Highland Road Trip (HRT)

Superbly fantastic! Best holiday so far. Scotland is such a beautiful country and I am so proud to be studying here. On Friday we went to collect the car. We were expecting a Vauxhall Meriva (4 doors but not so good looking in my opinion but very pratical as there were four of us and the car offers a lot of space. But when we got there, they gave us a black corsa 1.4 instead (2 doors, very sporty, very handsome and more importantly our main driver loves the car). So after giving it a thought we decided to take it with open arms.

DAY 1 - Glasgow - Loch Lomond - Willy Green Stop -Fort William -Glencoe - Fort Agustus - Urquhart Castle - Loch Ness - Inverness.

The journey on Saturday started at 7.30 am. Hehehe..at least that was the original plan. Unfortunately, being us and weekends, we only managed to drag ourselves out of the bed at 7.30 am. Without any real proper plan, we set out our journey to the unknown highlands with much spirit and enthusiasm.

DAY 2 - Inverness - Aviemore -Caigngorm Mountains (Ski Babeh!!) - ...to be continued..too sleepy

Lion Dance

The only aim for last Sunday was to go to Chinatown and watch the lion dance. But of course, on the way we have to make a detour. We decided to check out the tourist information center first to ask for recommended route for the highland tour on 24-26 february weekend. Unfortunately, it is close on Sundays. So then we decided to head off to Borders for a quick glance at travel books on scotland and germany and austria. They all look so good that we ended up spending about two hours there. So, watching Lion dance remains just a plan. At borders we got ourselves a road map for UK complete with speed cameras for 2007 for only £1 and a pack pf playing cards (at twice the price of the map). Terrific bargain which was extremely useful for the highland trip.

The best part comes after that. Since we think we have missed the lion dance, we went to the cinema instead and watched music and lyrics...hehehe cheesy movie. So, not surprising that I like the movie a lot. Always a fan of Hugh Grant Movie by the way. I recommend the movie to anyone who just wants to have relaxing day and have a laugh. The movie is entertaining and funny. After all, it is not everyday that you get to watch Hugh Grant shakes his bump that way..oo yeah!

Sushi Saturday

Last week was all about eating for me. I think I have even gained a kilo after all the great food. To add to the food variety for last week, we even had sushi and potato and camembert cheese on Saturday and Nasi lemak with cucur bawang on Sunday.

Sushi and potato and camembert? Weird combination you must think. Indeed it was. What happened was we went late for the cheese and wine party at a coursemates place the night before and missed the food. The second serving of cheese had ham on it...definite no no. So we decided to do it ourselves. It is really simple to prepare actually. For those who would like to try, here it the recipe (not sure if it is how eric, the owner of the recipe, does it). Definitely worth trying.

Potato and Cammembert Cheese

Ingredients:

1. Potatoes cut into 4 or 6
2. Cammembert cheese

First, boil the potatoes until half cooked.
Then drain the water and put the potato in caserole dish or baking dish (sapukan sikit olive oil biar x lekat)
After that belah the camemmbert cheese and arrange on top of the potatoes.
Can add some sliced sausagesand black pepper kalau nak
Put into preheated oven and cook at about 200 degrees for about 10-15 minutes.

If these instructions are not clear, just mail or call me and I'll be happy to explain further or if my mood is right, cook for you.

White Sole Shoes

This semester is suppose to be all about group project and the fancy title that I have thought of for the project is Towards A Carbon Neutral Community – A Blueprint for Every Community in the UK. The project will be about demand and supply side management to achieve a carbon neutral community. You will be hearing more about this once we actually start doing it. Anyhows, after two weeks of ‘endless’ research (somehow it includes youtube and peekvid a lot..hehe) and vague objectives, we finally get to meet our industrial representative for this project. He is supposed to be the man with all the answers and points us to the right direction. But after one hour of discussion, we are still a bit lost. Would love to dig more information out of him but we had to rush back to the university for a site visit with the rest of the class. Hopefully we will get more information when we go for the site visit on Friday.

We made it to the pre-class site visit almost on time. The site visit today brought us to the roof top of our department building and to a hall of residence that is one minute away from where I live. The roof top has a pathetic wind turbine of about 100W but the hall of residence has a great Trombe wall feature. Nevertheless, the class trip was really fun. Felt like when I was in school when we go on a bus for a class trip to the National Zoo or National Museum. Everyone would be queuing in twos with a teacher telling us to stay together. Only this time, it is all adult students who took various routes to get to the same place and when we actually got to where we were suppose to, busy peeking into the student room and snapping photos instead of listening to the explanations. I just find this funny because actually, even as mature students, we still very much behave like primary school kids, probably even worse.

What I really want to mention in this entry is however about my gym/squash trip after the site visit. I was so excited to go and play squash and burn some calories after eating so much for the past couple of days. In fact, I also intended to join the fitness club today. Unfortunately, the lady at the centre gave us some wrong information the last time we were there and we could not register. But we decided to play squash anyway and pay for today’s entry fee. Been a long while since I played and I am really looking forward to this. But then they did the shoe sole check and we failed. Apparently, you are only allowed to wear white sole shoes in the squash courts. So, despite my shoe sole is 75% white, I still don’t get to play squash. Geram betul. I bought brand new shoes for squash but I cannot wear it. Now I must get another new one! Luckily the cute guy at the entrance was really nice, he let us into the gym FOC for today, Yahoooo!! I know the entry of this entry is a bit hanging but I need to get some work done before tomorrow’s meeting. So, I’ll fix it later when I have the time.

Mackerel Gulai Tempoyak

Believe it or not I tasted my first gulai tempoyak in Glasgow at the age of hmmmm..slightly above twenty..hehe. But it was really delicious!! Even better, I had a true Pahang-ian to cook it for me, Chef Fairuz. I was told that you can get much more delicious gulai tempoyak in Malaysia with ikan Patin but for now I can’t imagine the dish getting anymore delicious especially with that great sambal tempoyak made by our Pahang celup-ed Chef Zack. (please excuse the extreme rojak-ness of this entry). At first I was quite put off by the horrible tempoyak smell but once I have tasted the gulai, the smell was long forgotten. For those who have not tasted a gulai tempoyak, I seriously think you should do something about it really soon because I can assure you that you are missing out on one of the best dishes in the world. Ok, maybe over exaggerated this but the dish is worth exaggerating. Unfortunately, I was too busy eating the dish that I forgot to take a photo of it. Sorry guys but trust me it was excellent.

Seafood Weekend – A Delayed Entry

You have probably read about our seafood weekend in Noris’s or Zack’s blogs but I still want to mention it here. The get together last weekend was really great. The theme was seafood (Noris’s and Zack’s idea). We cooked for six long hours and ate for almost equal length of time. More of this at my fotopage..photos as well.