Roasted, Fried or Flame Grilled

I got back from a weekend jaunt to the Blue Mountains yesterday, and it was all rather pleasant. The most exciting and fun thing about the holiday was that despite the bushfires blazing away in the area, we successfully avoided catching on fire. There were a few moments when the bushland at the back of our cute little cottage in Blackheath was completely obscured by thick white smoke, but that was as bad as things got, and often a change in wind direction had our view looking completely normal a short while later. Along with feasting on delectable cheeses, olives, dolmades and fabulous Spanish anchovies out on the balcony, we spent our weekend poking around shops and cafes in nearby Katoomba and Leura, did some short bushwalks down near the Three Sisters and the Leura Cascades, watched Australia grind down England in the Ashes cricket, snoozed and generally relaxed. Saturday night we toddled along to Le Gobelet, an authentic French restaurant in Leura. The food was utterly amazing, but the extensive abuse the chef hurled at the waitress (his wife) as we were waiting to be seated marred the experience somewhat. The service was also very slow, but the food was so extraordinarily good that this transgression was easily forgiven. The withering stream of curses erupting from the kitchen though - it really became a bit much.

On the way back to Sydney, we stopped in at the Norman Lindsay Gallery where we wandered the grounds and looked at the statues of naked girls, then wandered inside and looked at the paintings of other naked girls. Lindsay really was very good, but some of his works are almost Vallejo-esque in their portrayal of the female form. There's certainly nothing wrong with a dozen heroically-proportioned demigoddesses rising from the sea on giant seahorses and facing each other with eyes blazing and water streaming down their naked bodies, but seeing the fifteenth such painting in a row raises a smirk or two. We broke the mammarian monotony with some awesome models of Magic Pudding characters and a number of amazingly detailed etchings in the hall, as well as several beautiful model ships. I'm not sure that Lindsay had built them or if they were just part of the collection, but they certainly were impressive.

I've rogueishly avoided mentioning that I spent the weekend with my new girlfriend, Alicia. We've been seeing each other for a couple of months now, and I think she's rather fabulous. In a past life she was an aeronautical engineer, but she's recently finished her law degree, which makes her approximately 5.32 times smarter than I am. Most importantly, she shares my appreciation for the Bruce Willis action comedy Hudson Hawk, which automatically makes us dangerously compatible. When I get around to posting my pictures of the Blue Mountains weekend on Flickr, further proof will be presented that Alicia is not actually a figment of my imagination. Watch this space.