On the road again

For the past two months, I've kept my suitcases in storage, my passport in my bedside table and myself off of airplanes. Having spent most of April - early June living out of a suitcase and constantly flying around Europe and back to Canada, I was keen to stay put in London for the summer.

That's all about to change in a few weeks. My old goal of seeing a new city every month? It's back on baby.

A few months ago, I booked Seville for the August bank holiday. A few days ago, I booked a trip to Dublin in October.

August will also bring a long weekend in Paris with my mother, which I'm hugely excited about. I can't wait to introduce my ever-stylish and always chic mother to the city of style and chicness. I can only hope that in my sixties I can pull off the same effortless elegance that she does on a daily basis.

my flattie and I are culinary geniuses

When I was back in Guyana, I met the lovely Talia who wowed us with her own culinary genius by preparing edible meals from the horrible food supply we were given during our backpacking trips. She was able to throw together multi-course meals from tins of spam, a bag of rice, soy sauce and a wok. It was like watching MacGyver in the kitchen.

On Friday Suey and I discovered that our stove was broken.

As we are not only both keen chefs, but also the owner of two, yes TWO cookbooks, this was nothing short of a tragedy.

But we are culinary geniuses and were able to improvise two incredibly delicious meals using only our cunning talents and a working oven. And lots of pesto. Pesto, it seems, is the magic ingredient.

Saturday morning brunch was spiced potato wedges and a baked frittata with pesto, aged chedder and fresh basil leaves.

Tonight was baked chicken breasts with pesto, garlic and cherry tomatoes.

The great Talia would be proud :)

losing my festival virginity

Ben & Jerry's Sundae Festival was gentle.

There was barely a line up to get in. Not the hordes of crowds I had been expecting. Inside there were food tents, ice cream tents, a kids play area, a toe-war play area (don't ask), guys running around in boxer briefs with "Hugs are free" written on their lovely 8-pack abs, a host of prams and crawling babies, sunbathing people, a live band, enthusiastic air guitar performers and ice cream.

Oh, the ice cream. It was hard decided which flavours to tackle first. Like a pro though, I ate the ice cream and discarded the cone.

"It takes up too much room" I declared to Suey.

Still, I was only able to manage three cones and an ice cream sandwich.

Why Mahler?

I was at Waterstone's the other day killing some time before meeting with friends when I came across this book:



I've performed one Mahler piece in my entire lifetime. It was the Adagietto from Mahler's Symphony No. 5. It's his probably his most famous, if not most recognizable work.

When I played it under the formidable and hilarious Paul McCulloch back in high school, I distinctly remember him telling us that we couldn't play the piece properly until we had experienced war, famine, death, despair.* Needless to say, I'm sure most of us spoiled private school brats had no idea how to play Mahler, but we managed to limp through that performance without embarrassing ourselves too badly.

Lebrecht speaks of Mahler's ability to ease the pain of death and heal emotional wounds. He speaks of Mahler's symphonies being played on the death bed and world leaders altering their self-perception upon witnessing his performances. He says that Mahler is the soundtrack to our lives.

To be honest, it sounds a bit far-fetched to me. But then again, what do I know? I'm just a girl who has a playlist on her iPod titled 'soundtrack to my life' that's littered with Metric, Muse and now a litte Mahler.

* Paul, apologies if I've completely misquoted you :) But you're definitely formidable and hilarious, even when you were calling us meatball heads and stopping us mid-performance because we all lost our places

loving the old spice

On the twitter-sphere, there's been much talk (or tweets) surrounding the new old spice viral campaign.

I finally got around to checking it out while at work today. It was my break from working incredibly hard for the last few hours. Because in no way would I be procrastinating. Not. At. All.

Anyway, brilliant campaign by Old Spice. And I have no idea how the actor kept a straight face for each of those 180+ personalised YouTube video responses.

Check it out if you have a few spare minutes. Or, just watch one of my favourites below...

i scream, you scream, we all scream for....

Free Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream!!!!

mmmmm....

This Sunday, I'll be losing my festival virginity to the Ben & Jerry's Sundae Festival in Clapham Common.

A whole 8 hours of live music, chilling hopefully under the sun with my friends and free ice cream. Lots of it. Chunky Monkey, Phish Food, Cherry Garcia... my stomach is growling and my mouth is watering in anticipation.

only 6 more days.

Steaksauce!

My closest guy friends are obsessed with the hit sitcom, 'How I Met Your Mother'. They regularly reference and quote specific episodes, they have 'Suit Up' sundays and generally use Barney as a shining example of how to pick up women. (I have yet to see it work)

Steak Sauce is one of their favourites. Calling one thing/person/situation/etc 'steaksauce' means that it is beyond awesome. It is more than legend - wait for it - ary.

So it's only fitting that dinner on Friday was deemed a 'steaksauce', as we were all treated to an amazing steak dinner at Le Relais de Venise by Jess' parents who were in town for the weekend.

Vegetarians would hate this restaurant as there's no choice. You sit down (after queuing up outside)and the waitress asks you how you like your steak. Other than the wine list and dessert, there's no other scope for choice. They bring you a salad with slices of fresh baguette. Then you get your first serving of steak frites, followed by a "refill" of more steak frites. And finally you choose your dessert and after polishing off your last profiterole (and in my case, licking off every last bit of chocolate sauce from the plate), the bill is paid and you stagger outside completely satiated, to pure looks of hatred and envy from those still waiting outside to get in.

in which I go to Bermuda, then don't

For a total of 15 minutes yesterday, I was going to go on a last minute business trip to Bermuda and New York. And by "last minute" I mean it would have entailed leaving this Sunday for a week of industry presentations and client meetings. (and perhaps some stolen time on the beach?)

But then it all came crashing down on me, as the guy whose spot I was supposed to be taking informed me that his ticket was non-transferable.

So now I'm staying in London instead, where I will be looking at pictures of pink sandy beaches over pints of beer with the Wendover crew.

look ma! I made my blog pretty!

I'm working hard right now... really... just took a little break from PR work to play around with the different backgrounds on blogger and voila!

I rock.

That is all.

splish splash for social media

We had a seminar in social media for PRs at work last week. Before you start to yawn and fall asleep, no it really wasn't that bad.

The presenter showed us this video afterwards. I've watched it again because:

1. this is what presentations should be like - funny, passionate, casual... not reading off a powerpoint

2. who doesn't like whales? Especially ones with the name Mr. Splashy Pants?

3. we all like greenpeace - they do good stuff

4. the speaker is kinda cute in a dorky way

crossing off the bucket list in Brighton

Yesterday I made the trek down to Brighton - Britain's favourite seaside town. What started off as a gorgeous and sunny day in London was transformed into cloudy and overcast in Brighton. My exact words upon meeting Lena at Brighton's train station was: "It's fucking cold, we're going shopping".

Things didn't really turn out as planned.

Instead we met up with Cate the Intern and her two friends, and strolled around Brighton's rocky beach. Yes rocks. Someone in Brighton didn't get the memo, because instead of soft sand, we were treading on sharp stabbing stones. And there really is no graceful way to walk on those beaches in flip flops. Either you take them off and walk gingerly on top of said sharp rocks, or you walk with the flip flops on, pausing every few steps to shake out a few stones that get caught inside your shoe.

Case in point: Cate the Intern trying to make her way down a very slippery slope on the "beach"



A visit to Brighton wouldn't be complete without checking out the extremely tacky Brighton pier. Complete with rickety roller coasters, midway games with those scary looking plush toys as prizes and yes, cotton candy, it brought me back to my childhood summers hanging out at CNE with friends.

But I digress, this blog post was titled 'crossing off the bucket list in brighton' and that's exactly what I did. Crossed off one thing on my bucket list, which was ride a mechanical bull.

Unfortunately, in my mind, I would have had better luck on this bull than I did in reality. I got three tries on this bull, and how long did I last in total? 9 bleeding seconds. Shameful really. Oh, and I had issues getting onto the bull... much to the amusement of all the on-lookers. In fact, I can safely say that I made a complete ass of myself in front of some total strangers. But hey, I rode a mechanical bull, thus crossing off one more item on this list.

Apparently the gods felt that I hadn't been humiliated enough though, as they then decided a bird should use my hair as target practice. And it had good aim...