Time flies when your working non-stop

Yikes, started the following about a week ago. Finally getting a chance to post it now. I'll add some pictures later.

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Okay, it’s safe to say I love it here in Gdansk. A beautiful city and gorgeous country side surrounding it.

I could definitely live here. But ask me that same question after the winter hits and I’d probably sing another tune. Of course, I’d want to be making the same wages I make at home; otherwise it probably wouldn’t be as enjoyable. I overheard one of my coworkers talking to a waitress and asking about the wages, not good as a server in a restaurant. You’d definitely need to depend on your tips.

My other complaint would be the smoking everywhere, smoking sections move round with the will of who’s lighting up at the moment. Oh well. We’re definitely spoiled in that regard in Canada.

Otherwise, it’s been an amazing trip so far, good group of people to work with, very few language difficulties; I’ve had some people around to translate for me during the working day – after hours I’m on my own! Luckily I’ve been fairing quite well.

The food has been good, amazingly so. I’ve been trying to not eat at the same place twice, experience as much as I can. The only time that’s failed was last night when I fell asleep for an hour or so after coming back to the hotel and woke up quite late. Off to the Indian Restaurant around the corner. Well, it’s mostly Indian, it’s also Chinese and Thai too. Was a real disconnect for me to hear an Indian person speaking polish to his staff. I’m so used to being in an Anglophone country that it throws me off sometimes.

Memorable meals:

- definitely put the TGI Fridays on the list and not because it was good, but because how awful it was… UGH!

- The wine and cheese bar, Spirtus Sanctus

- A pretty fair filet mignon at Zeppelin(no, there was no long rocker hair and too tight leather pants) about a 6 ounce portion that was over-cooked but incredibly tender; served on a bed of spinach gnocchi and a mildly spicy paprika sauce. Fantastic presentation. I also started out with a very nice bowl of borscht that had apricots and raisins in it. That plus a glass of wine and my bill was about $45zl, or $15CDN

- The Chinese/Indian/Thai restaurant in a mall, Masala. Very good Indian, but a little on the bland side of the spicy scale.

- Soft serve ice cream cones done in a twist with two flavours. Much denser than the ice milk variety we have back home, almost like a gelato in texture. The chocolate is super dark and a little bitter, not sweet at all! LOVE IT!

- Take-out Thai that we had in Sopot on Saturday night. A group of coworkers invited me out for drinks and dinner at someones place in Sopot. They showed up with Thai food that rivaled the quality of any I’ve ever had anywhere. Normally being from Vancouver I’ve become pretty picky about my asian foods, given the enormous variety of outstanding restaurants we have. This Thai ranked up there so high, that I’ll be craving it back home. Cheap too, enough food for 8 people plus leftovers and it was just under $200zl

- OMG, just got served a bowl of Zurek, a sour rye soup. WOW! I’ve seen it on a lot of menus tagged as being a traditional Polish soup. Light broth, slightly sour and rich at the same time. With little bits of sausage at the bottom of the bowl. They like their soups here and every menu usually has several types to choose from. I’ve had three different types of borscht so far and each has been very different, the first two were light and brothy and no chunks of beets, the last had the fruit in it.

Work has been good, challenging but good. The unfortunate part has been delays waiting for things to get installed/delivered/wired. It’s really thrown my schedule off. They should have delayed moving a week to get the building in shape first. Oh well, work around the difficulties and move on right? Make the people around me happy and that’s what counts as they’re the end customer.

Here comes my dinner, more later

-- insert 20 minute delay here to chow down--

Okay, that was another memorable meal. A whole fresh from the Baltic Sea Turbot, simply fried and served on a bed of vegetables and a side of roasted potatoes. De’lish!

Ohhhhhh, now this is cool

This is a couple blocks from my hotel!

I just may have to visit with the green fairy.

I'm loving it

but not in the cheesy restaurant chain that coined that slogan.

Gdańsk is a very nice city, absolutely gorgeous. For the most part, the food has been great as well(more on that later).



I've hit a couple of local places, first night was a perogie specialty place, had a nice bowl of borscht with dumplings in it and a big plate of perogies that were stuff with wild game meat. All in all, very tasty.

The next night found me at "Spiritus Sanctus winiarina" a wine bar that specialised in wines and local deli meats and cheeses. They also had regular menu items for dinner, but I opted for a custom plate of various local cheeses(an aged goat, parmesan, etc) paired with some local deli meats and a basket of amazing breads. It was paired with a very flavourful white wine from Slovenia, I think I need to go and get a bottle to bring back. :) So far, the best meal yet.


Really, I wasn't grumpy. It just looked that way. I think I got distracted by something outside just as the shutter went off.

Now for the bad food part... I worked quite late last night and didn't want to go far to find dinner, so I thought I'd try the hotel restaurant. Sigh, cheesy American chain restaurant, a TGI Fridays. What a tired concept those theme restaurants are, from TGI, the Red Robins, etc. All the dusty crap on the walls, the faux americana, the bad choice of american beers(in europe and they're serving up Budweiser?!?!?! BAH I say! I ordered a 'cajun chicken sandwich' that was labeled as being quite spicy. This is how I imagine it was prepared:
- order comes into kitchen, cook takes the ticket and calls ala Starbucks to colleague across the room "one spicy chicken sandwich"
- colleague repeats order and then places chicken on prep table as far across the room as possible.
- cook then grabs 1 gram of cajun spice in a spoon and flicks it across the room, whatever makes it there by drifting stays on the chicken and is then cooked and served.

So there you have it.... lesson learned stay away from chain restaurants, they do nothing well.

New photos!

Alrighty, had a few moments over the past couple of days/evenings to prepare some photos.

I'll do a proper entry later tonight.

Enjoy!

Excellent...

Just noticed that the Gideons haven't sullied my hotel room. :)

25 hours of travelling later, I'm here

Woah, long long day.

Left home on Saturday at noon for the airport to allow plenty of time to check in etc.

As I was checking in the agent said they were looking for volunteers to bump to the next flight two hours later on a charter company. Initially I said yes, usually they give you pretty good deals, etc for bumping; but after doing so and walking away to find a coffee, something wasn't quite sitting right with me about it.

Decided to listen to that little voice and went back through the lineup to check in and take my name off the bump list. My main reason was that it is a charter I was being put on, meaning flying with my knees to me chest for 10 hours, crap food, and extreme baggage limits(gotta squeeze in those extra people to sell them 15$ cheese sandwiches) . Plus my checked bag was 7 kilos overweight due to the equipment I have to take to the office here. I didn't want to pay the much bigger overage charge the charter would ding me with vs the flat fee Lufthansa charged.

It was my first time flying Lufthansa, very good service, very comfy. During mid flight they kept a supply of juices, wine and waters available for you to help yourself to at the galley, plus bin of Toblerone bars. :) What I found rather odd is all the staff would speak to me in German while speaking English to my seatmate (and she had an accent I couldn't quite place - but no matter, she wasn't very friendly, the only time she spoke too me was to get past me to head for the washroom). What was even more amusing is I'd know what the flight attendant was mostly saying to me and answer her in English, she'd answer in German and I'd reply in English. go figure... I must still have some understanding of it from when I was youngun and could speak it conversationally.

By the time I arrived in Gdansk it was close to 9pm, our flight was delayed leaving Frankfurt due to a huge thunderstorm moving in on the airport. We saw some pretty impressive lighting strikes not far from the tower. Apparently they closed down all but one runway, so it meant close to an hour delay on the tarmac.

LOT is a nice airline too, good service on-board, even for a two hour flight. Drinks, snacks and friendly staff.

Overall a good trip here, only glitch was my hotel room. It was booked locally for me and they took my departure date from Vancouver to mean I'd be here the same day, when I lost a day on the way. Sadly I didn't catch that when I saw the reservation, and when I tried to check in they had nothing on me. They'd canceled my reservation and all their rooms are now full for next weekend. I'm only booked here until the 14th now. I'll have to ask someone at the company to sort this out for me today.

Anyhow, gotta get my butt to work. Hopefully I'll get some pictures today, I didn't get any yesterday(was way too tired by the time I arrived, 31 hours awake will do that to you).

Europe in June!

Specifically Gdańsk, Poland!

I was just hired to do some work over there that will last for about 3 weeks. Looks like I leave this coming Saturday! Yikes, that's coming up wayyy too quickly. But, I'll be ready. Unfortunately I'll be missing Tanya(aka Netchick) birthday party on Saturday night.

Looks like a beautiful city based on the pictures over at Flickr. I'll definitely be taking lots of photos.

Oh yeah, I hope to post some photos from my recent trip to Alaska soon too. Keep an eye out for those this week.

Hmmmmmmmm

Poland for the month of June?

Maybe...

more on that soon.

:)

again, way overdue...

overdue, but still geeking out. :)

Wow, where has the time gone?

Finally the weather has been improving and I've been able to finally get out on the bike for some extended rides including taking it to work. Must get out there more on it! Nothing new to report on the bike other than I had a new chain/sprocket combo installed. The new chain is certainly a lot quieter, when I bought the bike the previous owner mentioned several times that the chain needed cleaning and lubing. I suspect it hadn't been done in a while and that he wasn't using a proper chain lube. After I cleaned it the thing started making what could be best described as a 'zipper' sound that lessened over time with the application of more chain lube, but as soon as the chain was cleaned, sound was back.

In more geeky pursuits I recently built a MythTV box using Ubuntu Edgy as the distro. What can I say but I love it. I can record shows, and watch them without commercials and on bold my/bold schedule. I can even stream the show back to my laptop all via the wireless network. It's also doubling as a media center for our music, as we also recently picked up a Squeezebox by SlimDevices. Woah, very cool stuff. Both Q and I are huge music fans and are always picking up new cd's, checking out new bands, etc. The Squeezebox allows us to digitize and playback our music from one location, setup custom playlists, play internet radio(as well as access my online Sirius radio account) it routes the sound through my receiver and features audiophile quality sound. I compared it with my CD player playing a CD that I'd ripped onto the media system and the difference in sound was almost un-noticeable. It wasn't worse or better, just a little different and both were exceptional sounding.

Q and I are still playing house and it's going very well. We both enjoy having the other around and are pretty compatible living together.


Alright, I started the above about three weeks ago. damn again where does time go.

At the moment I'm about 30,000 feet above the arctic circle in Alaska. Way cool! I recently picked up a contract that took me to a mine site in the arctic to do a network analysis and documentation.

The trip has been incredible, I hope I get the chance later in the summer to come back and implement the changes I'll be recommending. My presentation to the General Manager and IT manager on site went well and they were both very happy with the work I'd done. I had the advantage of coming in with a fresh set of eyes and uninterrupted time to focus on the task where their staff are just way too busy with the day-to-day running of the place to tackle a job such as this..

All in all I think it was a job well done. Initially when I was heading up here I was more than a little worried about the scope of the job and if I'd be up to completing it in the time allocated. Part of my concern was the trip up here took a full two days when I thought it'd only take one. However, due to the staff being on site for and living there, they routinely work 12 hour days. I was able to easily fall into the schedule and get caught up, but it was still down to the wire today. I even was able to tour all the operations around the site, from the internal workings of the mill(crushing, grinding purifying of the ore) to the shipping and excavation of it. Plus due to needing to document all aspects of the site, a trip to the Port site about 50 miles or so away on the Chukchi sea! The ore is stored there in massive storage houses while they wait for the sea ice to break up and allow the barges to arrive for their very short 100 day shipping window.

Until now, I'd never been in Alaska, I have to say I'm a wee bit enamoured of it. I definitely want to come back and experience it in different seasons including the winter. The scenery has been incredible. Didn't get a chance to see a lot of wildlife, but I did see a herd of caribou that were in early stages of a colour change from the winter white to summer brown. I managed to get a few shots on camera using the 200mm lens, it turned out pretty good I think.

For a couple of years I've been thinking of purchasing a full DSLR camera and when I knew I was going on this trip, I figured now was the time. :) I picked up a Nikon D40 with two lenses, the basic 18mm-55mm kit lens and a 55mm-200mm zoom with vibration reduction.

So far I've been extremely pleased with the camera. It's performed flawlessly and I'm figuring out the various settings and how to use them properly. I'm still going to take a course though, I'd love to be able to use the camera to it's fullest abilities.

hmmm, we just reduced power and are descending a bit, time to stop writing and put this away for now.


and two weeks later, I'm finally posting this.. sheesh!

Wow, where did February go?

Time certainly has flown this month....

But it was good, busy, oh was it busy, but good. Sadly though, little time for riding.

Q and I celebrated our anniversary early in the month and we had an outstanding dinner at La Régalade. We started out the evening by stopping at The Beach House on Dundarave Pier (whew, that name is far too long) for a glass of vino, an plate of their "beach dip" and the view. Once we found our way to La Régalade for yet another appy and the mains.

We both started with the French onion soup, followed up by our mains. I chowed down on slow braised veal cheek dish and Q opted for the Seven Hour Lamb. Both were great but we should have just ordered the one main to split. The portions there are very generous!
I have to say though, I found the lamb to be much more interesting and robust in flavours over the veal.

The following week was Valentines day, so of course I was panicking a bit about doing something nice for us in the days before(I hate giving roses and going out to a restaurant on that night). I hit upon the idea of making the Seven Hour Lamb, trouble was the La Régalade cookbook was at her place and I wouldn't be able to discreetly sneak it out. So the internet comes to the rescue. Now normally the only search engine I ever use is Google, but it couldn't find the recipe anywhere online at all. In desperation I tried Yahoo! and it came up on the 1st hit. Go figure...

Anyhow, I started the dish before I left for work that morning and had a neighbour drop by to pull it out of the oven later that afternoon. After reheating it and reducing the sauce somewhat it was ready to go. I had stopped by Liberty on Granville Island to pick up a nice bottle of French wine the day before and the girl there recommended a bottle of the 2003 Château Rousselle CÔTES DE BOURG, with the recommendation to decant it for a minimum of an hour before serving. Woah, it was amazing fresh out of the bottle, exceptionally tanic, but good. After an hour in the decanter it opened up like nothing else and blew both our socks off.

Needless to say Q was impressed with the meal and even said she enjoyed my lamb over the one they served at the restaurant! :) Sometimes I think I should get back into the cooking biz... but then I give my head a shake and move on.

We even managed to get away for a wee weekend trip to Princeton this month too. My good friend Guy and his family own a cabin 20km outside of town. So a Friday night found us making the trek there from Vancouver arriving around midnight and then having to snowshoe into it from the nearest neighbours place. I always love visiting that cabin, it's comfy, remote and a nice little get away that's not far from the city. Q and I have been there twice now together and we're now looking to buy a chunk of vacation property within a 4 hour drive of Vancouver.

The majority of the month for the two of us was taken up by purging excess stuff from our closets in preparation for the big merge.

Oh, want to know what happens when two food and wine geeks merge households? A combined wine collection of about 5 or 6 cases, and a kitchen that initially looked like this!


Oh and I finally got a ride in right at the end of the month! About time too.

Warp speed ahead Mr. Sulu

oh I love this,

George lays the smackdown on this guy.

wow, time flies...

Well it's been ages since I've posted anything here. I haven't been avoiding it, just been busy... well, mostly busy, a lot of relaxation and work in there.

The fall here was amazing:

The last major ride I went on this past fall was a ride with my buddy Jason to do the Duffy Lake loop, October 28, next day there was a foot of snow up there. Was a chilly ride but always a good rip through the mountains. Actually, I began the riding season with a ride there in the spring and finished up the season riding it. Nice way to bookend the season.

Spring:

and Fall:

Otherwise, the winter has been a wash for riding. Record freaky weather, the wettest November on record, record setting winds, snow on the ground for weeks, with black ice and frost after that.

Heck, even the bicycles weren't going anywhere in the midst of all the snow, let alone my precious Gizmo!

Otherwise, life has been good. I did a temporary contract for a week around the end of October, beginning of November and after that decided I wanted to work for myself and go solo.

I've made the leap into self-employment and am loving it!

Other things... had a great time in Seattle for the Bike show there hanging out with Michelle and Jason, gorging ourselves on seafood, beer and coffee(something Jason is still mad at me for, introducing him to Vivace beans). Oh yeah, we even saw a bunch of motorbikes too. :)

What's next? Well the riding season is hopefully going to start up soon, had a fantastic ride this past weekend to the Vancouver Bike show, felt good to finally get on the bike for some highway riding.

Next up, I get a roommate. The Q-girl and I have decided it's time for us to shack up together.