jonny goes to england

I noticed recently that my cooking skills steadily increased (eventhough the ones who lived with me would probably disagree) in the last 3 years. Fortunately, I found an old picture of one of my meals when I first arrived here.

From the 3 cooked eggs + pasta “salad” without sauce 3 years ago

To recently my first proper (edible) steak on the grill pan (with rice or so):

From bottom to top: Cheerios, Tesco Value Coco Snaps, Malt Wheats.

For a better start in the day.

We recently bought very nice ice cube trays from Habitat, which produce perfectly squared ice cubes.

And I learned the following trick to make them even nicer: use boiled water to make the ice cubes clear when frozen! Here’s a pic

Here in an Old Fashioned cocktail (not a too nice picture though):

Anyway. Some more random pictures:

Fake bacon:

******

In other news, recently I got very interested in Forex trading, especially the possibility of automated (or algorithmic) trading via the metatrader platform. This consumes a lot of time .. too bad I have a phd to do too!

So I went to Wagamama the first time close to my place. It’s quite good japanese’ish food with nice staff. While eating, I noticed the nice, flickering candles (tea lights) and thought it adds to the athmosphere. A closer look revealed that the candle is actually not a candle but an LED light! I immediately tried to figure out how this thing tricked me into believing it was a candle for 40 minuts. It contains multiple (3-4) diodes closely stacked on each other. The lights are turned off and on in a pseudo random way to simulate the flickering of a real flame. Cool.

So I spent the Easter weekend at home. Was good but as usual way too short. Now back in London and we’re very busy. Our paper has been rejected from the last conference (frankly, we aimed too high there and we (or I) knew it) so we’re trying to resubmit and rewrite it quickly.

Still, it’s good to be back in London. Sometimes it seems that the local Bangladeshi (pre?) teenagers hold competitions in who can shout “wanker” (or sometimes “motherfucker”) the loudest through the street. Then I know I’m back in town.

Anyway, speaking of wankers, the army is recruiting people with a seemingly widespread campaign .. probably a good time to join the army during the crisis. Here is their current ad, on telephone booths:

If they only added a Wanker-tickbox..

Wankers to the third: I bought food in my favorite shop to buy food, cafe1001. For some reason, in a moment of clarity, feeling the silence before the storm, I snapped a picture of it:

I’m not quite sure if it was the chicken, or the beans, or the onions .. but it certainly unleashed hell in my stomach

Today, I discovered this coke drink in our union shop:

An Ubuntu drink. Funny. Haven’t tasted it yet.

I found a nice Engrish food description from the packaging of a Chinese walnut snack. Can not refuse to put this up here:

The back is also somewhat amusing:

I was invigilating midterm exams again ..

Apparently, eel dishes (for example jellied eel) are an east london speciality. You see a few shops around here which offer eel pies and other atrocities. Anyway, my housemates bought chopped up eel in some stock soup. Here are the pics — be prepared.

First, just an innocuous soup .. however the smell of it reveals that there must be more to it.

While I prepare some more substantial blog posts, this recent picture will keep you happy in the meantime. It’s from our hub where you can buy some junk food and tea. Here’s the pot noodle in the tasty “Bombay Bad Boy Flavour”…

I’ve been to bricklane and spitalfields market today. Always nice wandering around and looking at the odd things they sell, from fake fireplaces to old barbie dolls. In front of some store I found these huge balls, no idea what fruit that is. Anyone?

Also, I thought there’s only black and whit hats, apparently there’s also hard ones: