Some shimmies are bigger than others.

So I had my second belly dancing class this week. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant… except for how I was having a particularly clumsy day, so I could do pretty much nothing right. Until, that is, the end of class, when we did the usual shimmy circle. Every teacher I’ve ever had has done a variant on this, and it’s always my favourite part of class: throw on whatever song (usually a drum solo) and shimmy. Nothing else. Just shimmy.

Shimmying is exactly like what it sounds like, but it’s not done at all like how you think. Here’s what you do: stand up (go on, no one’s watching!), bend and straighten one knee, then bend and straighten the other. Did you notice how your hips dropped and raised as you did that? [sigh] No, I didn’t think so. Okay, try it again, but this time pay attention. I’m not doing this for my health.

Got it? Good. Now keep doing it, and congratulations: you’re shimmying!

Shimmying is very important to most belly dancing styles, and it’s just the most fun. (It’s also a great way to keep warm at bus stops, if you don’t mind the odd stare.) But like most things worth doing, it’s much harder than it seems at first. My particular weakness is slipping from a standard shimmy into a full-body shimmy when I speed up. I can’t really explain that without going into detail that would be boring and mostly useless without illustrations, but suffice it to say that it is, like almost everything in my life, a control issue. Except that this week, for some reason, I got it exactly right and entirely without trying. I can’t imagine why, especially as I’d been so useless at everything else (don’t even say the words ‘chest circle’ to me), but it felt SO. GOOD. There’s something about the rhythm of a good shimmy that feels like nothing else, and the best ones clear my head in way that few things do. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be doing this again.

This week I also had my first Zumba class. I switched into this when my intermediate belly dancing class got canceled; I figured it would at least keep me moving, and if I hated it, well, I’d only have to do it for six weeks.

I didn’t hate it; I didn’t love it; I was just terribly amused by it. Forget alcohol: Zumba is the great equalizer. Just ask the basketball butches - definitely a subspecies, easily recognized by their two-tone, mulletted plumage and wife-beaters - who were mamboing around with the rest of us: you can’t make Zumba cool, you can’t make Zumba tough. You can’t be too cool for school when you’re doing the Macarena (and no, I’m not making that up).

In other dancetastic news, I will be spending my weekend here. My belly dancing teacher is teaching a couple of classes, and I've wanted to check out burlesque for ages, so while many of my farthest-and-dearest are camping and fishing and otherwise being tormented by the 'Great' Outdoors (yeah, I have my sources!), I will be sauntering around in fishnets and heels. So... pretty much business as usual, there. I promise a full report after!

XOXO

Link du jour: This is what I want played every time I enter a room.

Confidential to the Ginja Ninja: Be careful at work, the temptation may overwhelm you. :)

The healing power of the dum-dum-tak.

I’ve been cranky this week, you guys.

I won’t go into why, because… well, I just won’t. It’s a few things. Suffice it to say that my playlist is once again full of short, angry women singing paeans to explosives and Stockholm syndrome. If Naomi (hi Naomi!) had made an album, that would be all I’d be listening to at the moment.

It started on Monday morning and didn’t really let up until sometime last night. But Monday was far and away the worst, and by about 4:00 all I wanted to do was get into bed and cut the day short. I couldn’t, though, because I had my first belly dancing class.

Thank god for belly dancing class.

You guys, I had NO idea how much I missed it. I was kind of dreading it because I’d enrolled for both an intermediate class and a beginner class (as a refresher on the basics), but the intermediate class was cancelled and I really wasn’t sure that the beginner class would hold my interest. It did, though. And in a beautiful moment of synchronicity, the song we’re using for our choreography is a drum solo that Shiva used ALL. THE. TIME., and that I love beyond all reason.

Which is fortunate, because I was a bit doubtful about the instructor, Zahara. I had looked her up beforehand and found some promising stuff, but when I got there and found that she was about 12, excessively perky, and a burlesque and circus performer as well as a belly dancer… let me put it this way: I’ve been indoctrinated with the idea that belly dancing, while it is sexy, is not about being sexy. The sexy is incidental. And that’s a really important idea to belly dancers (particularly those who grew up with it as part of their culture) because that’s what divides belly dancing from erotic/exotic dancing. Simply put, belly dancers are NOT strippers and they’ll thank you to remember that. So it came as a bit of a shock to find Zahara giving tips (like about posture and where to hold your hands) by saying that something was or wasn’t sexy.

I suspect that this was in large part because many of the students seemed to be, well, the sort of women who’d pay more attention if they thought something would make them more sexy. (Which I find distressing for a million other reasons, but they’re not people I’ll be seeing outside of class, so fuck ’em.) Whatever the reason, I was really put off by it; but when she played the music for the first time I changed my mind on her completely. What can I say, I’m fickle. And it didn’t hurt that after only one hour she invited me to join her invitation-only (read: upper-level) belly dance troupe. Which: bless her heart, because even when I was dancing twice a week I was still mostly unco and useless, so it’s probably for the best that it doesn’t work with my current temping schedule. But that’s not to say I won’t talk to her about it again in the future.


XOXO

Link du jour: I wanted to put in a link to the drum solo, but I only ever knew it as Rose’s Drum (Shiva called it after Rose-whom-he-saw-dance-to-it), and Zahara gave us the wrong title/artist for it in class. I’ll post it when I get the right information. In the meantime, here's a sample of what I've been listening to.

American / Salad

I've written a bit about about the awesome food I've had since I've been back in Boston. And I've enjoyed that (the writing and the eating). Unfortunately, I have not been entirely lucky.

My good luck ran out on Monday. I was temping at the non-profit, which is in... certainly not a bad neighbourhood, but not a great one, and not one with brilliant lunch options. In Boston, the pizza-and-sub shop has the ubiquity of the Thai restaurant in Sydney. This means that wherever you are, you're likely to have some reliably good munching options, but they're almost inevitably high-fat, high-carb, low-fresh-anything. After a few meals like this on my first days at the non-profit I was burnt out, and I decided to try a Greek salad from one of the local joints. I figured that, while Greek salads are hardly the healthiest option, it's not a bad choice from this kind of place: there's a whole subgenre of Greek pizza places in and around Boston, of which this was one. (You can identify Greek pizza most easily by the crust, which tends to be thicker all around and quite crunchy on the edges, but the cheese blend is also a giveaway.) In addition to the usual pizza and subs, they usually offer gyros, Greek salads, and the other odd Hellenic bit and piece, so I thought I might be safe.

Oh, how effing wrong I was.

To start with, there was approximately a metric tonne of feta crumbled over the top - and by over the top I mean to a depth of about an inch. I never thought there was such a thing as too much feta... well, they showed me. The feta was dyed a pale pink where it was touched by the black olives. I chose not to think about this too closely, and dug deeper.

The vegetable mix included the standard iceberg lettuce and tomatoes (more on them in a minute), but was spiked with the somewhat less orthodox green capsicum, carrot, and radish. I didn't mind them - in fact, the capsicum and carrot turned out to be my favourite bits - but they were unexpected.

The dressing was of the creamy Italian variety (casual cultural insensitivity? you be the judge), but had a surprising pink tinge to it that worried me more than a little. Maybe it had been dyed to match the olives, like cheap bridesmaids' shoes? Moreover, I got two vats of it; one would have comfortably drowned a dinner-sized salad, which this was not. Two was... well, I reckon it was about equivalent to half a standard bottle of dressing, no exaggeration. And the pita bread I'd been told came with it turned out to be a massive round white bread roll. Sure, fine, whatever. Nothing could harm me, I'd faced down the tomatoes.

You guys, the tomatoes.

First off, they were green. Not, like, red with green tinges, but pretty well fully green (while still having enough of an anaemic pink blush to indicate that the restaurant wasn't just having a Fannie Flagg moment). Weirdly, though, they weren't as hard as green tomatoes tend to be; in fact, they were weirdly and unpleasantly squishy. And as if that weren't off-putting enough, the tomatoes had a coconutty taste that was, while not entirely unpleasant, certainly inappropriate given the context.

Coconut-flavoured juvenile tomatoes. Oy vey.

Look, I know it's the middle of winter. I know it was a moderately dodgy neighbourhood sub shop in a moderately dodgy neighbourhood. I know I should adjust my expectations accordingly: I wouldn't expect a dream-come-true salad from the equivalent-level chicken shop in, say, Rockdale in July. And I did have an awesome salad at Alchemist with Liz the other night: the tomatoes were still a bit hard and clearly out of season (just use grape tomatoes people, damn!), but the greens were lovely, fresh and tasty, and there was just enough dressing to emphasise the flavours without covering them. So it can be done. I've eaten the proof, and it was delicious. It's just... it's a rotten, cold, rainy day on the back of a number of rotten, cold, rainy days, and all I wanted was some vegetables. I've never cried over a salad before.

On a lighter night, this was on the homepage of boston.com the other night. I invite you to look closely at the menu bar on the left, where they have posted what they apparently consider to be the two most important maps of my fair city.

XOXO

Link du jour: OH MY GOD, YOU GUYS. I promise I will tell you about this in every possible detail. It might almost make up for the salad.

You smartarses.

Okay, own up: who vandalised my innocent bunnies?

Boston : Melbourne

As many people have remarked over the years, Boston resembles Melbourne in lots of ways. It's being driven home to me every day as I head into my temp job, because the part of Cambridge I'm working in looks a lot like South Melb... which is not an entirely flattering comparison, but it's not meant to be: the resemblance lies in the way that both cities have taken what should be lovely, water-adjacent land and managed to turn it into stark, concrete-laden bleakness. That's quite an achievement when you think about it, but I would encourage you not to think about it.

Other ways in which the two cities are similar:

• They're on the water but not quite of the water in the way Sydney is
• There are beaches in the city but you wouldn't want to swim in them (South Boston and Revere : St. Kilda)
• There are quite nice beaches a bit of a drive away (Cape Cod : Mornington Peninsula; though our beaches aren't anything like that nice - and the water's way colder - the scenery is really pretty and surprisingly not dissimilar)
• We have above-ground public transport (trolleys : trams)
• There's a big arts/music/education culture (admittedly we're not as good on fashion, but our music scene would blow most other, bigger cities out of the water, so that's the trade-off)
• The weather is extreme, and quite grim for several months of the year (hence all the cultural hoo-ha mentioned above: when you're stuck inside a lot of the time, you have to do something to keep busy)
• There's a strong (and not always entirely successful) blending of old and new architecture
• We have an intense rivalry with our biggest neighbour city, about which the smaller city cares much more than the larger does because we have an inferiority complex that informs pretty well everything we do, not that we'd admit it (Boston-New York : Melbourne-Sydney)

I wish to god this weather would break.

XOXO

Masa = love.

Omigod, you guys.

Caitlin took me to Masa for brunch today, and it was THE AWESOMER. The food, the drinks, the service, the everything. All of it, just beyond.

I started with a Citrus Mojito, which, if there's a better way to start a Sunday than with rum and lime, I sure as hell can't think of it. Caitlin had the Latin Bellini, which was so sparkly and light - mango! guava! champers! - that we each had two more of those before the meal was done. Somebody get on the phone to Anise and tell them to start serving liquor, y'all, you don't even know what you've been missing all this time. These were accompanied by fresh, warm cornbread with a selection of sweet and savoury jams and what I think was a maple-walnut-flavoured butter (slightly sweet, slightly salty, altogether perfect).

For an appetizer, I had the Southwestern Spring Roll, which was lovely and cheese-y with a beautiful clean chilli heat to it. (Went really well with the mojito too!) Caitlin had the Breakfast Tacos, which I coveted mightily until I had a taste of my own app and did a Happy Food Dance in my chair.

For my entrée, I had the Santa Fe-style Eggs Benedict (no avocado), which were pushed beyond the usual level of Hollandaise greatness by the use of biscuits (American biscuits, not British/Australian biscuits), which maintained their crunch much better than the standard English muffin. The home fries were a bit bland and not crunchy like I like them, but everything else on the plate - including a transcendent fresh red salsa - was so good that I simply did not care. Caitlin had the chocolate-chip pancakes, and judging by the look on her face she was quite happy with her choice.

Sadly, I'm going to miss out on another Work of Culinary (TM Oscar and Versical) this evening: the Mission Hill Massive's Sunday Dinner is on, and it's the annual St. Patrick's Day Boiled Dinner edition - whether there's a reason it's only done once a year is your call. Unfortunately, I've come over all wicked tired and I feel like the cold I've been fighting off for the last few days is settling in, so I'm going to give this week a miss and stay home with my 'Stupid Stupid Man' DVDs, even though it means skipping my Mom's amazing Irish bread - and no, there wasn't one made for our house. But I need the rest more than the baked goods, I think.

Also, while we're on the topic of 'Stupid Stupid Man': how the bloody hell is Matthew Newton so hot? I *know* he's an asshole. He's even playing an asshole, so it's not like I'm deluding myself about the character. I just... gah. I'm a broken human, and a bad, bad lesbian.

XOXO

Link du jour: Caitlin's photo blog. Go check out what things look like where we live.

Excuse me while I dig out the butter churn.

So I had my interview yesterday. It went well, I think... it's always hard to know, but I felt pretty good about it. I spent 30 minutes with my prospective manager and each of three team members, for a total of two hours. Pretty intense, but I feel like I got a really good picture of what the job will entail and how the team functions. I have no idea what the process is from here (which is my fault: I had the chance to ask but spaced - blame the remnants of jet lag), so I don't know when I'll hear or if I'd need to go through another interview first. I'll keep you posted, anyway.

I've also been working for the last couple of days at a family friend's non-profit. It's pretty straight admin, but it's got me out of the house, which is good for me, and the people that work there are super-nice. More than anything I'm just trying to keep busy so that I can get over my jet lag and not sink into the blahs.

It's very weird to think that I've been back less than a week. I really don't know what to make of it. I'm not mourning as hard as I expected (in large part due to the keeping busy, I'm sure), but I'm afraid it's just denial: when I do think about it I feel like I've been hit in the back by a wave, so I'm trying very hard not to think about it. That's not going to work in the long run but I feel like I'll be in better shape to deal with it when I have a job and more structure in my life, so if I can continue to put it off until then, I will.

We appear to be in the middle of a black-out. Huh.

The weather's been... eh. The first few days were cool but lovely and sunny, but since Thursday it's been grey and rainy and quite cold at night. On the other hand, I noticed buds on a lot of trees and bushes the other day, and that fills me with hope. As I've mentioned to a number of people, it's been seven years since I saw Boston in a season other than winter, and I've entirely forgotten what it looks like when it isn't dead. I got a bit of a reminder when in Pentimento [Note to non-Inner West types: hyper-trendy books-n-things shop; the type of place that has a signature scent that they pump through the air vents] with Bex: there was a map book of Boston and I was showing her some photos, and she noted with surprise how green the city was. I agreed, with at least as much surprise: it is green, extraordinarily green, but I can't envision it at all. Like, my Dad mentioned the magnolia trees all along Comm. Ave., and I had no idea what he was talking about. Blank in my head. It'll be a nice surprise, I think.

News flash: we are in the middle of a black-out, and we had one last night as well (but I was out so I didn’t know). Apparently I now live in the Blitz.

Okay, so it’s now an hour and a half later and we STILL don’t have electricity. I’ve finished my book (Dominic Knight’s Disco Boy, which I can heartily recommend as a light-but-fun read in the early Nick Earls vein), and I am now bored and want the effing Internet back. Also, I’m hungry and I want pizza in bed, and here’s a thing: when I’m living in my own place I have no compunction about ordering delivery and stuffing my face while under the doona – in fact, I consider that to be one of the great joys of modern life – but being at home with my parents really puts me off that idea. Not sure why, but I think it’s related to the panic they go into when they see me ordering delivery (‘I’d have made you something! I’d have run out and picked it up! I’d have taken you somewhere!’). What they don’t seem to understand is that if I’d wanted homemade food I’d have cooked it myself, and if I’d wanted to go out somewhere I’d have gone out. If I order delivery it’s because I want to stay in my pajamas and not face the outside world. It’s a valid choice, not a desperate last straw. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate their concern and good intentions, but: 32 years old. I don’t need to be looked after or coddled or paid for or whatever; I am functional and competent and have lived on my own in another fucking country for several years now. I can manage. I just need somewhere to stay until I have my shit together.

But that’s a discussion (rant) for a whole other post, or possibly therapy session. In the meantime it’s simply a disinclination to take advantage of one of urban America’s greatest achievements, the no-minimum delivery policy. Shame.

XOXO

Link du jour: Do you know who Constance McMillen is? If you don't, find out now and do something to support her.

My destiny calls.

I wanted to avoid turning this into a food blog: there are already so many of those, and eating habits can be an unreliable source of material. No one wants to read about your having eaten leftover spaghetti at lunch for the third day running, you know?

On the other hand, I love food. Lurrrrrrve it. And one of the great things about moving to a new place - even when it's an old new place, like I'm in now - is discovering the yumminess on offer. Furthermore, Constable Parker has already demanded more specifics about what I've eaten, and far be it from me to refuse an officer of the law. So....

Yesterday I ate the kind of lunch that makes you happy to be alive.

El Oriental de Cuba is one of those places that has never made it into my high rotation, despite being local and excellent. Hear me now, that is changing: I intend to become a regular.

I've only been in the restaurant once or twice before, but we used to order from there occasionally when I worked at Brookside (lo those many years ago). The ropa vieja is beautiful, and the first time I ever tried yuca it was from there. (I didn't love that but that's not on them, I just don't like yuca much for the same reason I don't especially care for taro: there's something kind of gluey about them that I just can't come at.) But yesterday I had something very specific in mind: I wanted a Cuban sandwich.

When you examine the ingredients, a Cuban sandwich probably doesn't sound particularly special: ham, pork, Swiss cheese, mustard, and dill pickles on crusty bread, grilled in a sandwich press. But this is a classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts: the flavours meld to become something spectacular; the pickles and the crusty bread give texture to counterbalance the meatiness. It all just works.

The Cuban bread is a big part of the awesomeness. It's crusty like a pane di casa, but with a soft inside that feels to me more like damper. It's beautiful. I got to eat a lot of it yesterday, as I had an appetizer* of chicken soup that came with a basket of grilled, buttered Cuban bread for dipping. It almost eclipsed the soup, and that's saying something: this was proper chicken soup, with big knuckles of chicken meat (on the bone, natch), huge chunks of potato and carrot, and bright yellow egg noodles. This soup could cure most things that ailed you, including a broken heart and leprosy. Of course, because I haven't yet acclimated to American food sizes, I figured that a small soup and a sandwich would be an entirely reasonable lunch. I began to rethink this when I saw the 'small' vat of soup and the half-loaf of bread that accompanied it. But let it never be said of me that I am easily daunted.

I had almost finished the soup when my sandwich arrived. It can be argued (and is, at length - check Chowhound) that El Oriental's version is less traditional, as it also includes lettuce, tomato, onion and mayonnaise, which are common additions in South Florida but were not part of the sandwich as it was originally made in Cuba. I skipped the tomato myself, but left the lettuce and onion because I think they add a nice crunch. So awesome, all of it. So awesome. I kept giggling to myself with how delicious it was, especially when I chased a bite of the sandwich with a piece of the Cuban bread left from my soup. It just made everything better.

I left the restaurant about an hour after I'd first walked in, feeling just on the fungry! side of the fungry!/hull line and grinning from ear to ear. I'll be back but quick.

XOXO

* FYI, in an attempt to adjust to the local dialect I'll be using the American terms 'appetizer' for entrée and 'entrée' for main course. I know that 'entrée' for main course makes absolutely no bloody sense; the link du jour is a stab at the etymology that seems reasonable, even if I still disagree with the result.

I have to start somewhere...

...so here we go. I don't have much to say yet - I'm too jet-lagged - but I'm here and I'm conscious and I have a slightly narky but otherwise healthy Buster with me. All of these are good things.

The aforementioned furball has become the apple of my parents' eyes in no time at all, and I expect that he'll overtake me in the will stakes within the week. He seems to make friends wherever he goes: his fan club at the Qantas Freight terminal alone would make most pop stars seethe with jealousy. He was extremely well-behaved throughout the trip and I don't think he's stopped purring since we arrived, apart from a rather nasty run-in with my Boston cat Didi, which left me with a couple of angry-looking scratches on my hand and a renewed resolve to keep Buster safe in my room for a while yet.

I start work tomorrow - this is just a temp job, not the one I'm interviewing for on Friday - but I haven't got(ten) up to much yet. I took my computer in to get fixed yesterday, and thanks to the Apple Angels I'll have it back today. I'm using a loaner PC at the moment, and it's... well, it's free, so no complaints, but I'll be happy to return to my beloved Trillian. Apart from that I've been sticking pretty close to home, catching up on American television and trying not to think. In which news, the U.S. Women's Ice Hockey Team is on 'Ellen' today. Sometimes the jokes write themselves. (Another being the god-awful blush pink blazer she's wearing - with black pants and brown shoes, no less. Come on, babe: you've finally got the good hair, let your wardrobe catch up.)

Anyway. I'll follow up with something more... something... soon, but I wanted to get this started. Sign up to follow me and leave comments and all the rest: the more encouragement I get, the more likely I am to keep up with this, and I like having a project right now.

XOXO

Link du jour: Feist on 'Sesame Street' singing a new and improved version of '1, 2, 3, 4'