and all these girls got together in various venues and places to cook up their best dishes and feed us all so happily
so the menu was … eggplant dip, rattonwood dip, green papaya salad, green bean chilli mushed up salad, freshly roasted pumpkin seeds (my contribution and the only thing i can apparently cook well!), fried kaffir lime leaves w garlic, sticky rice, steamed rice, fried rice, fried tofu, apple potato cauliflower salad. all so sooooo tasty!!!
and i feel a small victory today as many people noted to me how they had never had just a vegetarian party before, and actually just eating all fresh vegie based stuff was in fact great!!! nice!!
my greatest birthday cake stash ever!! on the left you can see the delightfully fake creamed fake chocolate fluoresescent green chinese bakery version, the middle a cake carved out of watermelon!! and the right is essentially a big pancake with some homemade uht cream variety garnished with steamed carrots and sultanas!! and the thing i love about all these cakes is they reflect what people perceive i love which is essentially quite true … big flowers on top of the choc one, my attachment to fresh fruit in the middle one, and my perceived over eating of vegies (coming from a culture of people who love meat) embraced in the steamed carrot garnishing. fab!!
i actually for the first time in the history of lnt sampled some of this fake cream stuff, and you know, it’s surprisingly just not too bad at all!! happily spooned in a number of mouthfuls!
i write this in BKK airport after a rather massive day which involved rising at 4.45am, a magnesium, salt, gatorade hit, a bandaiding of feet, arrival at the mcg (the inaugural melbourne cricket ground), the 7am melbourne marathon with another 5000 odd people (with a super route tracking around all the inner city historical sites, along the bay from inner city out to elwood, and a return through st kilda), culminating in a joyous lap of the mcg @ just before 11. from there a speed walk/hobble for another km or two to a tram to get me home to st kilda, a lightning fast shower, a picking up of the backpack, another 2km walk/hobble to a 12.30 tram to zip me back into the city, to a 1.30 bus to the airport, to a 3.30pm flight to sydney anddddd bc of the weather delays on this one, required me to then hobble at high speeds through sydney international airport to jump on the waiting plane to now be here in bkk. nothing like a flight booking to help push you through those 30km + moments where you just feel like stopping, stretching or plain slowing up out of something close to just being sick and tired of running!
and if you’re wondering why I am in BKK not Australia still? had to make a last minute change (ie a couple of days back) of dates due to a fabulous interesting challenging work opportunity in the Solomon Islands in nov/dec … hence having to get back to laos and finish up some work here first. so apologies if I didn’t call you and explain etc etc … but it was all completely last minute, and my brain is still racing to catch up with the when’s, the where’s and the what’s at the moment. so the next couple of days in bkk for some lockdown uni writing time and then laos on friday.
just thinking a little further … it was a large day indeed, but a happy day, and a chosen day. there’s a lot of people having way beyond large days at the moment, and days that are far from anything happy and certainly not chosen. sobering.
well the sun is rising soon … time to head out and find somewhere to sleep. more soon. and in case i don’t say it often enough … THANKS for all the different types of special places all of you hold in my life. even if for many of you, i don’t get to say it face to face so often.
FOOTNOTE THOUGHTS
- the mcg is really a lot bigger than you think ie upon entering the mcg at the end, i thought i would put in a sprint to the finish line, but then after about 200m the end point still looked a long way away, so I had to pull my enthusiasm back under check until the real last 200m!
- murphy’s law … the very day when you do have a plane of hundreds waiting just for you is of course the day when the airport security decides to do a full drug/bomb check down, body, bags, mouth the lot. “But I don’t have time for this today, I’m running to catch a flight” Yes dear, everyone’s on the way to catch a flight. “No but you see mine is meant to be taking off in 1 minute and i’m the final passenger they’re waiting on”. Yes dear we understand. I even showed them my boarding card, drawing attention to the departure time, and was there a moment of consideration? No nooooooo. And the worst thing about these moments is when you eventually stumble red faced, sweaty and puffing onto the plane and every 2nd person sends grumpy looks your way, bc you (aka “I” in this case) are the person that has clearly been holding the flight up. I can see everyone just assumes I have been trawling through the duty free shops, buying up on perfumes and makeup & lost track of the time. And I want to explain the weather delays, the security people and the blisters under and between my toes. But there’s no point. So I sit down all the while feeling large buckets of gratitude for the lovely check in man in melbourne who put me on an exit row without charge, bc he was impressed with the early morning run. such a lovely unexpected treat.
