Everything has a pumpkin version in autumn

Including the grog

St Paddy's Day in Chicago

Every year St Patrick's Day falls during IU's Spring Break. (Normally we go to The Irish Lion for a lamb burger and a half-yard of cider.) Last year we were keen to head up to Chicago to see their big parade but we found out too late that it's not usually on the day but the Saturday before. This year St Patrick's Day fell on a Saturday so Cindy felt that we absolutely had to go.

We drove up the day before and found a cheap motel within walking distance of a railway station. Then we got up the next morning and caught the train into town to see them dye the river green at 10 am.

A few blocks south of there they held the parade. It started off with the sorts of groups you'd expect: Gaelic pride, Irish dance troupes, dignitaries like the mayor (I think the Irish PM was even in town but he's a bit nondescript-looking so I have no idea if I saw him in the middle of the secret service officers.) There were also Catholic schools, the Knights of Columbus (the only ones who tried to be provocative) and various politicians and judges campaigning for re-election. But after a while it started to get a bit random. Politicians gave way to trade unions; dance schools gave way to Ronald McDonald and the Irish heritage groups gave way to individual families and even a float of Assyrians!

"Is this a great country, or what?"

It seems that a few Americans are quite self-aware when it comes to their consumer culture and ridiculous food products:


I mentioned already that there are weird flavours of vodka hitting the market such as chipped cream and cotton candy. Now I've also seen cake and marshmallow flavours. I must confess that I actually bought a 50mL bottle of the marshmallow ($1!). I haven't tried it yet but I hear it goes well in hot chocolate.

Black Friday 2011

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, which makes today Black Friday.

Last night I had dinner at the home of a professor with whom I've worked (he invited one other international student). They bought two deboned rolled turkeys of 10lb each -- the six of us got through less than three quarters of the first one! (So we students were sent home with leftovers.)

I got home just before midnight and realised that it was just in time for me to go to the Black Friday sales. Every year the shops open early on the Friday after Thanksgiving and usually people camp out in the cold waiting. But this year a number of shops, including the electronics giant BestBuy, announced that they would open at midnight. I arrived at 20 min past but the queue was still outside, snaking around the corner about 150m. I brought a warm jacket and my earphones so I joined them. The queue moved slowly but when I got in I quickly found the hard drive I was looking for (and was happy that they hadn't yet sold out). But then I had to find the queue for the checkout. After wasting a few minutes in a line for something else, I was told that the end to that queue could be found by looking for a pink helium ballon. I did find it but had no idea how long it was, snaking through the aisles. About an hour and a half later I got to the checkout! I didn't get back to the car until two hours after I arrived!

It wasn't all that pleasant having to be there so long but my experience was nothing like the twenty people who got capsicum-sprayed by a psycho shopper in L.A. And elsewhere people have been robbed on the way back to their car and shot. I guess my experience was fine, compared to all that.

More Things You Can Get in America

Today I noticed that Bed Bath and Beyond had a surprising number of interesting products that I didn't know existed:




This one came from a plain old supermarket. If it's not clear, that's a home s'mores maker:

Crazy flavours extend to alcohol

A friend of our had a big housewarming party tonight. She's a well-paid full professor so her parties always have a well-stocked bar. But tonight, I noticed a couple of bottles that I'd never seen before:
Whipped cream vodka


"Cotton candy" (i.e. fairy floss) vodka

In America, you can get anything!

When I first arrived in America, I really liked to go shopping. I'd spend a lot of time browsing the supermarket and even Target seeing what was available. These Poms feel the same way:


While the novelty has worn off for me now, there are still occasions when I'm amazed that a certain product exists, and Cindy will exclaim, "You can get an-y-thing in America!" This happens mainly around Xmas.

Satellite TV is not as glamorous as it sounds

We've had some intermittent problems with the TV lately. Apparently it was the heat -- it's been in the mid-30s all week. A serviceman came today and found that one of the switches had melted.

It's fixed now but there's still nothing good on.

Bacon Ice-Cream

I had dinner tonight with some friends at a well-known local brasserie. One thing they have on the menu is a diabolical sounding seitan tenderloin, so I thought that if Cameron ever visited, I'd take him there.

But one other thing they have on the menu is bacon ice-cream! That's a chocolate-coated rasher on the left!


It had little chunks of real bacon through it, as you see in the photo and the rest of the ice-cream tasted of bacon too. It was as nauseating as it sounds.

Bilingualism

Tonight at the play I saw someone whom I was supposed to know but didn't recognise. I knew him from French Table (he came a few times a couple of years ago, I remembered his name when he told me) and he thought it was funny that we had never spoken in English before. In fact, I had failed to recognise him last week when he was at the meeting with Kim Beazley. That was the first time he had heard me speak English and so tonight he said to me, "I didn't know you had an accent in English."
"I don't. You do!" I replied.
"Well, I didn't know that you were Australian until then," he corrected himself.

Let Newton Be!

I went to see a play tonight. My department and a few others sponsored a showing of "Let Newton Be!", about the life of Isaac Newton. It was a very small production, just three actors and not many props, but they made excellent use of what they had. The actors represent three stages of Newton's life but they also change into other characters occasionally, like Leibniz. The most impressive thing is how they managed to keep it under an hour and a half and include so much material without dumbing it down.

Interesting Chip Flavours

What can't be flavoured like bacon?

I think this speaks for itself:

I'll just add that the picture on the box looks like that because Americans usually eat streaky bacon (rarely "Canadian" back bacon and never middle rashers).

Family Reunion

Today Mum, Dad and Erin arrived. Their hotel, the Outrigger on the Beach, is just on the other side of the market from us, only a few hundred metres away. We went there just a little before they arrived so that we could greet them with leis. They were tired but Erin was surprisingly perky, thanks to her travelling drugs, and insisted that we eat lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. I had a Hawaiian pizza and we all struggled to share a piece of Kahlúa cheesecake. (I didn't really need dessert but you can't go to The Cheesecake Factory and not order cheesecake!)

Cindy and I spent the afternoon showing them around the market and getting them oriented. Then we went out to dinner at The Hard Rock Café. Erin and Cindy ordered drinks that came with free hurricane glasses (they actually give you clean ones) and we had vouchers for a free gift, which just turned out to be a lanyard and pin but we received two.

Waikiki Beach

Today we shopped. We explored the market in front of our hotel and got some cheap souvenirs then caught a "trolley" (shaped like an old wooden tram but with bus wheels) over to the Ala Moana shopping centre. That was like most other American malls but have a couple of interesting shops like Hilo Hattie and As Seen on TV!
This evening we went down to the beach bar at the Hilton for a drink with my friend Matt who was coïncidentally in Waikiki for a chemistry conference and his wife. After a nice Hurricane we went to a tropical hamburger restaurant where all the waitresses were dressed in grass skirts.

Hawaii

Yesterday I went in to uni and marked a big stack of my students' final essays along with the professor and the other assistant instructors. I got home a little after lunch time and Cindy and I went to get the hire car that we planned to take to the airport the next morning. I had made the reservation a few weeks before and the car was ready for us (the guy started telling us aboutthe seat warmers) but when it came time to pay we discovered that Hertz does a full credit check on anyone paying with a debit card. After we ran around and got our social security numbers, it turned out that they would not let us hire the car at all. Our flight would leave too early for the Bloomington-Airport shuttle so we had to ask our friend Charly to take us. He's an early riser but it was still very kind of him to come pick us up at 3.30 am and drive an hour each way. The crazy part was that in the queue for security Cindy saw someone from her lab who had driven himself up - if only we had known!

We flew with US Airways because their flights to Hawaii go through Phoenix, Arizona and we didn't want a repeat of the Xmas before last when we spent a night in Chicago and our bags were lost. Because both legs of the trip were domestic, we didn't get any food, we had to buy it at the airport. That's not good for a 6-7 h flight to Hawaii because the food gets cold. US Airways was even worse than United in some ways, like trying to charge us $5 for headphones to watch the movie. But the trip itself was pretty uneventfull.

We got to the hotel around dinner time and went straight out for a cheap meal in a Chinese-Hawaiian takeaway.
I was feeling dizzy from exhaustion by that time because it was well after midnight in Indiana and I had had only a couple of hours sleep the night before and a couple more on the plane. But Cindy insisted that we couldn't go to sleep at 7 pm localtime so we wandered around a little touristy market for a bit before retiring for the night.

The hotel is quite nice, even the cheapest of Waikiki is pretty luxurious for us - I think it's the nicest hotel I've ever paid for.

Christmas Fare

I know I've mentioned pumpkin pie ice-cream before but an update is required: I've discovered that a luxury ice-cream brand here is making pumpkin ice-cream with cheesecake chunks in it!

I was going to take a photo of the fridge full of different egg-nogs, including Jack Daniels and pumpkin, but the shelves were a bit bare. Still, you'll be relieved to know that there's not one, but two varieties of egg-nog ice-cream (the slow-churned one is low fat):

That sounds like it could be good for Xmas in Hawaii!

Thanksgiving 2010

Today's Thanksgiving. This year I'm not cooking a turkey (Cindy's out of town) and didn't get invited anywhere. But my friend Larry heard that Bloomington's best pizzeria was hosting a free Thanksgiving lunch, so we went.

Believe it or not, they were serving turkey pizza: mashed potato, turkey slices and stuffing, with gravy and cranberry sauce on the side! We thought we were arriving early but the place was already packed, so we had to sit in the waiting area and eat off our laps but I was grateful for a free meal.

The Turducken of Cakes

So you all remember what a turducken is? Well this, my friends, is the cake equivalent.

You take a pumpkin pie, place it in a cake tin, pour chocolate cake batter on top and bake it into a cake. Then you bake an apple pie into a vanilla cake. The two layers are stuck together and iced all over with American-style butter-cream frosting. Voilà:


Apparently they're actually selling this in Philadelphia, from a café in Reading Terminal Market. I left town too soon!

Concert

Tonight Cindy and I drove up to Indianapolis to see a show. The headline act was Billy Bragg. He's getting a bit long in the tooth but still knows how to play a mean guitar. It was a great performance, he changed a couple of lyrics just to make the better-known songs more interesting.

When I was buying the tickets I was surprised to see that the warm-up act was Australian Darren Hanlon. He's completely unknown here, which might explain the supporting role.
I've liked his music for a while so it was nice that I actually got to have a chat with him and bought a CD, which he signed.

Oh, what's that? Yes, we went to IHOP on the way.