Wien

Here I am in Vienna, sipping piña colada at the behest of my traveling mates. To their credit, it is not half bad, tastes like coconut candy swirled in ice. Vienna is quite relaxing so far. We are taking it slow today, eating sacher torte and baby cow schnitzel and visiting what used to be the home of pompous yet adorable genius Mozart and imagining what life was like for him at the time.

We encountered an old man outside Mozarthaus who delighted us with tales of the 'bloody street' Blutgasse. He is an interesting person despite my initial wariness and left us this precious anecdote: There are many people in this world but only a few that are truly human. You know what I mean.

I hope we run into him again. It's not likely we will. But it's people like these that makes our trip and by extension, our lives richer.

Bye bye Paree

I am now sitting at the lobby of our hotel waiting to bring our bags down to the bus stop. We are going to bid Paris goodbye for now and going to Vienna later this evening. Aside from minor hiccups and aggravances like our elevatorless hotel (Not. Fun. Seriously. When you have a crazy large suitcase it makes you want to break out in Hulk mode and go berserk trying to carry it up 5 flights of stairs and you just pray you don't break a blood vessel in your brain nor get a hernia from the strain) and copious dog poo on the sidewalk, Paris had been most enjoyable with lots of good food, hot chocolate, and cute men who return your gloves to you when you drop them ;)

Au revoir, Paris. Hope to see you again one day!

p/s I didn't get my duck at Versailles. Instead Lydia and I had hot potatoes with different toppings on top, hers smoked salmon with creme fraiche and mine minced beef with carrots and peas and hot gravy, sold by a man who speaks with a British accent. It was divine (the potatoes, not the man, though I generally love listening to any accents of sorts because they ARE lovely but that's besides the points)

Goodbye Montmartre

We are attempting to pack up our suitcases to leave for Vienna. It has been a great 6 days in Paris minus Hanie's broken luggage handle, fiasco with the lock combination on Lydd's bag and my unfortunate episode with food poisoning. We have more than 6 hours to kill before our train departs from Paris Est so we decided to visit. The tombs of the kings and queens of France at the Basilique St Denis before doing some last minute souvenir shopping. Let's hope we have better internet facilities in our accommodation in Vienna for us to do something about this blog.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone.

Tea party with the Mad Hatter

We have not been very good with our blog since Paris happened. We find ourselves too tired to do anything but fall into our beds every night after our explorations of interesting monuments and places and not fulfilling our duties here ;)

Until we get our internal-batteries recharged we will continue to etch memories into our head/iPhone to retell them at our earliest convenience.

We're stuck on the RER on the way back from Disneyland which was really great, despite the cold wind. On the way back to our hotel in the heart of Paris or so they tell us, for a real good hot meal. We spent the day replenishing our blood sugar with nothing but hot chocolate and popcorn. So it's safe to say that we are very very hungry right now.

We had some bad luck the last 2 days with a few of the places we wanted to visit but everything else we managed to do has made up for it all. Tomorrow is going to be excellent as we will be going to Versailles and checking out this restaurant close to the chateau where Hanie will finally get her duck!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone.

Furry Menace

I was awoken last night by Nora saying: "Girls, I think there's a rat in the room."

What happened was that she had sat comfortably in her bed, at her laptop, the lights and tv were shut off as Lydia and I were asleep and a rat crawled over her bed and scampered onto the floor.

In all my years in Malaysia, and travels to other places I have yet to encounter rats in the room! And here it is in Paris. There's a first for everything I guess XD. Just didn't expect it to be in Paris!!

So the light was on and tv was left on full blast in hopes of scaring the rat away, and I think I slept thru an French opera show, and the opening of the Winter Olympics colouring the fringes of my stupor.

On a much happier note, I experienced snow for the first time ever in Frankfurt at 5 pm, on the 11th of February! It was completely magical as the snow fell in soft wispy flecks. I caught the flecks with my gloves and I swear I could see the snow crystals briefly before it melts away. So utterly beautiful.

The wind picks up after that, and it became so cold my face went numb. It's nothing like I've ever experienced before, and it left me in awe somewhat, because seriously I could not have imagined anything can be so cold, and yet it did.

We ducked into a restaurant to have our first German meal after that. How can we not when the restaurant is so warm and inviting. I had beef goulash and bread dumplings (bread kneaded with flour and baked? steamed?) and it was the kind of food that's no-nonsense and stick-to-the-ribs to keep you warm and filled up during winter. The meat is stewed in possibly red beets and tomatoes, it was warm and tart and slightly sweet with a tinge of pepper. The bread dumpling is not my favourite thing as it's a kind of stodgy brick of carbs meant to hold you up, I guess, hence the sticky chewy and heavy consistency. It's not too bad when you douse with lots of the goulash gravy, but I'd personally stuck with just bread and potatoes.

I do love the Kaiserschmann (spelling?) that Nora got for us - it's basically a lovely chopped up pancake doused with icing sugar, raisins, and served alongside applesauce and raspberry sauce. I love textural juxtapositions in food, and this provides just that. It was soft and crunchy (from the bits that had been left longer in the pan and caramelised in its own sugar), and sweet and tart (from the applesauce). I wished I had more space in my stomach to finish this up! I heard that there's a lot of different versions of this dish, some more custardy/ crepe-like than others.. so am looking forward to trying them out!

I would so love to upload the pictures of the FOOD but being a hardcore PC user I'm having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to transfer photos from the camera to this MacBook. Where's the Autoplay function? Why doesn't the control key work like a REAL control key? What's with the funny command key? Why do stupid iTune kept popping up every now and then?? Until Nora wakes up and shows me how to work this out, I'll just try to make my way (albeit like a blind clown trying to light a candle with boxing gloves on) ...somehow.

It's finally light outside in Paris! I can see the morning sun streaming through from the curtains. There's actually lovely smell of freshly baked bread wafting up from the bakery downstairs. Heavenly!! Now all we need to do is just get rid of that rat...

My First Meal in Germany

This food review is rather due as we are actually in Paris now. I haven't found the energy to blog since coming to Europe because of jet-lag. I think between the 3 of us, I'm the one who's having the most difficulty adjusting to the time change (I've been the one sleeping the earliest, and getting up at a godforsaken hour at SIX in the morning!! argh!!!)

As mentioned in Nora's previous post, we had our first meal in Germany in Binding... which was empty when we entered but filled up with people as the night went on.

The place was warm and inviting. It was pretty cosy in there, too.

The funky looking ceiling deco in Binding.

We were served with bread before our drinks and main course arrived (that's Nora's salad in the background). The bread was hard and cold... which made me miss the kind of bread you'd get in an Italian restaurant (which is soft and warm, and served with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Yumm!).

I ordered my first beer in Germany - the Krusovice. Sure, this isn't a German beer (it's from Czech Republic), but I wanted to try something on the menu that has an 'odd'/unfamiliar name.

I have no complains this beer as I've always preferred dark beer to light beer. The beer is smooth and if you're worried about having to drink through the frothy head before getting to the actual beer, then don't as the frothy head disappears rather quickly. But even as the frothy head disappears, you'd still get that 'fresh' beer taste (unlike with, say, Carlsberg, where after the frothy head disappears, the taste of that beer kinda reminds me of drinking my own vomit. lol!)

I really enjoyed the taste even though it felt quite light for dark beer. You'd definitely won't get drunk with drinking just one glass. Also, I thought it went well with my meal.

For my main course, I ordered the Fried Meatballs with potatoes and onions.

(p/s: For those of you who know me, then you would know how much I despise onions. But part of this trip was to try out new stuff and do things I wouldn't normally do. And yes, I did eat 'em onions!)

If there's one word to describe my first German meal, it would be salty. The food was alright for the first 10 bites, but after that my tongue started to feel 'funny' from eating all that salt. Even the potatoes were salty. I'm glad I had the beer to wash it down.

I don't know what else to write about the food coz really, all I can remember about it was it being salty. So yeah, the food was alright but am not too crazy about it :P

Here's the address for Binding Am Goethehaus:

Weißadlergasse 15

60311 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Seriously my finger are frozen now. This is also a test post using Blogger feature so wait for a proper post after this, heh heh