Author: jane

A foodie weekend

A weekend of food related stuff. Firstly, on Friday evening we revisited the Noir Caribbean takeaway, this time trying the goat curry and chicken curry which we both polished off in no time, all washed down with a bottle of local organic wine.

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On Saturday we pottered around the A Taste of Sussex market, picking up some local food, drinking some local beer and generally chilling out enjoying the sunshine. We headed out to Hove for dinner, but with no real plans, and decided on Los Amigos for dinner, which was good, but as with our last visit, the bill seemed surprisingly high. Our last stop for the day was The Sussex for beers.

live food stage

Today, Richard had to head off to London, so I decided to continue the food based weekend and, armed with my camera, I visited a few local food shops, both tried and tested and new to me, before returning to the food festival, to sample some of the hot food and also to watch a few of the shows on the live food show stage. Then home to cook some bagels.

bagels

iTunes 7 – Transfer Purchases

Transfer Purchases from the iPod”

A new feature for iTunes 7 is the ability to transfer purchased music from an iPod to a desktop – as long as the purchaser of the music is authorised on your machine. I discovered this by accident when I plugged my shuffle into my PC at work to put some files on it before heading home for the weekend. When I plugged it in a dialog appeared offering me a new option to “Transfer Purchases”, I figured I’d give it a try and it copied all the purchased music on my shuffle onto my PC. Great. So, I headed off home and decided to plug our main iPod into my macbook and see what happened. No pop up dialog, but if I control click on the name of our iPod I get a menu which offers “Transfer Purchases”. Very cool! This will save me cutting CDs to transfer our purchases from one machine to another.

We popped along to

We popped along to the Badger Music night at the Western Front again on Tuesday and had another fun evening. As we arrived Prince Rodger were just setting up, a 2 piece featuring a cello. The cello and the double bass are two of my favourite instruments, probably because one of the guys I shared a house with at Uni owned both, and the cello lived in our house and some Sunday mornings I’d wake up to the sound of a cello drifting up the stairs. Anyways, the second band were And His Voice Became, a great 2 piece act from London, featuring a drum kit, a guitar and a loop station used to excellent effect, and very good they were too. The final act were The Bobby McGee’s who were, quite simply, mad. But wonderful too, with a drum kit, a double bass and 2 singers armed with ukulele, banjo and a melodica. An excellent band to see live.

Some nice new goodies

Some nice new goodies from Apple were announced on Tuesday, movies via iTunes 7, new look iPod nano, new look iPod shuffle (so small….) and the iTV unit (yet to be given a proper name). I didn’t watch all of the event broadcast (partially due to the poor audio quality of the presentation, which when combined with the poor speakers in the macbook made it almost impossible to hear over the rain hammering on the roof outside).

I downloaded the new iTunes yesterday and quite a few of the user interface features look nice, although as with all things will take some getting used to. I connected my, sadly out of date now, shuffle and looked at the settings tab and found the following at the bottom of the page.

shuffle capacity

”

Cute!

Weekend in Spain

We spent a few days at the lovely La Casa Del Olivar with friends Jim and Lucy. La Casa is close to Villanueva de Algaidas, and only an hour or so from Malaga airport, so not bad for a weekend trip.

The days were lovely and hot, and so tourism suffered as a lot of time was spent around the pool making up games involving an inflatable dolphin, 3 beach balls and 2 inflatable pillow things.

We did manage a couple of trips and so headed off to El Refugio del Burrito where Jim was the definite friend of the donkeys, the flamingo lake at Fuente de Piedra and Antequera, a lovely town dating back to the Bronze Age.

Only Children

One of the podcasts I regularly listen to is Woman’s Hour, and yesterday’s was about Only Children as adults which, as an only child, was interesting for me. I’d never really given much thought to the concept of there being “particular challenges facing only children”, but I guess there are. Thinking about it, I don’t know that many only children, so I guess we’re still rare, although my Mum is an only child too.

Since listening to the podcast I’ve been doing a bit of googling on only children and have found a mailing list, a magazine, a book as well as the conference mentioned on the podcast. I’d never even though about there being support networks for only children, but I guess there are support networks for everything else 🙂

5 things to eat before you die

From The Traveler’s lunchbox via Amanda, 5 things to eat before you die inspired by the BBC’s 50 things to eat before you die (I’ve got 10 left to try):
1. Fish and chips (and mushy peas of course) from Rick Stein’s fish and chip shop in Padstow
2. Sausage and mash on a cold day
3. Chicken wings and ribs after a day snowboarding
4. Teriyaki salmon
5. Does chocolate count as food? If so, Montezuma‘s giant buttons

What makes a good hotel great?

Okay, so I’m not a professional traveller, or even someone who stays in a lot of hotels, but I do like to make sure that when I stay in a hotel, I stay in a great hotel. What makes a great hotel is probably quite a personal thing, but there are some common services which will help to make sure that a customers stay is a pleasant one.

Service

Service is probably the key for me. A great hotel has an innkeeper/host that wants to make my stay as pleasant as they can. Some of the things that can be done to give me the feeling of good service are:

  • provide information about local resources – i.e. restaurant menus, maps, local history maps, tourist information
  • have the room serviced whilst I’m at breakfast (if the hotel has a separate breakfast room)
  • be approachable when I check in, give me a bit of a tour so that I know that you’ve provided restaurant menus, local information etc

Breakfast

Probably out of character with a lot of other UK citizens I don’t find a traditional English breakfast necessarily the best thing I can be offered. I like to have a choice, I like to be able to decide whether I want some fruit, a subsection of a traditional breakfast (just egg on toast), a continental breakfast or a full breakfast.

Of course, if you have a chef available and the facilities then some masterpieces can be created – I stayed in a couple of places in New England last year which produced beatiful 3 course breakfasts that were incredible.

But you don’t even need to have a dining room to provide a good breakfast. An Inn in California which I’ve recently stayed in had no dining facilities and so they left a continental breakfast on a tray outside my room. They also included a copy of the local newspaper and it was a real treat to sit in bed reading the newspaper and eating breakfast.

Outdoor Area

Whatever outdoor area you have can be put to good use to impress. If you’ve got a garden, then set an area aside with tables and parasols for guests to enjoy. If you have a porch or balcony area, then the same goes. Its always worth making sure that any garden area is kept in order, so that the guests have flowers to look at, or well maintained furniture to sit on.

Entertainment

I don’t mean cabaret nights :-), I mean in room entertainment. Provide your guests with televisions, with cable/satellite where possible. Also provide them with some audio system – prefereably a CD player with a library of CDs available. If you want to go that little bit further then how about a playstation or Xbox, and use that to provide both game playing and DVD as extra entertainment methods. This is particularly useful if your location is remote. Again provide a library of games/DVDs for your guests to make use of. If you’re worried about loss of media then some form of check-out system could be employed, so at least you can recharge the guest for any losses.

Decor

I guess the key for me is to keep to neutral themes. Having said that I always like the idea of themed rooms, and being able to select a particular room based on it’s look and features when I’m booking. This also allows some creativity to flow. The rooms can be priced at different levels according to their features (so, for instance, add a hot tub to a room and increase the price of it). Any brochure/website should include photographs of each room so that the guest knows what they’re going to get.

Extras

The little extras can make all the difference, for instance providing bath robes for your guests. That’s a really nice touch, and gives a good feeling about the place. You can always get lots made up and offer them for sale if your guests should want them – that way you always have spares.

Great hotels I’ve visited

The following are the sites belonging to places I’ve stayed. Not all of them have all the things I’ve suggested above, but they have enough to make a stay there feel special.

Johansens and Select Registry are often good starting points for finding great accomodation.

Note: This article was first written about 3 years ago, and I’ve just rediscovered it and thought it should get posted.