A Trip Home

For all intents and purposes Oregon is no longer my home and I don't consider it so. I left 5 years ago and can honestly say it was one of the best decisions I ever made (sorry Dad).

But alas, here I am with a house in not only Oregon, but my hometown of Springfield, Oregon (The Simpsons Springfield I swear). Accurately described by locals as Springtucky, as in it's a small town that wouldn't be out of place in Kentucky.

So, a month ago we started the long ass trip to the other side of the world.

We started with a stop in Portland, Oregon for 3 days. We chose to stay in Portland for a few days for 2 reasons:

1. We needed to get over our jetlag and figured it would be easier if we were somewhere that didn't require moving in to ie. our new house.

2. It was our 1 year anniversary that weekend and let's face it there just really aren't any nice restaurants in Eugene/Springfield, but Portland has 1, yes 1 fancy restaurant =)

We spent our time in Portland wandering around downtown in a bit of a daze striving to fight through the 17 hour time difference that our bodies were reminding us of and enjoying the last few days of summer and sunshine (in the northern hemisphere anyway, luckily we get to return back to the southern hemisphere where spring is just beginning!)

We encountered a fair amount of freaks that I must say I was shocked by. I know I didn't live in Portland for very long, but this was definitely not the Portland I remembered. Lo and behold there was an anime convention going on that weekend, called Kumoricon and all the fruitcakes we'd encountered we're just dressing up like their favorite anime character...as one does when one is into such things.

Anyway, aside from the weird anime..ers or kumoriconers? we have a lovely anniversary weekend. We stayed at The Nines Hotel, which if Dom will let me I will totally be copying when I start decorating either the San Francisco house or the Oregon house. We made it through the jetlag, had our anniversary dinner at Portland's fanciest restaurant, Portland City Grill, which has a lovely view of the city from the 37th floor, and if you're ever in Portland and go to this restaurant, have the steak. I had salmon, which was absolutely delicious, but Dom's filet mignon was hands down the most amazing thing on that menu.

Sidenote about our anniversary dinner. I made a reservation at this restaurant at least a month ago. It was for 8pm on Sunday, September 5, which was the day before labor day, so it was a fairly busy night for the restaurant. We show up maybe 5 minutes early and while we're waiting for the hostess to finish up with the couple in front of us we hear her tell someone else on the staff that they're running right on time, NOT behind schedule. Then it's our turn and instead of seating us she tells us they're running a bit behind and would we mind having a drink at the bar. EVEN THOUGH SHE JUST SAID THEY WERE RUNNING ON SCHEDULE. Since it's our anniversary and we're in a good mood, the bar is beautiful and there's an awesome piano player that will play any song you want at the bar we decide not to point this out to her and just go with it. She hands us one of those lighted buzzer things and we go find a seat at the bar. About half an hour later still nothing from our buzzer and at this point we're getting a little annoyed, so Dom jokingly says "maybe our buzzer is broken, I'll go check" and he goes to the hostess to check on our reservation. Guess what? OUR BUZZER WAS BROKEN. No joke.

So, we asked her why she didn't ask around the bar for us, she did after all tell us to go to the bar, so it would be fair to assume on her part that we didn't just up and leave...also keeping in mind that the hostess station is right next to the bar and the bar really isn't that big. She tells us she DID ask around the bar but no one responded.

Let's all roll our eyes in unison.

Because it was our anniversary dinner, we didn't want to get our knickers in a twist so early in the evening, we quietly gave her our best WTF, you're an idiot look and followed her to our seats. Now, since the restaurant is up on the 37th floor and it overlooks the water and the city, there are a few coveted seats around the windows. As she showed us to our table, which was not a window table, we noticed an empty window table right next to where she was seating us. So, we asked her if we could have the window table, since she had left us cooling our heels at the bar unnecessarily after all, surely she should try to compensate by giving us the good table. She spouted off some ridiculousness about how there was a special waiting list for the window and if we wanted a window we should have told her when we arrived. At this point Dom got pissed and asked to speak to her manager. As she walked away we quietly giggled to ourselves, because we weren't honestly that upset and our evening was far from being ruined, but at this point we needed some compensation for the terrible hostess. Anyway to make my already long story short...that's an oxymoron....shorter than it could be. The manager came by and let us have a window table, where we discovered that our original table was actually a better table. =) Haha. Nevertheless we enjoyed the sheepish look on the managers face when we told him that our anniversary dinner was being ruined by his incompetent hostess and relished in the fact that as far as he was concerned the window table was the better table and he had to squeeze us into the stupid "window table list".

The next morning after our fabulous anniversary dinner (it really was damn tasty, and I still recommend going to the Portland City Grill and having the steak, even after our seating debacle) we headed off to catch our train down to good ole Springtucky. Which will come in my next post and I'll show you some piccies of the house.

Restaurant Review

Alright, time for another restaurant review!

We've made an effort to go out to eat every weekend and also to get out of our neighborhood niche. This gives us a chance to explore the city and branch out since we're here such a short time and it also gets me off the hook from cooking a few nights a week, since we all know how much I love cooking. Here we go!

Milson's - Lovely little Australian restaurant in Kirribilli, pretty upscale and expensive, but delicious and well worth it. We each had different entrees (appetizers) and mains and tried all 4 dishes. Everything was delicious! Plus they had really amazing bread and a really good wine that we ended up buying several bottles of around the corner at the Bottle Shop. Highly recommended for a fancy night out.

Cheng's on Fitzroy - Amazing Chinese! We've had a bit of bad luck with chinese restaurants, both in New York as well as San Francisco where we each ended up with food poisoning from 2 different chinese restaurants. So, we were treading lightly when we opted for chinese, but this place was absolutely delicious. It's just up the street from us in Kirribilli and they also do takeaway, so we've been here several times now and it's always superb. Highly recommended, both for dine in and takeaway.

Altitude - Fancy fancy Australian cuisine in The Rocks. This is where we went for Dom's birthday and again, like all the Australian we've had here, this place did not disappoint. We did a 4 course tasting menu and again we got different things so we could try them all and once again all 8 different dishes were superb. Highly recommended, but very expensive, so only recommended for fancy nights out. Oh, and when making reservations request a seat by the window!

Holy Cow - Indian restaurant in Surry Hills, which is close to where our apartment was when we came on our scouting trip, so it was nice to go back to that area, it's such a cute part of town. Great Indian restaurant that like so many restaurants here (all except very fancy places it seems) it was BYOB (B stands for bottle in this case, not beer) which makes meals SO much cheaper, it's amazing. Anyway, very very good Indian, highly recommended for good, cheap Indian food and if you're in the area I believe they do takeaway, which is a plus for those living in Surry Hills.

Red Zucchini - This is only 1 of 2 bad meals that we've had the ENTIRE time we've been here. This is an Italian restaurant in Neutral Bay, which is a fun commute for us because it's just 2 ferry stops away, and who doesn't like to go out to eat via a ferry =) This restaurant had fairly good reviews from several different sources, and it was the first Italian that we've had, so we were really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, it was less than stellar. For one the garlic bread, which smelled amazing, had NO flavor whatsoever, very disappointing. Then both our meals came, Dom got a meat dish, I got a pasta dish and we shared, both were very...eh. The pasta sauce tasted like it was out of a jar, seriously and the meat we asked for medium and it came very well done. So...not recommended at all.

We're definitely in search of a good Italian restaurant, especially now that we've tried and failed with our first attempt. Anyone have any restaurant recommendations? especially Italian, but any recommendations are welcome!

Bushwalking, wine and kangaroos

The weekend began on Friday night, which was Dom's 38th birthday, he arrived home from NZ just in time for us to go out to a fancy dinner at Altitude, which has a gorgeous view of the other side of the harbor from our apt. In fact you can see our apartment from Altitude...which was amusing, I'm sad I don't have a picture of it.

Anyway, we got a fancy 4 course meal with wine pairings and at the end of the night Dom looked like this:

That is Dom going to bed with the cool tie I bought him earlier in the week, which wasn't for his birthday, because ties are boring presents for birthdays, but it's still a damn cool tie if I do say so myself. Anyway, he'd been running on 4 hours of sleep for the last week and he went to bed as soon as we got home.

The next morning we got up late and got on our merry way about noon. We had a very chill, relaxed drive to Hunter Valley wine country, stopping in a little town called BROOKLYN for some gas (petrol to Aussies).

Who knew there was a Brooklyn in Oz?

An hour or so into our journey we started to see these signs:

but still no kangaroos (or wombats for that matter) EXCEPT DEAD ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD! And amusingly enough, we saw one of those kangaroo crossing signs with a dead kangaroo RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT and then later down the road a wombat crossing sign with a dead wombat RIGHT IN FRONT OF IT! I figure they were admiring the pictures of themselves from the middle of the road...using the light from the oncoming car of course and just didn't have time to get out of the way. I almost took pictures, it was THAT amusing, but thought better of it, because who really wants to look at pictures of dead kangaroos and wombats?

Anyway, aside from the dead ones we hadn't seen any kangaroos and then suddenly we hit the kangaroo jackpot! A whole shitload of kangaroos...just hanging out...I squealed, literally squealed! I sounded like a pig...yes I'm awesome like that. Seriously, one of the coolest things about Australia so far is these goddamn kangaroos. Over the weekend we saw many more and I got excited each and every time I saw one. THEY ARE COOL.

Yeah it's blurry, whatever, they're still kangaroos!

Moving on.

Sunday we headed off for our wine tour. Now, we've done our fair share of wine tastings, both in Sonoma, California as well as Portland, Oregon and let me just say that the Aussie experience was somewhat different.

First and foremost, most people take a wine tour on a wine bus, this is brilliant for about 7 different reasons, the most important of which is that it keeps you from drinking and driving (or as they say here, drink driving). Also, YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING. The driver has your tour all laid out for you, so you literally just sit back and enjoy. All the vineyards are expecting you and set up special group tastings, which means EXTRA WINE! Seriously, we visited 5 vineyards and tried at least NINE different wines at each vineyard. In a word, AWESOME. Now, keep in mind that the tour lasts about 6 hours and starts at 10am, so for the first time EVER, I found myself dumping out wine that I didn't enjoy. They were just so generous with their wine AND ALL THE TASTINGS WERE FREE.

In both Cali and Oregon the tastings are anywhere from $5-$10 so i guess you feel like you paid for that wine and thus don't want to waste a drop and by the end of a day of wine tasting, YOU ARE WASTED. I gotta say I enjoyed this way better, we came home with a bunch of yummy wine and we did not end up totally smashed at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon. Not that I mind being smashed on a Sunday afternoon, a proper NYC brunch is not complete without ending up so, but we were supposed to go out for a fancy dinner at 7:30 and I wasn't sure I could muster up the energy for that after a heavy day of drinking.

We toured around in a "Cheers" bus

Monday, we packed ourselves up and headed back towards Sydney, stopping off for a quick bushwalk. Now, I don't know about you, but I had it in my head that a bushwalk would be different than hiking. For future reference, IT'S THE SAME THING. They just call it a bushwalk because they call their forests "the bush" for some reason. So, anyway, we went for a "bushwalk" in the rain, which honestly was more fun than it sounds.

Setting off on our "bushwalk"

Us and Mel (the car)

Random carving in the rock

We have a wide angle lens and like to take cool pictures of ourselves, what can I say the two faces in the camera gets boring and we are exciting.

See, I am "bushwalking"

Monkey Face Road led to Monkey Face Lookout, Australians have awesome names for things.

And that concludes our first trip outside of Sydney together, I didn't even mind the fact that it was the 4th of July and we did absolutely nothing that has anything to do with America whatsoever. In fact, I completely forgot it was even a holiday at home. What did everyone else do this weekend for 4th of July?

The Best Thing I've Ever Eaten

As I've stated before, I usually do a bit of research before deciding on a restaurant, but by sheer happenstance ( ie. we were on King's Wharf and didn't feel like going any farther) we stumbled upon the best thing I've ever eaten.

Enter delicious potato wedges with sour cream and sweet chili sauce.

They taste even better than they look.

Restaurant is James Squire on King's Wharf, which I will not recommend for proper dining, but for bar snacks (potato wedges, potato wedges!) and beer..topnotch! First and last time I plan on ever using that term, topnotch sounds stupid with an American accent but I'm trying to blend in with my surroundings =)

Dining Out

Hailing from Springfield, Oregon it was a new concept to me when I arrived fresh faced and naive to NYC that one would need to do some restaurant research before dining out. In general when one wants to eat out in Springfield one has a very small selection of restaurants to choose from and so picking one requires zero research, especially since you've been going to them regularly for as long as you can remember.

NYC (and probably all other big cities) is a different story, there are over 18,000 restaurants in NYC, research is essential to dining out. Just like with my books, my favorite way to pick a new restaurant is a recommendation from a real person, and yes a blog counts as a person, a critic on the other hand does not! Lol! OK, sometimes food critics count, but in general they are looking for something other than what I'm looking for in food and I find they are way too critical.

I've applied this same logic to Sydney and while we haven't managed to eat out in the short amount of time that we've been here this time, we did have a chance to eat at a few good places on our last visit and I'm going to take a moment here and recommend a few.

FishFace - Yummy seafood in Darlinghurst, which was where our apartment was on our previous trip, and came highly recommended by a colleague of Dom's. For the life of me I cannot remember what I had, but I do remember that it was delicious. Oh, and you can BYOW (that works right? I can substitute a W for the B and everyone knows I mean wine =), for just a $10 corkage fee, which is WAY cheaper than their cheapest bottle of vino for $30.

Agave - We were in Sydney for Cinco De Mayo and felt we needed to have Mexican food that night. And while Australia is not known for having good mexican food I found this restaurant via another Aussie blogger and we were not disappointed. Very tasty sangria, tacos and salsa.

Eat Thai - I am not normally a fan of Thai food, but Dom is, thus every once in awhile I am forced into eating Thai food. Oz is not known for it's Mexican food, but it IS known for it's wonderful Asian cuisine, especially Thai. And I have to say, Eat Thai did not disappoint, we picked out 3 different dishes and shared them between the two of us and I was a big fan of 2 out of the 3! I would definitely go back and give it a second try.

Misschu - Take out Asian wraps. This place was right by our rental on our previous trip and everyday from 11am until late into the evening the sidewalk was packed with people lining up for this take out sidewalk joint. On our second to last night we finally tried it and it was definitely a satisfying experience. And at under $20 for both of us it was by far the cheapest meal we had in Sydney.

Tonight we're off for some Chinese and I will report back!