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Jun

Squared up with the Third World

Are you a closet knitter? Or are you loud and proud, knitting in the car, trackside at the motorbike races, at the beach?

Today, people around the world raised their knitting needles in public for the World Wide Knit in Public Day (www.kipday.com) The movement started in 2005, and last year, there were 751 knit-ins around the world on the day.

Image from Save the Children

From Amsterdam to Melbourne, knitters came out for some plein-air action, the Melbourne event contributing to the Save the Children’s Born to Knit campaign, holding a knit-in where your knitted squares (apparently however dodgy) are joined up to make blankets for vulnerable children.

Now, I haven’t knitted since I was 11, and I remember being told that I had ‘tension issues’ – I think that meant that my knitting alternated from a loopy fishing net to something as tight as a duck’s bum. But I digress. What got me was the photo of a little child of the third world, eyes darkened with kohl, clutching a beautiful blanket donated by these generous spirits. It caught me right at my newly-minted mummy’s heart, along with the event’s motto, “Better living through stitching together”.

So the Child Prodigy (CP) and I wandered down to Federation Square to see what was cooking. Much of the square was dominated by a busker busting moves, and the big screen broadcasting a speech delivered by the Dalai Lama during his visit earlier this week.

The Fed Square event was organised by wool manufacturers Australian Country Spinners. The lounges and bean bags scattered around the area were filled with eager knitters, mostly pros, but I managed to snag a set of needles and coax an old hand to teach me how to cast on, then a nice Greek lady helped with the first row, another lady talked me through correcting the stitches I’d added while she dandled CP on her knee as the Dalai Lama roared about peace in the background.

Volunteers collected the finished squares which they will stitch together into blankets to send to their programs in India, Cambodia and Laos. Some women were flipping the squares out like wildfire. Me? I had tongue firmly stuck out as I battled through four rows (I have added this pic as evidence). People, I have to get 88 rows to complete the square in my chic mauve wool. I think it’s going to take a little longer than an afternoon.

If you’re knit-tastic (and I personally know some extreme knitters) but missed out on the knit-in, they are looking to create 15,000 blankets, made of 16 squares each. You can knit your square (88 rows of 44 stitches) and drop it into any Spotlight or Lincraft store, post it to 42 Dight St, Collingwood Vic 3066, or visit Save the Children

May

Essential guide to Dubai

Tips for exploring the glitz, glamour and a dash of grunge of the UAE’s star city.

Click here to read more…

Apr

Happy Easter!

It is a mark of the difference between Australia’s commercial TV stations and the national broadcaster that at Easter, Channel 7 is showing The Fast and the Furious 2 (muscle mary Vin Diesel does street car races) the while the far more high-brow ABC is showing the 1956 movie, The 10 Commandments.

The Cecil B De Mille number was filmed partially just outside Cairo, starring Charles Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as a hunky Pharaoh Ramses, with an abundance of muscles and lavish use of body oil.

The TV notes describe the movie as “the monumental dramatisation of the book of Exodus, [which] recreates the life of Moses from his infancy through to his deliverance of the Israelites”.Talk about big subject matter.

Anyway, Charles and Cecil stayed at the Mena House hotel, which still stands right beside the Pyramids, and Charles would ride his horse down from filming into the hotel’s afternoon cocktails on the lawn, all flowing beard and robes.

With the discounts and incentives Egyptian tourism is currently offering to lure tourists back after the revolution, I reckon you’d be allowed to do a Charles and ride your pony down from the Pyramids into hotel drinkies, no worries.

PS: I now note that Channel 7 IS actually showing the same movie, only starting at 11.30pm!

Apr

Essential guide to Kuala Lumpur

There’s more to KL than those big towers – and what are they, anyway? You go up high, you look around, you go down…

Instead, we say hit the malls for some truly fabulous shopping, and get down and dirty on the streets of Little Inida, Chinatown, the Malay quarters…

Click here for where to shop, eat, sleep and sightsee in KL…

Apr

Hot to shop: Adelaide

Adelaide Arcade pic credit: Sun Herald

For vintage fashion, antiques and contemporary design, this city is streets ahead. We’re talking Adelaide. Yes, Adelaide. Canny eastern states bargain hunters are well aware of the great deals to be had in the city of churches, sex shops and hydroponic gardeners (and we’re not talking tomatoes here).

And with the addition of some cool new markets and ramped-up fashion, the city could possibly be getting rid of its love-hate relationship with Sydney & Melbourne (love to run away there, hate it when others run away there…)

To read more, click here

Apr

Open-air drama in Melbourne’s skies

ONE of my pet hates is staying in hotel rooms where you can’t open the windows. I understand, in extreme circumstances, that annoying hotel guests might muck up the aircon, say, in a Dubai summer or a Helsinki winter. But in balmy Australia?

Ok, so ‘balmy’ might be pushing it in autumnal Melbourne at the mo, but it was deliciously sunny the days I visited the Langham Hotel, on Southbank. To read more about the hotel and its new terrace rooms, click here.

Mar

More bang for your baht in Bangkok

MBK, you big, beautiful monster, I miss you!

Someone told me recently they couldn’t understand the hype about Bangkok’s best budget shopping mall, but then they don’t know about the fantastic little camera shop on the ground floor, Nice Face spa that will set your toes a-twinkling for a few baht up on the fifth, just near the fantastic food court and they don’t know about the awesome watch I bought there a few years ago, that only just conked out, to my dismay.

Click here to read more…

Mar

Kyneton: Cool Piper calls the tune

Prunella’s florist on Kyneton’s Piper St.

Cafes and galleries open at a rate of knots, yet there’s still a tractor shop in Kyneton’s hip main drag. How groovy can one town get?

IT’S a windy, rainy night, yet one street in this wee country town is buzzing with a crowd sipping sparkling wine and snacking while making dinner plans. Obviously country Victoria has changed since I last stuck my foot past Melbourne’s city limits sign.

To read more, click here

Mar

Hot to shop: Noosa

It’s not just about the surf and sand in this Sunshine Coast town, in Queensland.

Noosa is where the beautiful people gather to frolic on Main Beach, in between coffee, drinks and dinner on the pavement or by the window of the latest new restaurant; this scene’s all about being seen, especially if you’re fit, fabulous and tanned deep brown.

They’ll be newly-arrived Melburnians lurking in the shadows in their southerner’s black rags and milk-white skin.

Don’t have a kaftan/surf board to fit the smart set? Look no further it’s hot to shop Noosa…

Feb

Liquid diet only at Ponyfish Island

Ponyfish Island – this pic should help you find it!

In my continued (and futile) quest to stay with the pack on new Melbourne café openings, I finally got to Ponyfish Island.

The signs were good: a sunny day, the Yarra River flowing brownly past, my café companion, GG, found the place under his own steam. This is no mean feat. Try describing where Ponyfish Island is: it’s on a pylon supporting one of the footbridges that runs across the river between Flinders St Station and Southbank.

Yeah, easy.

Anyway, Ponyfish Island has actually been around for a while, but despite its amazing location in the middle of the river, it just hadn’t taken off. New owners and a liquor licence have fixed all that, and last Thursday afternoon, the place was heaving. Literally heaving, with good music and happy punters enjoying an after-work jam jar of wine (tres egalitarian, what, serving wine in a jam jar).

We’d planned to hit the island for lunch, so popped in on Friday, scoring a table by the water at 12.30pm. We ordered: GG had the gnocchi and I went simplistic with a toasted sandwich with spinach, cheese and tomato. We had plenty to talk about but when a youth wandered past with gnocchi and sandwich, we hailed him over.

No, this can’t be your order. You haven’t been waiting long enough, he told us.

Fifteen minutes for a toastie isn’t long enough? I asked.

Not in this place, he said with a little laugh, oblivious to the two journalists committing his nonchalance to memory for future blogging.

It turned out it was our order. Reader, before we ate, we played ‘spot the spinach’ (I won, espying two tiny, wilted leaves tucked in one corner of the no-name white bread offering) and GG’s gnocchi was cold.

The day was sunny, the conversation good, the food queue was long; we gave up and ate.

It may have been a fool’s errand but we also ordered coffee. I placed the order at the counter and then asked, will it be long, as we’ve got to get back to work. The barista heard us and grinned. I’m all over it, he told me. Nevertheless, ignore all the other orders and make ours first, I suggested blithely.

Two seconds later, he appeared with my flat white and GG’s double piccolo, both beautifully executed in delicious Niccolo coffee.

The moral of the story: put nothing solid, I repeat, nothing solid, in your mouth on Ponyfish Island, and treat it like the beautifully ambient bar that it is.

Open 8am till 1am.

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