urmilala's blog

Spring in the desert

I spent an extended weekend in the beautiful Joshua Tree National Park in California, where spring has sprung and the desert is anything but deserted. I lugged along my swanky new DSLR camera and here are the results (uploading photos to Vox in Vista is a biyatch, so I finally got a Flickr account).

Morning pick-me-up

The windows in my new place face east, and on a really clear day you can see the snow-capped Cascades in the distance. On a cloudy day, you can get the most amazing sunrises. I've started to sleep with my head at the foot of the bed so I can wake up to sights like today's:

Seattle Sunrise

Northwest history meets Monty Python

A couple of Sundays ago marked two years since I moved to Seattle, and I wanted to do something to celebrate this little corner of the world, so the B-team and I went to Pioneer Square (the oldest part of Seattle) to do the Underground Tour. Here's the concept in a nutshell: the city of Seattle you see today isn't actually the original city. The first buildings in this area were in fact built at a lower elevation, closer to the level of Elliott Bay, on top of what was then just a bunch of mud flats. The tour takes you down below the current city level to the old city underground, while you hear about the city's history at the same time.

So as you can imagine for a city that got built on a swamp, it just kept falling down, and getting rebuilt, and falling down, and getting rebuilt again. As the Underground Tour guide lady pointed out, not much has changed in Seattle since then - they still build stupid things and then regret it later and want to get rid of it: Alaskan viaduct/520 carpool lane much? Pretty amusing. Anyway, they did somehow finally get some semblance of a city going for a few years, but then the entire thing burned to a crisp in a glue factory fire. This is where I got really excited, because the entire thing sounds exactly like Swamp Castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and this gives me a chance to do a quote.

When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

 

Viva Seatac!

Year of the Rat

Boy 2008 is going by quickly - it's already getting to the middle of February. Today of course is Chinese New Year, and one of my Chinese colleagues brought a treat to the office for the occasion - Water Chestnut Cake. It was amazing. I need to get the recipe from her, but here is one I found online. All this time I've been putting water chestnut into curries and stir fries when I could have been putting it into cakes :)

I have to admit I am a sucker for Asian desserts - almond jelly, custard balls, egg tarts, chiffon cake... - just to name a few. Oh and there is a great Chinese bakery, Regent, down the road from Microsoft which does a mean mango mousse cake and fruit tarts. What I love about Asian desserts versus Western-style ones is that they are not as sweet and not as heavy. Ok I shouldn't be thinking about dessert this early in the day.

In other news, I moved into my new place in Capitol Hill a couple of weeks ago. It's closer to my friends, much quieter and greener than living smack bang in the middle of downtown, and I have my own place again. It's been great so far. I can see the sun rise over the mountains in the mornings (admittedly it's rare that the sun actually gets a look-in in winter, but summer's going to be fab). And the kitchen is huge and wonderful and I've been cooking up a storm. Ach there I go, inevitably back to the topic of food again. Let me end this before I start eating my keyboard.

S.M.R.T.

This event may just be enough to bring me out of a two month blogging wilderness:

My officemate, Hui, is discussing something with a colleague, Joe - I'm not really listening because I'm working with my headphones on. I happen to turn around and see Joe fiddling with the Rubik's cube on Hui's desk as he's talking. Well ok, he's not fiddling, he's solving it. By the end of the 5 minute conversation, the Rubik's cube is solved. Last time I turned around, that thing was mighty messed up.

Me (amazed): Er... Joe. Did you just solve that Rubix cube.
Joe (deadpan): Yes.

Working at Microsoft can be pretty humbling.

Whistler madness

It must be a uniquely tech-industry thing to come back from a vacation and within hours see an email that the digital footage of your escapades has already been edited and posted on YouTube. As you can see we got up to quite a lot of fun, even outside all the skiing which isn't featured in this video.

White Hot Pain

A thousand words

Since there is too much to catch up on since my last post, I'm going to let the photos do most of the talking, but here is a brief synopsis:

New York City (photos)
Spent a nice fall weekend in NYC. I think it's one of the few cities you can keep going back to because there's just so much to see and do. I'd already done all the usual touristy things (Empire State building, Wall St, etc. etc.) on a previous visit and the weather wasn't super, but there was still more than enough to fill four days, just walking around the various neighbourhoods, visiting museums and parks and catching a local poetry slam and an Aaron Sorkin play on Broadway (The Farnsworth Invention).

Victoria (photos)
I went to visit Sam who moved to Victoria (that's Victoria, British Columbia) about a month or so ago. It was my first time there, even though it's just a ferry ride from Seattle. It's a cute, quiet little town with lots of historic buildings and some nice little shops and eateries. Next time I head to Vancouver Island I want to check out the Pacific coast which is meant to be really rugged and beautiful.

Halloween (photos)
Although it wasn't my first 31st of October in Seattle, I didn't do much last year except visit the scary corn maze in Everett. This year my friend Jordan organised a Halloween party so I got right into it! I went to Red Light (a thrift store on Broadway) and managed to put together a Mary Poppins outfit, then added some fangs and blood makeup to make it Scary Poppins. It was good fun to see everyone dressed up. And I won best costume!

 

Sign of life

It's been a while since my last entry; I haven't really been in a writing mood, but I thought I'd post something as a sign of my continued existence. Some things that have been happening:

Australia
I went home for a couple of weeks. It was great as usual. Even though so much has changed since I moved away, it takes about 40 seconds for me to become completely immersed in life at home again. Except for the light switches being the other way around and driving on the left and things like that, which took a little longer. Funny how the superficial differences take longer to get used to than big things like being with family again.

I squeezed in the usual catchups with friends, and as usual most of them felt too short for either party to do any more than skim the surface of what's rolling arouund each other's heads these days. I guess that's part of life; drifting away from people to such an extent that although you trust each other to talk about things, you have so little time with each other, and so rarely, that to dive headfirst into such topics feels like plunging into cold water and so you don't do it.

My parents organised a family trip to South Australia for four days, which was amazing. The highlight was definitely Kangaroo Island, which is like a huge wild menagerie of all different sorts of animals. Growing up in Australia I stopped seeing the novelty of kangaroos or koalas a long time ago, but seeing them just casually doing their thing in the wild really brought back some excitement to the tired stereotypes in my head. It also helps that Kangaroo Island is stupendously beautiful, with wild jagged coastal cliffs, pristine beaches, iconic mallee scrub, green meadows, and random sand dunes in the middle of nowhere. The other places we visited on the trip were the Barossa Valley for some wine tasting, and a tiny bit of Adelaide (unfortunately, we didn't get to walk around and explore very much).

Work
Work has been busy, have been staying past 7 most nights (although the hours that Jon puts in make me feel lazy). Some interesting news from this week is that I will have someone reporting directly to me from next week onwards. It'll be a challenge juggling that with my own work, but I guess it's a good opportunity to figure out whether I like the whole management track or not.

Oot and aboot
There are several travel plans in the works: going to New York for a few days next week, visiting Sam in Victoria (that's Victoria, British Columbia) a week or two after that, and Thanksgiving in Whistler. By all accounts the snow is bucketing down in the mountains, so it's likely we will have some fully sick pow, bro.

Music
Have been to some decent shows recently: Fujiya and Miyagi last week (pretty good), Great Lake Swimmers (even better), Patrick Wolf (outstanding). I also brought back the 2 latest Cat Empire albums from Australia, Cities (more of an experimental album) and So Many Nights (a mainstream release). The former is outstanding and hard to stop listening to on repeat; the latter was pretty disappointing, unfortunately. New album means touring though, so hopefully they will make it to Sea'le.

Lighten up!

Actor Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood's answer to Tom Cruise, has recently come under fire for promoting Fair and Handsome, a skin-lightening cream targeted at men and sold in India and Indian shops around the world (the ad is viewable on Youtube here and speaks for itself). The ads for Fair and Lovely, the original cream for women from which F&H was spun off, aren't much better. Here's a particularly horrible one I found in English (with equally cringe-worthy runners up viewable in the related videos at the end):

Fair and Lovely Skin Cream Ad (in English)

The obsession with fairness is fed from all directions. Bollywood actors and actresses, the accepted benchmark for beauty, are invariably light-skinned (and don't tell me Bipasha Basu is "dark"). I can probably count on one hand the number of matrimonial ads I've seen that don't contain the word "fair", either to make the spouse-seeker seem more attractive or to specify what kind of husband or wife they're looking for.

I find it amazing that in this day and age, while we all boast happily about how modern and progressive India is, attitudes of this kind are still so widespread. And it's not just India - skin lightening treatments are big business everywhere from China to the Caribbean. I'm not sure if it's some prolonged post-colonial hangover or if it reaches back even farther than that.

Every culture has its own yardsticks of beauty, whether it's complexion or body shape or foot size, and most of us are hard pressed to measure up to our society's ideal of "beautiful". That exclusivity is one reason why beauty is so ardently worshipped. But in a world that's come leaps and bounds in recent decades in matters of race, measuring someone's beauty and worth by their skin colour seems unacceptable to me.

Home again

It's nice being back in Sydney. The last few days have been very relaxed, I've been bumming at home, going for walks with my mum, eating good food, not much else.

Some observations:

• The weather is still pretty cold right now despite it being late September. After being away for a year my brain somehow managed to reinvent Sydney as an idyllic place that is hot and sunny all year round. However the hoodie I brought from Seattle *just in case* has been getting a decent workout.
• When I got home my mum and grandma let me write a list of all the home-cooked food I want them to make, and they're now scheduling something for each day I'm home for dinner. Oh, this is the life. Going back to my wonderful (ahem) pasta and stir fries 5 days a week is going to be hard, hard, hard. Also in danger with all this yummy food promised at home is my other aim of hitting up all my favourite Sydney food haunts.
• I've been drinking Easyway every day, it's been great. Seems like their menu has really been trimmed down since I was at uni though. What happened to all the weird and wacky pearl teas I used to try with trepidation down at Market City? Even Gossip in Seattle seems to have a wider selection than Easyway now.
• I am working remotely for a week while I'm here since I couldn't get a whole two weeks off. The RAS is pretty responsive, so it's reasonably productive. I just have to stop myself from wandering into the kitchen and staring/sniffing longingly at whatever my grandma happens to be cooking at that moment.
• I have been staying up at odd hours watching the 20/20 cricket world cup on TV, it's been fun! I am a little nonplussed at ostentatiousness of the whole extravaganza - call me a purist but I still need more convincing that cheerleaders and fireworks belong on a cricket field. But the shorter format is definitely more compelling than one-day cricket though, which still seems like too much of a time investment for the casual spectator. Thrilling stuff.
• Heading to South Australia with the family later this week for the long weekend, I am looking forward to that, especially seeing Kangaroo Island and Adelaide Oval.