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Category: Travel

  • Seafood and Gaudi in Barcelona

    Seafood and Gaudi in Barcelona

    We have been incredibly fortunate to get to travel, even during the pandemic. I had a recent work event in Barcelona and so the Snook decided to accompany me. We headed there a few days early so we had time to play tourist.

    On the plane

    Neither of us had ever been to Barcelona before. Actually, other than a short work trip the Snook made to Madrid 20 years ago, neither of us had ever really been to Spain! We caught a Saturday afternoon flight from Munich and were there within a couple hours. We checked into our hotel and then went out in search of dinner. It was a lovely night.

    Walking in Barcelona

    It was nice to see palm trees again! We had made a 9pm restaurant booking off a recommendation from my boss Enrique, and we had plenty of time to walk through the city and explore. Our route took us past the gates of the famous Citadel Park.

    Gates of Citadel Park

    Our dinner booking was at Passadis del Pep. We honestly had no idea what to expect. Our first challenge was just finding the place – there’s no sign, and you enter through an unobtrusive hallway. We noticed right away that our 9pm reservation – which felt quite late for us – was actually the first sitting of the night, as the place was still pretty empty!

    Pa amb tomàquet

    Our waiter was an older guy who thankfully spoke a little English. “We have no menu,” he said. “We cook whatever is fresh and in season. Are you happy to be surprised?” We said we were. The starter was the classic “pa amb tomàquet” (bread with tomato) with some olives and chips.

    Tartar

    I knew we were going to be in for a lot of seafood! Next course was a tuna tartare doused in olive oil with some crisp toasts.

    Clams

    The food just kept coming. Next was a pot of all different clams and pippis. This was my first time ever having razor clams! The Snook was in heaven, and we eagerly sopped up the pot liquor with bread.

    Happy Snookums

    See? Told you he was happy.

    Peppers and fried fish

    Next we had grilled Padrón peppers with sea salt, and a plate of lightly battered and fried baby shrimps. I was dubious of the Snook’s advice to just eat them, legs and all, but they were so tiny they had crisped up like French fries!

    Grilled squid

    Little grilled squids! Just the right amount of char…

    Wild mushrooms

    Next up was a local specialty of wild mushrooms with a very rich sauce. (Definitely butter, maybe even some egg yolks?) I liked this, but the Snook wasn’t as much of a fan.

    Jamón ibérico

    At this point I noticed there was giant Jamón on a special stand behind the Snook. *drool*

    Langoustine

    These were like a langoustine, I think? With some sweet caramelised onions on top.

    More prawns

    Yet more prawns! At this point we were getting pretty full, and there was no sign of the parade of dishes coming to an end. I flagged down our charming waiter to ask him how much more there was to come. “Steak or fish?” he replied. “Steak,” I sighed.

    Our final “main” course was a beautifully rare steak along with garlic and rosemary fries. It was delicious, definitely the best steak we’d had since leaving Australia. We were so stuffed though!

    Us

    But we were feeling great. We drank an entire bottle of a local Catalan wine. That probably helped.

    Dessert was thankfully very light – just a couple scoops of lemon sorbet, and then our choice of a couple digestivs. I went for the cream liqueur, while the Snook went for the “Bruja” (which he said reminded him of grappa). What a great start to our Barcelona mini-break!

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  • A visit to Moominworld

    A visit to Moominworld

    I’m kind of obsessed with Moomins. For the uninitiated, these are the titular characters from a series of books and comic strips by the Swedish-speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson. I’d never heard of them growing up, but way back in 2005 the Snook introduced them to me and I fell in love. The Moomins themselves are “trolls” but look like hippos and live in a tall, round blue house in the middle of Moominvalley. The stories are funny and droll, but also at times melancholy and gloomy and even occasionally scary. I’ve read most of the books since then (wellll, in truth Rodd has read them to me), watched some of the various animated series and films, collected some merch, and even visited the Moomincafe in Hong Kong (sadly since closed). For my birthday this year, the Snook even made me a Little My cake!

    At some point many years ago we learned that there is an actual Moominworld theme park in Finland. Earlier this year I remembered it and jokingly suggested to the Snook that we should go. Amazingly, the stars aligned and Covid restrictions eased enough that we were actually able to make it happen! Strap in folks; this is going to be a long post…

    On the train

    Rather than just fly to Finland, we decided to train it north through the Nordics and visit some new cities (and some of my colleagues!) along the way. Our first destination was Hamburg, a 6.5hr train ride from Munich. When we arrived at our hotel, we were delighted to find that it was just down the street from the Hamburger Dom Fun Fair!

    At the Hamburger Dom

    We decided to have fair food for dinner. I was intrigued by the stand offering a “half-meter bratwurst” (which they had to cut in half to fit in the bun!) as well as “Oma’s Gurkenfaß” (Grandma’s Pickle Barrel). The Snook also had freshly-made Marillenknödel (apricot doughnuts).

    Sausages!
    Pickles
    Doughnuts

    After the fair, we went for a walk through Hamburg down to the Speicherstadt (“city of warehouses”), which used to be the heart of Hamburg’s working harbour. The Snook was very sceptical about our destination, a place that I’d been told by many was THE tourist destination in the city…

    Hamburg harbour

    Miniatur Wunderland! This place is the largest model railway in the world. It has 1300 trains across nine sections. The first one we came to was the American Wild West…

    Miniatur Wunderland

    We were only able to get timed tickets at 10:30pm, and it was still PACKED. It reminded me of the House on the Rock, in that it felt like an obsessive fever dream kind of place. Every fifteen minutes the lighting cycled through an entire day so you could see it all at night too. Some sections had buttons you could press that would cause things to happen, like a Ferris Wheel to start spinning or the Space Shuttle to take off.

    Windsurfer
    Elbphilharmonie
    Cars on bridge
    St. Michael’s Church
    Stadium
    Airport at night

    Did I mention it has a giant working airport?? Model plans take off and land through holes cut in the walls while little luggage trucks drive all over the place. It was CRAZY.

    Airport

    There are thousands of little scale figurines all over the place. Hilariously, apparently some of them are doing “rude” things and fans of the place try to catalog them all. We didn’t spot many, but it was pretty clear these folks in the sunflower field were enjoying themselves…

    Sunflower couple

    I think my favourite part was getting a glimpse into the control room that runs everything. It looks like Mission Control! It takes a lot of computing power and smart people to keep all the little trains, planes, cars, trucks, and boats moving.

    Mission Control

    The next day, we bought tickets for a “Hafenrundfahrt” (harbour tour) as it’s the best way to see the Speicherstadt.

    Hafenrundfahrt

    It was really cool to see all the old warehouses and canals. Apparently Hamburg has more bridges within its city limits than any other city in the world. (More than London, Amsterdam, and Venice put together!)

    Warehouses
    Warehouses
    Canals and bridges
    Canals and warehouses

    Then we went out in to the harbour proper and saw the working port and some big sailing ships near the Maritime Museum.

    Working harbour
    Sailing ship

    The sky had been threatening rain and it finally started to fall. Luckily our boat had a retractable roof so we didn’t get too wet! Our first glimpse of the Elbphilharmonie was through the rain…

    Retractable roof
    Elbphilharmonie
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  • Rivers and Lakes and a Staircase to Nowhere

    Rivers and Lakes and a Staircase to Nowhere

    After spending last weekend lying about the house like slugs (our first since we got here), we decided that we needed to get outside again. A few different folks had recommended we visit some of the many lakes near Munich, so this past Saturday we caught a train to Lake Tegernsee…

    Lake Tegernsee

    It was about a one hour ride south from Munich on one of the regional trains, which was nevertheless smooth and fast and sparkling. There were more folks on the train than I expected, including some in full lederhosen and dirndls (celebrating what would’ve been the end of Oktoberfest with a cooler bag full of beers). The forecast was for rain and wind, but we had all opted to take our chances. We whizzed through forests and fields and, for the time being, the sun was bright and warm. The last bit of the trip ran south along the east coast of the lake from Gmund to the village of Tegernsee, which was literally the end of the line.

    Walking into Tegernsee

    The train station is fairly high up, so to get to the lake you have to walk down into the village. We passed over little brooks with crystal clear water and wandered through narrow cobblestone streets that looked straight out of a storybook. Most shops were closed as it was German Unity Day, but we knew our destination was open: the Herzogliches Bräustüberl Tegernsee. This is a famous brewpub next to the Brauhaus Tegernsee brewery, and we were hungry for lunch.

    Rodd at lunch

    The place was pretty packed, but we managed to get an outdoor table that was still under cover. This was lucky, because just as we were finishing our lunch the rain hit!

    Tegernsee in rain

    Here we are huddled under a tree next to the lake. We’d hoped to go for a walk on the shore – or possibly even go on a boat ride – but it just got grayer and windier and colder. We made our way to the Seehaus Cafe and waited in a queue to get in. (Everybody had the same idea we did!) Thankfully it was warm and cosy inside, and we had a great spot overlooking the lake. We saw a large group of sailboats all making for the shore, and the Snook had fun trying to identify the various seabirds we could see along the shore.

    We gave up on any further lakeside activities and headed back to the train station for home. As we walked from the station to the house, the Snook pointed out that we were close to a very special sculpture…

    Umschreibung

    This is called “Umschreibung,” and it’s literally a staircase to nowhere. It does have an opening so you can climb on it, but there’s a sign on it now telling you to stay off (presumably due to Covid or something?). At any rate, it seemed a fitting end to our day to Tegernsee and back.

    Umschreibung

    On Sunday the sun was shining again, but we decided to stick a little closer to home with a bicycle ride. We plotted a route over to the Flaucher, the park that runs along the Isar River. Thanks to Munich’s excellent separated cycleways, we were safely there in no time.

    Isar

    We crossed the river and joined the many, many folks riding, running, and strolling along the banks. It was very hard for these Aussies to imagine that this rocky shore is as close to the beach as you’re going to get here!

    Rocky beach

    In the middle of the park we found the Zum Flaucher beer garden and refreshed ourselves with a quick lunch of leberkäse, potato salad, and Pommes frites. And of course, since we were riding, we washed it down with Radlers!

    Lunch

    Oh, and did I mention there’s a famous nudist (FKK) beach on the Isar? And people literally stop on the bridge to gawk at the sunbathers? And so did we??

    Beertrinken

    On our return trip, we checked out the northeast corner of the park, including the Entenweiher (duck pond). Munich really is ridiculously pretty, you guys. I can’t wait to see it when the leaves have finished changing colours…

    Entenweiher

    Then it was time to head home! We took a city route up across the Wittelsbacherbrücke and then up Kapuzinerstrasse back to Theriesenwiese. This would’ve been the final day of Oktoberfest, so we stopped to pay homage to the statue of Bavaria. Unfortunately she’s closed now due to Covid so we couldn’t climb inside, but I’m sure we will one of these days. Prost!

    Bavaria

  • Final Vegas post is a Bond tribute: Tiffany Case, reporting for duty! 😉🎪🎈

  • Heading off on another adventure. See you soon, Perth!

  • Weekly Meetup Wrap – February 25, 2018

    Does 2018 seem to be accelerating for anyone else? I went to FIVE tech events last week. 😲

    The first one was GraphDB Sydney – a rare Monday meetup. After a long hiatus, the group reformed late last year and, though it’s still small, it seems to be well supported by Neo4j and Ansarada.

    Josh Yu from Neo4j gave an excellent overview of APOC – which stands for “Awesome Procedures On Cypher.” Cypher is Neo4j’s graph query language, and APOC is a library of more than 300 custom procedures that add cool functionality. Josh ran through a live demo that used clustering to aid in financial fraud detection. I learned a heap from this talk – including that yes, the founder of Neo4j was a big fan of The Matrix. 🙂

    On Tuesday evening I headed over to BlueChilli for the SheStarts Mentor Mixer. This is a program to support startups with women founders, and this is my second year as an advisor (along with some amazing peers). I met with two of the founders to hear about their projects and offer them advice. Interestingly, both women I spoke to asked me whether I thought they should do a coding course. (They were both non-coders.) My advice is that something basic like NodeGirls would be a good idea to give them confidence in working with developers – demystifying the black magic of coding, as it were – as well as empathy and understanding for the skills those folks will bring to the team. I also really enjoyed catching up with some of the alumni from the first SheStarts cohort, like Jessica Christiansen-Franks from Neighbourlytics.

    Wednesday I headed over to Web Analytics Wednesday for what proved to be a very popular session!

    A panel of four experts spoke about all things content engagement: Dominic Laforgia, Head of Data & Insights at Fairfax; Mackenzie Stratford, Digital Analyst and Product Manager at News Life Media; Leon Bombotas, Chief Data Officer & Founder of Newsroom.ly; and Nathan Scully, Senior Analytics Manager at Oneflare. Meetup organiser Simon Rumble fielded questions from the audience on whether dashboards are important, what metrics are useful for different types of businesses, all the different platforms publishers have to support, and how they plan to handle future technologies like “zero UI” interfaces. (Spoiler – nobody really has a plan for that last one.) Great discussion!

    Thursday saw me heading to Melbourne for the first time this year. I love hearing what’s happening in the Victorian tech community! Thursday night I went along to the Melbourne Haskell Users Group to learn about “serverless Haskell” from Alexey Kotlyarov (speaker at Lambda Jam 2017!) and David Overton from Seek.

    The project came out of a Seek Hackathon last year, and it involves wrapping your Haskell code in an executable with Node.js and deploying it to AWS Lambda. They’re already using it in production! Pull requests are welcome. 🙂

    Not going to lie though… The best part of MHUG was going out to dinner with a dozen other folks afterwards for a Malaysian feast!

    Friday night I had an unofficial DevRel meetup with some of the awesome folks in the Melbourne community. It was a floating bar, and there were a lot of beers, french fries, laughs, and late night burgers. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?) ⛵🍻❤

    Saturday was the main event of the week for me: MeasureCamp Melbourne! This “unconference” style event brought together lots of folks from the data engineering, analytics, product, and UX worlds for a full day of talks and discussions.

    After the morning welcome and kickoff, attendees were invited to propose sessions and tack them up on a large schedule for the day. With 5 rooms and 8 slots, there was room for up to 40 different sessions! I decided on the spur of the moment to give a talk on giving “Better Tech Talks – How to do public speaking without sucking.” 🙂

    For the first session, I went to see Scott Sunderland, founder of Tribalism, try to convince us that humans are better than computers. Scott argued that there are things humans are really good at – like filtering out unnecessary information, making intuitive leaps – that computers just can’t do. He also made the analysts in the room happy by predicting that their jobs are the least likely to be automated away in the near future!

    The second talk I went to was from Val Lyashov at Envato talking about how they do analytics. I was impressed that Val presented with just a whiteboard – no slides! He gave a good overview of how they tie their various systems together and answered a lot of questions from the audience. (Oh, and they’re hiring!)

    My last talk before lunch was my new friend Mike Robins from Snowplow. Mike was speaking about a very important topic: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These regulations come into effect on May 25, 2018 for any online business that collects personal data on users in the European Union. It outlines some very specific things you need to do, and the worry is that very few Australian businesses are prepared for it! (My takeaway was: Damn, I’m really happy I’m not in charge of an online business anymore!)

    I spent the first session after lunch frantically preparing for my own talk! Soon it was time to head to the room…

    I essentially went through all the points from my recent LinkedIn article on public speaking. I ended up with about 20 attendees, and they seemed to really enjoy and get a lot out of it! Hopefully some of them will be inspired to volunteer to give talks at their local meetups and events in the future. 🙂

    The session after mine was a tag team presentation from Priscilla Cheung and Moe Kiss from THE ICONIC. I loved this one! They talked about the importance of good UX when presenting your data, and they walked through 10 tips for making it look better.

    I also loved when Moe got opinionated about pie charts. 😂

    In the last block of sessions, I went to see Sarah Crooke from Data Runs Deep talk about how she uses R to combine data from web and mobile analytics. I’ve seen a few talks on R lately, but most of have been from super experienced data engineers. It was nice to see someone who’s learned it recently and who could give advice to those of us less experienced with the language!

    The last talk I saw was actually a repeat for me – it was Johann de Boer  giving his talk on predictive targeted marketing using machine learning. I saw it at Web Analytics Wednesday back in January, but I felt honour bound to support someone from the Sydney community (especially since he’d caught the train to Melbourne the previous night!).

    Many thanks and congratulations to the MeasureCamp organiser for putting on a fantastic event! 👏

    Other Stuff

    I’m heading off to Perth, Bangalore, and Singapore over the next two weeks, so my meetup adventures are going to be on hold for a bit!

    • It’s all happening at YOW! right now. We’ve got SEVEN upcoming YOW! Nights happening across Australia in the coming weeks. Hope to see you at one of them!
    • QUICK. There is a Humble Bundle of functional programming books, but it finishes up early Tuesday morning! I just bought it…
    • Don’t forget that we have two upcoming YOW! events in Sydney with open Calls for Presentations! YOW! Data will be held on May 14-15 and is looking for speakers on data-driven technologies and applications. YOW! Lambda Jam is coming up on May 21-23 and is all about functional programming. Special note: This year we’ve added on an extra day for LJ that will be a full-day workshop aimed at providing an “on-ramp” to FP. (If you can’t make it to Tony’s 3-day course, you should definitely sign up for the LJ one!)

  • I forgive you the rain, Melbourne. 😍 #cubano

  • More meetups need to finish with a banquet at @mamakrestaurant! 😍🐷 #mhug

  • Shhh! Don’t tell the hipster Melburnians there’s a sneaky Sydneysider hiding in plain sight… #tramselfie

  • The @virginaustralia lounge attendant made my day by pointing out I could switch to exit row for free. 😍 #ffnoob