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Was trying to find my way to the Columbia Road Flower Market one sunny Sunday when I stumbled upon the Hackney City Farm,
where I stumbled upon giant pigs snoring in pens…
chickens who don’t give a hoot about humans (but chickens don’t hoot, do they?), walking all around us and going into the pens of all the other animals and taunting them for not being able to roam freely like they do….
sheeps with black faces…
goats with a sun-tan…
the biggest pig I’ve ever seen (believe me, this photo doesn’t do it justice, you MUST see it in person! When Nasty saw this photo, he was like, nah, it’s not that big. Until he went and saw it himself and he was like, yeah, that IS the biggest pig I’ve ever seen!)…
and a donkey who’s like a real-life version of Pooh’s Eeyore: he’s really just as depressed. He stood like that motionless and with that sulking face for as long as I was there.
Nasty and I went back the next Sunday for breakfast at the farm’s coffee shop and queued and queued and queued and waited and waited and waited for our Full English Breakfasts. It was crowded with screaming children and people kept streaming in. Luckily, the food was worth the wait and it’s one of the best breakfasts I’ve had here!
Combined with the Columbia Rd. Flower Market, this makes for a great morning out, esp. with the weather cooperating!
Chinese restaurants here give you prawn crackers for munchies as soon as you sit down, or while you wait for your take-out meal.
Why prawn crackers?
You get fortune cookies after a Chinese meal in North America.
Why fortune cookies?
I think prawn crackers in England is the fortune cookies of North America.
In Hong Kong, prawn crackers are generally seen as an Indonesian specialty.
But curiously, you almost always get them if you order Peking duck (a Beijing specialty: crispy roasted duck). How does that work?
If you sit down in a Chinese retaurant in Hong Kong or China, you’d get a small dish of salted peanuts or pickled cucumbers and cabbage. Which I almost always eat in over-abundance, even after our ordered dishes arrive.
Why don’t Chinese restaurants do that here?
Why is it that wherever you go, you are usually able to find quality “western” food, but not Asian food?
Pizzas, spagettis, fry-ups, steaks, fish and chips, pies, whatever. Speaking from personal experience, they are just as good in major Asian cities as anywhere else.
On the other hand, being in a major European city does not guarantee authentic Chinese food.
I know it’s arrogant, but sometimes it peeves me when I eat Chinese/Asian food with non-Chinese/Asian people and they proclaim that we’ve just had a “great” meal. Usually, it’s not. And mostly, we order food that would never be ordered at home. However, they are not inedible, so I smile anyways because no one wants to hear at every single meal about how “everything is better back home”. Which is, admittedly, but unintentionally, what this whole rant is about.
Why is that?
Having no internet at home, my new job isn’t helping.
Looking through and signing the Computer Security Policy, this is some of the many things it says:
“The use of personal screen savers and wallpaper backgrounds are prohibited.”
“Access to the Internet through the use of company facilities is provided for business purposes. Access to the web is monitored and screened in accordance with company policy.”
“Do not use internet based email accounts (such as Hotmail, Yahoo etc).”
“Within the company, websites are categorised as:
1. Business related – allowed at all times
2. Non-business related – Accessible, however, a message will suggest you should access outside work time
3. Inappropriate – not allowed at any time”
“It is company policy to monitor the use of the internet by employees and to record which websites they access.”
Bloody hell. Not even bloody wallpaper.
I miss home the most when I come home hungry to an empty house. It’s dead quiet and no one is around.
There are no friends to meet and no family to wait up for. There is no cat to cuddle.
I sit alone at the dining table, stuffing into my mouth some sorry excuse for food I managed to hastily throw together for dinner.
My stomach is filled, but not happily.
The wind is howling outside, the catch on my window is broken and it throws itself open every so often, blasting cold wind into the room.
This is when I feel like turning up All By Myself on the stereo while tearing into a tub of ice-cream a la Bridget Jones.
Only I don’t have a stereo.
Alas, I don’t even have that song.
I stood on the Central line platform (the only Tube line that goes all the way across London) behind a wall of people four deep, and watched three trains briefly stop and whizz by without me on it, packed and spilling people everytime the doors open.
That was my initiation into morning rush hour in the great city of London. Weeeeee!
… … …
When I was finally shown my desk and left on my own, I sat down and looked around at my typical office possessions of computer, pen-holder, phone, file-holders, drawers, white board, and calendar. I stretched my legs out underneath me, propped my elbows onto the expansive surface, and my first thought was, “Damn! It’s GREAT to be working again!“
Believe me, you don’t hear that very often, and that’s probably the only time you’ll ever hear it from me.
If and when things become difficult, I hope I’ll always remember how utterly defeating and depressing it was to be without work. I hope you’ll never have to know.
… … …
On my way to my second day at work, I sat down on the train and saw this right in front of me:
I wanted to raise my fist and say, “Damn you! You don’t know what it’s like to be out of work!”
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