Wine Is Confusing

My Mom sent a clipping from Vintages (a wine-marketing magazine from the LBCO) about Washington and British Columbia wines.

Columbia Crest 'Grand Estates' Merlot 2002...The nose is a bit shy at first before unveiling notes of Oreo cookie, black cherries, oak spice and cedar. Brace your lips, though, for an explosion of sweet, dark and rich fruit - black cherries, plums, and marionberries - joined by tannins with some grip. Then there's the finish, as remarkable and smooth and complex as you will find with cherries, cinnamon, blueberries, and cococa.

What on Earth does that mean? I thought listening to golf commentary was intense, but reading that is a whole other magnitude of psychedelic.

Vacation

I'm back from my (second) great European adventure. I started with a visit to my cousin Michael and his girlfriend Katie in London then travelled around Zealand/Øresund in Denmark and Sweden (i.e. Copenhagen). Afterward I went on the Berlin to Budapest Contiki tour (that also included intermediate stops in Prague and Vienna).

It was a lot of travelling (14 towns and cities in 8 countries, 6 airports, 6 train stations, 2 boats, well over 100 km of walking, and far too many buses, subways, and taxis to count), but I had a great time and so many unforgettable experiences - an English picnic in Hampstead Heath, sailing a Viking ship across a fjord, visiting the Tivoli amusement park, World Cup parties in Berlin, enjoying plum wine with friends in an open-air cafe on Prague's Old Town Square, cruising down the Vltava River, riding the famous Prater ferris wheel, and relaxing in the Gellért Thermal Baths.

I'm always willing to try new food and drinks, especially while travelling - salmon carpaccio (oops, I thought it was going to be cooked!) smoked eel smørrebrød (interesting...and I learned that the point and pick method of choosing food can yield some unexpected choices!), a giant pork knuckle with a 1 litre beer mug in Berlin (this meal can only be described as 'massive'), Sacher Torte chocolate cake at the Sacher Hotel in Vienna (very yummy), and a shot of absinthe ("Prost" to the 'green fairy'). And of course, I would be remiss if I did not have a 'Danish' pastry (weinerbrød) in Denmark!

I visited a lot of churches including Vor Frue Kirke with Thorvaldsen's beautiful marble statues of Jesus and the twelve Apostles, the ornate Berliner Dom, the singular Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächniskirche (the shattered bell tower is all the survived World War II), the beautifully rebuilt Dresden Frauenkirche, and St. Vitus in Prague Castle.

Of course, I also stopped at museums (e.g. HMS Belfast on the Thames, the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, and the famous Pergamon in Berlin), as well as palaces and castles (e.g. Kronborg Slot, Christiansborg, Prague Castle, the giant Schönbrunn (summer) and Hofburg (winter) palaces in Vienna).

The sights - Charles Bridge, the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag, Fernsehturm TV tower, etc. - and history - a walking tour through Berlin (e.g. Checkpoint Charlie, Bebelplatz book burning commemoration, etc.) as well as the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and the Berlin Wall, etc. - were also numerous.

With all that, somehow I also made it to three concerts! - The Red Hot Chili Peppers in Prague (awesome), a classical music concert in Vienna, Pink in Heroes' Square in Budapest.

Lastly, I should mention all the wonderful people I met - the friendly and polite Danes as well as all the great people and new friends from the tour.

I'll post pictures (with stories) once I have time to sort through all the photographs that I took.

Banana Cake

Ice Cream

Last week when I was on-call I had a craving for ice cream, but I didn't have any in my freezer. When I was at the grocery store yesterday I found a flavour called Moose Tracks. It's vanilla with chocolate streaks as well as chunks of chocolate too. Watching Grey's Anatomy and eating ice cream is a good way to end the week.

Thursday

I'm in good mood. It's almost the weekend, men's hockey has started at the Olympics (Canada beat Italy 7-2 yesterday and played Germany earlier today - I'm currently waiting for CBC to re-broadcast that game), I bought a new pair of New Balance running shoes that are very nice. I'm also planning on trying to cook risotto for dinner tomorrow night. (I've never tried making it before).

Last night I watched the last disc from season one of Lost. I can't believe how good a TV show it is. It's one of the best things since sliced bread. The season finale was even more crazy-mad than usual. (e.g. Pouring gun power in a wound and setting it on fire to suture it. Damn). I can't wait for season two to come out on DVD.

M & M's

Six photos of M & M's in a bowl.

Crazy Question

Sometimes living in a big city is an adventure. I was at the grocery store, minding my own business while selecting some peaches [Yay! Peaches are in finally season. :-)] when a guys walks over and asks How do you spelling 'kidding', as in 'just kidding'...I look up and realized he is busy text messaging on his phone. (But, I'm not sure if that reduces the strangeness of the brief conversation though).

Time Flies

I can't believe reading week(end) is over already. :-( I did too much homework to relax enough and too much slacking to get enough homework done.

Probably the most interesting thing I did was going Friday night with a bunch of my friends to an African-cuisine restaurant downtown. I don't think any of us were impressed. The service was really slow. I had a beef dish with beef chunks, sauce, and according to the menu, there were a few vegetables in there too, but there were so few, they were hard to find. It wasn't warm enough either. (Cold food isn't usually good food). The salad consisted exclusively of lettuce and tomatos - nothing else. And I don't like tomatos. The bread was interesting. The plates were pizza dishes and the bread covered the entire plate. It was kind of like a pancake, but cold and rubbery. For the portion-size and the quality of service, the prices were too high too. To be nice though, it was better than the last time we went to Jack Astors...

Other than that I've been working on Distributed Computing a lot. Aside from the midterm on Wednesday, there is a big programming assignment, where we have to implement a RPC middleware with a binder process and a bunch of other bells and whistles. It's not too terrible, except I couldn't find a partner, so I'm doing it all myself. (Hopefully the TAs will be cool with that). I figure I'm about 40% done. Most of the socket stuff is out of the way (I forgot how crazy some of socket stuff can be!). I have the server talking to the binder and vice versa, but I need to write the part where what they say is meaningful. (I think I'm into the outside-in programming methodology - kind of a blend of top-down and bottom-up!). For the client, I can rip-off (i.e. reuse) most of what I've already written as (I think) I've made it all nice and generic.