Tomoca

I was sitting in the waiting room of my dentist a few weeks before I went to Ethiopia, randomly flipping through magazines. I chanced upon an article on the history of coffee, and was intrigued to discover that coffee had originated in Ethiopia. As I later came to know, no story on Ethiopian coffee could possibly omit a mention of Tomoca!

Tomoca is the oldest continuously operating cafe in Addis, this branch off a side street of Churchill Ave having started in 1953. There's a newer branch inside a fancy glass building a few hundred metres down the road, but that just feels like an ordinary cafe.

The inside is stuffed full of coffee paraphernalia, some of which must date back to the Italian occupation. These giant old coffee machines are no longer used, but sit silently on a benchtop, watching the hustle and bustle.

One pays at the front counter, the salesgirls cool as cucumbers while dealing with a dozen customers at a time thrusting money in their faces. In exchange, one gets a coloured token (black for macchiato, blue for spriss, yellow for latte) which one takes down to the baristas out the back.

Two baristas pump out all the coffees, with a lady standing between them co-ordinating all the action. She takes your token and puts it next to a plate, but somehow manages to remember whose drink belongs to whom, and what order everyone came in.

Tomoca is tiny, a few bar tables with no chairs filling out most of the space. Along one wall is a coffee bean dispenser, under which are is a prized a wooden bench providing seating for the occasional lady that wanders in.

with Yoshi, a Japanese man we kept bumping into

There is one lonely old red formica table, accompanied by the only chair in the whole place. When all that is taken up, people spill out onto the footpath, along the benches and windows, finally extending into the aromatic roasting room at the back.

Now, let me reminisce about the coffee. Though we had plenty of good coffees throughout Ethiopia, Tomoca's coffee was clearly the standout winner. Rich, strong and full-bodied, there was always excellent crema and a perfectly smooth consistency. The amount of "buzz" was just right too.

I drank mostly macchiato, but on one occasion met an Ethiopian man who introduced me to "spriss", a drink made of half black tea, half espresso shot with a good dousing of sugar.

When served the coffee floats on top of the tea, but with a stir it turns an ominous colour which does not look inviting at all. One sip though, and I was hooked. The initial taste is that of coffee, but once it passes the after-taste is clearly that of tea. It is a drink with a light consistency, though somewhat syrupy from all the sugar.

Tomoca was "the" place to be, and we met our fair share of random strangers in it too. Almost all the locals we met there announced their allegiance to Tomoca, declaring it the bestest coffee in Addis, despite the existence of popular franchise chains like Yeshi and Kaldis. I, too, fell in love with Tomoca. And secretly promised myself that one day I shall return for another spriss.

A day out in Shanghai - Chongming Island, and some random water village

On a typically smoggy day in Shanghai we headed out to Chongming island, where there was reportedly a new "original" park. This sign at the front was promising.

Random photos from the park - the last is of a dried riverbed.

Lunch

 Traffic jam in a little water town

Really old school roadside eatery

View from the main bridge. The only touristy attraction in town is the "first teahouse" lined with red lanterns on the right

 How else would you get a TV home in a little water town?

 On a gondola ride

 Random shop

The stinkiest smelly tofu I'd had for a while, I could smell it on the water!

Dream: the one where Shanghai acquires a budget airport

In this dream I'm sitting around a square table with a glass top in our apartment in Shanghai, eating dinner with my dad and grandma. The rest of the decor looks similar but I don't quite recognise the table. Dad is trying to hurry grandma along as he usually does.

Hurry, eat faster! We have to go to the airport soon. He says, then asks me to check what time my flight is. I check the booking - it says I leave at 2300, and the clock shows 1930, so that leaves plenty of time to get to the airport. I tell grandma to slow down. She grumbles back that she can't eat any faster anyway.

But what airport is it leaving from? Dad asks. You know there are international flights from the domestic airport now, so you'd better check.

I look at the booking sheet again and it says I leave from Haima 海马 airport (as in seahorse), which I've never heard of (and is a rather strange name for a Chinese airport).

Oh no, that's the new budget terminal. You'd better hurry because you have to take a 1 hour flight from the main terminal to get to the budget terminal. Dad starts to panic and hurries grandma along even more.

I look at the clock and realise the time is probably not enough. I tell them I'll just go by myself and walk outside. The bomb shelter opposite our house (which in real life is now a nightclub) has been turned into a restaurant called 永康小厨 and I wonder why the restaurant is on the wrong street. On the street there are no vehicles, only a bunch of rickshaws pulled by topless men wearing silly headscarves like during the Qing dynasty.

I look around a bit more for a taxi then decide to ask a rickshaw man where I can get one. He says that our street has been turned into a "Cultural preservation street" and thus nothing motor is allowed within a 2 block radius. I start walking down the street and eventually see some cars on Urumqi Rd.

The taxi driver speeds to the airport and I dash into the terminal.

Hurry, hurry! You've almost missed the flight, don't worry about security! A lady in a red uniform waves me through and I run to the gate where my flight, MA005 is waiting. As I dash through the gate it closes behind me. Phew, a close one, I thought. I follow the ramp down and find myself on the tarmac with a display board looking much like a train station, showing each flight departing from a particular platform.

I go to the area where my flight is meant to be, and see a whole row of old white Ambassadors (like the taxis in India) on the tarmac in place of a plane.

It's too dangerous to fly by Visual Flight Rules tonight, but our IFR (Instrument flight rules) plane is hours away so you have to take one of these cars to the plane. 

I start looking for a spare seat amongst the Ambassadors but they seem all packed with people. As I frantically work my way up the row of cars, some of them start to leave and I am uncertain if I will find a seat.

Then I wake up.

Dream: crunchy chicken noodles

In this dream I'm trying to go to work but for some reason end up somewhere in Kensington heading back to my old flat in Kingsford.

Grace calls and asks if she can have a lift to RPA. I pick her up on the side of Anzac Parade near the Hunanese restaurant and we head back towards Newtown. I look at the clock and it's way past beginning of work time (almost 8am) and I try to rack my brain thinking of which unit I'm working in.

As we are driving along, Grace asks if we can stop to eat something. She's heard about some famous place serving crunchy chicken noodles, and for some reason I agree to stop and have some noodles before we go to work.

We sit down in a tiny restaurant with blue plastic tables and stools on the pavement. It looks like something from Vietnam but it's an Indonesian place. Our noodles arrive almost immediately and it is a pretty big bowl of what looks like mostly noodles with scattered fried shallots and chillies on top.

I mix the noodles in my bowl and take a big slurp. All these chicken bones enter my mouth and I spend the next painful minute spitting out the sharp jagged edges trying not to cut my mouth. I wonder silently in the dream how I managed to get all those bony fragments at once. The next slurp is not any better and I end up with sharp bony bits again. I look down at the bowl and it appears to be floating with nothing but bones.

What sort of place have you brought me to? I ask Grace.

I did say the noodles would be crunchy, just crunchy with bones!  She giggles as she says this and I wake up.

Easter in Melbourne

I was going to write a melancholic post, but instead I decided to look at the photos on my phone, so here they are..

I went to Melbourne with my swimmers and a swim date with Chatu, because apparently Melbourne was super sunny and warmer than usual. When I arrived it was the blustery cold Melbourne I always remembered - lies!

Elsie was sick with bronchitis, so our first stop was to Richmond's Little Vietnam to get some Chinese herbs. 

Sunny blue sky, but cold!

But first, a bowl of delicious beef &beefball pho at Pho Dzung, one of a dozen pho outlets along Victoria Rd.

That first night we went to Chef Lagenda in Flemington with Bo and her friend. We stuffed our faces with sambal mixed veg, beef rendang, curry fishhead laksa, claypot silverdrop noodles, hainanese chicken, roti and coconut / chicken rice. It was all quite tasty but somehow not quite the same as Mamak, I might be a bit biased since I eat so much Mamak.

The next day Elsie's cough was worse, and she blamed this on the lack of cicadas in her herbal concoction (who would have known it was an essential ingredient?). Despite the fact that her house now stank like herbs and that she had had a bad nose bleed from the first dose of the herbs, we headed back to Richmond for another dose of herbs! I mean cicadas..

Random park

Alas, the store was closed. So we went to Lygon St and poked around. Koko black was closed too, though I spied these cute little bunnies in the window.

Sunday evening was Seetha and Nikhil's wedding reception, and what an extravaganza it was! She was such a beautiful bride, fully decked out in a heavily gold-laden sari, and they looked so perfect together as always. The speeches were somehow less cliche than usual, and I think the audience was all pretty moved. It is quite special to find that special someone to love and cherish, especially when you are both young and have so much to look forward to together.

Sunset under the highway

Mmm.. tuna

On my last day in Melbourne Elsie was still not better, and everything we did seemed to not work out probably because she was sick and it was a public holiday. We went to DFO in Moorrabbin, which strangely was next to a light aircraft airport, but found the shops dull. We went to Clayton looking for lunch, and everything was closed. Then we went to Glen Waverley and managed to eat something before the shops closed. Just as we were feeling exasperated, we walked into this awesome BBQ joint in Clayton (practically in the middle of nowhere) where the spicy chicken wings made me feel so extraordinarily content I could have eaten them everyday. This despite the fact I don't like chicken. I also liked their BBQ pancake and coriander rolls.. the flavour brought me back to the roadside in rural China, sitting amongst the coals waiting for my skewers of food.

The night ended with all of us driving to Lygon St again for Koko Black. It was worth it though, the hot chocolate so rich it was almost like syrup. It felt odd to swallow, as if the texture was too thick to be a fluid, but once past the throat it filled the body with warmth and the palate with an aromatic chocolate aftertaste...

We ate too much, so despite our best intentions of having a second dessert at Brunetti we had to settle for spying on the food. Next time I want one of these baguettes..

RIP medlawn.. and other Sydney gripes

So I've been back in Sydney for two months now, and it's been hard to adjust. Possibly because I started on a month of nights - thanks RPA! But it seems to be a ritual that I go through every hospital I start in.. at least I managed to get through it ok having been with two really good senior registrars. I'm getting used to the place, sort of, and my group of 7 registrars seems like a pretty good bunch!

The rain and the cold has been getting to me though - I miss the sunny Darwin days and there just don't seem to be as many sunny days in Sydney. Today was nice so I ended up sitting in the park off Albion St for most of the afternoon soaking up the sun. A few weeks ago Christine organised a picnic at Strickland House, which was such a beautiful spot to appreciate Sydney (sitting on a grassy slope, atop a beach, with the harbour in full view), and that was a beautiful day to enjoy the sun. But there have been so many soggy days, and nights..

I also haven't been able to get to the pool, which has been disappointing given that I really wanted to do that once I was back in Sydney. I promise myself that I'll go swimming once I move to city quarter, but it's hard to motivate oneself when it's so cold.

On the other hand I've enjoyed eating in Sydney so much. I can't rave about the taro ball place enough, I seem to end up eating there at least once every time I'm off. I've also made it back to Mamak and Chat Thai, my two staple old favourites. Today we went to Reuben Hills, a hip new joint in Surry Hills serving icecream sandwiches (vanilla icecream wedged in chocolate cake served with salted caramel), ocean trout ceviche and Honduras-style breakfast tortilla (with black beans, eggs and soft cheese) - so Sydney! Another time we went to Bangbang cafe, which sounds rather sick, but actually refers to music (giant headphones drawn on the wall) where we ate the most divine brioche with ricotta and berry compote. I could keep raving about the eating.. oh the dark chocolate gelato at Gelato messina..

But I'll stop. This post is all about medlawn. I went back to UNSW the other day, got a coffee from the coffee cart on library lawn, and went to medlawn to sunbake. Except, wait, medlawn doesn't exist anymore. The last time I was there they had already built the hideous extension impinging on medlawn, such that one sees bile green building instead of the sky while lying on medlawn. If that wasn't bad enough, they are now building an extension to Wallace Wurth which has eaten up the other half of medlawn. Over 75% of the grass is gone, and the remainder has been partially paved and benched.. what little grass left is over-trodden and limp looking. Somehow sitting on a bench just didn't cut it. But it did make me feel like I was at university a very long time ago.. so that I could say back in my day, I would lie on medlawn and....

Surprisingly, I sort of miss Prince of Wales. I don't think I really enjoyed working there when I was there 2 years ago, I just felt like a misfit with no direction in life (obviously, nothing has changed) and other than Sim I didn't really make any friends there. But somehow I got a bit nostalgic walking through POW, and wondered if maybe one day I'd like to return.

Very last gripe - the 2nd hand bookshop at the Spot in Randwick has closed down, which makes me sad. One of the bookshops in Newtown is closing down too. Maybe no-one reads books anymore.. they all have tablets instead of books.

Dream: The one where Dr Majoni runs for US president

In this dream I am deployed to work in a developing country. When I arrive at the hospital it looks rather large, and not much like a shack at all. I go up the stairs and arrive on a ward consisting of one huge room and lots of patients lined up both sides of the room. Each patient has a number over their bed but the numbers are completely random (8 next to 42 next to 137).

Just as I am wondering how one finds the patients amongst this mess, I am distracted by the sound of a TV. I see that the US presidential election is on TV and there seem to be two main candidates - a Caucasian man and an African man. I look around and realise I am in Africa since most of the patients are African.

Suddenly I see Dr Majoni enter the room except he has a full head of springy curls a la Dave Stanton. I am so startled to see him with this hairstyle that I am somewhat speechless. Then I go up to him and say "Dr Majoni, what are you doing here?"

"My wife doesn't like my new hairstyle so I've had to move here by myself". He says and grins toothily as usual.

I look away briefly and when I look back, he has a new hairstyle with long, straight, shoulder-length hair and a slanted fringe falling into one eye, much like some fashion model. Just as I start to think how terrible this hairstyle is, I realise he is the man on TV running for US president!

Then I wake up

Goodbye Darwin

I feel like I've only just arrived, but here I am on my last night in Darwin already!

I have been so incredibly fortunate to have had this amazing year in Darwin - amongst so many things that I will remember about this place there have been some highlights.

Living in a beautiful tropical house with Johanna, Pete and Namiko - I loved this place from the first time I saw it, with its high ceilings and bright airy feel. Never mind our problems with ants, or rats (we only managed to catch two, one dead under the washing machine and the other in a trap that I named Patsy), or spiders.. we did have the occasional cane toad and some very cute green tree frogs too. Having a lovely place to call home was definitely a nice setting to my year in Darwin.

Cool people tend to be attracted to Darwin, it is a law of life that I found out pretty early on. So many doctors (and other staff of course) in the hospital have done different things with their lives - most have travelled, many have worked overseas, lots have different hobbies outside medicine.. It's made for such an interesting year of getting to know people. I was pleasantly surprised by the likemindedness of so many people - lots of hippies and free spirits, dreamers and roamers - I fit right in!

East Timor was a true highlight - Being on deserted Jaco island with the perfect shimmering turqoise water alongside a strip of fine white sand was the epitome of the dream holiday for me, but the truly special moment was when I saw coral reef and tropical fish swimming in the ocean for the very first time. It has motivated me to learn to swim - thanks to my housemate Namiko (and Chatu and Megs), I'm slowly making some progress out of the drowning stage. I never knew the ocean made little clicking sounds (it's the fish talking to each other!) and I really want to hear it again, and see those fish again. Maybe one day I'll go diving...

Mango season was insane too. I will never forget getting up on Sunday mornings (whether I had to work or not!) and going to Rapid Creek Market to buy mangos. There was one particular stall run by a Vietnamese family that I went to every week, and there was one week I bought 10kg of mangos! Eventually we chopped some up to freeze, and so long after mango season finished we were still enjoying mango smoothies.

Camping out at Edith falls, we walked up to the top pool and had the whole waterhole to ourselves. It was an amazing breakfast alongside the beautiful pool with a little waterfall at the far side. The next day we bought a giant watermelon in Katherine and camped at Katherine gorge where the sunset over the river was a deep dark orange. Kayaking in the gorge was one of the most fun things I did this year - it was so pretty that I felt like we were kayaking into a postcard. I love lots of tropical plants but the pandanus trees alongside the gorge had to be high up on the list.

Markets are part of the lifestyle here - I would go to Rapid Creek most Sundays to get fresh fruit & vegetables, and I loved the feel of being able to buy local produce that was in season, chat with the people who grew the vegetables while touching and smelling everything. Parap was often a Saturday haunt, and I'm faithful to the BBQ pork on a stick stall and the laksa lady. Ironically, Nightcliff markets which were my original motivation to move to Darwin have not featured much on the radar because I usually go home or to work after Rapid Creek. I probably went to Mindil the most because Seetha loved it there - my favourite stall was the Happy Cow vegetarian stall, which sold lots of yummies including my favourite Cowpat (spinach & cheese pattie with a gooey inner).

The Darwin festival was a pretty awesome few weeks of fun and activities. Just hanging out at festival park on the lawn with the little wooden seatbacks was great, and there was one show that I really enjoyed - Wulumanayuwi and the seven Pamanui, a Tiwi adaptation of Snow White and the seven dwarves. The other shows were more so-so, but it was such a happening time in town.

I loved Deckchair cinema, and went as often as I could. There was something so Darwinian about watching the sunset, grabbing a plate of Hanuman's curry and rice, dousing oneself in insect repellant then sitting down to a film while the fireflies flitted gracefully above. There were so many stars in the sky that sometimes I ended up watching the sky instead of the movie.

A few friends came to visit, Elaine was first in June and we headed out to Kununurra together stopping to gawk at the giant boab trees which I adored. Lydia & Elsie visited in August and we spent a long weekend in Kakadu - I loved the sunset at Ubirr. Hsiang made a cameo appearance, then in October Shelley & Thu-ha suddenly showed up and I didn't even realise they were coming!


And.. I had so many memorable dinners that I could not even write them all down if I tried. The most prominent on my mind is probably the Christmas extravaganza at our house, involving way too much food (including a rhubarb crumble from MP!), Christmas carols and people playing silly instruments such as a crocodile xylophone. In a town where eating out options are somewhat limited, I've been blessed with eating lots of excellent home cooking. I will never the freshly shucked oysters at Matt & Jerome's, they were just the best..

The dry season - is there anything better than the dry season in Darwin? Crisp blue skies, beautifully cool nights, wonderful sunsets. But even the wet season has its own appeal, with the huge thunderstorms and lightning that slices through the sky. We almost had a cyclone, but it got lost on its way to Darwin..

Last but not least, the patients and the pathology at Royal Darwin Hospital have been absolutely amazing. I have seen so many outrageous things that it almost seems normal to me now. I was lucky to have gone on outreach to Tiwi, Katherine, Gove, Groote Eylandt and Minyerri, flying around on those little planes ducking the storm clouds. On our way back from Groote, we flew over the Kakadu escarpment and saw Twin falls and Jim Jim from far up in the sky - it was awe-inspiring.


I have enjoyed Darwin so much that I feel melancholic about leaving. At the same time I know the experiences and memories will stay with me for a long time, and I'm so glad to have met a few friends here that I might keep for a while. With everything that ends comes something new, and the next chapter of my life is about to start in Sydney. So... goodbye Darwin, I hope to be back again some time!