Happy Travels

How much is 3 hours in Venice worth?!

2011-07-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

Our flight to Frankfurt left Venice airport at 8 pm so I had the brilliant idea of dropping off our rental car early in the day, checking in our luggage, storing our hand luggage and taking the vaporetto into Venice for lunch and a little wandering around. We had spent 5 days in Venice on our last trip so didn't really feel the need to do much sightseeing.

The first indication of trouble was when Lufthansa refused to check us in earlier than 3 hours before our flight. So we schlepped all our bags down to the luggage storage facility and left them there (after much security screening and id-checking). Then we headed off to buy vaporetto tickets - well it turns out that the vaporetto to San Marco takes an hour and ten minutes. Which would have given us maybe an hour in Venice before we had to head back for our flight.

So we took a water taxi for €100 direct to San Marco - which the girls just loved. We cruised by the Danieli, where we had waterfront rooms last time, and glided into San Marco in about 30 minutes. By this time it was past 2:30 pm and we went in search of lunch, only to be turned away by a few restaurants. We finally ended up at the cafe of the Bauer Palazzo hotel, overlooking the Grand Canal. We had a long and pleasant lunch watching the gondolas and boats go by.

After lunch, we wandered through San Marco, which seemed to be less beautiful than in the past. Perhaps I just like it better in the mornings and evenings. Or perhaps the huge section of walled off construction had something to do with it.

A little more shopping, some gelato and a stroll over the Rialto Bridge. Then we boarded a water taxi many hundreds of euros poorer, and headed back to the airport in good time for our flight to Frankfurt, then on to Bangkok.

Visiting Verona

2011-07-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

On our last full day in the Veneto, we headed off to see Verona in the daylight. It's really a lovely city and although parts were very crowded (by Juliet's house, mostly), most of the city was not very heavily touristed.

The ruling family in Verona were the Scaligieri (similar to the Medicis in Florence) and the Scaligieri Bridge leading up to the old castle was really lovely. Looking down at the Adige river (the same one that runs by our Villa) from the bridge very much reminded me of Florence as well.

We then went to see Juliet's house and balcony - a tourist attraction that was set up in the 1930s. The house had been an inn belonging to the Capuleti family who were famously feuding with the Montecchia family (and were the inspiration for Shakespeare and many other authors). So the balcony was added in the 1930s to add to the mystique and the whole thing was renamed Juliet's House and added to the standard tourist destination list. The odd little tradition is to rub the right breast of the statue of Juliet in the courtyard! We stood in line after a passel of Asian tourists, all happily snapping away with their cameras.

We had lunch in Piazza dei Signori at Antico Caffe Dante, some lovely seafood risotto and fettuccini - and watched an Italian commercial being filmed by Dante's rather creepy statue. We also had a lovely dessert of chocolate gnocchi - very yummy.

Bravissima Aida!

2011-07-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

Dave Morris, in his infinite wisdom, bought us Aida tickets many, many months ago. Which is why we packed the adults up into two cars and headed into Verona, sans children, one evening.

We did not recognize any of the famous Italians in the photo :(

We started off with a nice dinner at Trattoria al Pompiere, a Chowhound recommendation that managed to fit the 10 of us into it's smallish space with only a day's notice. We had yet another excellent Italian meal, with yet another fabulous salumi platter, and the local specialty, risotto alla amarone (the local robust red wine).

Prosciutto, Lardo, Mortadella, Sopressatta...

Then we strolled over to the 2,000 year old Roman amphitheater known as the Arena, armed with little padded cushioned seats, English libretto and a fan. The capacity was 25,000 for the audience, but we were a lot less than that - probably only about 75-80% full. There was a lot of choice - La Traviata had been playing the prior evening, Barber of Seville was the next night.

Seeing Aida there was simply magnificent, under the almost full moon. The cast of hundreds displayed phenomenal pomp and circumstance in the triumphal march in Act II, with dancing girls, solders and 4 very well-behaved live horses on stage. Radames was suitably noble, Aida suitably wistful and Amneris suitably dramatic and scorned.

Since the opera started at 9:15 pm, it ran quite late. I fortified myself with a cornetto ice cream for the roving vendors who appeared magically during the breaks between acts.

A night to remember!

Agriturismo

2011-07-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

I guess this is a big thing while holidaying in Italy - agriturismo are farms who are allowed to function either as B&Bs or to open up to serve food to the public Thurs-Sundays. They are very popular with families since the associated activities usually include a farm tour and lots of outside play areas for the kiddies.

We went to one close by for dinner on Sunday night, to Tre Rondini (or the three swallows). The kids enjoyed the trampolines, playground and this highly coveted bike thingy (I really thought someone was going to get hurt!).

The adults enjoyed some fabulous risotto and nice salumi platters. It made for a very relaxing and laid back dinner, with lots of other Italian families. Not a big thing for the foreign tourists apparently...

Busy in Bologna

2011-07-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

Bologna is an old university town. I read that of the major medieval universities, Oxford was renowned for science, Paris was known for theology, and Bologna was known for law. Nowadays, it's also known for food as the biggest town in Emilia-Romana.

Cheese display at Eataly

We headed into Bologna on a 90 degree day and ended up at Eataly, the food emporium, for lunch. Not the most atmospheric, but their air-conditioning was excellent! We had the local specialities - tagliatelle alla bolognese for Narisa (it's her favorite pasta and I told her she really needed to have it when it was invented, in Bologna!), tortellini in Brodo (small tortellini served in soup), some local fish and a meat patty that was prepared to Slow Food standards.

This part of Italy is the cradle of the Slow Food movement - the precursor to the locavore movement in California. More on that at a later restaurant...

The Trabosh, Morris and McAdams kids

Bologna was surprisingly untouristy. We wandered around the mercato di mezzo in Bologna and into the old San Petronio cathedral, which was enormous. The interesting thing about Bologna is that almost everything was built in red brick but not faced in marble like other Italian cities. So the Bolognese are reputed to be very straight forward without a lot of pretense - plus a hotbed of leftist politics.

Gelato bars - the blood orange was yummy

After a nice wander, a little shopping and the requisite gelato, we called it a day.

Lake Garda and Sirmione

2011-07-14T02:26:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, we drove up to Lake Garda, the easternmost of the northern Italian lakes (Lake Como is the westernmost and probably the most famous of the lakes - where George Clooney has a house ;).

It was a beautiful, albeit very hot day. We had lunch at a small restaurant lakeside with a dock and boat mooring - where Narisa stuck her feet into the water (it was not as cold as we thought it would be).

Then we walked and walked to the small town of Sirmione that was lovely but extremely crowded. It was a small medieval town, so cars had to park outside the walls of the old town. Inside, there were narrow cobblestone streets with charming shops. Check out the most magnificent bougainvillea in the photo below.

And we ended up at the ruins at the tip of the little peninsula with lovely views.

Villa Bartolomea!

2011-07-14T02:05:00.000-07:00

My apologies for being so behind in my posts, but it's been awfully busy and blogging does have a lower priority than sightseeing, shopping, eating, gelato and doing work emails!

We arrived on Saturday evening to Villa Mira, our 13 bedroom villa in the small town of Villa Bartolomea, located about 30 miles southeast of Verona. It's a huge and rambling villa from the late 1800s belonging to a prominent Roman family who rent out part of the property - there are some parts that are just sealed off (although we did break in to explore the old chapel ;) and parts that just seem unused (the old stables). There is an onsite caretaker, which is really useful when things break down - she gave us an hour's worth of instructions about the house. 130 year old houses have a lot of idiosyncrasies...

We have five families staying here this week - 10 adults + 11 teens and kids ranging from 5 to 18. Every room in the house is fully occupied! The ground floor has a large living room, music room, billiard room, conservatory room, dining room and enormous kitchen with a large marble topped table where we spend a lot of time.

Our bedroom are beautiful, look at our ceilings in the photo below.

The downside to the house is that not all the rooms have screens, and when unscreened windows are left open, we are often swarmed by mosquitos and wasps.

We are located right next to the Adige river which runs from Lake Garda in the north, down to meet the Po, running through Verona before it gets down by us. There is a great bike path that runs along the river for miles - I went for a bike ride while our teenagers went for a run the other morning.

Last Day in Rome

2011-07-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

I think we might have had our favorite meal in Rome for lunch on our last day. We started off the day by going to the Capuchin Church off Piazza Barberini, also known as the Church of Bones. The kids found this a little creepy but the thousands of bones were used in a very decorative manner in their crypt (see above photo). I highly recommend this and it's a really quick stop!

Then we wandered down the hill towards the Roman Forum and into Enoteca della Provincia di Roma for lunch. We sat at a table next to floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Trajan's Column and the Forum. The restaurant featured local wines and all local products from the Lazio province around Rome.

We ordered the antipasti plate of salumi and local cheeses, which was excellent. Then two different salads and two sandwiches, including a delicious porchetta sandwich that I enjoyed very much.

After the rejuvenating lunch, we wandered off into the Imperial Forum museum and were sad to learn that Trajan's Market was closed for renovations so we could wander around inside what I described to the girls as the world's first mall. We enjoyed looking it from afar though, then called it a day and headed back to our apartment for our last evening in Rome.

The Great Gelato Round-Up

2011-07-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

We like gelato - a lot. What's not to like?! Technically, gelato is denser and richer than ice-cream since it has a lot less air churned into it (~20% air vs ~60% air in ice-cream) and a softer texture.

Our first stop in Rome was Gelateria del Teatro, a newish hand-made place down an ivy-covered alleyway a few blocks from Piazza Navona. Following our usual family pattern, Narisa had white peach and strawberry, Amara had stratiaccella and chocolate, Sean had puro (a super dark chocolate) and tartufo and I had lavender flowers/white peach and sparkling strawberry. Plus we shared a surprisingly rich granita of mint and lime, that tasted of fresh mint leaves. It was a great first stop - traditional flavors plus a few nouveau experiments that were lovely. And rich, rich, rich! We made multiple stops back here during the rest of the trip.

The next stop of note was Gelateria Corona. I had lemon with basil and wild strawberry, Amara had chocolate and stracciatella. The fruit flavors were excellent and the chocolate was also pronounced to be two thumbs up.

The third stop on the list was a little disappointing - Alberto Pica had been written up in multiple guides. But it was just so-so. I had chocolate and rice, which was a slightly odd combo - I also asked for pear, but I guess he did not hear me. Amara really liked hers - hazelnut and chocolate which if she spooned carefully, combined into an excellent nutella-like concoction.

The next stop was San Crispino - chocolate meringue and Valrhona chocolate for me, peach and lemon for Sean, stracciatella and peach for Narisa and Valrhona chocolate and nocciola for Amara. The shop was interesting - the gelato was kept in steel bins with lids so you couldn't see the actual gelato until you ordered it. And the service was almost surly. This was the gelateria featured in Eat, Pray, Love and most reports say it's gone downhill due to its enormous popularity, and the original proprietors are now too busy expanding their empire to maintain their previous quality levels. I have to say the peach was amazing - I'd go back just for that one single flavor.

Frigidarium was another local gelato place, not as high profile as the others, but recommended nonetheless - plus an ideal location just 3 mins away from our apartment. They had some excellent cream flavors including a vanilla caramel specialty and another vanilla swirled with nutella. Plus they gave very generous servings! And you could get whipped cream or a chocolate dip at no additional charge. We went back there a few more times and concluded this was the best quality/value combo, although their flavor selection was not huge.

Venchi was a beautiful place we happened on - not written up anywhere but it seemed to have a big focus on chocolate flavors (and also sold other chocolate items). It was such a pretty store plus interestingly enough, sold low cal gelato. Which was quite delicious - plus we also tried their gianduja and chocolate flavors. A nice find. They had just run out of Azteca Chocolate though, I was sad.

We also stopped at Il Gelato one evening - almost too many flavors to choose from - 20 different kinds of chocolate alone. Venezuelan, Madagascar, Columbian - you could get gelato made from sourced cocoa, and then labelled with % intensity! It was a little complicated to choose and I was still rather stuffed from dinner. It would have merited a return trip but alas, we were not in that part of town again.

Another place that came highly recommended was Giolitti, near the Pantheon. Supposedly the successor to Il Crispino for best gelato in Rome, I found the service to again be surly, with almost a factory element with the huge lines of people. The gelato was just ok. By Day 5 here, I was getting pretty picky about the whole gelato experience! Really nice flavors, but the hassle factor was too high to be overcome.

We also tried the special tartufo flavor and fancy sundaes at Tre Scalini, a pretty cafe right on Piazza Navona with a view of Bernini's Four Rivers Fountain. With sundaes running at €13, it's a pretty pricey stop, but you are paying for the atmosphere of being right on the square.

And finally, Fiordiluna in Trastervere - we had stopped by earlier in the week and it was closed, so a return trip was in order. Again, a nice place, but nothing completely memorable.

So, that's it for our Rome gelato experience. Even walking 30,000 steps a day, I am pretty sure I have gained a few lbs. Thankfully, there is not a scale in sight so I won't worry about it!

The Pantheon and Shopping on Via Condotti

2011-07-10T02:43:00.000-07:00

Our last two days in Rome were "lazy days" as my family likes to call them - that means that I don't have anything in particular booked and allow them all to sleep in and laze about in the morning.

So around noon, we finally headed out to the Pantheon - which we had seen multiple times at night but finally got to visit during the day. The oculus, as the 9 m circle in the roof is called, was very cool and sent an enormous shaft of light into the dark interior.

At lunch at Maccheroni, I had their special pasta with black truffle. Not the best choice on my part since it was 90+ degrees out and the heavy pasta lunch made me a little ill.

But then I rallied for the afternoon shopping expedition. Trying to avoid the nightmarishly crowded area of the Spanish Steps, we wandered down Via Condotti - in and out of all the lovely designer boutiques. I ended up at Louis Vuitton where I unwisely purchased a beautiful limited edition purse. The transaction took about an hour due to complicated export paperwork that needed to be filled out for the purse, because it was partially made of exotic material (python in this case). But I was a good enough customer to be offered champagne while I waited (Moet, I was told) and they were shocked when I asked for cold water instead!

Dario Cecchini, the Tuscan Butcher

2011-07-10T02:24:00.000-07:00

We left Rome in the late morning and headed up north on the A1 autostrada, to Panzano in Chianti - to Dario Cecchini's famous butcher shop. In case you missed it, Dario is the opera-singing, Dante-quoting butcher immortalized in Bill Buford's book Heat, and also in a great little episode of "No Reservations" with Anthony Bourdain.

It took a little over 3 hours to get there from Rome, and we entered the Dario+ restaurant for lunch. The menu consisted of two items - either a fancy burger patty or a selection of meats. The selection was interesting with Chianti sushi (steak tartare), porchetta (my favorite!), meatloaf (just ok) and Chianti tuna (essentially a shredded pork). Sean enjoyed Dario's special beer (pictured alongside Dario's special olive oil).

We went downstairs to the butcher shop and met Dario, who seemed very jovial (and not singing or quoting Dante that particular day). We bought his special beer, plus a few jars of the special fennel pollen that all the foodies are raving about. Not sure what I'm doing to do with the latter as yet, but apparently, it makes everything taste better.

Galleria Borghese

2011-07-07T01:05:00.000-07:00

The Galleria Borghese is located in the middle of a large park called the Villa Borghese in northern Rome. It's a small museum, so pre-booking tickets is mandatory to visit it. I had made our reservations a couple of weeks before, in a last burst of trip planning activity.

We took a little electric bus up to the museum, thanks to Ron in Rome, who has a beautiful blog with a focus on the transportation system. And a great list of gelato places to visit, but that's for another post...

The museum itself was in a beautiful building in a corner of the park. We had tickets for a timed entry from 3-5 pm. That's it. You entered at 3 pm and they herded the stragglers out right at 4:55 pm, so the next group of people (with the 5-7 pm tickets) could enter. Oh and you had to store all your bags, including cameras, water, cell phones etc.

We were one of the last groups to leave, we spent every single minute in the museum and could easily have stayed longer. It's especially known for a few key Bernini sculptures and some lovely Caravaggio paintings. The girls really enjoyed it - with the Bernini's Apollo and Daphne sculpture being their favorite. The audio guides made the art come alive with backstories and the calling out of particular details. It turns out that Cardinal Scipione Borghese was not a very nice man - when he saw a painting that he especially liked, he would threaten the owner or artist with prison, unless the painting was turned over to him. He did this a number of times!

I loved the trompe l'oeil ceilings in every room with paintings and backdrops linked to the themes of each room. Alas, I couldn't capture this on film since I was camera-less, while the gift shop items did not focus on the ceilings.

After we were herded out of the museum, we rented a four person bike and spent a pleasant hour exploring the park grounds.

Italian Memories...

2011-07-06T23:04:00.000-07:00

I was last in Rome in 1987 on a 3 week trip around Italy with my family - we were in Rome, Florence, San Marino and Venice. Or at least those are the places I remember. I had been at Oxford for the year, and flew back to Bangkok to meet up with my family - and promptly turned around and got back on a plane for Rome.

My father borrowed a diesel Mercedes from a work colleague, and I think it was in Florence that we ended up on a street too narrow to pass, and he had to back up a long way to get us out of there!

I remember Venice clearly, since we have a family photo on a gondola where I had especially tragic 80s permed hair. I also remember it well because I took my younger sister out to ride the vaporetto (boat-bus) one evening and it turned out to be a super long ride since I didn't realize it was going all around the Grand Canal. My parents, who don't usually do this kind of thing, really freaked out and my dad went hunting for us. Boy did I get in trouble. It was memorable because I very rarely got in trouble ;)

I've been to Italy multiple times since so why am I reminiscing? Well, this is the first time I've been back in Rome since 1987. I remember going down the Via Veneto and thinking how fancy it was. I remember the Roman Forum and the enormous columns rising into the sky, no longer supporting anything. I remember taking the bus and having my butt pinched (no, I didn't say anything - I was barely 19 and confused about what to do). I remember throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain while my dad sang the goofy song.

Most of all, I remember a boisterous, fun family vacation - I hope my kids will have the same happy memories from all the places we have taken them.

Il Passetto de Borgo

2011-07-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

So those Dan Brown fans out there will be familiar with Il Passetto de Borgo - the 800 meter long secret passage that links the Vatican to the old Papal fort of Castel Sant' Angelo. I really wanted to go down this passage, so arranged our visit to correspond with the special opening times for this tour, as listed on the Rome tourist bureau web site. It's only open 2+ months a year, during the peak summer tourist season.

Alas, when we arrived, I learned that particular website was not to be trusted - for opening times at least. We went in anyway, and enjoyed wandering around the old fort that began life at Hadrian's Mausoleum in 130AD. It was an especially interesting building since it combined some traditional castle elements, but also had some papal apartments on the luxurious side situated in the middle.

The views of St. Peter's were really lovely and their little bar/cafe was a great place to rest for a while.

Now, do we pay handsomely again and come back another evening for Il Passetto only? Still thinking about it...

4 Coins in a Fountain

2011-07-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

We went to a spaghetteria for dinner last night, Spaghetti dell' Archetto. What is a spaghetteria, you might ask? Well it's a restaurant that specializes in spaghetti, offering 137 different sauces (Narisa counted!) - which was almost paralyzing in terms of choice.

After some nice appetizers of bruschetta and pizza bianco, our very large portions of spaghetti came. Almost American-sized portions! Amara had a gorgonzola sauce, Narisa had a boring but excellent bolognese, I had Pasticciati (see photo above for description, bottom right) while Sean had something else which didn't turn out to be as spicy as he thought it would be. All in all, an excellent (if extremely carb-heavy) meal.

After dinner, we strolled up to the Trevi Fountain where each of us threw in a coin over our left shoulder. As you should know, that ensures that we will all return to Rome one day. The fountain was especially beautiful at night, all lit up.

Then on to San Crispino, the gelateria featured in Eat, Pray, Love. But you'll have to wait for my mega-gelato post to hear more about that...

Vatican City and the Sistine Chapel

2011-07-06T00:29:00.000-07:00

We awoke to a very cloudy day that soon turned into a heavy thunderstorm. So we used that excuse for a late start and lounged around for a few hours in the morning!

After a short stroll to St. Peter's Square, we looked around for a while, marveling at the long lines to get into the basilica. Then we went around the corner to the Vatican Museums, where we had a reserved ticket for a guided tour. Again, we marveled at the huge long lines to get into the Museum - why do people not plan better?! There are now about a billion resources that will tell you to prebook your tickets or come right at opening time - they will give you step-by-step instructions on how to avoid the long lines. And yet, all these people were prepared to wait well over an hour - I just don't get it...

On the other hand, our guide seemed to be a thwarted Italian actress and the 3 hour tour of the Vatican Museums was hurried in spots where we would linger, and lingered excessively in spots that seemed to be rather mundane. Suffice to say that the Raphael Rooms and the Sistine Chapel were lovely and well worth it. I was a little worried that we would be herded through the latter at a brisk pace (which would not have been surprising, considering how crowded the whole museum was). But we weren't at all - we found some seating on the side and gazed up at the ceiling for a long time.

The payoff for the tour was the ability to take the right side exit from the Sistine Chapel (supposedly just reserved for group tours although no one seemed to be checking due to the sheer volume of people going through) directly into St. Peter's, bypassing the other security line and avoiding the circuitous walk around the Museums to get back to St. Peter's. We took full advantage of this (once again, this is all laid out in vast detail on any number of websites).

Once in St. Peter's, we immediately got in a short line to head up to the dome - €5 per person if you walk all the way up, €7 per person if you take the elevator up half way. We opted for the latter and found ourselves on the walkway inside the Basilica, and then climbed more stairs to get to the exterior terrace on top. Lovely views and a very cool experience.

The cathedral itself was magnificent and immense. Unfortunately, the nave was blocked off for mass, so we didn't quite get to wander everywhere we wanted to.

We ended our visit with a photo of Narisa standing on the border of two countries:

Dinner in Trastevere

2011-07-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

Sunset view of St. Peter's from the Ponte Sisto crossing the Tiber

We wandered out for dinner around 8:30 pm and headed over the Ponte Sisto to the Trastevere area of town. Younger, hipper and waay livelier, it was a fun area for dinner.

We headed to a craft beer house known for their pizza - thereby ensuring Sean's happiness as well as the kids. Bir & Fud, besides having a silly name, was a nice space on a small windy street. We consumed multiple pizzas and many small little fried appetizers. Sean says it's the first decent beer he's had in Italy!

Ancient Rome in a Day

2011-07-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

We had a late morning breakfast procured at Forno Campo Dei Fiori, which one guide termed "the best bakery in Rome", amidst all the market stalls in that square. I especially liked the squash blossoms that everyone was selling.

Squash Blossoms at Campo dei Fiori market

Then we set out for a long day of touring.

We walked across town to the Capitoline Hill and through the Piazza del Campidoglio, a pretty square designed by Michelangelo in the 16th century. Then we headed over to the Colosseum. Now, the regular ticket line there is really rather long. But I had made reservations for the special basement or subterranean tour, and so we were able to head right up to the front of the line.

The subterranean tour was pretty cool - I like tours that take me behind locked gates and cordoned off areas! We descended into the basement where the gladiators entered and the slaves would keep track of all the wild animals to send up to the main stage level. Then we wandered up two flights of stairs to the third level which was also not open to the general public. Some really nice views from up there.

Then we headed towards San Clemente church, looking for a well-recommended Sicilian gelato place - alas, they were closed on Mondays. We enjoyed San Clemente though - it's a medieval church with beautiful mosaics, but the really cool thing is that you can descend under the church, and see the 5th century church that it was built on top of. Then if that's not enough, you can go down another level and see the 1st century pagan church that was the first religious building in that location. So it's been a house of worship for over 2,000 years.

After a quick stop at a sub-standard gelato place, we headed over to the Roman Forum, the heart of the Roman Empire back in the day. It reminded us of the main ancient road surrounded by ruins at Petra. The House of the Vestal Virgins was a favorite.

Narisa with her favorite Vestal Virgin

Exhausted, we headed back to the apartment for a rest. Of course, we happened to stop for gelato on the way...

When in Rome...

2011-07-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

Castel Sant' Angelo

We are staying in an apartment behind the Piazza Navona for 6 nights, located on a narrow pedestrian-only street called Via del Governo Vecchio. Here's the link to the apartment. I must stay it photographs much more spacious than it is in real life, although there is really nothing specific I can complain about! The location is superb and the air conditioning a welcome respite from the summer heat of Rome. We are in fact within spitting distance of no less than 4 different gelato shops - something we intend to exploit fully in the next few days.

After a quick stop at the apartment, we were off in search of food. We had some decent pizza at a cafe near the Piazza, followed by the first gelato stop of the trip. Must devote a whole post to the quest for gelato later...

Bernini's Four Rivers Fountain at Piazza Navona

We strolled around all the little artist stalls and started out our shopping adventures by buying a watercolor of Rome for each girl. Then we found a small supermarket and I did some grocery shopping - one of the tasks I enjoy most about our travels! This was a Carrefour Express but had all the essentials we needed. My interesting fact of the day is that bread is sold by weight - so they have huge country loaves and you tell them you want about so much, the lady slices off the appropriate hunk and weighs it to assess your price. Same thing with breadsticks, boules and rolls. It will be interesting to see if this is just a Rome thing - since I don't remember weighing bread when we were last in Tuscany.

8 pm and the kids are fading fast, we kept them up for as long as we could - here's hoping they sleep all the way through the night!

Our Trip Summary

2011-06-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

So we are T -4 in terms of departure on our big trip. Sadly, our itinerary is both expensive and complicated and I could not find mileage tickets despite spending a few hours on the phone with United.

Sat July 2: we're on United, SFO-FRA, then FRA to Rome, arriving on Sunday.
6 nights in Rome at a lovely apartment next to Piazza Navona

Sat July 9: pick up car in Rome and drive up to the Veneto
7 nights in the Veneto countryside, about 45 mins outside of Verona

Sat July 16: flying Lufthansa from Venice to FRA, then FRA to Bangkok, arriving on Sunday.
We're in our usual apartment building in Bangkok, the Emporium Suites

Sat July 27: the family stays in Bangkok, while I return to SFO for 3 days for a key meeting.

Tues Aug 2: I head down to Singapore for 2 days, I think my dad will come with me for fun.

Sat Aug 6: flying Lufthansa from Bangkok to FRA, then FRA to SFO - this is the painful part, as it would have cost an extra $2,000 per person to return via Tokyo. The only upside is that we get to fly the new Airbus A380 from FRA back to SFO. This is the huge double decker plane that required new airport gates to be built - can't wait to try it out.

And finally, back home on August 6!

How many electronics does one family need?!

2011-06-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

This is my partial inventory of what we are bringing on our upcoming trip:

1. My work PC laptop
2. Sean's MacBook
3. My MacBook Air (appropriated and under the care of Amara for the summer)
4. 1 iPad1, 1 iPad2
5. 2 iPhones, 1 blackberry, 2 iPod Touches, 1 nano
6. AppleTV
7. Apple AirPort

I'm hoping that's it. We'll need a small suitcase just for electronics + the associated chargers and cables!

Prepping For A Big Trip

2011-06-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

Long time no blog! My fundamental problem is that I am working 60-70 hours a week on a regular basis with work dinners 1-2 nights a week, and I can barely keep my life together. Blogging has fallen to the bottom of the list of priorities, most unfortunately.

But we are now a week away from departing the US for 5 weeks, and I now need to focus on all the last minute details for the trip. Here's my to-do list for the next 7 days:

- check to see if I really do need an International Driver's Permit to drive in Italy. Hertz says I don't need it for the rental but the carbinieri may not be so agreeable if something untoward happens.

- if said IDP is needed, figure out when to go to AAA to get one.

- call Lufthansa to make sure seat assignments haven’t been screwed up.

- go through all the guidebooks I've purchased over the past 6 months and figure out which ones are actually worth bringing.

- figure out to pack for Rome, Verona, Bangkok, work meetings, potential beach holiday within a reasonable amount of luggage. The clothes are challenging enough, but it's the shoes that require some deep analysis!

- clear my work to-dos so nothing falls apart when I am out of touch for two weeks.

- what else do I need to pick up from Target this weekend?!

- make sure bills and other adult stuff are taken care of.

- book car pick up at Rome airport.

- locate all electronic travel necessities (Int'l adapters, chargers, video projection cables, camera accessories etc.)

Thank goodness I already ordered all the euros I needed from Wells Fargo (super easy by the way) since we need to pay for our apartment in cash when we show up.

Phew, I have a lot to do.

My favorite signs in China

2010-09-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

I know there has been a lot written about goofy English signs in China, There's a whole blog that captures the goofy signs at the World Expo!

Here are a few of my favorites. I loved this sign on a Giant Panda enclosure, can I use this line on my kids?

The funny thing was, I didn't really see any water:

I have no idea what a parabolic is - some kind of trash? A hammer? A wishbone?

No stamping!

No idea:

This was a great sign - and a truly star-worthy bathroom!

We nervously rode our bikes downhill anyway:

No smoking?

On a sign at the World Expo:

I've never had a potted drink before - and I was really tempted but we were in a bit of a hurry:

Hope you enjoyed my small selection of signs!

Final thoughts on China

2010-08-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

Overall the trip was most excellent. If I had to do it differently, I would have picked a cooler time of year - spring or fall would have been perfect. The heat and humidity was a little sapping. And of course, more time would have been better - we still want to go to Beijing, Tibet, Hanzhou, Hainan, Guilin and a whole host of other places.

Some interesting observations:

There are a heck of a lot of Chinese people. I know it's been said, but this country and its people will be a force to be reckoned with. In fact, China surpasses Japan as the world's second largest economy last month - and is forecasted to overtake the US in 20 years if they progress at their current rate.
Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan and relatively unknown in the US, has an official population of over 5M. Plus a whole of others who live and work there but are not registered.
The Shanghai Louis Vuitton boutique greatly surpasses the San Francisco flagship store. This is not surprising, in and of itself. However, there are also giant Louis Vuitton boutiques in Chengdu and Xian - much smaller, much more provincial cities.
Corollary to the last observation, many Chinese have a lot of money. And they like spending it. LV is extra expensive there with an additional luxury tax!
The Chinese don't have the same queuing philosophy as the West. If there is any space within the queue, they will move to fill it. Even taking a minute inconsequential step forward is of paramount importance. Seriously. We almost came to blows over standing in line.

OK, I'm done now. I'm so behind on all my posts - I must move on to Thailand...

Shanghai BarbieWorld!

2010-08-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, this was a somewhat random stop on our part - especially since my two girls never ever really liked Barbies and we don't have one anywhere in our house at this point in time.

But it's the world's first and only Barbie World! How could we miss that?! To be honest, I was curious about the experience - wondering if it was as immersive as the American Girl stores. And being a connoisseur of retail experiences, I dragged my girls along with me.

First of all, it's totally unprepossessing from the street. You actually enter something that looks like an office building, and there is a single escalator from the lobby.

Here's where the pink started.

Funnily enough, the girls were ahead of me in the escalator and when they got to the top, the both turned and their jaws just dropped.

It was a giant spiral staircase with hundreds of pink Barbies and in general, just an explosion of pink everywhere!

The Barbie Design Studio where you could supposedly design your own Barbie turned out to be a bit of a dud. You really just picked the accessories that you could have with one of 5 standard Barbies. Not the customized experience I thought it would be. Although the Design Studio was pretty cool looking.

There was also a number of limited edition Barbie displays. I especially liked these two - the Kate Spade and Lilly Pulitzer Barbies!

And finally, the Barbie Cafe (alas we did not partake).

By the way, the store was not terribly crowded but the number of Asian adult females greatly outnumbered the children in attendance. I may have had their target demographic wrongly pegged!

High Design vs Good Food...

2010-08-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

For dinner one night in Shanghai, we headed into Xintiandi, a lovely warren of little streets that have been rebuilt in a Disneyfied vision of old Shanghai. Since I'm a big Disney fan, I have no objection to that!

The restaurant I had originally wanted to go to was booked that evening, so our concierge sent us to the Shanghai Tang Cafe. Funnily enough, I didn't quite associate it with the Shanghai Tang fashion empire, of which I'm a big fan. Of course, it turned out to be the cafe owned by the same firm, just around the corner from the main boutique.

Upon first glance, everything looked very promising. The dining room was outfitted with Shanghai Tang accessories and was extremely dramatic in the fashion line's familiar color scheme. I fell in love with the placesettings and wondered if I could pocket the beautiful chopstick stand and napkin ring without being noticed. Alas, while I was contemplated my descent into crime, the waitress came by and quickly removed all temptations.

We ordered a big selection of food including a number of dim sum items. Everything was just gorgeous when it arrived BUT to my deep disappointment, it all looked much better than it tasted.

The dumplings with different color wrappers were a nice touch.

The taro pastry swans reminded me of a similar dish at the fancy hotel at HK Disneyland, but there, it tasted divine. Here... meh.

Why couldn't we have had high design AND good food in a single fabulous package?!

Thailand and USA!

2010-08-07T01:27:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned earlier, the Expo was very much characterized by very long lines everywhere. People would carry around these small foldable stools which they would pop up and use while in line.

Thailand had a large and very popular pavilion, also with a 3 hour line (3 hour lines seemed to be the norm). However, any Thai citizen can by-pass the line by flashing their passport at the VIP entrance. I love my country! And so we scooted right in and checked out the exhibits, movies and 3D experience inside the pavilion - it did a good job of explaining some major milestones in Thai history, a little about the culture and the people Thailand is a very popular holiday destination for the Chinese, so this was as much as travelogue as anything else.

Then we wandered over to the USA Pavilion. I had read online that US citizens DO NOT get to cut the line (misguided equality principle!). So we walked into the store/exit area and I found a nice college student from the Mid West, fluent in Mandarin, who was on a 2 month rotation, and she helped us bypass the main (3 hrs of course) line. Thank goodness!

If you've read any of the background on the USA Pavilion, you would have heard that Congress passed a law some years ago that prohibits US government funds from being used to fund any Expos and trade fairs. So the US was the ONLY pavilion funded entirely by private contributions. And that the US was the last country to sign up for the Expo and we only managed to get the thing funded through extensive personal lobbying from Hillary Clinton. Which was a good thing, it would have been terrible not to have been represented.

The USA Pavilion consisted of three theatres with different movies, starting with Kobe Bryant who greeted the audience in Chinese. I'd rate the whole Pavilion a solid B. After you exit, you then end up in a corporate sponsorship area where all the corporations have little exhibits. A little cheesy but seemingly the best solution in the end.

Good thing we were able to bypass some lines - otherwise, we would not have seen any of the major country pavilions! We walked past impressive structures for France, UK, Italy, Australia, Korea and Switzerland (complete with a cable car ride!) but could not stomach the wait.
And Denmark actually brought the Little Mermaid statue from Copenhagen Harbour over to Shanghai for their pavilion - apparently also surrounded by Copenhagen Harbour water! At least we could see that from the walkway outside, so didn't have to wait in line.

Lastly, I give you a massive photo of our glorious leader, Colonel Khaddafi, hanging in the main entrance of the Libya pavilion. Who needs those Swiss cable cars when you can experience items like this one!

A Glimpse of the World

2010-08-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

After lounging around in our fab hotel room for a few hours, we finally muster up the courage to head to the World Expo - leveraging the free ferry service. Of course, I didn't realize just how slow the free ferry service would be, since it took us well over an hour to get there (vs 15 mins by taxi). But the views were beautiful and it was a very relaxing journey.

As I posted in FB, the Shanghai World Expo = the World Showcase at Epcot in Disney World x 100, with 450,000 of your closest Chinese friends in 95 degree heat. And NO concept of "my personal space bubble", as my 12 year old daughter calls it.

When we finally got in around 7 pm, we noticed the line at the Japan pavilion was 3 hours. This did not bode well for the rest of our visit.

We decided to focus on the Axis of Evil and other small but interesting countries' pavilions - countries that we were unlikely to ever visit in real life.

Our final list across 2 days at the Expo included such perennial faves as Libya, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Angola, Yemen, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mongolia, Nepal, Vietnam, all the Chinese provinces and our personal favorite, Lithuania (where hubby enjoyed Lithuanian draft beer and we had some unmemorable Lithuanian delicacies).

The kids got their little Expo passport stamped at all these countries, which makes for a nice souvenir.

More Xiao Long Bao

2010-07-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

After having our first xiao long bao with the teeming masses, we retreated to a lovely air-conditioned restaurant about a block away to have a more enjoyable lunch. We found Din Tai Fung to be an oasis of calm in comparison.

We had a great order of xiao long bao.

Followed by an order of something that turned out to be very similar to shiu mai.

And a fabulous dessert of shaved ice, covered with fresh mango pieces and condensed milk. Yum!

Xiao Long Bao!

2010-07-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

The most famous item in Shanghai cuisine (at least in my family's book) is xiao long bao, often called Shanghai soup dumplings. The bite-sized, steamed dumplings are filled with a small amount of broth, served piping hot. The girls like to wait til they're slightly cooled, put them into their mouths, bite down and get a hot soup explosion - they call it the "Pop"! We get it often in the Bay Area, but wanted to make sure we had it every day during our Shanghai stay.

So we headed out to Yu Gardens, a beautiful 400 year old classical Chinese garden. Not surprisingly, it's surrounded by a large Bazaar and is a big souvenir shopping destination. It was teeming with people. TEEMING! Did I mention how hot it was yet?!

And of course, the ubiquitous Starbucks.

We lined up with all the crowds at Nanking Dumpling House - a line of 60+ people that snaked halfway through the bazaar.

We watched one of their workers make the little baos at lightning fast speed, and about 30 mins later, got our little tray of xiao long bao - I think it was 20 little bao for under $2.

We ate them standing up, like everyone else around us - and tried not to burn our mouths.

Then we found a stand with extra large xiao long bao served with a straw so you could suck the soup out. Fun but definitely just a novelty!

Finally, we did our share of little souvenir shopping and found this man who very adeptly shaped wire into Chinese letters. We had him make them for the girls with both English and Chinese writing.

Shanghai at Night

2010-07-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

We decided to head to the Bund for our first dinner, at one of the most famous restaurants in Shanghai, called M on the Bund.

The view from the terrace of the Shanghai skyline was just magnificent.

The Bund is an old Indian term for the embankment on the river and is lined with old colonial buildings. A perfect place for an evening stroll after dinner.

Best Hotel of the Trip

2010-07-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

We had perfectly lovely rooms at the Shangri-la in Chengdu and the Sofitel in Xian, but they paled in comparison to the rooms at the Park Hyatt Shanghai, located on the 79-88th floors of the Shanghai World Financial Center, currently the tallest building in China (although another planned structure across the street will beat it by a few floors in a few years).

Our building is the one that looks like a bottle opener.

The lobby is on the 87th floor and we were escorted to our connecting rooms on the 79th floor. The rooms were very high-tech with automatic blinds and very complicated control panels. And what a view! There were two long boxes on the desk, filled with little madeleines, cookies and macaroons. And a large fruit tart was also waiting for us. Plus a Nespresso machine and a great selection of teas.

My favorite part was the toilet though - it was the same, very high tech, Japanese toilet that we had in Macau two years ago!

Our bathtub had a bird's eye view of the city.

And the pool is on the 85th floor, so it was our highest swim ever!

The lobby area had some nice telescopes to view the world down below.

It was a great start to our stay in Shanghai.

Of Terracotta and Teapots

2010-07-23T05:55:00.000-07:00

Our last stop in Xian was to the Shaanxi Provincial History Museum, which was a pretty, modern building with lots of local artifacts in terracotta and bronze, and the first celadon glazes.

We found an old teapot in a pale green celadon - they called it the magic teapot because there was no obvious way to fill it by looking at the top, you had to turn it over.

So we bought a reproduction at the gift shop! Not sure if we'll ever use it but it's awfully pretty.

9 miles in 95° heat!

2010-07-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

So it seemed like a really good idea to plan a family bike ride along the Xian city walls. After all, we loved our family bike tour in Barcelona last year.

Alas, it was a lot hotter in Xian. And sunnier. And more humid. And it was a 9 mile ride, on really crappy bikes dating from the Mao era...

But we persevered and still had a good, albeit slightly sunburned, time.

The wall is an immense structure surrounding the inner city of Xian, originally built in the Ming Dynasty (13th century) and stands about 40 feet tall and about 35 feet wide. It's been repaved a few times (and a marathon is run on it later in the year) so it was only moderately bumpy!

Some of the gate towers on the wall have been beautifully restored.

And we saw some leftover lanterns from last year's Mid-Autumn Festival that made for a fun section of the wall to ride on.

Anders, our trusty Swede, told us that Westerners can typically get all the way around the wall in about 45-50 mins while the Chinese take a more leisurely pace and take closer to 90 mins. Which do you think we were?!

Tablets and Mosques

2010-07-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

After a lovely lunch, we headed to the Forest of Stone Tablets Museum where thousands of etched stone tablets were displayed. A large room of 20+ tablets represented a book - the tablets were created so students could study for their main tests by making paper rubbings of the tablets, which would ensure consistency before the advent of printing. Rubbings were still being made and you could purchase them as souvenirs.

After the tour, we stopped for an hour long calligraphy lesson with a master who has been practicing his calligraphy skills for over 40 years. We had a lot of fun and I remember far more of my elementary mandarin than I thought I would!

I thought this gate was simply beautiful.

Later, we visited one of the largest mosques in China - it was unique because it was built in the architectural style of a Chinese temple. Instead of a minaret, there was a pagoda!

A shot of the arabic writing over the Chinese gate to continue the incongruity.

Terracotta Highlights

2010-07-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

We headed off bright and early the next morning for the Terracotta Warriors, with our new local guide, Jessica and our new driver leading the way. Our little van had a special pass so we could drive almost all the way up to the main entrance - in contrast to the tour buses and other transportation that had to park about half a mile away and brave a gauntlet of souvenir vendors on their way to the main gate. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the perks of a private tour?!

Walking into the main room of Pit 1 was breathtaking. There were multiple burial pits with scores of warriors lined up in rows. We learned that there were an estimated 8,000 warriors in the 3 pits they've excavated so far, with about 2,000 of them having been reassembled. Yes, they found a jumbled mass of body parts and every single warrior had to be painstakingly put back together and lined up for display. That's why many warriors are incomplete - missing heads, arms etc. But each face and body was very distinctive - there are serious looking warriors, more mischievous warriors, tall & skinny warriors, short and fatter ones. But all had a small tummy sticking out - they were made to reflect the fact that they would be healthy and well-fed in the after life! They also all had mustaches or beards!

You can see the reassembly work in progress at the rear of the building, in what is known as the hospital wing.

There was also an active excavation going on in some of the pits, and we could see parts of warriors being excavated.

We visited two other pits - while Pit #1 had a lot of infantry, Pits #2 and #3 were a little ways behind, and had calvary as well as officers in a command center.

And finally, the best specimens were in cases in the museum so you could see them up close. This archer was the most intact warrior found - his torso was all in one piece.

We learned that about a year after the death of Emperor Qin, his dynasty ended and his tomb was broken into and burned - so although all these warriors were brightly painted, all the paint had been burned off thousands of years ago. Pits #2 and 3 had not been burned, so when discovered, there was still color on some figures. Alas, they peeled right off about a week after they had been excavated, so all we have left are some photos. That's one of the reasons that the Chinese government has slowed down excavation - they want to make sure that we have the right preservation technology so that doesn't happen again. It was weird to think that there were countless treasures under the ground that we were walking on, but would probably never see in our lifetimes.

Overall, this was a wonderful experience. It was a marvel to think that all this was created 2,200 years ago over the course of 30 years, with 700,000 workers (many of whom probably died in the process).

Making Noodles and Dumplings

2010-07-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

We checked into the Sofitel Xian and the most exciting thing I found in our suite was a washer/dryer unit. I know all you moms out there will understand - I literally clapped with joy. I had been faced with the possibility of sending little t-shirts, undies and socks out to the hotel laundry - now, I could do a couple of loads during our stay! Ah, the simple pleasures... Oh, the rest of the suite was very nice as well!

Dinner that night was at Le Chinois, the hotel's Chinese restaurant. We had been really looking forward to this because we were slated to learn how to make dumplings and noodles. We had been thinking we'd actually eat the product of our work, but we were served a beautiful meal to start. In retrospect, it was a good thing we didn't eat what we made... ;)

Here are the various kinds of dumplings we ate - aren't they beautiful?!

We then watched Ms Yan hand pull lo mein noodles for our noodle soup, which was wonderful.

After we were sated, we started off with Ms Yan trying to pull lo mein noodles ourselves. I don't have a photo of this because my hands were covered with flour and I was too busy being frustrated. Suffice to say, I would not have eaten anything we made - my big learning: it's really, really hard to hand pull noodles.

We then moved on to dumplings. A couple of them were quite easy to make. One was very, very hard. We made and remade multiple versions. Our dough got a little messy. Here's our final set of dumplings - the really nice ones were made by our teacher, although I thought some of mine were quite credible!

And finally, we made another kind of noodle that was a lot easier so the kids loved doing this..

We had a great time - this was a fabulous experience that we had access to by booking with a great tour company. It was not something usually offered by the hotel and we wouldn't have been able to set it up on our own.

A Han Tomb in Xian

2010-07-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

On the way into Xian from the airport, we stopped for a quick visit to Hanyanglin Museum, the site of the tomb of the 4th Emperor of the Han Dynasty.

The Chinese found a number of burial pits around the main tomb, but these were of a more modest scale than Emperor Qin's tomb with all the terracotta warriors (that we were scheduled to visit the next day). The Hans typically created their retainers and soldiers for the afterlife at one-third scale and with molds, so they weren't all individually featured like the more famous terracotta warriors (who were created at a scale larger than the average male 2,000 years ago)

This was a fairly new museum, so everything was displayed very well. We walked on a glass corridor that was above the burial pits, so we could look down and see all the figures. Each pit had a specific function - the kitchen and pantry pits were the largest ones, reflecting the importance of food in Chinese culture. That's where I get it from!

Taoist Temples and Tea

2010-07-11T02:37:00.000-07:00

Our second day in Chengdu started with a visit to a old taoist temple where we had a brief overview of Taoism and met with a monk to chat about his life and to see his dormitory on the temple grounds.

He was pretty nice although I am not sure everything he said was being well-translated for us. He had a nice room with a computer, mobile phone and lots of other modern appliances. He did a short tea ceremony for us with both oolong and green tea, and another monk came by and gave us a short tai-chi demonstration. He and Anders then decided to try and see who could unbalance the other first. The kids thought that was hilarious.

We also did a fortune telling ritual with shaking the sticks out of the container, one of my favorite pursuits from a child when I visited any temple. Then our monk interpreted the fortunes which were printed on a piece of paper that matched the number of the first stick that fell out when you were shaking.

I still remember our trip to Taiwan when I was a child where we learned that although I would have "middling fortune", my sister would have "supreme fortune"! Our fortunes on this trip were nowhere near as specific or amusing!

And so, we said goodbye to Chengdu and took an hour long China Southern Airline flight (in a nice new Airbus A330) up to Xian for the next stage of our trip.

Feats of Engineering

2010-07-10T23:50:00.000-07:00

We were hot and exhausted after our panda adventures and went to a very good Sichuan lunch in a nice place with unfortunately poor air-conditioning and a distinct lack of ice for their drinks!

We were originally slated to visit a museum after lunch but decided to change our plans and go see a 2,200 year old irrigation system at Dujiangyan instead. In the temple at the top of the project, we saw a model of the whole system with an island built out of rocks placed in baskets in the middle of the river, called the fish mouth. The island has since been rebuilt out of concrete.

The whole river diversion project was pretty impressive and the 2 mile walk would have been lovely if the weather had been slightly cooler. As it was, many of the Chinese tourists were taking golf carts around, which zipped by us on the path at breakneck speeds, honking all the way. Mei, who really wanted to ride the golf cart, would moan every time one zipped by! This meant that our walk was not quite as relaxing as I would have anticipated ;)

There were a couple of fun swinging rope bridges for us to cross, which most of us enjoyed (Pooh was, of course, completely freaked out!)

Dinner that night was hot pot, a big Sichuan specialty - we had two pots of soup (one spicy, one not). The big difference for me was that we had an attendant cooking everything and serving us the whole time. We later went down to a different level of the building and watched a brief show of face-changing, something that Sichuan Opera is famous for. The masked performer basically tilts his head quickly and his mask changes - he did this about 10 times with 10 different masks, showed us his real face, then finished up with one final mask. It was pretty cool to watch!

Pandas, Pandas Everywhere

2010-07-10T18:49:00.000-07:00

Early morning on our second day, We set off with our little entourage to the Chengdu Panda Breeding Reserve in the northern suburbs of Chengdu.

After walking about a mile uphill in the stifling heat, we stopped at the Panda Kitchen to learn a little about their diets. As we hear more about pandas, it's a wonder that there are any left in the world these days, after learning about their picky eating habits and impossibly small procreation windows! There are around 200 pandas in captivity (about 87 at this particular preserve although only 60 on premise since many are loaned out to zoos around the world) and an estimated total population of around 2,000.

We then went to one of the enclosures, quartered a handful of apples and fed some pandas! We first had to put on these goofy blue robes and shoe covers, carefully spear the apple onto the end of a 7-8 foot long bamboo pole and dangle it in front of a panda, making sure to only give it the apple after it stood up on its hind legs. They are truly adorable animals, the black and white faces, and the cutest ears. And greedy. And super lazy (though this is more understandable given the heat). And they make little growly noises when they want more apples!

Then we walked over to another area of the park to have our picture taken with a 10 month old baby panda. This was the highlight of Mei's trip although it was all a bit rushed and they were very nervous about panda handling - smearing the little panda's paws with honey to keep it distracted as the photos were being taken! That little panda was heavy!

We wandered around a few more enclosures, visiting a playful group of 5 young pandas and also saw a lot of red pandas, which looked a lot more like red raccoons with long striped tails. And watched a movie about panda breeding - newborn babies are pink, hairless and generally creepy looking!

We were a little panda-ed out but still managed to buy countless little panda knick-knacks on our way back to our little bus.

The Best Breakfast Buffet Ever

2010-07-10T18:35:00.000-07:00

We all awoke early on Day 2 in Chengdu, still vaguely jet lagged and headed down our to hotel restaurant for breakfast. The restaurant was set up as a wide series of stations (or theatres, as they called them).

There was an amazing choice of food - the usually boring egg/omelette bar and standard western breakfast stuff, but also lots of Asian selections. The Japanese station had sushi and cold soba noodles with tofu (Mei had this). The dim sum station was enormous, with very good cha siu bao (roasted pork buns - the kids had 3-4 each every morning!).

And my favorites, the noodle bar (where I was completely unable to order what I really wanted) and the congee bar (where I had yummy shrimp congee every day). Congee is a savory Chinese rice porridge and a wonderful warming breakfast - especially when eaten with fried Chinese donuts (you tiao).

I finished off with a handful of sweet lychees and some nice local melon, while the kids had waffles with an insane dollop of whipped cream (we are on vacation after all!).

Our First Day in China

2010-07-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in the early afternoon and were met by our Swedish guide Anders, our local guide Rebecca and our trusty driver Mr Shi who never said a word the whole trip.

Why all the fuss?! Well it turned out that I hadn't done a whole of research when I booked this trip and we ended up booking throughout a very highly regarded, but also extremely high end tour company! In hindsight I learned that I could have gone through A&K and just had the one guide and probably saved a little money. But one big benefit of this trip was that we had complete flexibility and could easily change our plans on the fly (which we often did). I certainly didn't regret how it all worked out - although it often felt that we had quite the little entourage going everywhere!

Anders was fluent in Chinese and had a Masters in Chinese history, lived in Shanghai and would stay with us throughout our trip. He was our lead guide and any little comment or mild preference we expressed, he rushed to take care of. He was also a very interesting conversationalist on a pretty wide variety of topics. Rebecca's English was good but not nuanced, and she would just be with us for the two days in Chengdu, her native city. And Mr Shi capably (if rather insanely!) drove the little bus we took everywhere, liberally applying his horn to get us there quickly.

And so we arrived at the Shangri-la in Chengdu, which closely resembled the various other Shangri-las I had been to (Bangkok, Singapore, HK). Something wasn't quite right with our rooms and Anders started off demonstrating his advocacy for us by arguing at length with the front desk. It was all quite amusing!

We finally checked in to a gorgeous pair of rooms on the 27th floor with a view of the river and the city. And promptly headed down to the Lobby Lounge where every other Shangri-la Hotel serves afternoon tea. Alas, not in Chengdu! My limited Mandarin was shown to be completely inadequate when it took me multiple tries to get a Diet Coke. And we ended up ordering off the room service menu that they brought us. It was all very good, just not quite what we expected.

We later met up with our little entourage to head out to a little renovated pair of walking streets for a stroll before a nice Sichuan dinner that we would have been completely unable to order without Anders. Rebecca hung out with us and told us about Chengdu history, culture and customs, but left before dinner.

I especially liked this beautiful Starbucks we saw. Starbucks has the quite the presence in China!

It was stiflingly hot even in the evening, at least 90 F and amazingly high humidity. It might possibly have been more humid than Bangkok! After buying Mei a hand-painted panda fan to start our shopping for the trip, we headed back to the hotel and called it a day.

Why I Wasn't Blogging from China

2010-07-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

We're in Bangkok right now, and have been in Asia for about 12 days - most of which were spent on holiday in China.

So why wasn't I blogging that trip on a daily basis like I usually do? Well, despite super fast internet access and other technological marvels, internet access to Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is blocked by the Chinese government.

I did manage to make a few FB updates from the mobile FB app on my Blackberry. I think that may have worked because it's on an international data roaming plan not controlled by the Chinese government.

So, delayed by a week or so, let the trip blogging begin!

Teppan and Cupcakes

2010-06-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

These are the lovely cupcakes that Sibby's Cupcakery made for me this weekend - for my daughter's 10th birthday. The theme was the color blue, and I think they looked lovely! The ones in the middle were especially yummy - the special flavor for June - lemon meringue. In a vanilla cake with a dab of lemon curd in the middle. I wish they were on the regular flavor rotation!

We had them after an epic meal at Benihana. Now, why is it that kids love Benihana so much?!

Secret Sea Cove Dinner

2010-06-07T22:23:00.000-07:00

Last year, a girlfriend and I had discussed going to one of the Outstanding in the Field farm dinners. But we were a little late and most of the ones we were interested in were already sold out. So when the tickets were released for this year, we were determined to get our top choice. So were a lot of other people. So much so that the website went down upon ticket release!

A week later, with an upgraded server infrastructure on the back end, everything worked fine and we got our tickets to the Secret Sea Cove dinner with guest chef Mourad Lahlou, Iron Chef winner and chef at Aziza in San Francisco (recipient of one Michelin star). Apparently, we were lucky - the event sold out in 7 minutes.

We were not given directions nor the location of the event until about a week prior, and it involved finding a small road about 7 miles south of Half Moon Bay. As you can see from the photo above, the site was truly magnificent!

We arrived around 3 pm and were handed glasses of rose (or in my case, a lovely cool water). They were passing appetizers of moroccan flatbread with dill yogurt and roe (yum), crispy fried chickpeas with harissa (very yum) and pickled sardines on toast (meh).

Around 4 pm, the founder of Outstanding in the Field, Jim Denevan, spoke about the farm to table connection. Or in our case, the ocean to table connection, with Hans Haveman as our speaker - he sourced all the fish and has been fishing off the Northern CA coast all his life.

Then there was a mad rush for seats at the big long table - we were outrun and were finally seated almost all the way at the far end. Where the waves got dangerously close to us as the tide rose - it was all part of the fun!

Our first course was roasted and marinated yellow beets with wild arugula and pumpkin seeds. It was a beautiful salad and the arugula was particularly nutty, just the way I liked it.

Next we had grilled mini meatballs with grapes over a jicama salad in a green herb dressing (Green Goddess!). Yes, those green things that look like pasta were julienned sticks of jicama. This was excellent but a little skimpy on those meatballs. The dishes are served family-style to a table of 8, and not everyone got a second stick.

Then we were served a mound of slow roasted black cod with some marinated carrots, chard and mushrooms and roasted meyer lemons. Plus the best couscous I have ever tasted! It was brown butter couscous made by hand (as they apparently do in Aziza) - they make the dough fresh, then press it through a sieve, into a steamer. Freshly made couscous! It was divine.

Our dessert was fresh strawberries served with a wonderful lemon verbena cream - and a rhubarb crostata (which I didn't get a picture of, because we descended upon it like locusts).

There was wine with all the courses - which I mostly ignored except I did like the 2008 Bridesmaid White (or at least the one sip I had of it). And the fisherman, Jim the founder, the sommelier and all sorts of people circulated to chat with everyone. There was a very convivial atmosphere.

Alas the weather was pretty foggy and then started misting then drizzling lightly by the time we got to dessert. We wrapped up just before 8 am and gratefully got into the warm car to head home.

A Weekend in Napa

2010-06-06T22:12:00.000-07:00

We went up to Napa recently and stayed at Meadowood. It's been about 11 years since I last stayed there and I had forgotten how family-friendly everything was. We had a nice relaxing time, with good meals at Press in St. Helena (wonderful outdoor seating area and a bacon sampler appetizer that we thoroughly enjoyed) and Tra Vigne for Sunday Brunch (a reliable standby). But the whole reason we went was to dine at Meadowood's signature restaurant, The Dining Room, with Christopher Kostow's cuisine having been graced with two Michelin stars this year. Plus 4 stars from the normally stingy Michael Bauer at the SF Chronicle.

We had first experienced Chris' cooking when he led the kitchen at Chez TJ in Mountain View - and had earned them two stars as well (one of which they have lost since his departure).

We left the kids to order themselves room service and walked down to the main building. As we were seated, our waiter indicated that the chef wanted to "cook for us" - which we gladly agreed to. Because of that, we never really looked at the menu and the names of the various dishes we had are pretty hazy in my memory.

We started with a cute little amuse of a small pastry filled with goat cheese. Delicious but I could have easily eaten a dozen of them!

OK - it's already starting to get hazy. The lovely little crudite selection on the right had little carrots and radishes, with a wasabi ice and some other delicate sauce. But for the life of me, I really just can't remember what the little morsels on the left were. By the way, if I had actually blogged right after the meal as originally intended, this would be a lot easier...

We next had a lovely vichyssoise soup in a petite portion. This is why I love tasting menus. Little plates of delicious food that keeps you wanting more, followed by course after petite course!

Next came wagyu beef cured with pine from the Meadowood property with little bits of hamachi, served with a little bun that was just like a chinese bao but with rye or pumpernickel. I really liked this dish!

This was also yummy - poured tableside. But honestly, I have no idea what it was. Except to recall there was some cauliflower involved. And maybe beans. What a useless food blogger I am!

Next we had a small dish of frog's legs with I believe some ravioli filled with cremini mushrooms. I honestly only like frog's legs prepared in a Thai or Chinese style (fried with garlic). Frog's legs in French or other cuisine has never done it for me.

I think this was goat. It was yummy.

I began wondering if this meal would ever end. And just then, we were brought the cheese course, which was a mild cheese that was deep fried. Reminded me of a highly refined version of the cheese sticks I used to love at Chili's when I was in college!

There was also the most delicious lemon sorbet palate cleanser that I just loved. More than the actual dessert pictured below. There were too many elements and they didn't tie in very cohesively. I had the little chocolate fudge square and handed the rest to Sean for him to finish up, which he gladly did.

In between, the kids came down to visit and got a kitchen tour and some candied raspberries. And a photo with our favorite chef!

We're already making plans to return soon...

2.5 hrs in Paris

2010-04-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

We were not fully confident of our previously booked BA flight from Bordeaux to Gatwick, despite all the resumption of flights, so we ended up driving back up to Paris and taking the Eurostar over to London. The drive back was infinitely better than the drive down, and we made good time - arriving in Paris with a few hours to spare.

As we drove into the city, I was almost absurdly happy to catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. I do love this city so much!

We returned the car at Gare du Nord and started walking south towards the heart of the city. Specifically we headed for the Marais, where we first stopped at Dominique Picquier, a favorite stop of mine for fabric bags. Nothing really inspired me, but then we noticed a lovely shop next door with a rainbow of brightly hued bags in the window - Stephane Verdino.

The gentleman who assisted us was charming and a great salesman, but the closer of the deal was the designer Stephane himself, with whom we had a nice conversation. So I bought this bag, in beige - totally didn't need it but it's a lovely bag. BTW it cost a lot less in France...

After that, it was time for my ice cream of the day, which I had at Amorino, a great little stop right across from the apartment we rented 2 years ago. Their speciality is fashioning the ice cream into a flower on your cone or cup. I had salted caramel, chocolate and straciatella. It was excellent!

Then we rounded the corner to Mariage Frères, and stopped off at their tea salon. Where the cheapest pot of tea was €9 and there were a number of much more expensive teas. After one of my last trips there, I am always careful about noticing the price now!

I had a nice little tea plate with a scone and a madeleine. The scone paled in comparison to the real thing in the U.K. but the madeleine was light and delicious. And a pot of one of the more obscure kinds of Earl Grey tea.

And finally, a short stop at the store to purchase some tea and have a spirited discussion (in French, no less!) with the tea man (pictured below) about what new kinds to try and buy. Just so you know, Mariage is available in the U.S. but just a few kinds. When you are in Paris, you will see that they have 14 kinds of Earl Grey tea alone!

And that was the end of our brief, costly but very rewarding sojourn in Paris. Then it was off on the Eurostar back to London for one night, then back to the U.S. the next day.

Our last meal in the Dordogne

2010-04-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

On our last evening, we decided to walk down to the village for dinner. The walk down is quite steep but yields some very pretty views of the valley, not to mention all the lovely limestone houses along the way.

We had dinner at La Petite Tonnelle, which was named as the best restaurant in the village in our handy-dandy house book. We sat outside and enjoyed the evening air as the sky darkened.

I started with a plate of roasted asparagus with slices of smoked duck breast. It was a lovely starter.

My main course was a couple of carved slices of leg of lamb, served with some excellent couscous (it's in the pastry tower) and a terrine of some sort that was just ok.

For dessert, I had the canaille de citron, some lemon mousse in a light filo shell, served with raspberry sauce and some raspberry ice cream. Alas, it looked better than it tasted. Although I still finished it ;)

All in all, a very nice meal. Next time I'm in Beynac, I'm gladly stopping by here again!

A nice ending to a busy day. Now, I must go pack...

The castle tour

2010-04-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

On the last day of our Dordogne stay, we finally made it to the two major castles in the area. The first was Castelnaud, which I really wanted to visit because I'm reading a book about an American couple who bought a little house in the shadow of the castle back in 1985. "A Castle in the Backyard" has been great so far. And I was determined to find their house from the descriptions in the book!

The town of Castelnaud is pretty tiny but the castle is impressive. It's on the other side of the Dordogne River from Beynac and the two castles have been rivals throughout history. They can see each other very clearly and were on opposite sides of the One Hundred Years War. Here's the view of Beynac from Castelnaud.

To add to an already excellent day, I found the artisanal ice cream I liked so much and had a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of salted caramel. Yum.

Finally, we visited our castle next door, Chateau Beynac. It took us quite a few days to get here, considering we are staying in its shadow! It's a bigger castle than Castelnaud, and is apparently still occupied (a few rooms) by its owner, who bought it in 1961. There was a magnificent view from the top of the ramparts, and we stood there surveying our little town with a touch of sadness in anticipation of our departure.

Now it's time for a real cave...

2010-04-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

Since our taste had been whetted by the reproduction caves of Lascaux II, we headed to the only cave in France with polychromatic cro-magnon cave drawings that was still open to the public. La Grotte de Font de Gaume allows only 180 visitors each day, in small groups of no more than 15 people.

It was nice to visit this after the Lascaux visit, since it really made me appreciate how difficult it was to preserve these drawings. It was also good because I heard the English tour at Lascaux, which made it easier for me to understand the French tour at Font de Gaume today!

Font de Gaume was discovered in 1901 and not particularly protected for a few years, so there is early 20th century graffitti that defaces quite a few of the drawings. It was a sacred site for our prehistoric ancestors, same as Lascaux, and they painted many of the same animals - primarily bison and horses. It was much harder to discern the drawings and they use the same principle of leveraging the natural contours of the rock.

Here's a photo of the postcard they had of their best preserved bison.

I predict that Font de Gaume will also be closed to the general public in my lifetime.

Our Pre-History Tour

2010-04-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

The first piece of good news we got this morning is that we didn't have to try and exchange our Hertz car today. Phew - I was budgeting a few hours to try and make the change since we would have likely needed to go up to Bergerac.

So we headed off to Les Eyzies in the late morning and had a nice lunch while looking up at the statue of Cro-Magnon man next to the buildings set into the rock. Not a very pretty town and apparently a zoo in the summer. I'd give it a miss.

After lunch we took a little detour to La Madeleine, a troglodyte village in the Vezère valley. Troglodyte refers to a prehistoric race of people that lived in caves, dens, or holes. We didn't really mean to spend 40 minutes here, but the sign from the main road looked promising. The most beautiful building in the little village was this petite church built into the rock. There were even gothic arches inside.

After that, we headed over to La Roque de St. Christophe, another very impressive troglodyte village where up to 1,000 people lived back in the medieval days. It's interesting that cro-magnon man picked particular sites, and they were reused much later by people in the middle ages. A good and defensible site is hard to find!

Finally, here's a recreation of what the whole village in the rock might have looked like.

There are a total of 5 terraces, although not all are currently accessible. It was a lot of fun tramping around the caves though, and they did a great job of describing how each cave might have been set up, so you could really picture it.

What an educational day!

A Pilgrimage to Rocamadour

2010-04-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

In the afternoon, we drove a windy, mountain-hugging road to Rocamadour, the famous cliff-hugging village in the Lot valley and a noted pilgramage site in the middle ages. We parked on the bottom road in the picture, walked up to the main village and paid €2 to ride up an elevator 50m (these modern pilgrims had a lot less grit than the medieval ones ;) The elevator was actually very cool with glass walls where you could see the interior rock face as we went up.

We walked around the ramparts up top and also around the main church, which is built right into the rock face.

And then descended the steps to the main village, which was filled with somewhat garish souvenir shops - reminding me a lot of Carcasonne.

Finally we stopped for a drink on a panoramic hotel terrace, where I indulged in my second ice-cream of the day. Alas, it wasn't terribly good, quelle dommage!

Un Déjeuner à Sarlat

2010-04-22T01:37:00.000-07:00

After wandering around the market for a while, we decided it was time for lunch. We picked the picturesque over researching some place with known good food. And we ended up at Les Îles at the Place de la Liberté. It's the café pictured below on the left. Doesn't it meet and exceed the picturesque test?!

We sat and had a nice lunch from le menu du jour, and watched the market being torn down all around us. I had a foie gras salad, duck confit with potatoes sarladaises (potatoes fried in duck fat) and for dessert, two scoops of ice cream, pictured below. The first ice-cream of the day! Pictured next to it is the apple tart that was just ok.

Market Day in Sarlat

2010-04-22T01:25:00.000-07:00

We arrived late morning to the Sarlat market, which had been billed as the best market in Perigord. It was certainly bigger than St. Cyprien, but was also considerably more touristy, with fewer fresh food vendors. However, it was a gorgeous day and walking around the market in such a beautiful medieval setting was perfect. This was probably the most people we'd seen in the last 5 days!

After foie gras, the next most common item sold were sausages. I guess they have to make something with the rest of those geese and ducks! Some of the variations above were sausages with mushrooms and sausages with walnuts.

I especially like these sausages pictured below - made to look like big chunks of truffles! Incidentally, we missed truffle season by a month. Maybe next time...

We didn't buy too much fresh food, but I was once again tempted by the asparagus.

A Primer on Foie Gras

2010-04-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

Instead of every third stall being a foie gras vendor (like St Cyprien), at the Sarlat market, it was every other vendor! Seriously, foie gras was starting to feel akin to a hamburger in terms of the frequency in which I saw (and ate!) it.

In the above photo, you can see multiple whole foie gras livers (foie gras entier, the most expensive kind) - the smaller ones on the left are goose livers, and the larger ones on the right are duck livers.

The goose foie gras is more expensive and has a more delicate flavor. The duck tastes a little stronger but I think they are both good. We've tasted a lot of foie gras over the past few days, and I think my purchase list is now up to 7 tins (of the pure stuff, not the various mixed kinds you can also buy). Maybe I'm getting a little carried away.

We also drove past a foie gras farm on one of our routes - I proposed a stop but my companion shuddered in horror. We'd rather stay ignorant though the geese I saw from the road looked quite content roaming around...

Le Vieux Logis in Tremolat

2010-04-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

After a satisfying session of retail therapy in Périgueux, we headed to the small town of Tremolat to have dinner at Le Vieux Logis, a Michelin 2-star restaurant and Relais et Chateaux property, located kind of in the middle of nowhere, accessed by really small windy roads.

Their dining room was just beautiful, decorated in pale blues and reds. And I have to say that the service and pacing of the meal was just impeccable. We started with some little treats placed on the table just after we ordered - small potatoes with aioli and some kind of mini brochette. It was followed by the official amuse, a vegetable vichyssoise soup that was poured carefully into a bowl with a small pile of chopped veggies at the bottom. I have to say that I'm not a fan of cold soups, nor of vichyssoise, but I may just have been converted today! This soup was just wonderful - light yet creamy, salty but not too salty. And the small bits of mystery veggies were a nice textural contrast.

Our official first course arrived next, with the most impressive presentation. It was a small circle of foie gras, with a tower of spun caramel sugar standing on top of it. I was told to break the tower into pieces and to eat the shattered pieces of sugar with the foie gras - served with small pieces of toast. I'm not sure this photo does it justice:

The between-course treat came next - a foie gras creme brulee. It was just like a creme brulee with a foie gras flavor. Very salty and oddly satisfying. At this point, I'm starting to think I may just be reaching my foie gras saturation point.

The next course was nice and petite - a small order of sauteed scallops with a sweet pea puree and lots of pretty green foam. A nice and light counterpoint after all that foie gras.

Now at this point, I think we're past the halfway mark and am wondering how much more food I can possible consume. So we get to the main course, which is lamb loin, served with one very nice asparagus spear and a red and yellow pepper bruschetta. I think this was good. I can't quite remember - my taste buds were becoming a little dulled at this point.

Finally, we hit the cheese course. Now, I always love the cheese course in Europe. You get such a wide variety and some really stinky, unpasteurized options that would never make it through U.S. Customs. The chevre here has been really good and was excellent tonight as well. I lost track of the other cheeses I picked.

We next had a small palate cleanser of a light mint granita served under a creamy chocolate mousse (also very light and refreshing).

Although the pacing throughout the meal had been perfect, I was starting to get a little tired (staying out all day from the morning will do that to a girl). Finally, dessert! A fresh fruit Vacherin, served with pina colada sorbet with various tropical fruit (including dragonfruit - they can get this in the heart of the Dordogne?! Very impressive!) It was a great end to the meal.

We had a little coffee and tea, and were brought some little tuille cookies and madeleines.

Sated to the point of no return, we rolled out of the restaurant a few hours later and made the long, dark and windy 50 minute drive back to Beynac.

Shopping in Périgueux

2010-04-21T00:15:00.000-07:00

We awoke to a cloudy day and had a late start for Périgueux, the capital city of the Perigord. It's not a typical must-see on the itinerary, but we wanted to go to a big town and do some shopping. Périgueux seemed about the size of Avignon, with a combination of the medieval picturesque and the modern commercial. We had a light lunch at a salon de thé where I saw my new favorite sign shown above.

Oddly enough the street cafes of Périgueux were nowhere near as cute as in Avignon or Aix as we wandered around looking for a place to have a snack later in the day. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to have my ice-cream today!

Dinner in Domme

2010-04-20T02:38:00.000-07:00

It was the afternoon of my third day in the French countryside and there were two things I had yet to do - have a nice meal in a restaurant and go to the supermarket. For those who have traveled to house rentals in the European countryside, you will realize that #2 is critical! However, Stephanie, the owner of La Maisonette, had kindly arranged to leave us with a small starter set of groceries when we arrived, including some half and half, strawberries, pasta/sauce, orange juice and cookies. After multiple house rentals, this is the first time anyone has been this thoughtful - which meant that our supermarket trip could be delayed without too much consequence!

So in the afternoon, I set to remedying #1 - finding a place for a nice meal (all I'd eaten by 5 pm was a ham and cheese croissant and a massive ice-cream sundae!) Alas, it was Monday. I started out with an ambitious search of Michelin-starred places. None of them were open on Monday night. Then, I went down the list of restaurants in Stephanie's helpful house book. I was 0/5 so I gave up and we decided to go over to Le Roque-Gageac to check out the pretty town (another of Les Plus Beaux Villages de France).

Nothing was open there on Monday at 7 pm. Seriously, nothing. I took a few pictures and we left.

We headed up the hill to Domme, yet another of Les Plus Beaux Villages (the Dordogne is swimming with them). It's a old bastide town with high walls and teeny tiny winding streets. The thought of driving through this town in the crush of summer was somewhat terrifying. We parked and finally found an open restaurant, Le Bistrot. I had a classic Perigord meal - the "formule" (set menu) with a foie gras starter, cassoulet for a main and the walnut cake for dessert. It was nice, relatively fast (for dining in France) and a deal (€15 for all three courses). Parfait!

Then we walked over the side of the town to look over the fabulous sunset views of the Dordogne river.

And yes! The ice cream place by the view was open! So I had two scoops of artisanal sorbet - apricot and peach. Not as good as my pear the previous day (same local ice cream maker) but perfect for sitting on the terrace and happily watching the sunset in Perigord.

It may seem that we really like gardens...

2010-04-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

We visited Les Jardins du Manoir D'Eyrignac yesterday afternoon. Now, this is not typically a stop on the major sights of the Dordogne list. But it came highly recommended from someone and we knew he'd get a real kick that we actually went to visit.

The gardens were more formal than Marqueyssac, but what I liked most was that the gorgeous chateau had been in the same family for 22 generations (over 500 years) and the family was living there still. And it was such a pretty chateau.

We also learned that you can do weddings and other events there, and that their annual maintenance costs were €700k - with 80,000 annual visitors, they were still short of covering their maintenance costs. It's a true labor of love for the family.

Oh, and I promised my daughter I'd post a picture every day to show my ridiculous self-indulgence on the ice-cream front. This is my peach melba of the day - more chantilly than ice cream!

The Lascaux II Caves

2010-04-20T01:41:00.000-07:00

There are lots of caves here in the Perigord but the most famous of them all is Lascaux. The caves were discovered in 1940 and opened to the public for about 15 years before being closed due to the the carbon dioxide damage from all the visitors.

In the 80s, Lascaux II opened for visitors - a full and precise fascimile of the original caves. It reminded me a little of the Ramses II temples we visited in Abu Simbel, which had been laboriously dismantled and moved to an alternate location to save them from the Aswan High Dam flooding.

Lascaux was also the name of a basement French restaurant in San Francisco in the early '90s, on Sutter St, where my husband and I went to dinner when we were still dating!

Lascaux turned out to be very different from the caves we visited at Nerja, Spain last summer. It was a very small cramped space but the paintings were beautiful and remarkably lifelike, with the contours of the cave walls being used to enhance the animal bodies and a real sense of movement. Considering our Cro-Magnon ancestors were using saliva and earth pigments, and burning animal fat for light - their achievement seems even more extraordinary. The photos you see don't do it justice.

Note - you can't buy tickets at the Lascaux site. You have to buy them in the town of Montignac first and their website is a big old mess of flash and sound, but with no discernibly useful info. Our trip involved driving back and forth and a spectacular .5 km sprint to get us to the cave just 10 mins late for the one and only English tour of the day!

€5.50 for a dozen escargots - what a deal!

2010-04-19T16:20:00.000-07:00

There was an escargot vendor at the Sunday market at St Cyprien yesterday. I walked by once and thought to myself, pre-made escargots seem a little weird. On the way back, I was obviously a little more hungry because I stopped to take a closer look.

The vendor had frozen escargots bourguignonne for sale - this is the classic (and my favorite) preparation, in a parsley, garlic, butter sauce. For €5.50! I couldn't resist and bought a pack. The instructions seemed simple enough - bake at 180° C for 10 minutes.

After figuring out the oven, I threw in some white asparagus to roast and the escargots to bake. And it became part of my impromptu Sunday dinner - the fresh baguette dipped into the bourguignonne sauce was a highlight.

Les Jardins Suspendus de Marqueyssac

2010-04-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

We headed to these gardens in the afternoon with relatively low expectations. I had read a really nice write-up and since the weather was so beautiful, we thought a walk around some gardens might be a good way to salvage the day after 3-4 hours were wasted on car-related issues.

All our expectations were exceeded by miles! The place was crowded with mostly French families and there was a lot to do. First we were starving so we stopped by the tea room to have a late lunch. The room had a gorgeous view and was beautifully decorated. And had a peacock walking around inside. It seemed to resent our intrusion and stalked out shortly after we arrived.

My croque-monsieur was just so-so, but my dessert, proudly called La Dame de Marqueyssac was a sight to behold. The pear sorbet buried under all that whipped cream was my favorite.

After thoroughly enjoying our very late lunch, we spent the next 2 hours hiking up and down various trails - there are apparently 6 km worth of paths and trails. I believe we walked over 5 km of them! The gardens are situated on a hill and the views were great.

The formal gardens had both wild elements and lots of sculpted boxwoods.

And the chateau was nicely restored with a few rooms of period furnishing. What a country estate this would have been in the 19th century!

Breathtaking Beynac

2010-04-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

This was our first glimpse of Beynac, the town we were staying in. Isn't it gorgeous?!

Market Day in St. Cyprien

2010-04-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

We awoke to a bright and gorgeous day and headed out to the Sunday market at St Cyprien, a little town about 10 minutes drive away. The car was driving rather sluggishly and we vowed to go to the nearest Hertz station to try to exchange it later in the day.

The market was lovely, perhaps not quite as picture-perfect as the ones we went to in Provence, but it was pretty darn close. One of the biggest differences was that every third stall sold foie gras! We tasted and bought a few tins from the stall pictured above. This is a short summary of the instructions the seller told me:

Store in the cupboard or pantry.
Put it into the refrigerator one day before you plan to eat it.
Open the tin on the top AND on the bottom, and push the foie gras out.
Use a thin, sharp knife dipped in hot water to cut the block into slices.
Make sure the slices are not too thick.
You need to dip the knife into the hot water after every cut so your edges are smooth.
Serve with country bread. Not brioche. Not honey bread. Do not toast the bread.
Make sure you fan the foie gras out when you are serving it.
Make sure you don't spread the foie gras on the bread, just place the slide on top and eat it together.

I may have missed a few details. He talked to me for a long time ;)

We also bought 3 kinds of cheese, the right kind of bread to eat with the foie gras (!), white asparagus, little teeny, super sweet strawberries and a great ham and cheese crepe for a late breakfast from a lovely husband and wife team.

And finally, of course, we couldn't resist the poulet de fermier, a roasted young farm chicken - which we planned to have for dinner. Also sold by a lovely husband and wife team!

All in all, a great way to spend Sunday morning!

Alas, things turned a little sour later on, as our deadbeat Ford Focus would not start. I had to call the Hertz emergency number and a tow truck turned up after a 50 min wait. Then another 30 min wait for a taxi to take us to Sarlat, where another car was procured. Note that the new car was procured from a Hertz franchisee in a Shell gas station, where they sold both wine and foie gras!

Foie gras - from a gas station! That's why I love France.

What An Adventure!

2010-04-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

I arrived in London on Wednesday to a cloudy, chilly day. After a restless night, Thursday dawned bright and sunny. I headed into the office at Staines (35 min train ride from Waterloo station) to find that some sort of volcano in Iceland was erupting and my colleague's flight from Dublin was cancelled and he would be late to our meeting.

I didn't think too much of it and continued on with my day. A couple of hours later, I started paying a little more attention to the volcano ash cloud. We were scheduled to fly from Gatwick to Bordeaux on Saturday morning to spend a girls' week in a castle-side cottage in Beynac, one of the most beautiful villages in France, located in the Dordogne Valley. My other colleagues began urging me to book some Eurostar tickets as a backup. I finally did, just to appease them, but I bought the fully refundable fare and really didn't believe that I'd need them.

Fast forward a few days. Europe is in chaos. Millions of passengers are stranded, including 3 out of the 5 girls of our group. My Sat morning flight was indeed canceled and Eurostar tickets are all sold out. Meanwhile the French railway union have decided to strike and the TGV trains from Paris to Bordeaux were unavailable for purchase. So we got on a packed Eurostar train, got what seemed to be the last Hertz car in Paris (after waiting in line for 45 mins) and started driving 650 km south to Beynac.

Let's just start by saying that getting from the Gare du Nord to the southern periphery road to the A10 highway is no mean feat. Especially for someone who hadn't driven in downtown Paris for at least 10 years plus had not driven a stick shift for 2 years. About an hour and a few u-turns later, we were finally heading south on the highway.

On our way to Orleans, we made a highway rest stop where the ham and cheese parisian sandwich from the Paul bakery far outshone almost any sandwich available in Menlo Park! Of course, our temperamental car had some issues starting up again plus has some strange choking rough patches when you're running in gear under 2500 RPMs. We going to try and trade it in to a nearby Hertz tomorrow.

Hours and hours later, about 14 hours after we left our hotel that morning, we made it to La Maisonette, our rental house in Beynac. It's full of character and wonderfully decorated in a charming manner. Alas, the 300 feet walk from the parking lot to the house involved an extremely uneven giant cobblestone path sloping down at a 30 degree angle. Suffice to say, it's lucky that I didn't break my neck or my nice high heeled boots.

And so, the two of us are banging around this house tonight, hoping against hope that some of our friends will be able to make it over the pond before the end of the week. And also hoping that the darn volcano calms down, the ash cloud dissipates, and that we can actually fly home in a week.

Grand Central and Metrazur

2010-04-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

We headed to New York for a 5 day trip over Spring Break and stayed at the Grand Hyatt above Grand Central Station in Midtown. It's really not one of my favorite hotels, but I can get to the office in under 5 minutes, which is super valuable when I'm blearily rousing myself to be in at 9 am eastern time.

We arrived around 8 pm and headed into the Main Concourse of Grand Central to sort out some dinner. Although the basement food court was tempting (I'm serious, I love that food court), we ended up at Metrazur on the east balcony.

The restaurant is beautiful and the ambiance in Grand Central can't be beat. They also had a great deal for a prix fixe - pick 3 courses off the menu and get 2 glasses of wine for $44. Since each appetizer was around $15 and the entrees were in the high $20s, we decided this was the way to go.

I started with a white asparagus salad that was excellent - my first white asparagus of the year! I followed with some wild striped bass with more asparagus (green this time), which was very good. We also ordered a couple of the angus strip steak with french fries - which I liberally sampled from Amara and Sean.

Desserts were pretty but somewhat unmemorable. We finished eating around 10 and wandered back upstairs to our room. Which was billed as a parlor suite. But had the smallest bathroom in creation. Do not book a Lexington Suite at this hotel - trust me on this.

The NYC cupcake challenge

2010-04-04T17:29:00.001-07:00

I like my cupcakes small and cute. So I never used to like Crumbs in the cupcake wars. I'd prefer Magnolia Bakery (made famous by SNL's viral hit Lazy Sunday) or Buttercup Bake Shop any day (I'm referring exclusively to the NYC cupcake challenge here - SF Bay Area is a completely different matter).

The regular Crumbs cupcake which I first experienced a few years ago was the size of a small cake. I can't even remember if it was good. I just remember it was huge. And that I ate half and felt sick.

But this time, a new Crumbs outlet opened up in Grand Central (as did a new Magnolia outlet) and a colleague told me about their 12 pack of mini-cupcakes, known as a Taste pack. It's pictured above - 12 mini versions of their top sellers.

It was awesome! 2 little bites of heaven per cupcake. At $18 for the dozen, it was definitely not as good a deal as their mega-monster cupcakes. But so much more enjoyable for me.

My favorite was the red velvet. There were a few unusual chocolate variants including cookie dough, oreo cookie, mint chocolate and brownie. I loved this pack! I can't wait to get it again next time!

Breakfast in New York

2010-04-04T17:12:00.000-07:00

I'm a girl who likes her protein in the morning. I learned this the hard way when I got gestational diabetes with my second pregnancy, and had to monitor my blood sugar like a hawk. My blood sugar spikes very high in the morning with carbs, more so than any other time of the day. So now, I make sure to have protein every morning - usually involving eggs and ham.

There is no protein at the continental breakfast supplied in the Hyatt's Grand Club. There is a whole counter full of carbs. OK, there are some desultory looking cold hard boiled eggs sitting around, but really?!

My favorite breakfast is a breakfast sandwich on whole wheat english muffin. That's what I make when I'm at home. In a pinch, the breakfast ham sandwich at Starbucks also does the trick very well. That's what I had on my first morning.

On my second morning, I wandered into a local coffee place called Macchiato. I had a really nice chai tea and an excellent ciabatta roll with scrambled eggs, cheese and ham. So big I could have had the other half for lunch, had I not had other lunch plans. I was very sad to throw the other half away later in the day :(

The next couple of mornings, I remembered that I last had great breakfast sandwiches at a little place called Dishes in the Grand Central food court. I love this place. Not only did they make a mean ham and spinach muffin sandwich, they also had chocolate croissants from Balthazar! The latter for my daughter of course.

And that's what I love about breakfast in New York - some form of the breakfast sandwich is offered at practically every outlet. Fast, reasonable and gets me anchored with the protein I need!

Full Time Job = No Time for Blogging

2010-04-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

It's pitiful that my last post was over 2 months ago. I swear that good things have been happening in my life that I want to share with everyone. I just keep forgetting. Plus the fact that my not-so-trusty MacBook Air died once in January (right after the last blog post) and once again in March (and is currently in the Apple Store ICU) has put me off my game in terms of personal productivity. Plus I can't get my hands on the iPad we bought yesterday because my kids and hubby keep fighting over it!

But here's a short summary to bring everyone up to speed:

Came back from Thailand and started a new, more than full-time job. Work a lot. More than you'd think. Email and powerpoint are my life.
Went to Vegas for said job's Sales Kick-Off, slept very little. Blackjack bonding with new colleagues.
Went to Northstar at Tahoe for our annual ski trip. Left the slopes to take conference calls for said job. Tried Traci des Jardins' new restaurant at the Ritz. Too tired to blog about it.
Called for jury duty for a 60 day long murder trial. Managed to get excused due to said job.
Went to management offsite at Half Moon Bay for said job. Actually slept very well and took some lovely walks along the cliffs.
Went to New York for spring break where said job allowed me to work out of the Midtown office for a few days.
Preparing for a trip to London for said job next week which allowed me to expense the airfare for wonderful upcoming trip to the Dordogne.

That's about it - will now work on posting details about New York food and fun.

Tech support from 8,000 miles away

2010-01-23T01:55:00.000-08:00

So my sister and I are in Thailand for a 6 day visit with my parents. Yes, I know I was just here in November, but I thought I'd be nice to my sister and assist in the 20 hour journey with her 23 month old toddler. That journey is a story in and of itself, but I'm still too traumatized to post about it...

One of our goals this trip was to set up Skype with a webcam for my mother so my parents can video chat with us when we're back in the Bay Area. The first step, which was accomplished the day before we arrived, was getting high speed internet installed with a wi-fi network. We don't know the very nice technician who came and got everything up and running, but we are deeply grateful to him.

We walked in the house at 1 a.m. our first day, connected to the network and all was good (especially since both my sis and I have a mountain of work to do while we are here). The next day, we trotted out and bought a webcam. Then we tried to install it on my mother's laptop - it was most definitely not plug-and-play. One hour and one very frustrated sister later, we decided that the laptop was a piece of s#%t and gave up.

It's actually kind of funny - when we booted up that laptop, the info screen said it was running Windows 2008 (what?!) brought to you by... with a photo of a pointing Bill Gates. We figured out it was an illegal copy of Windows.

So today, we set off for the big electronics store to buy a whole new laptop. It turned out to be a fascinating exercise. We found a nice Dell laptop (Inspiron 6600 in a lovely deep red) for 19,000 baht, which is roughly $520. Then we learned it only came loaded with DOS. DOS! Seriously! I wasn't even sure I heard him right! (Turns out it's FreeDOS - an open source OS)

The nice salesman told us that we could get all the software we wanted for 800 baht ($23). We were confused. I asked about just installing Windows. He responded that we could also get the real Windows for 12,000 baht ($350) with no other software. That's over half the cost of the machine we were buying! After a very short (almost non-existent in fact!) moral argument about the sanctity of copyright, we went with the 800 baht option (which was done on the side by our kindly salesman, and not paid to the store itself).

A couple of hours later, we returned to pick up our machine and handed over 800 baht in cash. For that princely sum, we received the nice salesman's mobile number and the promise of tech support for my mother if there were any software issues. And Windows 7, MS Office, Photoshop, Acrobat, Nero, QuickTime Pro and an anti-virus software package. In fact, the desktop was completely cluttered with application shortcuts.

We're now conducting a tutorial with my mother (who has only used her computer for email in the past) and hoping that we don't have to do too much troubleshooting from 8,000 miles away.

Good Eating in Santa Fe

2009-12-29T09:51:00.001-08:00

I love coming to Santa Fe around the holidays - there is usually some snow on the ground and all the adobe buildings are decorated with the traditional luminaria they call farolitos. Of course, it seems to be extra cold this year, which means our outdoor activities are extremely limited. And snow is forecasted for today, which my kids are eagerly anticipating.

The heart of Santa Fe is the main Plaza - we visited the Palace of the Governors where we learned about Santa Fe history and the old trade routes of the Spanish Empire. And did some shopping with Native Americans artisans under the old Portal - where folks have been selling their wares for over a hundred years.

The dining is excellent here in Santa Fe - our first meal out was Sunday Brunch at Santacafe, a few blocks off the Plaza. After wandering around in the sub-freezing temps, hot chocolate never tasted so good! I had a really good spinach Nicoise salad - I don't know why all restaurants don't always do Nicoise with spinach, it's so much better than with regular greens. Amara's lamb chops were good but the gorgozola polenta they came with was remarkable. We did notice that Giada had visited here on one of her Food Network specials.

Dinner that night was at the historic La Fonda Hotel, the last stop on the old Santa Fe Trail. We had a New Mexican meal at La Pozuela, which couldn't be beat for ambiance. It's situated in the old courtyard in the middle of the hotel (which thankfully has been covered over), with the lights in the trees and the brightly painted window panes, was simply a lovely place for a casual meal. And I had sopapillas for dessert, smothered in honey - mmmm.

Christmas Eve at Alexander's Steakhouse

2009-12-25T00:32:00.001-08:00

Our Christmas Eve was spent at the San Jose Tech Museum at the Star Trek Exhibit, where we got to sit in Captain Kirk's chair and use the Transporter to beam down to a nearby planet. It was nice having practically the whole exhibit to ourselves.

After that, we headed to Alexander's Steakhouse in Cupertino for our dinner. We love this restaurant because it combines a high end steakhouse with a number of Asian touches, including an impressive selection of Wagyu beef. Their appetizer of hamachi shots is phenomenal.
However, tonight, I ordered a special of foie gras soup, served with cranberry espuma (Spanish for foam). It was served in a tall glass, with a creamy warm foie gras soup on the bottom and a cold cranberry foam on the top. It was an excellent soup, although very rich - it tasted like pureed foie gras with a bunch of cream added. I drank it with a straw and hubby called it my foie gras milkshake.

Other appetizers we shared included popcorn crab (surprisingly good), truffled french fries (really good for thick cut fries - I'm typically only partial to skinny cut fries...), edamame and fried shishito peppers.

The between course palate cleanser was a lychee gelee with pomegranate pearls. Sounded (and looked) better than it tasted though.

My New York Strip entree was fine but hubby got the New York Trio - consisting of American Angus beef, Australian F1 (a Wagyu and Holstein crossbreed) and Japanese A5 Wagyu. They were presented on a slate slab labeled with the word "Guess". It really wasn't very hard to identify the three kinds of beef. The Wagyu was almost disgustingly fat, with a richness than practically ran down the back of your throat. The Angus was just a nice New York cut of fairly typical prime beef. And the Australian was in between.

For dessert we ordered a couple of chocolate specialties including a modern interpretation of a Buche de Noel - one of my favorite holiday treats.
And finally, the meal ended with a big bundle of cotton candy - watermelon flavor today. All kids in the know who've been there before usually ask to make their own in the kitchen. Mei could have taken or left the meal (she's not a big meat eater) but the make-your-own cotton candy makes it all worthwhile for her!
After a nice flowering pot of white jasmine tea, we stumbled home to await Santa's arrival. Happy Holidays to everyone!

Fun Things At Narita Airport

2009-11-09T22:46:00.001-08:00

I have spent countless hours in transit at Narita over the past few years. Only this time did I find the Origami Museum. Above is a Japanese feudal scene, all made from origami. Below is a lovely Japanese garden in springtime, also all made from origami.

I found some Kit Kat - regular boring chocolate Kit Kat plus Strawberry Kit Kat, Cheesecake Kit Kat and the ever-popular Green Tea Kit Kat.
I also found the cutest face masks - Disney princesses, Winnie-the-Pooh and Hello Kitty - all sized for children. I have to admit, I was tempted...

An orgy of truffles

2009-11-08T22:29:00.000-08:00

So after my extremely long drive to dinner, I found out that it's the first day of a three week truffle festival at Biscotti. My dining companion practically lives at this hotel and knows both the Maitre D' and the Chef (a lovely young Italian from the Piedmont region).

We got the full treatment when a domed dish bearing multiple knobbly lumps of black and the coveted white truffle is grandly presented to us. When the glass dome was removed, we could smell the rich, earthy aroma. The truffles had just arrived 3 hours ago, fresh off the Thai Airways flight from Rome - they originated in Piedmont, very close to the farm where the Chef grew up. I have never seen this amount of fresh truffles close up.

We kind of went overboard when we ordered - probably due to massive hunger after the long traffic jams.
Crusted Mullet Eggs with White Truffle, Mashed Celeriac, Robiolino Cheese Fondue
Truffles and a slightly running poached egg in a savory crust. It was divine. As with all the later dishes, the Chef came out and shaved a very generous portion of truffles over my dish. He just kept on shaving. I think I benefited from my girlfriend's most favored client status.

Roasted Turbot with Black Truffle, Braised Endives, Jerusalem Artichokes and Tomino Cheese Fondue
I have to admit that I liked this dish the least. Which was a bummer since it was my main dish. I just didn't think the truffles went as well with the fish. And again, he shaved an incredible amount of black truffle all over the dish.
White Truffle Risotto with Boston Lobster and Sora Cheese Fondue
My companion's starter. Truffles and risotto - a match made in heaven.

Beef Tenderloin with Black TRuffle, Sauteed Porcini Mushrooms, Cornetti Beans and Pecorino Crutin Cheese Fondue
The main course I should have ordered! I had a bite and this was divine. Truffles and steak - who knew?

I concluded that I like white truffles better - of course, they command a higher price, I learned. I also learned that the Chef takes the truffles home with him every night. They were too valuable to leave in the hotel kitchen!

A Primer on Driving in Bangkok

2009-11-06T01:04:00.000-08:00

For most of you reading this blog, my advice is to never, ever, ever even think about trying to drive in Bangkok.

One night, I jumped into the car and headed into town to meet a girlfriend for dinner at Biscotti, the Italian restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel, my favorite hotel in Bangkok. It took me an hour and 45 mins to cover a distance of just over 6 miles. No weather, no accidents - just random Bangkok traffic.

During that excruciating drive time, I listened to the all-traffic radio station (the intersection by the hotel is at a complete standstill?! Oh great.) and mentally composed this blog.

Now, I actually learned how to drive in Bangkok, many years ago. However, I am now used to driving in a more rules-based orderly system - as opposed to the free-for-all, completely opportunistic way people drive in Thailand. The usual Thai traits of kindness, politeness and consideration all fly right out the window once they get behind the wheel of a car.

So here are a few rules of the road:

Any open space on a road must be filled up - if the space is too small for a car, it will be filled by a whole mess of motorcycles or some enterprising tuk-tuk with a fantastic turning radius.
Lane markers have no reason for existence.
When turning left or right from a three lane road, feel free to overtake all the losers waiting for their turn, and turn from the center lane.
Never start up immediately when your light turns green. There will be at least 5 red light runners speeding through the intersection. Do not get in their way.
When trying to make a lane change, no one will let you in unless you force your way in. Assume they will not hit you since your car is nicer than theirs.
Do not apply Rule #5 in front of a bus. They will hit you and those bus drivers are all crazy anyway.
A typical bus driver will pick up and drop off passengers at a stop, then veer out to the fast lane in heavy traffic. And veer back into the curbside lane to stop at their next stop. This whole exercise will have allowed them to pass 2-3 cars, but have them cutting off countless others with their veering back and forth.
There are a million taxis in Bangkok, all cruising slowly in the curbside lane looking for fares. If they find one, they will stop. No matter where they are or how inconvenient for other drivers. The most popular taxi color is a bright, neon pink.
Many of the main overpasses in town have lanes that can go either direction, depending on whether it's the inbound or outbound commute time. There are big lights above these lanes - red X or green arrow. Do not assume that those lights are correct. Do not head into an open lane on an overpass ever. Always follow someone else. That way, they will be the ones in the head-on collision, not you.
Getting out of the way for an ambulance is optional.

And there you have it. Go to Bangkok and check it out if you don't believe me.

I was 45 mins late for dinner. Thankfully, my girlfriend was 35 mins late - so I was only net 10 mins late. By Thai standards, that's perfectly acceptable. It took me 20 mins to get home later that night.

On my way to Bangkok

2009-11-04T00:19:00.000-08:00

I'm blogging from the UA Lounge in Narita Airport after a pleasant 10.5 hour flight from San Francisco. Of course, I first went to the ANA Lounge because their food is better and had my big bowl of nice udon. But I came back to the UA Lounge for their free wi-fi and the proximity to my departure gate.

I had the oddest encounter on my first flight though.

So, I'm sitting comfortably reclined, 6-7 hours into the flight, reading the Kindle and listening to music with headphones on. The UA male flight attendant who covers our area came over and squatted down next to me in the aisle. I took my headphones off, thinking he was coming to take my lunch order.

"So do you think they'll let me take a banana in?" he says.

I hesitate, somewhat confused. Is this a joke? Should I wait for a punchline? Did I mishear him? But no, he seems to be waiting for an answer. I presume he means taking the banana into Japan.

"No, I don't think that would be a good idea," I finally reply.

"What about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?" he continues.

"No, I don't think that will work either," I say.

He looks a little crestfallen.

"You'd better eat them now." I finally said.

And he nods, straightens up and walks back towards the galley.

Now you've gotta agree, that was weird!

The best porchetta sandwich

2009-10-30T16:10:00.001-07:00

Well the posts have been few and far between, primarily because I've been working rather a lot, and when I get home after a long day of work and commuting, all my brain is capable of processing is reality TV. Maybe that explains the ratings for all those strange shows out there.

Anyway, my new commute is rather long - the main upside is that I'm working next to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. And every once in a while, I deviate from my usual spinach salad lunch and walk across the street to enjoy the views and dining.

On Thursdays, the lunchtime Ferry Plaza market features a lot of different prepared foods. One of my favorite options is the porchetta sandwich from the Roli Roti stand (they also sell at the Saturday market). This week, I actually waited 20 mins in line for this sandwich - it is that good.

First they split an Acme roll, rub it on the big cutting board to gather some of the juices on the bread, then load it up with slices of porchetta (a seasoned Italian pork roast off their giant rotisserie). Then they place a few bits of crackling fatty skin on the top, followed by caramelized onions and a pile of arugula and watercress. They finish it off with a sprinkle of a special blend of salt, pepper, rosemary and god knows what else. Sliced in half, the sandwich is presented to you on a paper plate. I can't think of a better use of $8.50!

I usually take my sandwich over to the one of the communal tables in front of the book store with a view of the ferry traffic. I actually like eating this alone - it's a bit of a messy exercise. I start out by telling myself that it's such a big sandwich, I'll only eat half. Have I told you how much I love this sandwich?! Some bites are truly exquisite, with the perfect combo of porchetta, cracking skin and seasonings.

I'll really have to try and restrain myself from eating the sandwich right away next time so I can take a picture for posterity.

After I finish the first half, I sit there and look at the second half. Then I start eating it - reasoning that I don't really have a good place to put the leftovers in the office or that I'll just take another bite or two.

A few minutes later, I come to the realization that once again, I have devoured an enormous 6 inch long, 4 inch high, fat-laden sandwich in under 10 minutes. And to complete my happiness, I traipse on down to Rechiutti and pick up a Burnt Caramel chocolate.

Fully sated, I wander back into the zoo of my office.

Ghirardelli Chocolate Festival Year 2

2009-09-14T15:47:00.000-07:00

After last year's parking debacle, I was a little reluctant to park at Ghirardelli Square for this year's chocolate festival - but since we had a baby in tow, we went for it. The garage was better organized by an order of magnitude this year - entry and exit were smooth. Yes, it was a little pricey, but hey - super convenient.

Alas, the weather was not as cooperative as last year - it was a strange weather weekend in SF - muggy, not quite cold and it started raining part way through the afternoon. The format for the Chocolate Festival this year was the same as last year - we bought $20 tickets that had 15 tastings each.

The tastings were good - we had Ciao Bella gelato (Chocolate Hazelnut, Alphonso Mango and my younger daughter's favorite, Blood Orange Sorbet - the latter two clearly having nothing to do with chocolate!), more gelato from Gelateria Naia (Straciatella and Chocolate Hazelnut), various toffees and best of all, handfilled mini cream puffs from Pacific Puffs. These were lovely - and one of the longest lines we stood in - a mini version of Beard Papa. Alas, by the time we made it to the Kara's Cupcakes stand, they had run out :(

The most fun was the special Chocolate Tea at Crown & Crumpet. I've blogged about this tea room in the past - it's a wonderful experience especially if you like have afternoon tea like I do! The Chocolate Tea was a plate of chocolate goodies and a selection of tea tastings. On the plate were chocolate banana sandwiches, tea-infused truffles, chocolate hazelnut tarts and a chocolate chip scone served with jam and clotted cream. The tea tastings were for chocolate tea, chocolate mint tea, chocolate banana tea (not as disgusting as you might think!) and chocolate orange tea. I like the last one the best but frankly, don't think that chocolate should be paired in teas as a rule!

We were a little "sweeted" out by then - and the craving for something savory kicked in. So we ordered some plain scones, some sausage rolls, a baked potato and some crumpets as well. Sitting on the terrace with a grey and overcast view of Alcatraz and the Bay, it was pleasurable way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Back home... kinda

2009-09-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

O.K. it's been a busy month. We returned home from Thailand, stayed for 36 hours, then left on a roadtrip to southern Oregon for a wedding.

On the way up north, we toured the Ave of the Giants, drove through a giant Redwood and stayed in Eureka at the lovely Carter House Inn. Our room was in the attic which was charming and atmospheric, but a drag (literally!) with the luggage.

We spent a few days on the Oregon coast in Bandon, attending a family wedding. Where the advertised internet access in the beachside house rental was non-existent. I was reduced to sitting on the sidewalk in front of a nearby motel...

On the way home, we stopped in Mendocino after a harrowing drive on Highway 1.

Note to self: Mendocino is really far away from everything. DO NOT make it a stop on your way home unless you have a lot of spare time.

We stayed at the McCallum House Inn where we had a lovely dinner and an even lovelier breakfast in their dining room. Our attic room here was exceptional - I'd stay here again in a heartbeat.

I hadn't been to Mendocino is over 15 years and had forgotten how charming it was. Still, must remember previous note to self about the drive...

Then we finally got back home with 5 days to spare before the start of school. Phew - can't you see why I haven't been blogging?!

One last fit of gluttony

2009-08-09T08:38:00.001-07:00

Sunday brunch here in Bangkok has become quite an institution in terms of the lavish hotel buffets. There is truly no comparison with anything in the U.S. - even the $75 Ritz Carlton Mother's Day buffet is paltry by Thai standards.

We do like to indulge while we're here. Last Sunday, we went to the buffet at the Shangri-la Hotel by the river. That's a very family-oriented buffet with entertainment for the kids, but also with foie gras for the parents.

Today we went to the distinctly more adult buffet at the Four Seasons, supposedly the most expensive brunch in Bangkok. This is due to the fact that there's an unlimited flow of alcohol throughout the brunch - from mimosas and bellinis, to beer and bloody marys.

It was a lovely way to spend 3 hours - and the foie gras here was better than last week. There was a full grill with steaks, lamb chops, lobster, large prawns & lots of other foods cooked to order. Sushi and sashimi were cut to order and I had some amazing unagi. The custom California Roll I ordered for older daughter was wonderful. Plus other stations for Thai grilled meats, pasta, omelets, waffles, schwarma carved to order.... the list goes on and on.

A beautiful Thai station.

A unique caviar and roe station located in their carp pond, with the server standing knee-deep in water during the whole buffet. The kids loved this one!

Great Indian food - where a nice man demonstrated making naan in the tandoor.

Thai desserts - alas, they look better than they taste in my book.

Three kinds of honey, with a dripping honeycomb display.

And a fully laded dessert table with lots of other desserts. My favorite was some crepes suzette served with fresh mango. But I had tastes of god-knows how many other things. My last order of a banana souffle did not arrive, which was probably a good thing considering how full I was!

Mother's Day in Thailand

2009-08-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

I've always been lucky enough to have two mother's days each year - one in May in the U.S. and one in Thailand during our annual trip. Mother's Day in Thailand is the day of the Queen's Birthday - August 12. Alas, this year, we are heading home on August 11, so poor me - only one Mother's Day celebration this year!

It's fun to be here in the week leading up to Mother's Day though - all the major shopping centers have special decorations and exhibits, and most buildings are decorated with pale blue, the Queen's color.

Emporium, the shopping center in our building, has a beautiful floral display this year - of Siam Tulips. When I first saw the promotional posters, I was surprised, thinking they had imported tulips for the floral displays. Instead, they've actually just renamed a local Thai flower to be called the Siam Tulip! It's a pretty flower that often grows wild in rural Thailand and is now exported thoughout Asia.

It's a little strange to see the main concourse of the shopping center transformed into a lush garden, but pleasant nonetheless!

Love the beach!

2009-08-05T07:11:00.000-07:00

We're spending a few days in Hua Hin, a sleepy beach town about 2.5 hours away from Bangkok. It's our usual routine - we eat at the same places and stay in the same hotel, the Hyatt. I actually usually try to get the same rooms every time but with mixed success. This time we were generously upgraded to a rather large suite. Well, since I've stayed here every year since it opened, maybe I'm just due ;)

It's been a good trip - the weather has been mostly overcast, which means it's not as stiflingly hot as usual. We've had lots of beach and pool time and the kids are not too sunburned for the most part - I consider that a success!

Nokia Ultra Screen Theatre

2009-08-02T02:28:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, we discovered these ultra luxury theatres here in Bangkok. This year, we decided to revisit them to watch Harry Potter #6. This time, I remembered to bring my own camera to document the experience!

Here's a shot of the display seats in the lobby to entice theatre-goers in. As a reminder, these tickets are about $18 compared to $4 for a seat in the regular movie theatre (which is already nicer than the Century theaters we go to in California).
We went into the fancy lounge area to wait for the start of the movie. It's very plush with lots of chandeliers. We had drinks and snacks while we waited. Here are the girls using the ubiquitous hand-sanitizing gel (yes, there's a bit of a swine flu paranoia here in Thailand).
And finally, here's Mei relaxing in her leather recliner, just waiting for the movie to start.I was surprised that the theatre was almost full (capacity was 32 seats, 29 were occupied) given the relatively high price.

More food innovations

2009-08-02T02:09:00.000-07:00

Last year, we found pizza in a cone here in Bangkok. This year, I found potato chips on a stick.

A small potato was sliced so it all came out in one long spiral. It was placed on a stick and then fried in a special machine. You could get them in all sorts of flavors. The most popular were cheese and BBQ. I opted for the plain and boring original flavor. Which was really just salt. There were also chocolate and tom yam flavors. We'll have to save those for next time! The original flavor was quite good.

And we found a great little local frozen yogurt place like Red Mango and Pinkberry, called Buddhi Belly. The logo was so cute, I wanted to get a t-shirt that said "I have a buddhi belly" - but alas, although the product was excellent, they hadn't quite figured out how to exploit all the merchandising as yet. Maybe I can talk them into selling me an employee t-shirt...

Back in Thailand

2009-07-28T14:02:00.000-07:00

Goodness, I'm not quite sure where the summer went. We're in Thailand right now - it seems like a whirlwind since we came home from Spain and sent kids off to summer camp etc. There was a bit of a swine flu scare but since it's been resolved, I'll just leave it alone for now.

We were back in California for about a month and then left for Thailand. This is a pretty short trip for us - just 3 weeks, since we need to be in Oregon for a wedding in mid-August.

And Thailand is as wonderful as ever - we're on the 37th floor of our usual apartment building. Check out the sunset over the city skyline.

I dread to weigh myself when I get home, I've been eating everything in sight...

Robatayaki in Midtown

2009-06-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

I've been in New York for a couple of days and have had a few great meals. The first night, we had a large group at Koi - a Nobu-esque place within the Bryant Park Hotel. The miso-glazed cod was almost as good as Nobu and the Hamachi tataki was phenomenal.

I've also had some great fast food (all local purveyors) in the basement dining concourse of Grand Central Station - paninis with organic ingredients for breakfast, huge slices of white pizza with sopressata and some good chicken schwarma and falafel. Hale and Hearty Soups and a cheesecake from Junior's will have to be saved for the next time I'm there.

Finally last night, I found a little robatayaki place in Midtown, just a few blocks from my hotel, called Aburiya Kinnosuke. I sat at the bar and watched with fascination the choreographed movements in the kitchen area in front of me. Although I didn't order sashimi, I loved watching the master at work - how he precisely sliced the fish, and arranged all the servings on large platters adorned with shiso leaves, radish, wasabi and pomegranate seeds, among other things. After every dish, he cleaned his work and arranged his knives and supplies just so, before starting work on another order.

The big grill with scorpion fish and tsukune (minced chicken loaf) being cooked on wooden paddles was also fun to watch. The grill master worked without gloves and turned the various skewers in a pattern that was only discernible to him, but that ensured everything was evenly cooked in the right order.

Roasted Eringi Mushrooms w/ red miso and scallion - grilled on a large houba leaf placed upon a small charcoal grill placed right in front of me.
Grilled anago (sea eel)

DIning in London

2009-06-24T04:14:00.000-07:00

We had a couple of other good meals in London - it's become quite the dining destination.
We went to a Thai restaurant called Busaba Eathai one night - it's the Thai equivalent of Wagamama (if you're familiar with the Japanese chain). Communal tables, modern decor and a good, if not authentic, menu. I would not have given this a try but my sister assured me it was good. We had a whole bunch of dishes including chicken satay, grilled beef, pad thai, gaang kiew waan kai, gaang karee kai, pad see eew, pomelo salad plus 3 kinds of rice (jasmine, coconut and sticky). No dessert though. All in all, given the genre, fast service and reasonable price, I'd give it a solid three stars.

Another night we tried Maze, a Gordon Ramsey eatery. Quite good but alas, a little slow on the service, especially in light of the multi-small course approach. My favorite detail was the utensil holder with slots for the fork, spoon and knife. A nice variant on the fancy chopstick and spoon holder you find in high-end Chinese restaurants.One of their signature dishes is the "assiette" of sandwiches - with a deconstructed BLT and a croque monsieur. The croque monsieur was a little strip of grilled cheese but the BLT was served in a cocktail glass with tomato gelee on the bottom, a white layer of cheesy sauce, and sprinkled with large bits of bacon and circlets of fried onions. Deconstructed indeed! It was interesting but not sure I need to ever have this again.

Londontown

2009-06-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

We stopped in London on our way home from Spain. A few observations:

I really do love the ritual of afternoon tea, with scones served with Devonshire clotted cream.
People smile a lot more in Spain.
It's hard to remember that a pound costs more than a euro.
It's really nice to NOT be using an outdoor bathroom (see prior posts) and to sleep in a big soft bed with Frette sheets. With no mosquitoes in sight.
The Selfridges sale is a crazy place. What recession?! See the photos below - there was a line of 15 people waiting to get into their little Louis Vuitton boutique. Don't they know that LV never goes on sale?!
We had dinner at a beautiful old restaurant in the heart of Piccadilly Circus, called the Criterion. Modern British cuisine. The ceilings alone were worth the price of admission. Which was pretty high.
Soft serve ice cream tastes better with a Cadbury's Flake stuck in it.

Nerja - our favorite Costa del Sol town

2009-06-22T00:24:00.000-07:00

On our last full day in Andalucia, we headed east along the coast to Nerja, a little under an hour's drive away from us. The eastern Costa del Sol coastline becomes more beautiful as it approaches Nerja, with cliffs and small secluded beaches that somewhat preclude the massive overdevelopment of the western side of the area.
Nerja is a small pretty town notable for a beautiful promenade overlooking little beaches hundreds of feet below - this is known as the Balcon de Europa, or the Balcony of Europe. There was a wedding taking place while we were there - the groom in a kilt and the bride resplendent in a big poofy dress. It added to the atmosphere as they clambered onto a horse drawn carriage for a photo op.
We found a quiet restaurant with a ringside seat to the views, La Punta del Mar. And it was surprisingly good. I finally had my paella al marisco - a huge dish full of mussels, prawns, squid, lobster and scallops - and it was delicious! During lunch, we could see the ocean fog drift slowly in, imbuing the coast with a mysterious air.

After wandering around town and down to the beach, we drove 3 km out of town to visit the famous Caves of Nerja, where their stalactite known as the Column of the Cataclysm is certified as the world's biggest stalactite by the Guinness Book of World Records. The caves were much bigger than I had expected - one of the caverns was so large that they have seats set up for concerts and recitals. We were there at the end of the day, so the caves were virtually deserted except for our party - this definitely added to the slightly eerie atmosphere.Finally, back to the villa for our final dinner and our last evening in Andalucia. Once again, the discussion turned to where we should go in 2011!

Dinner in Marbella

2009-06-19T00:19:00.000-07:00

Last night we drove down the coast road and headed to Marbella for dinner. Marbella is the nicest of the resort towns and we ended up at Playa la Fontanilla, primarily because we had no idea of where we were going.
We found a lovely restaurant overlooking the main promenade, La Navilla Del Mar. The service was excellent, we were the only non-Spanish family there and happily watched the sunset over the Meditteranean.

I started with the Salmorejo Soup, which is a local variant on gazpacho. It's more like a puree than a broth, with bits of bacon and hard boiled egg scattered over the top. It was a nice soup but I just find cold soups a little off-putting. Hubby had a nice white asparagus soup.
I moved on to a nice grilled turbot while younger daughter had gambas plancha or grilled shrimp. And french fries. The seafood was very fresh.

My favorite thing about the restaurant was the bread service. It came with 4 mini disposable olive oil packets. How cute! And it was great oil.

Strolling around Granada

2009-06-18T04:59:00.000-07:00

After our Alhambra wanderings, we took a taxi over to the Albaicin area, which is on a hillside directly across from the Alhambra. The Plaza San Nicolas is a great place to view the Alhambra and is also where many of the postcard photos are taken. The Plaza was busy with lots of musicians and young people hanging out. We had an orange granita and took in the views.

After noticing a distinct lack of taxis up there, we started walking down through the narrow windy streets of the Albaicin. We were quite tired, so we stopped in a tetería for some smoothies and crèpes. A tetería is a smallish Moorish coffee shop with low tables and hookah pipes - serving all sorts of tea and snacks. Ours was lovely, with Arabic pop music playing. It was a nice little stop.

Then hubby decided a stop to Kebab King was in order. It's been over 12 hours and he hasn't suffered food poisoning yet, so I think we're safe.

Tales of the Alhambra

2009-06-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

Granada was a fast 90 min drive from our house but of course, we didn't head out until midday. It's very hard to get everyone going in the morning!

We first headed to Plaza Nueva for a nice lunch at Torres Bermejas, a restaurant with both Granada specialties as well as pasta and pizza (satisfied all the constituencies!). I tried the Habas con Jamon - baby broad beans sauteed with bits of ham. It was pretty good although it was something that would have been better in a tapas portion!

After a short stroll around the town (with a yummy gelato stop), we headed up the hill to the Alhambra - we walked up, which was a little tiring, but pretty.

We had a specific entry time into the Nasrid Palace, so we headed there first. Although the tiles were less vibrant that what we had seen at Real Alcazar in Sevilla, the whole building was just wonderful. The only downside was that we were surrounded by a couple of tour groups so some of the spaces were a little crowded. And sadly, the lions in the Court of Lions had been moved elsewhere due to a renovation.We also saw the palace of Carlos V - like many conquering kings, he decided to build his palace on top of the palace of his vanquished foe. Which was a little incongruous - the solid Renaissance palace did not compare well to the light elegance of the Moorish architecture.

After the Palace, we walked down to the Alcazabar, the ruined fortress area that's the oldest part of the Alhambra. We had a great view of the town from the tower.Then we wandered around the Generalife which are the palace gardens. This was probably my favorite part of the complex - the gardens were lovely, there was a nice view of the palaces and the fountains were relaxing.
After roaming the complex for over 3 hours, we were tired but happy.

More Churros

2009-06-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

Churros are part of the standard breakfast in Andalucia, and so far, we've tried three different vendors near our house. Our house owners had recommended one particular place and we finally made it there this morning.

First the batter is fed from the funnel contraption into a huge vat of oil, with a stick to shape it into a large coil.
After a minute, two sticks were used to flip it over.
After another minute, the entire coiled churro was pulled out of the oil and put onto a rack to drain. Then it was cut - this coil was cut into 10 pieces.We took it home, threw a bunch of sugar on it, and devoured it.

Malaga - a nice Spanish town

2009-06-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

Although many people coming to the Costa del Sol fly into Malaga airport, most of them bypass the city of Malaga altogether, opting to head for either the inland sights or resort towns like Marbella.

But Malaga is a lovely town, with a central area that's charming and not overly built up. We headed in to visit the Gibralfaro Castle, which provided a bird's eye view over Malaga and much of the Costa del Sol. Apparently you're supposed to be able to see the coast of North Africa on a clear day - alas, we didn't.Then we headed down into the center of town to grab a quick lunch (a late lunch, it was around 3 pm by the time we sat down) and strolled around the town, making the requisite cathedral stop.

Finally we headed to the Picasso Museum. Picasso was born in Malaga, although he moved up to Barcelona in his teens (and then later to Paris). This museum was founded with a 150 piece collection donated by his daughter-in-law and grandson. It was a beautiful space - a renovated 17th century palace - and a well-laid out collection. The kids enjoyed themselves.

Then back to the house for a swim and BBQ dinner that ended around 11 pm.

Gorgeous Sevilla

2009-06-16T00:40:00.000-07:00

We set out for a 2+ hour drive for Seville yesterday morning. It was about 190 km but was on fast motorways almost the whole time.

Seville is the current capital of Andalucia province but was also the historic capital of southern Spain for many years. It was a beautiful city, albeit 41°C when we arrived. That's hot enough to wilt the kids and me (despite all my years in Singapore and Thailand!).We immediately headed to find lunch at Cervecería Giralda, a tapas bar in the shadow of the Cathedral. It's located in a space that was formerly a Moorish bathhouse - so the vaulted ceilings are beautiful, as are the tiled walls. We had tapas (again! I think I'm done with tapas for a few meals) - I've become more finicky about tapas after all the meals. This one was ok, with a tortilla espagnola smothered in some kind of gravy as the highlight.

After lunch, we headed over to the Cathedral - alas, there was a big sign saying that because of a special occasion, the Cathedral would be closing at 15:30 that day. Guess what time it was?! Yes, 3:35 pm. Oops.

So we wandered over to the Real Alcázar, the royal palace where King Juan Carlos still stays when he's in the area. I love Moorish architecture - the complexity and finesse of the arches and swirls, the use of water elements, the fanciful designs. This palace was a joy to walk through.

After we left the palace, we took a walk around the Cathedral (the largest Christian church in the world by volume!) and found a side door open. So we sneaked in and saw a little bit of a concert by a children's choir with some boys in traditional costume doing a dance. It was charming. So we did experience the soaring heights of the cathedral after all, but didn't get to go to the top of the tower or visit Christopher Columbus' remains.

Seville has many pleasant, pedestrian-only streets so we strolled around for a little while and had ice cream and dessert at La Campana, apparently Seville's most famous patisserie. Then grabbed some very good sandwiches and a caesar salad (first one I've found in Spain!) and headed out for the long drive home.

Sounds of the country

2009-06-14T22:27:00.001-07:00

There are few rooms with air conditioning here at Rancho del Ingles so we sleep with the windows open - thankfully with the mosquito nets over the windows. But this means that we can hear everything outside = and sound carries very well in the countryside.

At night, someone was having an '80s party somewhere in the province because at 1 am, the distinct sounds of "Footloose" floated over the air as I was trying to get to sleep.

After the human party wound down, the dogs decided to have a chat across the valley - lots of gossip was exchanged and arguments were had through the various barking conversations that took place for a while.

At around 5:30 am, the roosters started crowing. Now as a city girl, I was under the impression that roosters typically crowed a few times around dawn - then called it a day and went to bother the hens. Not these Spanish roosters. They (like the dogs) seemed to be crowing at each other in conversation - there were at least 6 distinct crows. And they crowed for a while - I think around an hour.

After the roosters have quieted down, the flocks of birds start twittering and tweeting. I think they're all right outside my window, but at least this sound is relatively relaxing.

Another day in paradise.

Pueblo Blanco Ronda

2009-06-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

It was a beautiful day in Andalucia and we had a 90 min drive over to Ronda, one of the pueblos blancos or white hill towns. We took the scenic route, which was a very curvy drive with lots of switchbacks but with pretty views of little towns.

Despite some of the predictions I had read, Ronda was relatively deserted of tourists when we arrived. It reminded me of Gordes in Provence with the hillside perch and the beautiful views. Of course, Gordes was overrun when we were there, so the quiet of Ronda was a nice change.

We had lunch at Restaurant Don Miguel (pictured above), right under the famed bridge (this bridge is featured in all the Andalucia tourism ads). Lunch was imminently forgettable, other than the lovely location. This bridge (the new bridge, from 1793!) crossed into the old town and we had a nice hike across it, and back across the old bridge (2 centuries older).

Ronda is also the home of the bullfight and has a famous old bullring. Here are the kids doing their best matador imitations.

We've determined that a successful vacation requires one, if not two, ice cream stops per day - so we made the requisite stop in Ronda and headed home via the coast. It was interesting to see how built up the Costa del Sol was - golf courses, big beautiful homes on the hills and right down by the coast, massive, ugly condo complexes and hotels. This was quite the contrast with the inland areas.

And finally, the kids jumped into the pool and we had a quiet dinner at home at 9 pm. We're really taking to these Spanish hours ;)

Rancho del Ingles

2009-06-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

On Saturday morning, we took a short flight down to Malaga on ClickAir - a Spanish low-cost carrier. We picked up our car and drove a short distance to Alhaurin de la Torre, to our home for the next week, Rancho del Ingles.I have to admit that it was a little more rustic than I had expected, but it's definitely grown on me over the past day.The whole rancho consists of multiple buildings with a total of 10 bedrooms, 3 kitchens and a nice pool. We're surrounded by fruit trees - we had plums and oranges from those trees today. My friend Leslie provides an overview here.
My bedroom is in the tower of the main building. It's a small room with beautiful views but it's most unique feature is an outdoor bathroom. Now, this may be common in high end resorts in Hawaii, but it's a little unusual for a renovated farmhouse in Andalucia.
I'm getting used to showering in the open air, hearing the birds and feeling the breeze :)

A Surprisingly Good Lunch

2009-06-12T15:29:00.000-07:00

After wandering around El Born for a few hours, we decided that since it was close to 2 pm, we'd better have some lunch soon.

We happened upon Morelia and their outdoor tables and the girls decided they liked it. So we sat down and ordered the Menu del Dia - an amazing deal at 12 euros. This included a starter, an entree, a drink and coffee or ice-cream. Our best lunch of the trip.

We had a fabulous arugula salad and an empanada with jamon y queso that was so good that we had to order a second one immediately. Then we had linguine in tomato sauce and a curry chicken risotto. Both were excellent. This was surprising to me - no research, just wandered into this place and the food was not only a good deal, but extremely well-prepared.

I couldn't recommend this more, plus the kids got to run around the square for a couple of hours. Because that's how long the meal took. Do not try to eat in a hurry in Spain (or in most of Europe actually).