fortune cookie: now is the time to try something new

We ushered in the Year of the Dragon with homemade bao and other Chinese food, mini-dragons, and setting money on fire. A typical Saturday night at Marin’s

More on Chinese New Year:
http://www.herongyang.com/chinese/festivals/chinese_new_year_spring_festival.html

Food gets the limelight as per usual at Gail At Large:

tea eggs

go bao or go home

another yummy veggie dish

rice and noodles featured prominently

yeah yeah, we know okonomiyaki isn't Chinese (it's Japanese) -- we'll still eat it!

Burning money:

the burn

one way to warm up in the winter

And the aforementioned mini-dragons:

enter the mini-dragon

fierce mini-dragon

this dragon even plays the tambourine!

The photo album is best viewed as a full-screen Flickr slideshow, or you can view all in the smaller slideshow below:

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Oh to have the level of excitement that children have! Especially a two-year old.

(Shot with the video camera on my phone.)

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park pooch

big chair, little boy

chasing a flock of Canadians

Sunday drive

The Fam

The Mod

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in the ball pit wind machine

When he gets older he’s going to protest how all his photos are with his face covered in food.

he loves his food

R and A

R

cousins

brothers

I went all out with cooking today — I made my from-scratch-but-never-the-same-twice lasagna, and this was hands down my best version ever. Uually it takes a day before the lasagna sets properly, but this time the texture was perfect right out of the pan.

my four cheese lasagna

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sunset, Day 2

H, Day 2

teething G

G

H

G loves his food

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us in London, 1999 (what a terrible scan!)

In a few hours I’m getting on a plane, but this isn’t going to be a couchsurfing trip, or anything like my birthday trips where I meet tons of new people, sightsee, and zoom around on trains, planes, and automobiles from one city to another. I don’t even care what the weather will be like, or what we’ll eat. I’m going to visit my best friend of nearly 19 years, in England, hang out with her family, and it’s going to be a homecoming of sorts.

I was thinking all day today of our long, storied history filled with adventures, highs and lows and everything in-between. It’s enough to fill a book or two, and we’re not yet 40. We met in Edinburgh shortly after I arrived in London from Bangkok in February 1993. I was 20 and Lucy had just turned 18. I was looking all over my Flickr albums for photos of us back then, in those days when we wore mini-skirts and smoked cigarettes and watched way too much Beavis and Butthead on MTV Europe, but I have none scanned… they’re all still on film, and maybe that’s a good thing!

Lucy knows me better than anyone. She is the only person to have attended both of my weddings in Scotland (1993) and the USA (2005). I was in England for her wedding in 2004, drinking with the groom’s Belfast crew and videotaping them pranking the Best Man, who was fast asleep in his chair.

Amsterdam balcony

Lucy’s put up with all kinds of wackiness from me over the years, like the time we met up in Amsterdam in 1999 (above), after we’d been out all night and I decided to go roaming the streets in search of food at 4am and returning at dawn while she was sleeping. Or the time we met up in London a few months later when, after a full evening of dinner and wine, I decided to go to the hotel lobby for cigarettes and a friend of one of the hotel staff offered to take me to the petrol station to buy some… he then took me on an impromptu tour of the entire city for the next six or seven hours, showing me each of the nine (?) bridges that cross the Thames and I arrived back at the hotel at dawn, when Lucy woke up. I don’t think much surprises her anymore when it comes to me and my randomosity.

Over the years, our other reunion spots have included Brighton, Bergamo (Italy), Vancouver (we also did a side trip to Las Vegas), Glasgow, and Pennsylvania, with lots of reunions in London.

I moved back to Canada in 1995 after two years in the UK and we’ve had reunions in 1997, 1998, 1999, then a gap until 2002, where there was a reunion followed by an Almost Reunion. I was in Switzerland in 2002 and Lucy had a ticket to meet me in Geneva (we’d met up in London the week before), but she lost her passport the night before the flight. I had rented a car to tour around Switzerland and drove all the way from where I was staying with a friend in Neuchatel to pick up Lucy and my German friend Berit at Geneva Airport. Instead, Lucy couldn’t fly and I had to drive up to Zurich, where Berit decided to meet me at the last minute by train from her company function in Munich instead of flying to Geneva. What a malarkey!

2003 was Italy, 2004 was Lucy’s wedding in England, 2005 was my wedding in Pennsylvania, and 2006 was a really heartbreaking reunion in England, after David’s passing. The purpose of that trip was to help Berit put together her son’s memorial at Hamburg Airport. It was a tough trip. November 2007 was our last reunion, also in London, when I was enroute to Morocco.

It’s now four years later and this is the longest I’ve ever gone without a reunion with Lucy since we first met in 1993, when we were inseparable. Since then I’ve started a photography business that keeps me very busy and she’s had two babies I have yet to meet, so this trip will be happily filled with playtime and catching up on each other’s life. And in the meantime this blog will be inundated with baby and toddler faces…  it’ll also be my first time-out from work since September 5 and I can’t wait!

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Loy Krathong on the Humber River

Last night was my first Loy Krathong, a Thai festival that my friend Marin celebrates every year and I seem to miss every year for one reason or another, usually because I’m out of town. I was determined not to miss this full moon of the 12th month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar… known to us western calendar folk as November.

What is Loy Krathong? Let’s ask Wikipedia:

Loi literally means ‘to float,’ while krathong refers to the lotus-shaped receptacle which can float on the water. Originally, the krathong was made of banana leaves or the layers of the trunk of a banana tree or a spider lily plant. A krathong contains food, betel nuts, flowers, joss sticks, candle and coins. Modern krathongs are more often made of bread or styrofoam. A bread krathong will disintegrate in a few a days and be eaten by fish and other animals. The traditional banana stalk krathongs are also biodegradable, but styrofoam krathongs are frowned on, since they are polluting and may take years to disappear. Regardless of the composition, a krathong will be decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, flowers, candles and incense sticks. A low value coin is sometimes included as an offering to the river spirits. During the night of the full moon, Thais will float their krathong on a river, canal or a pond lake. The festival is believed to originate in an ancient practice of paying respect to the spirit of the waters. Today it is simply a time to have fun.

Since this is my inaugural Loy Krathong boat and I haven’t been to Thailand in a LOOOOONG time, I did what any red-blooded internet user would do for tips on how to make one: I did a Google image search. Isn’t Loy Krathong gorgeous?

There’s no way I’m going to attempt that. First of all, this ain’t the tropics. I don’t have a banana tree in my backyard. Flowers are expensive. So I did what any red-blooded consumer would do: I found the cheapest biodegradable boat material that I could find in 10 minutes and wouldn’t mind sinking in the cold river. What did I find?

Ice cream cone cups. After all, they hold ice cream, right? Ice cream is a liquid, sort of, eventually.

I hope the fish don't mind the lack of ice cream

So what are those two tall things sticking up that aren’t incense sticks? Why, ear candles, of course. Not because I wanted the weirdest boat in the flotilla, but because I found beeswax candles WAY too expensive. This alternative was cheap yet aesthetically pleasing. I am proud to say my little barge exceeded all expectations for buoyancy and made it all the way down the Humber River to the waterfall where it perished along with the other boats that made it that far (maybe half?).

Marin was quite prepared this year, wielding a blowtorch for speedy lighting and a pair of rubber boots to get the boats offshore and into the river’s guiding current.

lighters just won't do for Loy Krathong

the flotilla

I can’t think of a better way to spend a Saturday in November than to hang out with friends, eat tasty Thai food, and construct edible and biodegradable boats to float down the nearest river, sending away the bad karma and making wishes for the year to come.

The photos are best viewed as a full-screen slideshow, or thumbnails, or watch the smaller autoplay slideshow below.

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Antony at Brookfield Place (#photographerfail)

On Friday I happened to read a post in the Toronto Couchsurfing forum from a name that rang a bell — a really loud bell. So I wrote the poster the following message:

Hi Antony,

I saw your message posted in the Toronto CS group, and recognized your name — I’m pretty sure I stayed with you in Amsterdam in late April 2003. It wasn’t through CS, it was through another website that doesn’t exist anymore. I was living in Vancouver at the time, and I was travelling with a boyfriend from Calgary named Tyrone.

Does any of that ring a bell?

Gail

Looks like my memory hasn’t failed me yet: it WAS Antony, and he suggested we meet before his return to Amsterdam. Fast forward to Tuesday night, my first opportunity to meet up with him after returning from Chicago. I introduced him to Brookfield Place and Marché. (Unfortunately, I didn’t zoom in on my phone-camera shot to see that his eyes were closed in the picture — sorry about that!)

What a catchup… I think we were there for four hours before I had to head home. If you know what my life’s been like since 2003, you would understand why I asked Antony to tell me his side first instead of launching into my condensed version of life events since that year — we’d be at Brookfield Place all night and I’d never get to hear his story.

Antony also remembered Tyrone, and I gave him the sad news that Tyrone had died in 2007. I explained what I knew about the motorcycle accident in Montana that claimed him, that I’d spoken to Tyrone’s parents as soon as I found out in 2009, and it was the segue into discussions about the future and how we live our lives differently today compared with when we last met.

I still find it quite mind-boggling to imagine that it’s been only eight years and not longer, because it sure feels like longer. Life for Antony is more similar to 2003 than mine is — I’ve moved a bunch of times cross-border between several cities while he remains in Amsterdam — but we’ve both had similar shifts in thinking and approach to travel and life in general over time. It will be interesting to meet up again in the nearer future (less than eight years, anyway) and see where life has taken us by then.

me at Marché

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faux-beef skewers

It was a double-header yesterday: a last-minute barbecue at Marin’s, and shooting a bachelorette party. My plan was to return to the barbecue after shooting the bride-to-be doing her solo song at karaoke, but sadly, I didn’t make it back to Marin’s. But more on that in the bachelorette post…

Have I ever turned down a barbecue invitation? I don’t think so! The summer’s winding down, and I’ve only been to one barbecue all summer! That had to change.

Believe it or not, the skewers in that top photo are not beef! In a soy-versus-beef lineup, I would never have guessed.

the most colourful food is the best for you

kebab prep

It was threatening to train, but we got in the pool, anyway.

cooling off

foot spa

shish kebabs? how about fish kebabs

sorry, no fish for you

sad to be fish-denied

illustrious hosts

Now, if you’ll excuse me, all those food pictures are making me very, very hungry!

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Helma in hiding

I spent time at Helma’s place, aka “The Bunker”, this weekend. I call her house “The Bunker” because it’s the one place I’d run to in the event of a natural disaster. Maybe it’s characteristic of people who’ve lived through a world war to have a tool for everything, a pantry stocked with enough food to feed an army, and a fridge and freezer at capacity. Helma has a table saw, for goodness sake — she just rebuilt a part of her fence.

Oh, and she has hedge cutters, of course:

Don't mess with The Helma!

Look at those hedges, it’s as if she used a ruler.

Helma's perfect hedges

Helma in hiding

begrudging a smile for the camera

happy the shoot's over

Helma’s a troublemaker: she stirred up the wasp nest in the hedge with her hedge cutter. Now she’s running away!

Title reference is from this movie (which I’ve seen but I can’t remember why! I must’ve been with some kids?):

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