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For years, I’ve been reading articles about how 29ers handle differently, roll over obstacles, absorb bumps and grip better, but haven’t actually had a real opportunity to try one out.

So I’ve now finally had my first real ride on a 29er.

And not just any old 29er. A rigid, steel, singlespeed 29er… a proper one. Previously, my only experience with large wheels off road was my hack job rigid singlespeed conversion of an Avanti Blade flat bar road bike with CX. That bike was incredibly stiff, over geared and a real struggle with relatively skinny 35mm tyres.

This time, it was a proper setup. 2.1″ tyres. ~50 gear inches. Proper steel mountain bike.

Initial thoughts?

I’m impressed.

Or maybe I had expectations of it being really hard work and I should say that it wasn’t as tough as I was expecting?

Traction – Mud plus Crossmarks makes for a very slippery affair. Hard to say if there was more traction, since there was generally no traction. Although I dd manage to catch myself during slides easier. Does that count as more traction?

Comfort – Comfort a bit difficult to measure given that I was riding a fully rigid. There’s nothing really comfortable about this endeavour normally, so I guess you could say it was more comfortable (than what, I’m not sure – maybe sleeping on a bed of nails?).

Roll-over-obstacles-ability – Sure, it rolled over obstacles just fine. Primarily limited by my general inability because for me lofting my front wheel over obstacles involved some preloading of the suspension. In the absence of suspension, this proved to be a bit more of a tricky process and more often than not it was a bit more of a case of crashing into obstacles and kind of rolling through them. That said… it did this very well.

So… thinking about going 29er? Rigid? Do I recommend it? I think I do…

(More later when I’ve had a chance to ride this bike again in conditions I’m more familiar with)

Searching for somewhere new to eat after a morning ride up Mount Dandenong, HPG and I decided to head towards Heathmont to see what was on offer. It’s strange that after two years of living in the area, I had never actually hit this strip of shops which is just around the corner, despite having driven and ridden past it many times.

Right down the end of the strip is Barclays Cafe.

It looked quite promising from the outside, with a very solid Sunday mid-morning breakfast crowd and a constant bustle of wait staff around the room. With most of the tables either full or reserved, we were actually lucky to be able to secure a table.

The room is nicely furnished, with a couple of tables out the front and another courtyard out the back, so there are quite a few options of places to eat. Didn’t seem overly squashy either.

Unfortunately, despite the positive start, the food was rather average. HPG reports that the coffee was too hot. My freshly squeezed OJ was indeed freshly squeezed, however the juice itself was quite bland. We the breakfast was quite overcooked, with the bacon not only crispy, but hard and quite black. There were also significant parts of the Turkish bread which was burnt.

It’s a shame really because the space is quite nice and the prices quite reasonable.

So I’d heard a lot about this mythical place – J’s Surf and Turf. $28 for all you can eat Japanese and run by actual Japanese people. Sounds like a good deal hey? Well I finally got to go last night.

A bit of background first. I quite like Japanese food. For anyone who’s seen me eat, this might seem strange because I do tend to eat large amounts of food very quickly, which doesn’t really go down very well at Japanese places, where serves a often quite small and delicately prepared. I should point out that I am not one of those typical SE Asian types who seems to have a fetish for everything Japanese (although I do own a Japanese car), took Japanese as subject in school/uni, went to Japan to teach English and watches hours of anime. Rather, my interest in Japanese food is that I like tasty food – all sorts of interesting flavours.

So with the possibility of being able to try every single flavour on the menu for $28, I couldn’t really pass it up.

Of course, we had to get there first, which proved to be quite a chore. The reason I held out going to J’s for so long is that it’s in Brighton (131 Were Street since I hadn’t mentioned it before), which is a royal pain in the backside for me to get to. Traffic down Nepean Highway was grindingly slow and as usual, the rain made people drive like stupids.

But we did get there eventually and my folks had already started to order. The oysters (which you have to pre-order) were just oysters. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of oysters, but they seemed to be okay. The takoyaki octopus balls were quite tasty, although had a bit more sauce than I liked. The agadeshi tofu seemed to be a bit too dense. The serve of prawn tempura was massive, however the batter itself was kind of heavy and the prawns tasteless. Teriyaki chicken was quite good and not too sweet. The beef salad was quite tasty, although again drowned in sauce. Sashimi again came in a very healthy serve and tasted okay, although was lacking a bit of firmness. The sushi was very cold and the rice was hard. Croquettes were actually quite good.

Sounds very average doesn’t it?

I will forgive it however because the service was excellent. We never had to wait long to get service and the food arrived in a flash. Unlike some other all-you-can-eat places where you order through a waiter, we didn’t sit there waiting for ages, trying to get a waiter’s attention. In fact, a waiter seemed to be hovering nearby all the time and ready to pounce the moment someone even looked at the closed menu.

Dessert was a very simple affair. vanilla ice cream & fruits with jelly snakes & chocolate coins. Very un-Japanese, but somewhat satisfying.

So overall, I’m really not sure how to rate this place. Food was quite average, but it was sufficiently cheap for all you can eat Japanese seafood. Serves were generous and service was generally quite good. Maybe I’m rate it descriptively rather than a score. I’d rate this as a place I’d go with a group of friends because it’s a bit of fun, but not really somewhere I’d go for a special event. If it wasn’t so far away, I would probably go back more often, but given the time and effort to get down there, I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything.

Today was my third trip to Subaru Docklands STi in as many weeks.

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So I finally got a chance to go to MoVida after a previous attempt to go there, only to find that you need to book ~3 weeks in advance (thanks C for booking!!). I’d heard about the place for quite some time so I was pretty keen to go.

I should add that I’d actually heard the best review of the joint from one of the pastors at church – Dan. Now no disrespect to the guy, but I really don’t see him as a tapa kind of person. To me, he seems to be more like the 500g steak and fries or the burger with the lot kind of guy. So truthfully, I wondered what kind of tapa would appeal to him (maybe it was just LARGE quantities of tapa?)…

So what was I expecting?

• Small tables that weren’t nearly big enough – Small yes, but not uncomfortably and everything fit rather well on teh table actually
• Cheap glasses, mismatching cutlery and paper napkins – Wrong on all accounts
• Sitting on top of the table next to you – Okay it was cosy, but not uncomfortably cosy
• Waiters with a lissssssp – kinda… but not really. Nowhere near as trendy as I was expecting actually…
• Terrible service – Majorly wrong here. Can I take your coat and umbrella? More water? And before dessert – let me just give your table a quick wipe…

So I admit. I was wrong.

So… more importantly, how about the food? Well… it was good, but as with most specialist tapa places, rather pricey. From the tapa (small single serves of food) we had quail, lamb cutlets and scallops and from the raccion (larger shared dishes) we had ham-sorry-I-mean-jamon, mushrooms and octopus… sorry… I didn’t manage to capture the romance of the highly expressive, emotive descriptions provided on the menu.

But I will say – it sure was tasty. Very tasty. In fact. After a while… too tasty. Due to there being SO MUCH flavour, I’d have to recommend avoiding most of the raccion and focusing on the tapa. I reckon I could have gone for one piece of most of the items of tapa and been satisfied, but after the fourth mushroom and tenth piece of octopus, I was rather over the flavour. Maybe it’s a matter of going in a slightly larger group (max group booking of six it seems!) so that you don’t end up eating too much of the raccion dishes.

Also, with all of this flavour, I started to feel like I was missing something… then I realised that my Asian-ness was crying out. Where was the rice?! Now I don’t NEED to eat rice with everything – heck I don’t ask for a bowl of rice at a steak place. However, I realised that with all of the flavour, I really needed something very plain to provide relief from the tastes and a contrast.

We finished the night by sharing a serve of the churros. And yay! A different flavour. I have to say, that this was great. The chocolate was just the right thickness and flavour to contrast with the doughy donut. Yummmm.

So would I go again?? Uh… maybe. Maybe not with those who have an Asian palate. Definitely in a group of four or six people, so we didn’t get sick of the raccion. I can see the charm of the place, but I definitely won’t rave on about the joint like some people do.

So I took in the sights of a couple of bike paths today…

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Pfft…

That wasn’t so big…

Another quick restaurant review…

On the recommendation of a colleague of a friend, we found ourselves at Bluecorn in St Kilda last night. Now I’m not massively knowledgable about Mexican food with the bulk of experience coming from Old El Paso. Either way, it was worth a shot.

We had a tapas platter and a double baked burrito. The tapas wasn’t all that bad, but none of it really had the strong spicy flavours that I was expecting. Flavours were there, but maybe I just have the wrong understanding of Mexican food. There were some rather powerfully flavoured anchovies on the platter which we gave a wide berth, but the two different types of olives were brilliant. One thing I was quite pleased about was that everything seemed generally pretty healthy. Lots of different veggies and beans and no thick layer of oil I’ve come to expect with the supermarket stuff. The burrito was pleasingly large and I reckon two small eaters would be just about right sharing one. As it turns out though, it was pretty much more of the same and I’ll admit that when we got to the end of it, I was quite over it all. I think it’s just because that it all becomes one big gloopy mess after a while and it’s not really clear what you’re eating sometimes.

Overall, I’d say that the Bluecorn gets a thumb pointed slightly up. Nothing really shines about the place, but there was nothing to really let it down either. If alcohol is more your thing maybe you’d like it more, but I didn’t sample from the extensive list of grog, so I can’t really comment. Bright and cheery, lots of space, decent service. Can’t really complain.

A random dinner visit to a place in Jackson Square in Doncaster that we thought was actually something else. What happened to the chicken rice place that used to be there?

The place looks like one of those modern HKie places that have 10,000 items on the menu. As it turns out, the menu is only a couple of pages. I actually worry about cheap-eat Asian places that have to use soft-focused photos to make their food good. I want cheap, tasty and quick. Anyway, rather than the usual set of $7-10 rice and noodle dishes, everything was $3-5 (soup, “bowl rice” and desserts) with a couple of set menu things of 3 dishes at $10. We ordered a set menu with beef noodles, steamed veggies, green tea glutinous rice balls and two “bowl rice” things (chicken & mushroom and pork ribs). Costing no more than the standard 2 dishes at a Chinese restaurant, I figured that it probably wouldn’t be too bad.

Then the food arrived.

Beef noodle soup came first. I SWEAR that this was just instant noodles. The moment it hit the table, I instantly recognised the smell as that of a Taiwanese instant beef noodle that my mum buys. They didn’t even bother to dress it up with some veg or give us a spoon to drink the soup. Steamed veg came next which was perfectly acceptable. No points gained for this one though because I figure you can only lose points in this area for doing a bad one. “Bowl rice” came next. As it turns out, they were just a standard chinese bowl of rice with a layer of the chosen topping. Flavour was okay, but the mushroom turned out to be two tiny slivers of a chinese mushroom. Not even one whole mushroom. Hmph. These were served with tea spoons. Not too sure what the story with that was, because I definitely wasn’t going to eat rice with a tea spoon. Finally came the green tea glutinous rice balls, which actually turned out to be glutinous rice balls with a thick layer of icing sugar and instant green-tea drink powder sprinkled on top. I can’t substantiate any claim that these were bought frozen from the Chinese shop, but I have my doubts about how home-made these were.

Verdict? With a review like the above, you’d think that I would instantly condemn the place. Hmmm. No. I think I will hold my verdict. Looking around while mocking the instant noodles and tea spoons, I realised that quite a few people were having their special soup/broth dishes. Given that these were at the front of the menu, I figure it’s something of a speciality. Hence, I will hold back from making a final verdict until I have tried this. Although, I doubt I am ever going to go back. *shrugs*

Being quite a Gunther fan after Anatomy for Beginners and Autopsy: Life & Death, I decided to check out the Amazing Human Body exhibition at Docklands on the weekend.

The short review : Save your money

Aside from the fact that I really, REALLY dislike the Docklands/New Quay district, it all started off rather badly when I drove past a REALLY TINY sign for exhibition parking. No matter, there was another REALLY TINY one ahead. Parking was plentiful, but a bit expensive at up to $18. No matter, spend $15 and get your parking validated for an $8 flat rate. Which was fine, I figured, given that the exhibition was going to be >$15. Well, fine until the guy at the ticket booth told me that I’d parked in the wrong car park and he couldn’t validate my ticket. ARGH!!

After paying the exorbitant amount of $23 for an adult ticket (and $19 for a concession ticket), on top of the up-to-$18 I’d have to pay for parking, we found that audio guides were an extra $2. Stuff that. I brought a med student along with me (who, as it turns out, is USELESS at Anatomy).

So on to the dead bodies…

The whole exhibition just reeked of cheap.

• The exhibits were dirty. Like there were bits of fluff stuck to some of them!
• The protective cases were rather pathetic, with some exhibits just left uncovered on the table! No wonder something got stolen
• The exhibits were placed on cheap plastic fold up tables covered in cloth
• One of the full human bodies fell over
• The foetus skull (& matching brain) had a massive dent in it
• Spelling mistakes on the signs
• Who thought it would be a good idea to glue the tiny bones inside the ear using a MASSIVE BLOB of white glue? Ooh, where’s the bone gone?
• No real logical flow to the layout of the exhibition. I mean, why is there a madible and an arm/clavicle in the middle of the brain exhibit?!
• In the horizontal cross section exhibit, the hands were placed at abdomen height. That guy must have had a hard time scratching the top of his head with arms THAT short

Since we were too cheap to pay for the audio guides, we decided to pester the “exhibition guide” who was wondering around. I mean why not? We’d paid ~$40 collectively, we were going to make him earn his pay. As it turns out, he was a 2nd year Med student and Steph derived great pleasure from asking him to name every single muscle and never single nerve (“NAME IT!! I SAID NAME IT!!!”). Meanwhile, I apparently had my bored face on, because he kept asking me if I was following. I will admit though, he did pretty well naming most things.

So all up, I was rather disappointed. I think I’ll just go back to Gunther re-runs.