Five years ago today I wrote the first ever blog post entitled “The Guns of Love Disastrous” an ode to a Smashing Pumpkins b-side on the 1997 single “The End Is The Beginning Is The End”. I probably picked that title because I was listening to the track at the time. G2007.com is half as old as Google.com but with significantly less revenue. In fact Google Adsense (the advertising that is shown on pages that are referred from search engines) has returned me a whopping $150 since August 25 2006, however, G2007 is not about the money it is about letting people know what is happening, an online picture book with a slight sprinkling of narcissism.
I had big plans for the 5 year anniversary to do a site redesign but then I forgot about the 5 year anniversary and found out 2 days before about it. So I thought I would do a quick review of the last 5 years -
November 2003 - Kim, Gin and Me in Madrid on Holiday
We spent a long weekend in the Spanish capital. One of the things I will remember from this trip is trying on a jacket in Zara and liking it putting it down for 5 seconds then going back to get it to find it wasn’t there anymore and then to find Gin with a Zara shopping bag with the jacket in that he’d bought for himself. 5 years ago and I’m still not letting that one go.
February 2004 - Matt, Emily and Me in London
2004 was a pretty big year on the G2007 blog and really made it fun as I got the opportunity to travel to India for work for two months as well as go to Australia for a year.
India was great fun working in Signature Tower, Gurgaon with Nitin, Vijay and Tony (who’s real name I cannot remember). This is a video that is available somewhere on G2007 but I couldn’t find it when looking for it so I doubt it will ever be found by anyone else trying to look for it. It was about 43 degrees when I made this little video.
Tony and me Outside Signature Tower with Pigs
March 2004 - Tony, Vijay and Nitin in Gurgaon India
After two months of taking malaria tablets and generally not feeling too well from the heat but loving the time in India I went to Australia for a year to relax and do something a bit different. When I got there I had to find somewhere to live and I remember ringing Andrew (Cooster) from the hotel I was staying in, getting half way through the conversation and the phone cutting out. I didn’t bother ringing back until the next day when luckily the room was still available and so began that fun!
July 2004-Matt, Chris, Esther and Andrew (Cooster) - Bourke Street, Sydney
2004 was the year I got into surfing and have loved it ever since, many times were spent with Magnus and Faisel down the beach paddling for our lives trying to catch waves day in day out!
May 2004 - Magnus and me learning how to surf
I still use the very same wetsuit although it is falling at the seams!
I also was lucky enough to have Gin, Karine, Mark and my parents visit me all around December that year.
December 2004 - Me and Parents in Vaucluse
After some great months spent in Australia I decided to head back to the UK, via Japan and Canada. This made the trip back fun and also allowed me to complete a “round the world” adventure, flying East out of England and returning from the West.
May 2005 - Tokyo, Japan
After a couple of days in Japan it was off to Canada where I spent 2 weeks in Vancouver where I went a bit starbucks crazy. They say in London wherever you are there’s a rat within 2ft of you, in Vancouver they say the same but for Starbucks instead of rats. I also spent two weeks with cousins in Halifax which was great.
May 2005 - Starbucks Crazy at Cloverdale, Canada
I returned to London and was eager to carry on the surfing. My friend Faisel who I’d met in Australia had also moved back to London around the same time so we carried on the surf tradition by going down to Newquay (a six hour drive) and meeting up with Fizzer’s Uni friend Davey for surf trips. Most of the time the waves were too small, the atlantic just didn’t have the power in the summer that the pacific seems to be able to produce, but it was fun times anyway.
June 2005 - Davey and Fizzer Newquay, England
Mark got me a job back at the old company I used to work for before I left for Australia and this is where I met Amy. We kept it a secret for a while mostly to cover up our secret beer drinking trips away to Amsterdam -
September 2005 - Amy and Me Undercover in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Karine and Mark, who also had their baby Monsieur Felix earlier that year got married in Nice, France. It is still one of the best weddings I’ve ever been to, a thousand times better than any wedding pictures you see in OK! magazine of the rich and famous -
September 2005 - Karine et Mark kiss on the Beach Wedding, Nice, France
As the year went on Faisel and I kept a brave face on as the English summer crept into the English winter and the water got colder and colder.
October 2005 - Still Surfing but Getting Ridiculously cold, Wales, England
Annoyingly, somewhere in early 2006 the hard drive failed on the laptop I was using, taking a load of pictures with it, the first photo I have that is not already on G2007 is from September 2006! Well in that time, I had moved to Sydney with Amy! Mostly thanks to Marcus putting me in touch with a recruitment agent that got me a job and a work visa in five days. The first thing I managed to do when I arrived here was dislocate my shoulder, which wasn’t must fun neither was the 12 months it took to really get back to where I was with the surfing.
Simone and Stu were kind enough to let us stay at their place whilst we trawled the real estate market for somewhere to live. We eventually found a little unit in Manly.
March 2006 - Simone and Stu in Mosman
We had a little holiday in the year to Fiji which was excellent fun, we also went to Brisbane for Amy’s sisters wedding. Unfortunately original pictures aren’t on my computer anymore. That will teach me to backup.
October 2006 - Amy and Me in Fiji
Christmas 2006 was spent at Amy’s parents house in Brisbane and my parents and their friend Marion were over as well.
January 2007 - Parents and Marion at the Manly Wharf
January also saw the arrival of Andres and Yami to Australia from Argentina. We spent a month with them and did camping and spent a lot of time on the beach!
January 2007 - Andres with a Kookaburra and a Koala at Coolendale
Mike and Rach our intrepid friends hired a cave, yes, a cave for Rachels 30th Birthday. When you imagine a cave you picture a dark small opening that bats live in. This cave is in the Blue Mountains and is a bit better than that. In fact we went again a year after but it wasn’t for Rach’s birthday but we got her a present anyway.
April 2007 - Rach’s 30th in the Cave
Amy’s sister Taryn and Wade also came down to visit us from Brisbane where we had a good time visiting the blue mountains (not sleeping in Caves this time) and going to some really good restaurants in Sydney.
June 2007 - Taryn and Wade at the Blue Mountains
Carrying on a long tradition of trying to visit every restaurant in Manly, we went down to
That Christmas we went to England via China and had a trip to Prague. It was nice spending Christmas in England and getting the chance to see China, it was also great to meet up with my old mates from the village.
December 2007 - Me, Kim, Dino and Gin, Stratford-upon-Avon, England
We got back to Australia and it was so hot I missed the cold weather of China, England and Prague. In March we spent the most money possible on a dinner at Tetsuya’s for Marcus’ birthday which was great fun -
March 2008 - Marcus and Nancy at Tetsuyas, Sydney
We had a little holiday to Tasmania in May which was really fantastic as we seemed to get given free upgrades at every turn.
May 2008 - Tasmania, New Zealand
And then in July we went to Bali -
July 2008 - Amy in Bali, Indonesia
Well that was quite a uber post in the end. Look forward to doing Part III in 2013!!!!! There’s loads more photos I could have added, if you really want to look at more pictures then checkout the archives at flickr, that have pretty much all the photos I’ve ever taken (and have not lost) that I think are good enough for the internet.
Have not done a blog entry in a while, I personally blame the credit crunch and the bipartisan poisoning that caused the bail out to fail.
Last weekend good friend T-Bone had a BBQ to celebrate there new baby Natasha and their Australian Citizenship. Amy, Marcus, Nancy (not Marcus’ Nancy another Nancy) and myself went down for some BBQ fun and to play with Dylan’s hot rod cars.
On the way there I thought we might have taken a wrong turn and ended up in London -
£10,600 Cab Fare
When we got to T-Bone and Issy’s house the new baby was asleep and Dylan and Dad were also pretty tired -
Like Father Like Son
The weather was perfect for a BBQ and we had some excellent multi-meat kebabs with salad and potatoes and a delicious ice cream which has a special name that I can’t remember but have not had it for a long time.
Marcus, Amy, Natasha and Issy
A fantastic day and some great lego building completed at the end of it.
A fun blog entry is coming up soon as Amy and I are heading to far North Queensland in a couple of weeks time which should be excellent!
I’ll leave you with a cool picture of down town Sydney I snapped the other day waiting to cross at the pedestrian crossing -
Governor Macquarie Tower
See you on the other side of the credit crunch.
This weekend was the first weekend in a while where we’ve been able to go out not wearing pullovers or sometimes even coats. It is very strange how it goes from being fairly cold to being 30 degree weather. I like to pretend we are tourists and walk around Manly, here we are on the way to Shelly Beach enjoying the weather -
Amy and me Manly Beach
Amy got her hair cut and came out of the hairdressers wearing a coat, I told her she had to take it off because everyone else was wearing shorts and t-shirts. I guess that is what happens when you grew up in Queensland.
That night we had Simone and Stu over for dinner, Amy got the recipe for a fantastic Lamb with Quince and White Wine sauce which was a bit of a risk because we’d never done it before but it turned out absolutely fantastic. Here’s Simone, Amy and Stu about to tuck in -
Simone, Stu and Amy
The next day the warm weather turned on us and the storms came in we spent most of the day indoors but for a detour back from the shopping mall to a place where we had not been before; Dobroyd Head it has a fantastic view of Sydney -
Manly from Dobroyd Head
There was also an opportunity to see the spot of a wave you see from the ferry in large swells which doesn’t really seem to have a name so lets call it “Dobroyd Lefts”. It looks like it breaks nice when you see the back of it from the manly ferry.
Dobroyd Head - Is it Surfable?
I found some posts on realsurf of people who have claimed to have surfed it and they say -
It gets pretty crazy, definitely only for the experienced. We normally take the boat and anchor it in crater bay and paddle from there. Very sharky [sic], seen some big bulls and hammerheads around there. You also invariably hit the bottom which has lots of caves amongst the boulders.
So probably won’t be paddling out there anytime soon! I’ll go back when its crankin’ and get some decent swell photos.
That night we went over to Lorraine’s house, who has just moved into a great place in Manly for dinner. Here’s Marcus, Mel, Nancy and Amy on the cheese plate before the delicious dinner that Lorraine made -
Delicious Dinner at Lorraine’s House
Peace.
Last weekend we celebrated Christmas at Leura Dairies, an award winning eco retreat in the Blue Mountains (although there’s nothing eco about my 45 minute showers), a very similar trip to the one I wrote about 4 years ago to the day. Doesn’t time fly! Here is Amy in Leura downtown where it really did feel like Christmas -
Amy with Rudolph, Santa and a Cappucino; the life blood of Champions
Rach had organised for us to stay at Leura Dairies which is a converted dairy which had a main house, a workers cottage (where Amy and I stayed) and a studio apartment - and also an out door hot tub!
Leura Dairies
We drove up after work on Friday taking the express toll route out of Sydney, it is a fantastic way to get out of the city as it is very fast but the downside is its about $20 worth of tolls! It was cold up in the mountains but warm in the house so we relaxed and had a few drinks with the 17 other guests we had for Christmas!
The next morning Matt played us a potential new track for the band BhangLassi which was great and we had breakfast in dribs and drabs as people got out of bed in the morning after a heavy night of boozing. After burning myself on the grill cooking bacon Amy and me headed up to Leura where we looked around the shops and then headed to Echo Point.
Echo Point is underrated as a spot, kind of like the poor mans Three Sisters, it is one view point down from the Three Sisters at Katoomba but offers the same view, you also get to see the Sisters from a different angle, rather than real close up. Here’s Amy and me in the way of the view at Echo Point -
Echo Point Far Away in Time
We got back and dinner was already being prepared, cooking Christmas dinner for 19 people is no easy task. We talked about how hard it must have been in our grandparents days when they had families of 12 and had to cook like this everyday (although not sure they had Christmas Dinner everyday). Everyone was given a certain task to do Amy’s was to make a starter and mine was to make a dessert.
Jacqui, Sleiman and some Brussel Sprouts
Christmas evening was great fun, things started to get a bit crazy with Christmas Hat making which Mike was really into and Alita’s creative side meant we had some fantastic creations -
Mike, Sleiman, Alita and Mel - Crazy Hats
When dinner was ready we had the Christmas tunes pumping out of the ipod and the fire was roaring it was very Christmas like, except for the Australian guests who thought it was a bit strange (particulary those from Queensland Mel and Amy).
Christmas Dinner
We held a secret santa game where we sat in a circle and a person choose a gift, they opened it and if the person sitting to the right of them wanted it they could take it it was a great way to do secret santa. I got some playing cards and Amy got some Brazil Nut Body Butter from the Body Shop.
After dinner we played the game which I invented with Amy (although it may have been invented before hand I’ll have to look it up) where you use an iPod or iTunes and you play the first 2 or 3 seconds of a song and you have to guess the name of the song and the artist and for bonus points the year. To finish off what was already a fantastic evening the subbuteo was ironed out and a championship was help - we even had stadium style spotlights for the games -
Subbuteo Championships at Leura Dairies
A fantastic weekend I wish it was Christmas all year round!
Last night I watched the film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” a film by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers.
I added this film to our DVD rental queue after watching The Life and Death of Peter Sellers which was my favourite film of 2007. I think watching the Peter Sellers film before watching Dr. Strangelove is definitely a good idea - Peter Sellers is excellent in this film, playing the roles of the President of the United States, an English Group Captain and Dr. Strangelove - an ex-Nazi physicist who has become the President’s scientific advisor but who has tendencies to drop back into his old Nazi ways, calling the President “Mein Führer” on a few occasions, one of his hands also has a mind of its own - doing the Hitler salut whenever he gets excited about something, such as a doomsday event.
Dr. Strangelove
The film is based around a military general that orders a first strike nuclear attack on Russia, without the authority of the President. The “war room” is where a lot of the action takes place and in this short clip the President of the United States (Sellers) has to talk to Dmitri Kissoff, the Russian Premiere on the hotline to tell him what has happened, it is a genius piece of monologue by Sellers and apparently was mostly unscripted apart from the first few sentences -
The bomb Dmitri, the Hydrogen Bomb
The film is very dark and some people might not get the humour, as its mostly not laugh out loud funny at any moment but it dark comedy makes it brilliant, especially for a film which is 44 years old. A few anecdotes about the film -
* It was due to be released on November 22nd 1963 however Kennedy was assasinated that day and a film about a president trying to prevent a nuclear war being released wouldn’t have gone down well in a country which didn’t have one.
* There’s only one female in the entire film but the film is entirely based around sexuality, the general who orders the nuclear strike believes that water flouridation is a communist conspiracy to impurify “bodily fluids”
* One of the crew on the bombers was James Earl Jones who is the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, it was his first motion picture.
* When Ronald Raegan became President of the United States he asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff where the “war room” was - probably from watching Dr. Strangelove. The war room was fictional at the time.
This winter/summer whatever you want to call it, Amy and me went to Bali for our holidays. Bali is a fairly small island which is part of Indonesia. It is really a tourist mecca but not in the bad way that most European holiday destinations suffer from - Kuta is probably the most effected by that with pubs that serve “ozzie grub” and show rugby based games in the evenings but its very localised so not a problem. We stayed in Seminyak, which is up the road from Kuta but much nicer and relaxed. We stayed in a villa, which had a walled garden and a swimming pool which was big enough to actually swim in on the first six days of our holiday (to clarify: we didn’t eat so much we couldn’t fit in the pool after six days, we just changed hotels).
Amy and me in our Pool in our Garden
The bestest thing about having the pool in the garden was that the two pool beds were never taken. Whenever we wanted breakfast we picked up the phone and then a couple of villa chefs would come over, cook the breakfast for you. Here’s Amy with Chefs from the first day -
Amy with Villa Breakfast Chefs
The funny thing with the villa chefs is that the first day its a real novelty and you watch there every move in delight as they prepare the breakfast meals. After about 4 days of it you start to take it for granted and get a slight superiority complexity - we sooned dropped that after some women complaining at the front desk about a kite that was flying nearby being far too loud and if “something could be done about it”.
Eight Kites in this Picture over Seminyak (can you see them all?)
The Bali Kite Festival is an annual affair. The ATSB, FAA and CAA would go crazy if this happened anywhere else, it basically makes most of Bali unsafe to fly low as some of these kites got very high!
Our first day we headed into Kuta to see what all the fuss was about. Kuta is the main tourist town in Bali and has two starbucks. Being a man of the world our first stop was to get a ice caffe latte from starbucks. If there’s anyway to judge a country its by any suttle differences in a globalized coffee chain. Safe to say we left starbucks on first name basis with all the staff in there (seriously) and got recommendations on where to go in Bali. The people in Bali are probably the friendliest bunch I’ve ever met, even the hawkers with there sunglasses suitcases and various pieces of junk they try to sell are friendly after you tell them “no thanks” or “tiida marakachi” which is Balinese for the same thing.
One of the funniest shops in Bali are the DVD Hypermarkets. These places are like the Virgin Megastore of pirated videos. Every video was a copy and even films like the latest Batman, which isn’t even out in Australia was for sale (no doubt filmed from a seat in the cinema). Loads of tourists in these shops with shopping baskets full of illegal DVDs no doubt helping to fund terrorism. Talking of Terrorism, Bali tourism is still recovering from the 2002 and 2005 bombings (the 2002 accused are potentially about to be executed) - Indonesia and Bali is on the FCO’s and Australia’s “SmartTraveller” “not recommended to visit” list, most drivers we had talked about it telling us they were very happy for us to come etc. the reality is most people are more likely to be killed by the driver crashing whilst he talks to you than in an actual terrorism related bombing.
On one of the days Amy and I got a driver, Mr Harry, recommended to us by Marcy and Chris - we didn’t really have a plan of where to go but that was ok as Mr Harry just took us all over the place. One of the places he took us was the elephant sanctuary, where we had a ride on an elephant called Phoebe. The “driver” of the elephant told us he (yes the elephant is a he and is called Phoebe) is from Sumatra and is on loan by the government and gets retired at 30 to breed. The driver/minder also told us he has to get up every 2 hours in the night to feed the elephant and that he has been with him since birth. That is a tough job!
Amy Me and Phoebe
Afterwards we went to Monkey Forest, which was as it name suggests, a forest full of monkeys. Mr Harry told us we should buy some bannanas to feed the monkeys as they were “friendly”. I had a monkey fully climbing on my face at one point which didn’t hurt but wasn’t exactly the safest I’d felt in a while. We’d managed to avoid “Bali Belly” up to then and I didn’t want to catch some disease from our second closest ancestors. Amy got off lightly with a bit of skirt pulling -
Amy vs. Monkey
Mr Harry also took us to a few tourist shops with stuff we didn’t need to buy but that seemed to be the same with all drivers. After the elephant tour we went to Uluwatu, via Dreamland. I wanted to see Dreamland for its marvellous beach and surf. I had read on Aquabumps that it recently had been ruined by overdevelopment and it wasn’t wrong -
Dreamland?
The only good thing about that building was that when you looked out to see you couldn’t see it - and what a beach that was -
Dreamland Shoulders Fishing Boat in the Background
The surf in Bali was relentless, I never actually got out as there was some serious waves. You look at to sea and it looks flat then 10 seconds later there are some 6-8ft bombs rolling in so a little bit unpredictable.
After that night we went to Pura Luhur Uluwatu which is a temple that had a show in the evening with traditional Bali music and people dressed as monkeys kicking straw on fire about, it was fantastic. In the evenings a few nights we met up with Amy’s work collegue and wife who were also over there at the same time for a few drinks at KU DE TA in Seminyak which is on the beach and fanstatic. We also went to Sarong restaurant which was one of my favourite food nights as it was delicious and we drank good champagne. For my birthday we went to a bar on the sixth floor of a building next door to the Sofitel in Seminyak, at six floors high it was one of the tallest buildings in Seminyak and had fantastic views of the surf, it was a great night!
The second part of our holiday was in Ubud, which was inland. We stayed at a resort called Maya which was huge and had swimming, golf and tennis. We played golf and Amy beat me. A lot of the time in Ubud was spent going around all the little shops which mostly all sell the same thing but every now and then there would be a few gems and a few t-shirts could be picked up for as little as $5 each. Amy was in her element at the market -
Amy and lots of bags at the Ubud Markets
Bali has a few volcanoes and I’d never seen one before so we took that opportunity to go and visit one. We got a great driver who took us (via some art and wood shops) to Mount Batur which is an active volcano at the centre of two concentric calderas - you can see the wall of the caldera on the picture below as the sort of cliff that surrounds the volcano and the lake on the right hand side. It looked absolutely fantastic, probably one of the best views I’ve ever seen, the pictures don’t really do it justice, you have to be there but here it is anyway -
Mount Batur - Active Volcano in a Caldera
Bali is mostly Hindu which means we visited a lot of temples and had to wear little robes when we got to them which was fun.
Amy and me at Temple in robes
My favourite photo that will remind me of Bali is the one below, an old lady working in a rice field who although probably has a very hard life is as happy as all the rest of the people in Bali are -
Happy Lady in Paddy Field in Ubud
If you ever get the chance to go to Bali I really recommend it. It rained for a total of 3 minutes for the 10 days we were there. The temperature was a consistent 30 degrees C every day which isn’t too hot and isn’t too cold. Everything is cheap (taxi costs $2 to go anywhere locally) the food is good (we didn’t get “Bali Belly”) and the people are super friendly. It also has fantastic surf for the brave and you can do anything you want (relax on the beach, relax at the pool, go shopping in Seminyak, visit a Volcano, ride a Elephant etc..) and the fact that it is so cheap means that the credit card bill doesn’t mean 3 months of poverty when you get home. Which is really good news because the car won’t start, the rego is due, the insurance is due and the video camera is broken.
We will definetly go back providing the words peak and oil aren’t used in the same sentence in news and financial circles in the next few years.
At around 2pm today a broker somewhere decided that the value of QBE shares was $0.01 rather than $22.90, a decision which meant the companies market cap would have totalled around $8 million rather than the $20.19 billion that it was previously. Checkout the ASX 100 Dip at around 2pm thanks to a company practically disappearing off the stock market -
Source: Google
My mate Matt in England tells me this is called ‘Fat Finger’ in financial circles or more commonly known as a Typrographical Error! Nice one that guy - more info here.
You may be wondering where the Bali story is, well it is coming, I need a full evening to write that entry and it needs to be the highest of quality to make it into the Best Posts Category.
We are having a wonderful time in Bali so far we have been to some fantastic beaches and sights. Yesterday we had a ride on an elephant called Phoebe and I had a brush with Ebola as a monkey climbed onto my face at monkey forest in Ubud. Today we are at double six in Seminyak, Amy is helping to keep the Indonesian economy afloat by buying lots of nice dresses.
As I am writing these entries on the iPhone I will keep them short and do a proper story when we get back.
Amy and me at Echo Beach Cangu
We are having a fantastic time nice weather nice people and some seriously big waves! We are enjoying a cold drink in a little bar off the main beach right now.
This is a fantastic animation of Jerry Levitan’s conversation with John Lennon that has won a lot of prizes for best animation at various film festivals. Here’s the trailer for it -
What the full version at YouTube (click high resolution to see it in better quality). From the website I Met the Walrus via DoobyBrain.
