Reality TV in the family!

I nearly forgot! I spoke to Dad today and told him that the TV show "The Lost Tribes" currently showing in Aus, with a family called the Poveys, which has a father called Tony who's about 50, whose eyes look remarkably like Dad's eyes, and who's from Western Sydney, could in fact be featuring his son from his first marriage. That makes him my half-brother. He said that he had been a fireman in Sydney, and, at least from the few bits and pieces that you get about them on the TV show's website, Tony Povey is also a firefighter. So I'd say given there are only a handful of Poveys around in Australia, it's pretty certain that my half-brother and his wife and 2 kids are on reality TV... how bizarre hey? In the website above, he's the dude with little black marks on his face gazing off into the distance on the main title banner. Crazy!

Bludgy London day

After canning our plans for Plymouth this weekend because the weather looked like it was going to be nasty, we wound up with the most stunning summer day on Saturday (although apparently it was still horrible down in the south-west where Plymouth is so it's all good). Mark and I basically drank our way around London. We started with the most miraculous of all things - good coffee in London. Kudos to Mark for finding the place - this great tiny little place at Neal's Yard near Covent Garden. There were only 3 booths up the back of the place, but it had the best vibe - coffee sacks and pastries everywhere, and funnily enough it seemed to be run by Aussies! Don't you love that - the only good coffee we can find over here is made by Aussies... Here's a pic of me pretending to drink coffee and not laugh while Mark takes a photo of the place. :)

Then we kept on wandering, and after getting our first pastie this London trip (so amazingly good, although still not as good as yours Mum. Although the chain you buy them from is called "The Cornish Bakehouse", which Dad would be disgusted at.), we did a quick visit to Temple Church. This was the church they visited in The Da Vinci Code, when they were looking for "a knight interred" (it was a red herring - they should actually have been at Westminster Abbey). It was kind of funny - there were these amazing stained glass windows at one end, but the stone effigies that they look at in the Da Vinci Code are at the other end, so all of the tourists go to the other end and take photos of them. Here's a pic of what I thought was actually worth seeing - one of the windows. You can't see it properly because the camera (and potentially my photography) aren't good enough, but most windows seem to have quite big chunks of glass, whereas this one has so many little pieces it's almost a mosaic - the effect when you're there is amazing.

Then we wandered along the Thames and went to the Waterloo Bridge second-hand book market (I can't stay away from books - it's useless to try), and then went into a couple of the big old boats moored along the river, which are now restaurants and bars. We sat around and drank wine for a while floating up and down on the tide, then pub-crawled our way home - 'twas great! Edie, you'd be proud of us ;) And then just to top it off we went out for more drinks with some friends in Islington that night - that's a lot of drinking for one day!

Round up for the week

That's week #3 out of the way now - only 11 to go then it's back to the Sydney bumming life :)

We also went to see Pirates of the Caribbean #3 this week. It was a surprisingly crap movie experience, but a better than expected movie somehow. I have to admit I wasn't expecting much, so I was pleasantly surprised by this at-times-random, very light-hearted, romp-y kind of movie. It looked like they were all having an absolute ball making the movie, and there were some great special effects. However, the cinemas here at crappo. For starters, you have your seat allocated when you buy your ticket (figure that out, especially when there are no seats allocated on plane flights so you have to race to get a good seat there - they've sure got their priorities sorted out there...). There are also "extra special good" seats, in the middle of the cinema, which cost a few pounds more each just so you don't have to turn your head that extra degree or two. Then apparently it's necessary to have an intermission between the ads/trailers and the actual movie!! So in reality you can turn up a half hr after the movie start time, and you could walk in during the "intermission", with the lights bright enough to find your pre-allocated seat, and sit down for the actual movie. All very wierd... So seeing this one movie ended up costing us about Au$50!! What a joke hey...

Anyway that's enough whinging for now, on to something nice - Chilean wine (that's wine from Chile). It's surprisingly good! In a desparate bid to try some wine over here that's not Australian (which has got to make up at least half of the supermarket wine stocks, not to mention restaurants wine lists...), we're trying all these wierd and wonderful locations. Chile's been the best so far, for sauvignon blanc and also some good merlot and cab sav, and I had some good South African red too surprisingly. Argentinian white has been no good when we tried it. The first bottle I bought over here was just some M&S-brand bottle, which I realised when I got home was good old South Australian red!!

I just booked tickets to see Damien Rice in Brighton in July. It's on a Saturday night so we'll take the train down there and spend the weekend there and check it out - it's only an hour on the train apparently.

Since we're not going down south for the weekend, we're going to pack a lot into the weekend - Mark's got a plan for tomorrow to go drinking on a boat on the Thames and check out some other stuff, then on Sunday we'll catch a train up to Oxford or somewhere and check it out just for the day.

Oh, and it's now officially summer - yay! Now if only someone would tell the weather to improve...

Plymouth?

Well we were going to go to Plymouth this weekend, but it looks like it's going to be crap weather so we think now we'll wait for a better weekend later down the track.

For Mum to check that we're going to the right place (the house we lived in until we came out to Australia), here's a link to a satellite map of the street. There should be an arrow pointing out the front of the house. Leave me a comment if it's the right spot! You can zoom the map in or out and also move around by dragging the mouse on the map - it's pretty good actually, I love google maps. Once you've zoomed out a bit, you can also get it to overlay the street names on the satellite map - use the little 'Hybrid' button at the top right.