Vegie Bar

So yesterday I had the most amazing vegetarian meal ever! I'm not vegetarian, in fact I love eating meat, but sometimes vegetarian food is just incredible. I went to The Vegie Bar in Melbourne yesterday and ordered a vegetarian burrito and it was lacking in absolutely nothing. It was beans, spinach and tomato covered in spices and wrapped in tortilla bread, with brown rice, sour cream and guacamole... my mouth is watering just thinking about it! It was so indulgent :/

 

NUMNUMS

Sniffles

 

I've been sick for the past few days! It's going around at the moment, everyone's sick while we're all adjusting to the cold weather. Everyone I work with at my clothing store job is sick and we use up boxes of tissues each shift, haha. My boyfriend's sick too, so we had the sniffles together yesterday. We also went to see the new X-Men movie with a couple of friends, and it was amazing! Much better than I expected, and I was expecting a pretty good movie in the first place. Magneto is such a brilliant character, and Wolverine's cameo appearance was awesome. Between us we ate a huge bucket of popcorn, two massive Cokes, a packet of M&Ms and a bag of Twisties. I should feel sick thinking about it, but I feel hungry again, haha.

I bought a heap of new clothes from my work the other day, one of which is this lovely red cardigan...

I bought the earrings too, the jewelery store Diva was having a big sale so I grabbed them for $2.50.

My life this evening consists of tissues, Kingdom Hearts, and blog surfing...

 

And on that note I should probably be getting to bed - tomorrow's the day before my Chinese exam, so I'm going to the uni library to study with some friends. Looking forward to it!

Oats!

I am a lover of oats. I don't particularly like eating first thing in the morning, but oats are so easy to make and so easy to eat, and you can be so creative with them! I get most of my oat-recipe ideas from Fit Foodie Finds, a food blog I absolutely love. This morning I made some brownie batter oats.

I used wholegrain oats, cocoa powder, So Good soy milk, vanilla essence and a little bit of sugar to make the oats. Then I added sultanas, peanut butter and quinoa. I'd been reading about quinoa on the previously mentioned food blog but I'd never tried it before. I bought a bag and now I absolutely love them! They are a type of seed which is high in protein, fiber, magnesium and iron. They can be eaten raw (tastes like popcorn!) or cooked, and make a good alternative to rice.

In other news, I've started cooking at my restaurant job after being a waitress for nearly 3 years. It's a little more stressful than waiting tables, but I love it! It allows me to be creative and do something I love - preparing food. Can you tell I like food?

新潟

Towards the end of my stint in Japan, in the middle of summer, I spent a few days in Niigata teaching. I just came across this photo that I took and it just brings out the most beautiful memories for me.

Because I spent all my time in Tokyo, a big city, I really didn't get to see much of rural Japan while I was there. Admittedly, I am a city girl at heart, but something about the Japanese inaka (countryside) makes my heart flutter. The parts of Niigata that I got to see were gorgeous - bright green rice fields and mountains under a clear blue sky. Summer here was just perfect. I saw advertisements for hotaru (firefly) viewing festivals in Yahiko and I wish I'd had one more free night to go to one.

The photo above is of a very famous torii (gate) in Yahiko, Niigata. This thing was huge, and I actually got out of the car, stood in the middle of the road and took a picture of it. Such an amazing sight!

Winter sun

I'm updating from my phone... Hello!
The weather today has been beautiful and I've been seriously enjoying the sunshine. Right now I'm on the bus, on the way to my boyfriend's place. Since he never has any food, or rather he doesn't eat much, I stocked up before I left and now have a bag of delicious things like avocado and hommus dips, sesame snaps, cruskits and almonds.
Today's been great, nice and relaxed so far.

Sunday

 Today was eventful! Breakfast was at 6:30am in my freezing cold house - a hot bowl of soy/vanilla/honey oats with cinnamon and maple almond butter and raisins. Oh, and some nice black coffee. I made everything myself :)

I prepared everything the night before, so all I had to do this morning was microwave and assemble!
Then I headed into the city to do my 5 hour shift, which was actually alright. The time went fairly fast, usually it drags on forever. After my shift, I ate some sushi and walked around doing a bit of shopping. I bought much more than I thought I would!

Firm tofu, sweet jasmine/green tea, kimchi, rice flour, chilli bean paste, white miso paste, more jasmine tea, and a frying thing (have no idea what it's called). I can't wait to get into the cooking! I plan to make kimchi fried rice, bibimbap, miso soup with tofu and wakame, kara age chicken with the rice flour... I went around to a couple of different Asian grocery stores to get all this lovely stuff... and what made it better was that I remembered to say "gamsa hamnida" ("thankyou") to the Korean counter girl, and she said it back to me and smiled. Yay! I can't speak Korean but I find it pretty interesting and would like to learn a little bit. I think it's nice to be able to respectfully say thankyou, or hello, in other languages. What do you think?

Laziness

It's a beautiful, consistently sunny day, which is quite unusual for Melbourne weather... and my boyfriend and I are lazing around in bed as usual.

Featured on my shirt: the amazing Karnivool, who I saw live again on Thursday night, and who were phenomenal as always. Their support acts were pretty terrible, and I got bruised, battered and suffocated in the pit, but it was all worth it to see them. Me and my lovely friend Ebony did a stakeout... we waited outside the venue all day to be first in line, with an endless supply of hommus, Ryvita, energy drinks and Jelly Belly beans. It's our Karnivool tradition, we've been fans for many years.

Tomorrow I start work at my clothing store job at 9am... gross. It's Sunday too, which makes it more gross. But it's good pay and should be a fairly good time, so I'll load up on caffeine and jitter my way through the day!

Love

Just a quick post - to mention my amazing boyfriend and tell the world for the millionth time how much I love him!

(Us on Valentine's Day, 2011)

He's awesome. He's relaxed, smart and funny, and doesn't worry too much about little things. He'll kick your ass in Street Fighter, Marvel Vs. Capcom, DC Universe, Super Smash Bros. or pretty much any other game - take your pick! He's friendly and gets along with everyone, and whatever he strives for, he'll get, because he knows he can do anything.
I've never had someone care about me and love me quite like he does. I'm pretty sure everyone wants to puke when I start talking about it, but I don't care. He really respects me, listens to me and looks after me. He's my best friend (and pretty damn sexy)!

I love you, Dan!

中文考试

I hadn't mentioned it in this blog yet, but in addition to Japanese I also study Mandarin Chinese. My Japanese is at second year advanced level, but my Chinese is only second year beginner's.
Just felt like mentioning that I had my half-year Chinese oral exam today and it went perfectly! I did really well and am pretty proud of myself.

Aww yeah.
I have my half-year Japanese exam on Thursday, so it's time for some serious revision tomorrow, but... how am I supposed to study when these keep finding their way into my mailbox?!

 

It's a dilemma indeed.
Tonight I'm making chilli con carne for dinner, playing some DC Universe online with my boyfriend, and watching Family Guy. Looking forward to relaxing for a few hours, mmhmm.

富士山

Watching the sun rise from the top of Mt. Fuji is something I will never forget. Climbing the mountain overnight, for 9 hours, was the most brutally exhausting thing I have ever done in my life. I'm not exactly the pinnacle of fitness, so I still cannot believe that I did this. I thought me and my friends would be casually taking breaks, having some edamame-flavoured Pocky and Asahi beer, chatting and messing around. Oh, how wrong I was. In retrospect, I definitely shouldn't have climbed up in a t-shirt, converse shoes and jeans. Oh, and some sunscreen and a hat would have been useful to prevent the awful face-swelling sunburn I had to put up with for the next few days. But, flaws and all, I will never, ever forget this journey I took. Painful as it was, this is one of my fondest memories.

First post.

I've been through way too many blogs in my life, it's true. I've made new ones in a flurry of inspiration, posted a few entries, then deleted them after a couple of months. I'm hoping this one will be different.

I'm a 21 year old Australian girl living in Melbourne. Melbourne's an awesome city - it's got pretty much everything you'd want. However, the public transport here, which used to be called the "best in Australia", is now a heap of shit run by lazy people who don't care about their jobs. Late trains happen to everyone, almost every day, and no-one apologizes for it. But, the rest of Melbourne is nice. I just can't bring myself to rave about it, though, because it doesn't really feel like home to me. Sure, my family's here, my amazing boyfriend is here, most of my friends are here, I go to university and work here... But when I'm here, there's always something missing. I'm guilty of constantly comparing Australia to Japan. I've had a love affair with Japan my whole life. The first time I visited was on a 2008 study tour of Hokkaido and Tokyo, after my first year of learning Japanese. The second time was last year, after a few more years of learning Japanese, and I worked and lived in Tokyo for 4 months. At this stage, I have been learning Japanese for 3 years and still have a couple more to go before I get my degree. I enjoy studying here, but nothing compares to Japan. Arriving in Tokyo last year, for the second time... oh man, my cheeks hurt from smiling. I can't explain the sheer exhilaration I felt. I love everything about that city - the neon lights, the skyscrapers, the narrow streets littered with bars and ramen shops, the humidity in summer, the way it rains, the way everything smells, beautiful girls with their cascading hair and tiny shorts walking around Shibuya, eating homemade curry rice in winter, staying out all night drinking with friends and ending up legless at a random Izakaya, the clean, punctual trains consistently packed with salarymen... My heart skips a beat when I think about it. But it's not just Tokyo I crave... I dream about watching fireflies at rural summer festivals, cycling past bright green rice fields in Niigata, visiting beautiful temples in Kamakura, watching the sun rise atop Mt. Fuji. These things are what give meaning to my life, that inspire me and make me happy.

This blog is for me to reminisce, plan, share stories, practice my Japanese and other such things. If you find any of those things interesting, then hot damn that's great.