted said] "the camera work on the program is a bit too mtv for my liking".
[link]11:04 AM dublin time
last night was exhausting - i'm still pretty cream crackered!
there were just one last car load left yesterday to bring out to blackrock, so i thought it would be an easy enough evening. i'd forgotten about the stack of extra little things that had to be done - like clean out and defrost the fridge/freezer, hoover up the inch thick layer of dust behind the now absent shelves and scrub the floor of the shower. so by the time we'd dumped everything in the entrance hall - all ready to be brought down to the car - i was already fit for bed.
we'd loaded nearly everything into the car when aonghus - noticing the clamp on the front wheel - startled passers by with resounding expletives. we were parked in a bus stop [damn damn damn] and had to pay a sixty five pound fine and wait for the de-clampers to arrive.
by the time we got to a box-full, bedless bedroom in blackrock it was 10.30, and we barely managed to clear space for the bed and move in the mattress before collapsing on top of it.
[link]