excuse my awkwardness, you don't recognize me...do you?

Dear Food Co-op,

you had served me well.

Duke needs a place like this.  Locally sourced, volunteer based, and homey - not too far from the go green, back to the land vibes I get from trekking around downtown Durham.  We already have a farm, couldn't be too outlandish to put in a co-op.  Or maybe what I'm really saying is that pumpkin needs to be a more popular campus food... and it shouldn't be this difficult to just be a vegetarian for a day or two.

At Melbourne, if you volunteer for two hours at the co-op, you get a free meal,

which I kept up for about a couple of weeks before I got too busy and a lot lazy and a little bit scattered in organizing my days.

I don't know why I stopped; it wasn't hard - I was just asked to chop up and roast pumpkin and run the cash register.  Better yet, if I didn't want to do either of those things, I could just casually wonder behind the counter to serve people their pies and rolls or leisurely wash a few cups.

hot pumpkin and tofu pie 

cold smoked tofu and onion jam salad roll

It took me a whole semester to talk my friends into doing it, and by then, I was trying to get my shit together for exams (kind of a theme in my life).  But maybe I would've saved myself ten pounds by eating vegan/vegetarian/gluten free Aussie fad foods instead of sausages cradled in slices of white bread and drenched in ketchup.

Two more weeks until sunshine-y beach-y paradise (read: starve/work myself to bikini-ready body... I shouldn't say that, it's eating disorders awareness week... but you know what I mean.  In all seriousness, it's not happening anyways...the worst feeling in the world is hunger).

I need a soy latte.
I need to not bomb my next orgo test.
I need a burrito bowl from Chipotle.
I need an other half.
I need to be able to do things/take classes I care about.
I need to get drunk this weekend.

purely australian

I've already committed to going back to Melbourne.  It's happening.  Without a doubt.

Which is why I wasn't as sad as I thought I would be on the plane to LA.

Seven Seeds iced coffee.  Blew my mind that iced coffee meant coffee with ice cream.  That's going to be a thing in my household from now on.  Pretty excited there's still that frozen yogurt I made before leaving for Australia.

Honeycomb and hokey pokey desserts.  I never got around to buying some though.
Magnum bar in the cold?  Yeah, why not, always have room for dessert.

Lamingtons... not my favourite but that could've just been the fact that it was probably sitting in the display case for days.  And I was disappointed by my expectation for their being a jelly filling.  There were big ones and little ones and huge ones and pink ones pretty much in any dessert cafe.

Rice pudding made with the free coconut water and ginger beer I was not going to otherwise consume (yes, there are numerous ways to make rice pudding last time I checked).  Ginger beer was pretty interesting stuff - we decided it was probably equivalent to their root beer.  Delicious when mixed with vodka and pineapple juice, as I discovered in Duty Free sampling.

Just because he's cute.  Poor little penguins in St. Kilda looked so confused running around the rocks.

warm and cozy, diving back into winter

...but not before one beautifully ideal week in paradise.

It's currently 2AM, and I'm thinking about all the shit that has gone wrong.
I forgot that traveling can really suck sometimes.
But let's not talk about that yet.
I've gotta let it sink in until it's funny.

I'm so close to going home, so close to seeing my dad and hugging my brother and tackling my puppy and eating myself into a daze.
But that also means I have to leave Melbourne in summer, which could potentially be perfect... or unbearable.  Tomorrow's 38C ("that's a lot of Farenheit"), so I'm not sure I want to stick around for the end of December.  And while I prefer being cozy in the cold, I don't know if I can handle another season of winter.  Be kind, Durham.

On the bright side, I guess, here's to another season of roasty toasty steamy comforting food.

Noodles at some random noodle place near (not in) Chinatown - hunted down in the middle of the night after picking up a hungry Bernard at the train station.

Tom Yum at Coconut House, which is supposedly really good, but you might be able to tell that by the fact that there are two next door to each other.  Necessary?  I guess so..
Sarah mentioned it tasted like lemon scented soap (?) or something... I think I was too hungry to really notice.

Hot chocolate and curry sampler at Lentil As Anything where you can pay what you think the meal deserved.  It was okay, nothing special, but then again, I think we went to the wrong one because my roommate remembers a full on buffet.

Best hot jam doughnut at the stand next to Flinders, and I don't even like doughnuts.  I came out of it with streaks of jam on my shirt and foot.  I don't know how it happens.

Fingers crossed the Fiji travel gods will be a little bit kinder than the New Zealand ones.

Manchester Press

Post marked: 18 November 2012.  A little late on the delivery.

 

Not another I-wish-I-lived-here-for-all-the-indie-coffee-shops post.

No other unique words to say, except that it was my first time seeing legit coffee art in real life.

And that it's like...the only place for (good) bagels,

And that there were many tourists photographing the doorways and such (Melbourne Laneways Tour, we guessed). 

Oh and our waiter was a super cool dude.  How many people greet you with indistinguishable sounds rather than a "hello, how you going?"  I thought Izzi and Parisa knew him, the way he interacted...

Goat cheese, pesto, roasted capsicum on poppy seed bagel.

All good things I haven't had in ages = perfect afternoon.  It's the time for splurging...shopping and food therapy to quell my anxious mind.  Rampage for useless souvenirs and duty free chocolates for Dad...and memories.

And that disco ball hanging in the alleyway...that was pretty cool too.

Coming at you from Christchurch after sleeping in the airport for four hours.  I kind of love my new backpack.  And awkwardly trying to understand rugby but not really because I'm blogging, obvi.

The NZ accent is kind of hard to understand sometimes.  There's nothing to do in Christchurch.

"Bye Amelia, see you...talk to you tomorrow." 

-I love my baby brother.

all sorts of chips

 Better than expected, huge ass $10 chicken parma from the bar next door on a load of too-hot-to-handle (but I'll take my chances) chips.

 Homemade wedges take one with carrot chips.

Chicken burger with avocado, haloumi, and pesto mayo... with an unexpected side of fries that made me very happy.

Homemade wedges take two with tomato relish.

Counting last night's homemade fries take three with cheese, that would be five meals of fried potatoes in seven days.

The Hardware Sociéte

Melbourne, your homey and alternative and artsy cafes/brunch spots will be greatly missed.
I only wish I had the budget and time to discover them all because I'm pretty sure I have the stomach.

Brunch date on one potentially stressful SWOT VAC week day.  But given that I have given up caring, I was especially okay with wasting time eating.

The Hardware Society is tucked right near Thousand Pound Bend.  I found it in passing on my way to Tuesday nights burgers, remembering months ago when I added it to my mental list of places to eat in Melbourne, so naturally, I had to go the next day.

Dragged my eating buddies out with me, and the three of us ordered baked eggs, pictures of which taunted me on Urbanspoon - can't really concentrate on studies after seeing those.

I went with the vegetarian option because... well the brie got me.  And it helped that the waitress in the cute yellow apron and bright red lipstick recommended it, too.

Served in a little dutch oven (love baby serving vessels) alongside three pieces of pesto and bread.  Dipped and soaked and rolled around in the baked egg sauce, just forget about it.  This is one of those times you want to sop up every last bit, including scraping up the cheese off the lid.

Concentrating hard on capturing the chorizo baked eggs.

Less cluttered NYC feel, God I love those place.

Speaking of brie... studying the production of camembert (Geotichium candidum and Penicillin camemerti deacidify the cheese surface and setting up a pH gradient from low in centre to high at the surface due to the production of ammonia on the surface from protein breakdown.  Lactate and ions migrate to the surface where lactate is metabolised and calcium phosphate precipitates, resulting -with the pH gradient and proteolysis- in the characteristic soft centre of camembert.)... definitely should've started rote memorizing this stuff before the night before my exam...

Two more days to New Zealand, bitchesssss.

Sushi Sushi to die for

Oh yes, that was the time I spent $20 on sushi.  But I justified it to myself by saying I hadn't eaten sushi in the four months that I've been here so this is essentially making up for lost time... or lost food... lost money?

 Whetted my appetite with a scallop salad and the best spicy tuna I think I've ever had - literally the perfect bite.  Nikhail went back for two more of those.  Who was I kidding when I thought I could stop at just two puny little non-rolls?

So as Joelle ran off to get her huge $7 jar of vegemite, I went back for the bento box and the soft shell crab roll just to reach the EFTPOS (aka credit card) minimum.

So while the city was near-dead, everyone off at the races for their public holiday of getting toasty and gambling, I was preparing myself for my usual 3-hour afternoon nap but gorging on sushi.

One more exam to go and all I'm thinking about is the awesome new backpack Izzi and I got - excuse to go hiking all the time.

I have no idea what I'm going to do when I get back to real-life college.

Work ethic, productivity, motivation, please come back to me?

Little Africa and Ohm

Before

After  - it multiplied, what?

The theme here, kids, is overeating.

I had tried on multiple occasions with multiple groups of people to finally make it to Little Africa for dinner.  My experience with Ethiopian was limited to one meal with Megan at Queen of Sheba in the Thrill - wasn't bad, but what can you really expect from the only place of its kind in almost-Southern suburbs?

It was pretty much everything I expected it to be after Christine talked it up (and apparently her friend from Sydney visited again just to eat there one more time).  We got two heaping plates of injera piled with lamb, fish, chicken, and garden veggies and pumpkin and lentils and some sort of tamarindy-coffee concoction none of us could place... oh and salad.

I want to go back just to get a huge pot of their lamb.

Lucky we were the only group in the comfy upstairs area decorated with artifacts that reminded me of Thailand because we literally attacked it.  Very attractively stuffed everything into our faces.  Reaching over each other to try at least six bites of the ten different dishes in front of us.  Making yummy noises (I use too many Friends references in my life) and food orgasming all over the place.

Note: two 2-people combos for eight poor college kids will be more than enough - came out to $15 a head. 

The rest of them said the tangy-ness of the injera was getting to be too much, but I loved it.  The acidity was kind of perfect for cutting through the rest of the food, and I think I managed to eat more with it than a bowl of rice despite the spongy denseness of the bread.

I love that it is in keeping with Aussie culture to stay at meals for hours on end because we certainly needed those hours to digest and slowly lift our asses out of our chairs.

Now, Ohm is probably not going to sound as appetizing, but never pass up $6.50 all you can eat vegetarian Indian food.  Especially when you are too lazy to make your own dinner, too hungry to think straight, and too bored to do anything that doesn't involve the company of other people.  Made the trek down to Flinders despite the rain and the getting lost for about five minutes (they got rid of their giant yellow/orange sign).

You can just keep going back to get more servings of rice and the two selections of curry.  I went back three times... and picked at Nikhail's leftovers.

Not pictured, but definitely the best part - the naan.  Which they make fresh.  Which the hostess just carries around in a basket should you want more.  Which came out different each time.  Fluffy.  Then crispy.  Then chewy.  I probably had about six pieces.

Killing time by freaking out about biochem until my fourth meal of fried potatoes.

One more week in beautiful Melbourne...

I can't accept this.

iron, copper, selenium

So I guess Obama won.

Don't mind the seemingly apathetic tone, it's apparently just how I am.

Meanwhile, my priorities are catching up with Criminal Minds and pretending to memorize reactions before heading off to eat four times my weight in early Thanksgiving deliciousness.

  Mad cravings for meat strike whenever I start reading about iron.  It's probably because I haven't eaten red meat since...forever ago.

Maybe it was because it was child-sized and cute.  More likely because it was bright magenta.  Either way, it caught my eye whilst I was hunger-shopping at Queen Vic.  Beet root base pizza from Pizza by Nature, topped with sausage, red capsicum, and olives.

Turkish Eggs Benedict for lunch on Sydney Road.

Kind of a forced choosing after a leisurely stroll was interrupted by a car on fire and a crazy woman shouting "IT'S GOING TO EXPLODE!"

Panicky people freak me out.

Ironically, the smoking car was parked right in front of Bonfire Cafe.

Now carotenoids, ascorbate, alpha-tocopherol.
Wish me luck, I don't know how to study anymore.

exam time

They take their exams seriously in Melbourne.

Walking 15 minutes past campus to the Royal Exhibition Building, I suddenly found myself in a sea of students gathered with their books and pens at the main doors and a man making announcements over the speaker system - not what I expected at all.  When the doors opened, I luckily happened to pass by the posted list of student numbers and... seats.  Yes, assigned seats.  I was 2499, all the way at the back directly across from the main doors.  The large hall was lined with desks and chairs, each with a specific exam booklet awaiting the students because this wasn't just one class, this was a bunch of classes taking their exam at the same time in the same place.  There were proctors stationed everywhere, walking up and down the isles, checking to make sure your bags were outside in the provided storage containers (by storage containers, I really mean large shipping containers).  I noticed some picking at pencil bags to make sure there were only pencils.  

There's a designated reading period where you are advised to read through the test (or start it right away if you're antsy like me).  Then there's the announcement for the writing period when you are asked to fill out an attendance sheet, which will later be checked by two proctors and collected by a third.  Fortunately, you are allowed to leave early (but not during the last 15 minutes of the 3-hour exam period), and you can bet I booked it out of there as fast as I could after I finished bullshitting all the short answers (damn, how I hate short answer tests).

I'm 98.28374% certain I will never need to know the family of wind pollinated eudicots (Caesalpiniaceae) or the different forms of lichens (crustose, foliose, fruticose), so threw all my notes on bryophytes and angiosperms and fungi away - what a good feeling.

Thank you, Duke for requiring I take a diversity course.

One down, three to go.

On the bright side, Carte is giving away free nutella crepes after your last exam.

 So speaking of uni-related activities, let's talk about how delicious Egg was.

All semester, I've seen people with their Egg bowls and Egg bento boxes, and I've heard such good things, and as I was headed home to stirfry some bok choy, Joelle intercepted me and bound and gagged me, and dragged me (not really, all she said was "Come," so I did) back to campus to try what would be the second meal I've eaten on campus.

It was one of those "choose from A or B" type places, but all you really need to know is that there were choices, which meant Amelia was overwhelmed.

Which also meant Nikhail had to ask one of the workers to explain the system to us,

and we ended up staring at the menu while waiting for the lunch rush to pass, so we could make a level-headed decision.

I went with the Japanese curry and teryaki tofu, Joelle got the tofu and chicken namban, and Nikhail got the namban and Japanese curry (and the most meat, that fucker).

All so surprisingly good, especially when you've been trained to believe campus food is absolutely shit (except Subway, I miss Subway.  Oh and the salad bar, I do appreciate that).

Potentially productive day turned on its head when I wanted free coffee >> finding free cookies >> finding AC'd, well lit study room with comfy swivel chairs >> naps and collaborative risotto effort...

asparagus, mushroom, spinach, and green peas risotto

(looks kind of like a pancake in this picture)

Also discovered Joelle and I out-eat Nikhail every time - reinforces my sense of femininity and added benefit of getting to finish off his leftovers.

L.. what?

I've gotten many blank stares when I casually say "LDOC." 

Not even from Aussies... from Americans.

Is that not an accepted acronym?

Done with class before it's even Halloween.  Such a strange feeling.

Rumour has it that there's a slip n slide on South Lawn.

Too bad I'll be in prac... and then lecture.

Too bad it's raining, too.

It amused me that Melbourne's colours are the same as Duke's.

Getting double use out of all of my... two items of uni merchandise.

Happily nomming on free-ish burgers (supplies courtesy of Costco - only place you'll find buns in Aussieland apparently... fuck, I miss Costco) and spiders (aka floats) on the penultimate (I remember when we thought we'd never use this word in high school English) day of class.

And their creaming soda that comes in a pink can is actually pink, like candyland, Katy Perry status pink.

a week long affair

I've never had a friend who loved to celebrate her birthday beyond going out to dinner and calling it a night.

Enter Sydney.

the diet always starts tomorrow

I don't really like eating on campus without a meal plan.  Spending actually feels like spending when you use free money.  It's too easy to swipe a card without caring about the total.
But we'll call this $6 crepe a splurge with my tip money... and a very well balanced lunch.
[Last day at work, by the way.]

I don't really like eating on campus, but let's be serious, Melbourne Uni has far better eateries than Duke.  The willpower to resist can only be so strong.

I spend all my days on one side of campus and the Union House so I never realized the little stalls scattered about, embedded in and around the buildings.

I think I've passed this place numerous times at the beginning of the year, never once during operating hours - I thought it was a shack.  I mean, it literally looks like a shack... that apparently houses a wonderful collection of Nutella and peanut butter.

 Snickers crepe: dark chocolate, caramel, chunky peanut butter.

So delicious.
So overpriced and delicious.

roo like venison

 Tuesdays at Thousand Pound Bend are $8.50 burgers days.

Not going to say no to that.
So after spending most of the day in transit back from Sydney to home, constantly-hungry Amelia followed suit to get a fucking burger (especially since Bernard's precious Moo Gourmet Burgers' kangaroo burger was $16.50).

Quite possibly one of the best burgers I've ever had.  Definitely up there with the Thunder in DC deliciousness.  Maybe even better because the bun was fantastic, so soft yet didn't mush with the weight of the patty.  And the roo meat was surprisingly moist despite the gamey..ness.  I wish I could describe the taste of kangaroo meat with words, but you're just going to have to get a burger yourself.  And whatever their sauce was, I would like to purchase a bottle of that, please.  I was even a fan of their hot sauce condiment, which was both not sweet Thai chili (which is everywhere) and spicy enough for the side of me that is my mom.
As Sydney quoted, or sung, rather.. "there's a party in my tummy, so yummy."
["Yeah my 3-year old cousins watch that..."]

As a side note, it was Fashion Week last week.  Week's worth of free workshops and shows and makeovers and photographs.
When I saw a man, hands full of paper Levi's bags, my immediate instinct was to lurk.  Lucky for us, he didn't know what he was doing (aka I think he was only supposed to hand out bags to people actually seated in the fashion show area) and we happened to be right behind a woman who was offered a goodie bag, so naturally Sydney and I hopped on the last two.  Cue scramble to get Nikhail and Joelle goodie bags, too.
Loveeee that free shit,
especially when you legitimately need it - don't have to make a trip to the W for cheap lotion anymore.
Free shit included a selection of Australian bath products, coupons, and... coconut water... sure, why not?  Oh and a pen that lights up, cool.

3 square meals/homie gotta have breakfast

The most tragic thing I realized last night was that I forgot my tips after work.  $7.  Considering (a) it's not customary to tip here, (b) I'm a poor uni student, and (c) a decent-but small-meal can be purchased for about $10, seven dollars is kind of a big deal.

Progression of meals weeks 1-6

peanut butter, pecan, chocolate chip, (sometimes bananas if available) sammy on poppyseed bread

with the tea that my daddy so thoughtfully packed for me

other variations include pb/bananas/cinnamon/honey, pb/honey/vegemite (surprisingly so good... or I"m just a freak), pb/apples/pecans, bananas/pb/nutella, and of course, classic pb.

middle of the night, legit eating cold rice and kimichi straight out of the takeaway containers

fried up an easy over egg because I was feeling fancy.

four muffins for eleven dollars because I'm weak

gluten free banana eaten on site, apple cinnamon eaten with peanut butter (it's gross how much peanut butter I eat - jar count is now at 3), recommended-by-cashier strawberry and bran eaten mushed up with muesli and soymilk, boysenberry eaten after simply microwaved

it's really because I am unable to make my own muffins.

[disclaimer: parody time, please don't think I actually speak this way about food]

beautiful pan fried fillet of barramundi topped with luscious homemade tomato (read: toe-mah-toe) sauce - made with fresh, plump tomatoes, mind you - and laid ever so delicately over a bed of spiced, fluffy, golden basmati rice

with a side of juicy bok choy sauteed with oyster sauce.

[end parody time - thanks rando friend of Jeanette]

I think I ate this whilst on the phone with Bernard... yeah, that was the night I literally didn't stop eating even though I didn't really stop talking... to the point where even my roommate was appalled (aka, I hit an all time new record for nonstop eating I guess).

My stomach is embarrassingly acting up in the library, right about now.

Speaking of, still can't believe Ballieu library closes at 10pm.  Missing the option of staying at Perkins late into the night and walking those used-to-be-grueling-but-not-compared-to-the-five-streets-I-have-to-cross-now couple of steps back to the dorm.

The list of things I won't complain about anymore is currently as follows: free e-print, meal plans, housing on campus, my shit phone, Perkins.

(Although this is probably a lie given that complaining about shit is a form of bonding with strangers.)

On the bright side, I'm going to have to admit that, statistically, the percentage of classes I hate back at home is far greater than that of UniMelb.

(Okay, minus the fact that we don't get those beloved cheat sheets for science classes.)

I just realized I don't know what I'm going to do for Thanksgiving - it's not something I can just skip.  Calling all American friends and someone with a kitchen, pleaseee.