juice & snacks

We loved Melbourne. I’m sure it had a great deal to do with the fact that we have a friend who lives there who helped us out immensely while we were doing our planning but we also really enjoyed the nice, relaxed vibe of the City. It’s also set up on a grid season so it was much easier to find our way around. The Flinders Station area is a great, central location though all of downtown is easily accessible.

Places we enjoyed:

• San Churro. Cafe where they make fresh churros with different dipping sauces. Came highly recommended by my brother. They also have them in Sydney but good thing we didn’t try them until Melbourne because we went there twice in three days.
• Longrain. Thai fusion restaurant that came as a recommendation from our friend’s colleague. There is also a location in Sydney. She called it the best Thai in the world. It was conveniently located across the street from our hotel and the perfect place to celebrate our last dinner in Melbourne. It was definitely more upscale than the Thai restaurants we go to at home but it was delicious and worth every penny.
• Brighton Beach. More of a locals beach with cute little bathing houses.
• St. Kilda. Really cute beach area with lots of trendy shops and restaurants.
• Cafes in the laneways near Flinders Station. Free wi-fi and reportedly the best coffee in Melbourne.
• Phillips Island. We loved it so much it deserves a separate entry.

Skip it:

• Camy’s Dumpling House. In the guidebooks touted as the best Shanghai food outside of Shanghai. Two words: not true. It was cheap but not worth it.

Honeymooning in Australia

Photo of the day, travel

Ian’s been doing a great job of carrying our blog for awhile now, but I thought it’s about time to chime in and share my perspective.

Australia is a place that has been on the top of my list to visit for quite some time. The beaches, the wildlife, the friendly vibe that Australia seems to have has always attracted me. We figured that it would be a great destination for our honeymoon since we’d be able to spend more time there than we usually do on our regular vacations.  Also since it’s an English speaking country we hoped that it would eliminate an additional stress that usually comes with travelling to a foreign country.

Booking the flight was easy but everything else I found to be a bit more of a challenge then when I’ve gone abroad in the past. A large part of it comes from my reliance on Yelp and other online resources. Nowadays before I go anywhere or buy anything I look up reviews online so I know exactly what I’m getting into. Admittedly it does take some of the adventure out of it but I hate having a bad meal or wasting my money on something that’s not worth it.

Fortunately to satisfy my need for information, I was able to get references from friends and friends of friends which put my mind at ease. I also relied heavily on TripAdvisor.com when looking up accommodations and activities, but I found it to be a little cumbersome to navigate not to mention that it’s harder for me to determine the reviewers reference point to see how they stack up to mine.

Here are some of the useful things we discovered during our travels.

General

• Most restrooms do not have toilet seat covers. Toilets also have half and full flushes.
• Free internet at the Apple Store. Internet at hotels were quite expensive. We also got a 50MB plan for Ian’s phone for about $50.
• This is applies to anywhere you travel, but be careful about marking yourself as a tourist. We got yelled at by a panhandler in Bondi Beach in broad daylight for pulling out our map.
• Sun is INTENSE. The no ozone layer thing is not a joke. Bring lots of sunscreen, a hat and sunglasses. The highest SPF they sold in Australia was 30, so if you think you need more protection, bring it with you.
• No international driver’s license required if you have a driver’s license written in English.

Money

• Bank of America has a “sister” bank called Westpac. ATMs can be used without any additional service charges.
• Many hotels charge a 1-3% surcharge for using a credit card.
• Tipping is not required. Though the guidebooks often recommend 10% at fancy restaurants our Australian friend told us that tipping is not necessary anywhere. To us it felt really wrong especially since there were many places we received excellent service so we did tip, but as the trip went on we got a little more used to the concept. As an alternative many hotels and restaurants allowed us to make small donations to charities in lieu of tipping. We thought it was a nice way to solve the issue.

Eating/drinking

• Food is expensive. Expect to pay $30+ for a main dish. Of course there are many fast food options, including Subway all over the place but we found that cafes were good places to sit down and get affordable and good meals especially for breakfast and lunch.
• It is standard that hotels provide hot water heaters, tea, coffee and milk. Most of the hotels we stayed in also have small kitchenettes.
• Most days we bought pastries for breakfast which was a more affordable option and also saved us from having to rush out first thing in the morning.
• Most restaurants allow you to bring in your own wine for a small corkage fee.

travel

I have lived in California for most of my life with limited travel to other parts of the country. In fact, I’m quite sure that I’ve traveled to more foreign cities than US cities. I have quite a few Japanese colleagues who have been more places in the US than I have despite them living here for a much shorter amount of time. Pretty sad, but I hope to change that.

Diversity in the US can easily be taken for granted so when we went out to St. Louis for the MLB All-Star game, I experienced a little culture shock.

Though it’s only about a four-hour flight away, St. Louis is a very different place than California. Driving from the airport to my friend’s place, there were rows of quaint, cute brick houses surrounded by lots greenery. I noticed that on our way from the airport, we were forced to taking side streets—a result of a one-year freeway closure of the main highway. More surprisingly, these closures hadn’t caused any major problems with traffic or delays. Freeway shutdowns would be unthinkable in California, as they are nightmares already as it is.

Living in the Bay Area, I am spoiled with all the choices of varying cuisine. Just within a one-mile radius of our apartment, we can get American, Indian, Mexican, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Peruvian…the list goes on. In St. Louis, the selection is much more limited. Admittedly, we didn’t go too far out of our way, but our friend who has lived there for more than a year wisely suggested that we stay away from anything ethnic. We did find some awesome barbecue at Pappy’s Smokehouse. We also enjoyed frozen custard from the famous Ted Drewes.

The racial and political make-up in St. Louis is also very different from the Bay Area. Based on the reactions we received when we went places and the boos and cheers during the video clip of past presidents at the All-Star game, red doesn’t just represent their love for the Cardinals. Perhaps that was just in the area we were sitting, because on TV, the boos for the President were not quite as apparent as they were for us. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to criticize, it was just a shock coming from the San Francisco Bay Area where things are much different.

St. Louis is a great baseball city. It was awesome to see a city so unified in their love for the team. If anyone’s seen the attendance at A’s games this year, you know this is a shock for us, too. Everywhere we went we would see someone wearing Cardinals gear. It seemed like the whole city was off on the day of the All-Star game based on the masses of people present at the parade. It was really great to feel that energy.

Overall, we had a great time with our friends exploring St. Louis and all the sights and sounds that were there. It was nice to be able to explore another part of this vast country of ours.

Lifestyle

In the past month that Ian and I have been married and living together, I’ve been trying to be the good wife and cook dinner as often as I can. For me it’s not just my old fashioned wifely duty, but it’s really something I enjoy doing because it helps me to unwind and relax as well as it helps support our efforts to save money and live healthy lives.

In the beginning it was really hard because I didn’t have any idea of proportions and would always cook too much even if we took leftovers the next day to work. I also had trouble using up all the produce we bought before it went bad. Over the past couple weeks I’ve gotten a little bit more used to realistic proportions and have done a better job at cross using the produce for different recipes so that nothing will spoil, but it’s still a work in progress.

Since as many know Ian is not a fan of cheese and he doesn’t care for pasta either so it’s been a challenge to find quick and easy recipes that will please us both, but with the help of Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking, Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat, and foodnetwork.com, I haven’t done too bad even if I do say so myself.

A super easy but delicious dessert that we’ve discovered is this sweet apple pancake recipe. I’m sure the ice cream we put on top doesn’t hurt,  but it’s good all the same.

Lifestyle

I follow the Seattle Mariners—aka my 2nd favorite baseball team on Twitter—and the other day they posted this article about Ichiro, one of my favorite baseball players. I was mentioning the article to Ian last night, and he suggested I write a post about it.

Reading this article just warmed my heart. It talked about how since returning to the Mariners, Ken Griffey Jr.’s presence has boosted the morale of the team, Ichiro in particular. The article said that for the past few years that Ichiro has been an island—not excluded, but not included, drifting on his own. I had always wondered how well Ichiro gets along with his teammates. I’m sure he speaks English, but I always see him use a translator in interviews and just reading articles about his work ethic and such I’ve always wondered how this translates to a major league baseball team.

In Japan, interpersonal relationships can be quite complicated. In fact, this is not limited to just Japan, but many other Asian countries as well. Factors such as age, status, etc. dictate how people are able to interact with each other, even still to this day. Because of this, Ken Griffey Jr. and Ichiro’s relationship is especially unique. Only a person with Ken Griffey Jr.’s status as a player would be able to mess with Ichiro as he does, tickling him as he warms up and teasing him about his style of dress. In fact Ichiro himself said that no one in Japan would dare to do it and if someone else on the team were to do it, he’d probably smack him.

I think the reason this story touched me so is because it was nice to be able to see that even in baseball multi-million stars make the effort to reach out to one another and bridge a cultural gap. I know that living in another country is not easy, but it’s so much easier when someone reaches out to you to give you a hand.

Lifestyle