Hege's adventures in the kitchen continues

I love hotpot and since I have had it at Chang's place in Brisbane I knew, in theory, that it was possible to make it at home. It just looked like a lot of effort and a little too complicated for my liking. But I finally tried it and it turned out to be surprisingly easy:

1. Wait for water to boil
2. Add hot pot sauce/base
3. Add food
4. Wait two-three minutes for food to cook
5. Eat

Of course this dish does require access to a well equipped Asian supermarket where you can buy the hot pot base, Asian vegetables, dumplings, sliced meat and sea food balls. If you have to make the food from scratch it would probably take a bit longer. Or maybe a lot.

Market Day

Market Day is the highlight of orientation week with its stalls, barbeques, entertainment and giveaways. A great way for new students to familiarise themselves with the university and for returning students to grab freebies such as noodles, Red Bull and pens. This year was crazy though. I have never seen it this busy. I had to wait in line over 45 minutes just to get UQ's free diary and a can of ice tea.

One of the numerous people walking around campus in funny costumes on stilts. Personally I could have managed without them.

The religious student organisations always thrive during O-Week.

Red Bull forced you to go through a maze before they handed you your free drink. Sneaky.

Wildlife on campus. Pus, pus, puuuus.

Pancake Tuesday

I love tradition and I am always ready to adopt a new one. By coincidence Vas and I stumbled upon Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Tuesday, which is a commonly celebrated day in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia. The day is closely linked to our Fastelavn and is a day you eat food restricted during the fast, such as fat and egg. In Australia people mainly associate the day with fund raising to charities with money made from pancake sales.

Fastelavn

As in earlier years, Fastelavn was celebrated at Yeronga Flat with home-made buns and festivities. Sadly the feather decoration had to be left out this year, mainly due to lack of materials and general laziness. As usual, the cream turned out to be a problem. It is almost impossible to buy, let alone make cream, in this country. It is either too runny or does not taste like cream. This time I opted for buying something which according to the advertising was particularly suited to "dollop on scones". It turned out to be more like sauce than cream. No one else seemed to think the cream was weird though.

New Zealand

It's the type of place where you can walk barefooted on the grass. Where it smells of barbecue, sunscreen and saltwater. Where it doesn't get dark till late. It's the type of summer we have in Scandinavia every ten years or so, the ones we hope and long for every year, but seldom get. Just that in this place it feels like it is going to last forever.

Vas and I spent 10 days driving from the north to the south of New Zealand at the end of January. New Zealand is a beautiful, scenic country, which has much to offer tourists. It is quite similar to Norway with its forests, mountains, fiords, lakes and glaciers. Below is a route similar to the one we took.

www.newzealand.com/.../lions-tour-test.cfm

The Waikoto River, the longest river in New Zealand. After the initial excitement of seeing the pretty, blue water we went downstream and found a place calm enough to swim.

Rotorua, a town in the middle of the North Island, is the place to go for thermal activity. It was truly an amazing sight and my favourite part of the trip. The following pictures are from the two thermal parks Hells Gate and Orakei Korako.

The negative thing about Rotorua was that it smelt pretty strongly of sulfur. It didn't seem that bad when we were there, but all the clothes we wore still smell pretty strongly, even after several washes.

There's a sign at the top of this cave saying "No swimming in cave water", which I couldn't quite understand why someone would be tempted to do in the first place. It just seemed a bit creepy. But then I got down there and the water, which is actually quite deep, is crystal blue and it is so warm. Hot bathtub warm. For people coming there in winter it must seem overly tempting.

More hot water. Most of the water was too hot to touch. There's warning signs everywhere.

Steam from boiling water.

This pool was used by the Maori to cook food. It has the correct temperature for cooking and the water does not contain anything that adds bad taste to the food.

Snow-peaked mountain. Vas was quite excited. Me not so. But I did take a picture.

A person bungy jumping off the Kawarau Bridge on the South Island. This is the world's first commercial bungy site. New Zealand has everything imaginable when it comes to extreme sports and whenever we went into a tourist information or asked people "what there was to do around there" the answers were: "heaps, we got bungy, rafting, zorbing, hang gliding...". Pity I'm not into that kind of thing. Vas took this photo by making the camera shoot continuously. I think it came out pretty cool.

Norwegian road standard? Vas loved this road. He even drove back up so he could drive down it one more time.

Somewhere on the South Island.

New Zealand has incredibly blue water. We never stopped being amazed by that. This is a place aptly called the "Blue Pools".

Endless forest on the South Island.

Franz Josef Glacier on the South Island. We didn't go on to the actual glacier. We just walked up to it, about a one hour hike.

The South Island came with a bit of weather change. I might be smiling, but I am secretly just wanting to go back to the summer on the North Island.

Imsdal - "kilden til et renere liv"

Pictures by Hege and Vasos