Vegemite, pavlova, VB, lamb chops, ocker rock

My Oz Day party had it all!
(some pics soon)

• I made three pavs. Cheated with a store-bought meringue base, but I hand-whipped fresh cream (hard work!), and managed to find passionfruit, kiwi fruit, and banana for the topping. They turned out awesome.
  
• Everyone loved the pav, almost everyone hated the vegemite (but one or two liked it), and the same was true for its liquid form, VB.
• Everyone enjoyed, or at least tolerated, my selection of ocker rock: from acca dacca, through inxs and the oils, custard and you am i, through to hilltop hoods and sleepy jackson, and everything in between. Oh, and a bit of men at work, gangajang, icehouse and even Peter Allen (it wouldn't be right otherwise...)
• Afterwards we went in to town, most of us went to a club called Scharinska which was wikid, but a few went to a concert where the floor collapsed injuring 30 people - nobody I know was hurt though.
• Party was on Saturday - a day late, I know, but I was up late on friday preparing two papers for NOLCOS, one two, in case anyone's interested.
  

Reprazent

My 4th-floor apartment window, taken from street level:



Happy Straya Day, my friends

Iceland Spar

Two items of good news: My submission to the conference aka travel rort in the greek islands was accepted, and our project about cerebrospinal fluid dynamics was just given an extra million or so dollars (AU) from the swedish research council, which means I have plenty of money to stay here if I so choose.

It's getting properly cold now. This afternoon it was around -20 and, wouldn't you know it, our office fire alarm went off and we all had to assemble outside (seems they actually take such things seriously here???).

In the mad-dash every-man-for-himself tread-on-the-wounded rush to get outside, I forgot to bring my beanie and scarf, so I was somewhat underdressed to stand around for half an hour in -20 while waiting for the fire department to come and declare it a false alarm.

The entire bone structure of my skull actually started to ache and vibrate with cold, like a titanic ice-cream headache just from standing there. My front teeth became the temporary home of a small fur seal colony, but even they soon found it too cold and retreated to the warmer waters around my molars. The tip of my nose felt like it was being dragged at high speed along the surface of an ice rink, kind of a tingling, stinging, burning cold combined with a sensation not unlike being rubbed vigorously with fine-grained sandpaper. All because some dickhead was left a soldering iron on or something.

In other news, turns out my local supermarket has meringue bases, thus vastly increasing the probability of pavlova on oz day. I think since I'm cheating on the meringue, I should do proper whipped cream rather than that shitty canned stuff. They also have kiwi fruit and bananas, but not much else, no strawberries or passionfruit. I think it will work okay though.

Ooga booga

Winter has finally come, temperatures these days are around -10 to -15, and the snow cover is building up. Just in time for the ski season.

I'm currently busy as, trying to simultaneously write four conference papers, revise two journal papers, and review someone else's journal paper. And I've gotta do a good job of the review, because the editor who asked me to do it was the Savman, my old supervisor.

Two of the conference papers are for South Africa in September (a good month for cage diving with Great Whites), the other two for the next CDC, which is in Noo Orleans.

In other news, my german mate got climbing shoes and a harness for christmas, and the unigym has a good little indoor setup, so that's a weekly fixture now. My arms are as weak as buggery.

On the weekend I'm hosting a little do for oz day, so I'm starting to get the fridge prepared:



The local bottle'o only sells one brand of aussie beer, and its VB. Noice. I woulda thought it would be Fosters if anything. Mind you, a case of veebs set me back about 60 aussie bucks, but it's Australia day so you gotta make an effort.

After a year of drinking all those refined European beers, VB tastes refreshingly like vomit. It's great!

Anyone know how to make pavlova?

A cool picture

by Swedish photographer Jocke Berglund:



Last year, a cyclone hit southern Sweden. What you see above is an area of forest that was trashed, and the tyre tracks of vehicles that cleared the area afterwards.

Christmas

Cambridge from the tower at St John's College, overlooking John's, Trinity and the massive King's College Chapel in the background.

Deadline extended: the two greatest words in the English language. I did have a paper deadline tomorrow, now it's in two weeks. So I can relax a bit and finally get round to finishing my Christmas memoirs!

So, I arrived at London on the evening of the 23rd. That night and most of the next day I stayed at Jo H's place again. She had gone north to visit her fam, so I was housesitting, and feeding the rabbit Bonsai. Bonsai and I got along gangbusters, and within a few hours he and my right foot were more than just good friends. Left foot strayed the same way soon after. (Why don't people name their feet? Seems so impersonal just saying right and left foot. In certain contexts.)

Anyway, On Christmas Eve I went to Cambridge to visit my old uni friend Wai Keet, who is there doing a PhD in quantum physics.

Wai and me in the Great Court of Trinity College, walking in the footsteps of such high achievers as Newton, Francis Bacon, Maxwell, Russell, Wittgenstein, Tennyson, Byron, Nabokov, G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan, etc, etc.

Wai seems perfectly at home at Cambridge, he is quite possibly the most quintissentially English person I know, despite the fact he is Chinese-Malaysian, and had lived in Australia since he was nine, and went to England for the first time two years ago. I'd put money on his first word having been "quite", as used as an indication of agreement. Possibly in response to a detractory remark about the architecture of some gothic cathedral or other.

He's one of those people who is basically a sponge for knowledge, especially languages (he did a degree in linguistics alongside Elec Eng, and he's fluent in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, French, German and Latin) . He lapped up all I could teach him of Swedish, 10 points to me for learning a language obscure enough not yet to have felt his wrath!

On Christmas morning we heard, and (barely) saw, the Kings College Choir, a Cambridge must do. Apart from that, most of our time was spent drifting around Cambridge from lunch party to dinner party to dinner party to dinner party, eating more meals in one day than most doctors recommend. Met some interesting folk, including a strange German girl studying the cyphers used by alchemists, who dreams of one day becoming a mad spinster living in an attic with hundreds of cats. I'd rate her chances of realising that goal as pretty high.

Also met a half-Guatemalan dude who was thrilled to hear I'd been there and loved it to bits. His dad's Guatemalan, but his mother is American, and she was doing aid work in the Guatemalan mountains during the "scorched earth" civil war, in which entire villages were roasted indiscriminately. She was simultaneously in danger from the rebels for being a yankee, and from the American-supported death-squads for, well, existing. His father also had a price on his head for some reason I don't quite recall, and they fled to America with their baby boy and settled in the Pennsylvania Amish country. A change is as good as a holiday!

Wai also showed me around his lab at the Cavendish, which had lots of old "artifacts" with rediculous signs on them, such as this:

Anyway, that's more or less the sum of it!

In-between bits

Between Chrissy and New Years, I lived moderately large in London, and caught up with a selection of my favourite peeps.

For most of it I was staying at Jo and Jeremy's, in this highly esteemed neighbourhood:


(note the feeble attempt at graffiti, which I'm guessing was abandoned because, well, how could you improve on whats already there?)

On the 28th and 29th, I hung with Mikey, including a visit to the London Eye on the only sunny day we experienced in London.

Like a giant bicycle wheel. All it needs is giant spokey dokeys!


Silhouette:


Looking straight down on a crowd watching a break dancer:


On the 30th, I went back to the other (Egypt) Jo's place, for a delayed Christmas dinner with her, Katie (Egypt one, not the one I was recently in New York with), James and Brendon. Jo put on a real proper dinner, with lamb, butternut squash, baked spuds, and so on. Hilarity ensued, as did alcohol, eventually culminating in a slightly drunk game of trivial pursuit, and all the frustrated anger that goes with that. Twas lovely to see the girls again, this time after just one year instead of five!

I personally enjoyed the question "Which soft-drink manufacturer painted a 747 jet blue as an advertising stunt" to which Brendon replied "how would I know? I'm colour-blind!" as though the blueness was the only identifying aspect...

During the day of the 31st, I greatly enjoyed a carvery lunch with Chia (perhaps better known to some as "tangles"). Chia provided a welcome change in that she is not called Jo or Katie!* Several beverages were consumed during and after lunch, and conversation ranged widely over such ground as hilarious accents, economic theory, bushfires, and a largish section on where on earth (literally) our respective careers are taking us. Various attempts were made to meet up again, but thwarted by such events as Chia eating then sleeping, or me flying back to Sweden.

* - as dearly as I love my 6 friends bearing those names, it does get a bit much sometimes, especially as far as writing this blog goes. Factoid: of all the international trips I've been on in the last 6 months (Spain, Austria, Norway, San Diego/Guatemala, Korea, San Diego/New York, London) there's been at least one person called Jo or Katie on all except Korea.

Hold Tight London

Update: Upon unpacking my bags, I realized with some pride that my first attempt (even if accidental) to bring explosives on-board a plane has been successful! Carry on baggage, no less! Okay, so it was only a Christmas Cracker... but it still counts on my book. Also, welcome back to the internets, Dr Cok!

Just got back to Sweden. Where to start? Think I'll cover New Years Eve and Day in this post, and then work backwards to Christmas and the in-between bits later, mainly because I can't find the cable for my camera, but for NYE&D I can just steal photos from Jo, Mikey and Alice.

New Year's Eve

For NYE, I went to a party at a pub in Angel that was organised by a french dude called Jef, who was (I think) a vague acquaintance of a friend of the flatmates of Jo and Jeremy, with whom I was staying at the time. Mikey and Jo's bro Roy came along for the ride as well. (further reporting of the festivities can be found, not surprisingly, on the blogs of Jo and Jeremy and Mikey)

The theme of the party was "hats", and we were stars of the show with our folded newspaper hats, made from a particularly classy tabloid Jeremy found, every page of which seemed to be page 3. That is, all our hats had boobs.

Twas an awesome night, punctuated by the mild shock of the following exchange:
Me: Can I have two bottles of champas and a bottle of white wine.
Bartender (corks bottles, hands them over): Okay, that'll be 91 pounds.
Me (slackjawed): wha??
Thanks the the internets, I now know thats 225 aussie dollars. But even my hasty calculations on the spot told me it was at least a metric fuckload.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think perhaps there may have been a mis-translation to blame:
In Australia: champas = a bottle of your absolute cheapest locally-produced sparkling white wine, please barkeep.
In England, or this club at least: champas = champagne, as in real stuff from france, Veuve Clicquot in this case (fancy).

But we took it on the chin, and had a wikkid night anyway. It's New Years Eve after all!!

There was much dancing and merryment, particularly with a sensationally hot Romanian chick who might well have been called Julia, or possibly something else, who was pretty much throwing herself on every guy in the room, much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, who watched it all grimly! All good fun...

Time for pics.

The crew: Mikey, Jeremy, Jo, Roy (peeking over the back) and Moi.




A rather kaleidoscopic (I love that word) photo from Mikey:



J&J's flatmates Shannon and Brett, bottom right. General partiness elsewhere in the frame. Jef (party organiser) is in the shiny white hat far left.




Shake it awn down!



Expensive bubbly:



Happy New Year!!




After our venue closed, Mikey and I went cruising the streets and tubelines looking for something still open, for a while we joined forces with some randoms from the countryside, including this girl whose feet were sore from her shoes - nothing unusual there - but she refused to take them off because she has a phobia of feet. The mere sight of any unshod feet, including her own, sends her into a panic. Bizzarrre!




Anyway, wanderings largely uneventful, except for excessive tube travel, we stumbled back to J&J's at 5am and collapsed, which brings us to...

New Year's Day

New years day, hooked up with my second cousin (aka 2-Cuz) Alice, and her boy Martin, to watch a DJ set by the guy from the Rapture, at a pub in Camden, London's Glebey goths&markets burb. The set "started" at 3.30pm, and we got there around 3, twasn't even open yet. It started (without quotation marks) at more like 7 or 8pm, which afforded us plenty of time at nearby cafes and Japanese restaurants (actually only one of each) to catch up on, what, 4 or 5 years since we last saw each other? Hamner springs trip, whenever that was!

We shared tales of nights spent bum-style homeless in Europe, or catatonic and disoriented in places not necessarily on the map at all, and discussed various generalities and specifics about the past, present, and future, and promised to keep in slightly closer touch from now on.

Me, Martin, Alice:



In the far back, in the blue shirt, is the guy from the Rapture. Honest.



As you can see, pretty couchy and chilled out atmosphere. We all had several waves of tiredness, and second, third, fourth and fifth winds, but NYE sleep deprivation got the better of us at around 9pm, and we headed home for a well earned slumber.

Stay tuned for more!!