Firing up the .. pan?

So in an effort to save money, I've been cooking dinners myself. I mean, why waste a perfectly good kitchen and fridge right? Well, actually not that that perfect. The kitchen is really tiny and lacking what to constitutes to me as essentials - a wok, rice cooker, and a chopping board. Ok ok, so perhaps the hostel wasn't build for an Asian style cooking.

Anyway, so I made fried rice the other day. And trust me, it wasn't easy! I cook the rice the traditional way, ala boiling it in a pot. Turned out quite nicely too. And funny too, that rice is like how noodles and bread are to us - they are just a few of them stocked in 1kg packets at the supermarket, compared to whole array of pasta and bread.

And of course I had to improvise. I had to peel garlic (first time, admittedly) and chop it on plate! For vegetables, I took the easy option of frozen vegetables - but then the variety type here only has beans, carrot, and potato! Yikes, potato in fried rice?! No choice. For meat, I toss in a few handy slices of ham. Flavourings a bit difficult - I had to make do with pepper, soy sauce (which is called spicy sauce here, no idea why since it's completely NOT spicy), and egg.

The last obstacle is the frying part - no wok! So then the non-stick frying pan comes in. Not easy trying to do some 'gentle' rice-frying in the pan.

Well, here's the end result:



Objective rating: 6/10
Personal rating: Bumped up to 7/10 due to hunger and hard effort in making it. And felt damn proud too!

In Barcelona

Arrived here yesterday. Checked into the hostel. Pretty nice room, with bathroom and kitchen some more. Slept a lot to get rid of jet lag.

Made dinner today - first time too as I've never had a self-kitchen before. Made a simple spaghetti with tomato sauce (sofrito de tomate) and added in sausages (cos it's convenient). Tasted decent. And felt damn proud too.

La fotos, episidio dos

Yikes, I just realised that I've still got a bunch of pics from my last trip to Barcelona which I've not posted up yet! And not to mention that I'll be leaving soon again to Spain. So here they are!

Like I said in my (really long ago) previous post, I didn't get to travel much. Only on the day before leaving, me and my supervisor took the afternoon off for some quick walk around the city. And because it's been almost 2 months now, I can't really remember where we went. We took went on the train and changed at several stops. So, on to the pics!

Ah.. globalisation. And I just remembered a friend tapped me to buy some stuff from Zara from him. Hehe, not gonna happen dude..

Random shots around the city.

A cool classic Coke in a contour glass bottle.

Erm.. I just find this highly amusing. No caption needed.

I'm sure this is a historical building of some sort with a fascinating name and background,
I just don't know it.

From a little pet stall near on a well-known tourist walkway area.

A flower boutique stall.

From the marketplace (top to bottom) - lots of veges; glorious loads of strawberries (which I missed out on buying due to poor money conversion maths); and presumably a butchery.

The customary "I've really been there" picture of proof.

Bonus shots! Taken with my cameraphone as my digital camera was stuffed in my bag somewhere. Really pretty pics of snowy mountains taken from the plane window. And as usual, I've no idea which mountain range they're from.




Lazy to post more stuff. Updates on my current whatabouts tomorrow!

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La fotos, episidio una

Ok, I lied. I got over jetlag a day after I got back, but procrastination and laziness got in the way. So anyway, there's a quite a few photos so I'm splitting them up two posts, in a sorta-chronological order in between my rambling narratives.

This was my first time venturing out for such a distance on my own, and not surpisingly, my parents were worried sick. But things pretty much went well. As the plane was arriving in the Frankfurt airport (around 6.15 am there), I was caught off-guard by the pilot's announcement that the local temperature was 8 degrees! Yikes. Landed on the erm, open landing (?) area, which was noticably windy and cold, before a bus took us to the airport. Inside the temperature is bit more tolerable.

It was a 6-hour transit, and man was things expensive there. A bottle of mineral water (500 ml) was around 2-3 euros (1 euro = RM4.8)! On the plus sight, coffee's widely available and cheaper there, relative to mineral water of course. So anyways, with my jakun-ness and all, I walked around the airport and took some pics. If you look real close at this departure information display, you can make out my flight - (Orange box), LH 4454 Barcelona.





No matter where you go in the world, you can always look forward to a warm, comfortable cup of coffee. A grande Caramel Macchiato here is 4 euros.



Cool to see some green steps taken by the airport. All the waste bins are like this:



Lots of shops there selling different kinds of shops - including this one which I'm not entirely sure but I think Fea and Alia would probably go ga-ga over:



Somehow, I find it amusing that travellers will just pop in and decide to buy an extremely (overpriced) crystals as they are about to board the plane:



Arrived in Barcelona airport around 1 pm. Took a cab to the hostel - La Residencia Campus del Mar. About 30 minutes ride, and the fare came up to 25 euros! (Double yikes). The rooms are really nice though, if a bit pricey:



Outside view of the hostel:



The hostel is actually within a residential neighbourhood, which is sandwiched between a large (assumably corporate) building and a park. It's also less than 10 minutes of walking distance away from the research institute where I would be heading to. It was really cool to walk around, as the weather there is really chilly, I'd say around 10 degrees in the morning, and bout 15 degrees later in the day. The daytime hours seemed to stretch longer too - 6.30 am over there is kinda like 8.00 am here, while 8.30 pm is kinda like 6 pm here.

I started out a bit earlier on Monday morning, and it was cool to see lots of kids walking around with their parents, presumably to school:



There also seemed to be lots of people cycling around, and later I saw people lugging their folded up bikes into buildings. I spotted many rows of bicycles, I kinda think they're sorta like a rent-a-bicycle service:




More pics and ramblings in the next post!