The end of an era

Last Saturday we went for the last time to our favorite pancake- and poffertjes (tiny pancakes) shop in our hometown Utrecht. The place was called Victor Consael and was a well known local place. Due to a new restructuring plan around their location and because they didn't want to fight (again) with the local authorities about a new location, they decided to quit. The stand and the household furniture have been sold. They will start a new place, but unfortunately it will be outside Utrecht. I wish them well and hope their new business will succeed.

This is too bad. Little by little the city is taken over by property developers turning characteristic city centres into the same looking boring shopping centres with the same store chains you find in lots of other cities.

I also feel disappointed because of nostalgic reasons. Victor Consael is already existing since 1850 (!!). They use to have a mobile stand traveling from fair to fair. Since 1974 they have a stationary stand in the city centre and I start visiting there as a kid of 8 years old, 33 years ago. It was a characteristic place in the city centre. It was the best pancakeplace of the Utrecht area and probably the best poffertjes place of the Netherlands.

Here are some pics taken by my girlfriend of what we ate through the years. The picture of the stand I got from internet.

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (3)

The International Filmfestival Rotterdam (IFFR) is finished. My task is accomplished. I watched 33 films in ten days. I know it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. It was a good festival. Most of the movies I watched were worthwhile. Today after I slept in I slowly had to adjust to my regular daily life. I had square eyes after seeing all these movies and I had withdrawal symptoms. But I'm doing okay now. I guess I probably won't see any movie this week. But although some people might see this as a punishment to watch 33 movies in 10 days, it wasn't a big burden for me. I've enjoyed it and saw some nice, gorgeous, funny and interesting movies.

Thursday my girlfriend and I stayed in a hotel for one night, because we had two movies on Thursdaynight and Fridaymorning we also had two movies together and the first one was starting at 9:45 A.M. So to avoid the early train during rush hour we decided to check for a hotel on the internet. We went to Rotterdam in the afternoon to check in at the hotel first. It was a very nice and clean hotel with good facilities and not too expensive. And breakfast was included, which is not so common anymore these days, I found out when I was checking hotels on the internet. Most hotels charge about 17 Euro for one person extra (about 20 Dollar) for breakfast. The hotel was on walkable distance from the trainstation and not too far from the different movietheatres. If you ever visit Rotterdam, this hotel is highly recommended. Our first movie started at 7:00 P.M. we had to take dinner a bit early. Because of our good experiences one week earlier, we went back to Sumo again. Because we entered the restaurant before 5:00 P.M. they charged us the price for a lunchmenu. We had the all you can eat dinner, but this time we only paid 16 Euro 50 each for a menu instead of 19 Euro 50 last time. A very good deal.

Anyway let's go to the rest of my movielist and my ratings. In my former post you can see how the rating works. You can click on the movietitle again to read an English description of the movie. At the end I have posted a few more pictures of Rotterdam on the day- and nighttime and from Sumo.

Betelnut (+)
It doesn't happen very often, but I left this movie after about 50 minutes. If the director's goal was to show boredom he succeeded very well, but the result was not interesting enough to watch for almost two hours.

Still Life (+++1/2)

Paprika (++++)

I don’t want to sleep alone (++++)

Weed (+++1/2)

Aachi & Ssipak (++++)

Nightmare detective (+++1/2)

The Killing of John Lennon (++++)

Lost in Tokyo (+++1/2)

Western Trunk Line (++++)

Day Night Day Night (++1/2)

Retribution (++++)

After This Our Exile (++++)

International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)

Since Thursdaynight I spend a lot of time at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). The IFFR wil finish on Sunday February 4th. This year I will set a record by watching 33 movies(!!!). When my mother heard that I was going to see 33 movies she said yuck. Actually she said something else, but this is a proper and decent weblog (wink).

I saw 2 movies on Thursday, 5 on Friday and 5 today (Saturday). So 12 down, 21 to go. Here you can check the festivalprogramme. The festival has a wide range of different movies from all over the world. My main focus is Asian cinema, so the most movies I normally watch at the IFFR are from China, Japan and South Korea and sometimes from Taiwan, Malasia, Thailand (this year a lot from Hong Kong) depending on the supply. That doesn't mean that I try to watch all. It also depends on the subject/story of the movie. The IFFR always has a wide and interesting range of movies from the Asian region. But I also watch movies from other countries if I find the reviews/descriptions interesting or appealing. I always have to make a selection. On my first longlist for this year I had 45 movies, so on my final list of 33 movies I had to skip 12 . The agony of choice (me in my ironic mode). Later I might post a list af the movies (with links) and my ratings.

Last Friday my girlfriend joined me with the last movie at night. Before the movie we had to kill almost three hours, so we went out for dinner. I also could use a break after four movies. We went to a place called Sumo, a Japanese (Chinese management) restaurant with three parts, a teppanyaki part where the food is prepared in front of you on a iron plate (teppan in Japanese, yaki means baked/grilled), a set of tables where you can eat à la carte and a part where they offer all you can eat. We reserved a table at the all you can eat part. For just 19 Euro 50 (about 15, 16 Dollars) you could order anyting you like, from all kinds of sushi, dishes like yakitori, tempura, different types of udon and some ricedishes and other small dishes. The sushi wasn't the best we ever eat, but still more than reasonable with an extreme good price/quality ratio related to the all-you-can-eat-concept. The yakitori and beef dishes were nice, but the udon was so so good. The (young) staff was very friendly and helpful. Surely a place to go back. The pictures below were taken by my girlfriend.

Some delayed pictures

Here are some more pictures from our last visit to England around New Year, as I promised.

Meet Noodles, my friend's cat, a bit of a chicken-cat, but cute and funny.

And this is Sushi, a less chicken than Noodles and very playful.

A part of the church belonging to the tower from my former post.

And a detail from one of the sides of the tower

This was our New Year's Eve dinner, soba noodles, very yummy.

Compared to Holland the fireworks was minimal, but there was some nearby. I manage to shoot this picture without a tripod. The first time my friend from England experienced the fireworks in Holland at midnight, he thought that World War 3 broke out.

For some reason I always have to think of Mr. Bean when I see a Mini

This picture and the next three were taken at my friend's parent's place, a small countryside village in Devonshire, which name I forgot

On our last night we went to a nice Indian restaurant in my friend's hometown Weston Super Mare.

My first scans - Hiroshima (1) - B/W-pics

I haven't figure out all the possibilities of my new Nikon Fimscanner, but the first results are promising. In this post I will show some black and white pics that I shot in 2000 in Japan at the city of Hiroshima, known as the first city in history that had the unfortunate and horrible honour to be bombed with an atomic bomb on August 6th 1945.

The pictures in this post are scans from a black and white APS-film shot with a Minolta Vectis S-1.

Most of the pics were shot in and around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park where you find most of the monuments related to the victims of the A-bomb and also the Peace Memorial Museum. A visit to this museum won't leave nobody untouched, unless you are a cold-hearted insensitive brainless idiot. It sure is worthwhile to visit, but be prepared that it can ruin your day.

But despite it's horrible and tragic history Hiroshima is also a fun city to visit. It has an excellent nightlife, good food (speciality Okonomiyaki) and some good sightseeingplaces in and around the city. I like this city very much. From the 8 times that I visited Japan I visited Hiroshima 5 times.

My favorite pub is the "Mac Bar", a tiny place with a good mix of locals and foreigners and an astonishing collection of CD's. When you visit the first time, Mac the owner will ask you if you have any musicrequest. Big chance he might have it.

The first pictures are from the A-bomb Dome, the only original thing that reminds of the nuclear explosion, which hypocenter was just 150 metres away and it's the closest construction that withstood the explosion.

The lighttowers left of the A-bomb Dome are belonging to the baseballstadium of the Hiroshima Carps.

Some teenagers next to the river on the opposite side of the A-bomb Dome.

It's my party and I cry if I want to....

I wanted to post this pictures earlier this week, but since last Tuesdaynight I was suffering from a nasty flu/heavy cold. Now I'm feeling much better compared to last Wednesday and Thursday.

Thursday February 9th I turned 40 (yeah, yeah I know) and during the weekend of the 11th I had a small birthdayparty with some good friends. Noriko spend a lot of time preparing lots of sushi. She did an excellent job and created some gorgeous and very tasty sushi. She made 7 plates with more than 100 pieces of sushi. First she was afraid she made too much, but at the end of the night all sushi was gone. It was a great success. The sushimaster herself was not satisfied with the picture I took from her with some of her creations, so you have to do it with just some of the sushi pics and a pic from the birthdayboy. Although the title of this post and the t-shirt below might give you a different idea, 40 ain't that bad. Had more trouble with it when I turned 30.

It looks gorgeous, doesn't it?

The birthdayboy

Japan in Holland

Last Thursdaynight Noriko, my good friend Andy from England and me went to a socalled izakaya in Amsterdam. An izakaya is a Japanese pub. You can check the link for some more info what an izakaya is. There are not many izakayas in Holland, but in Japan it's a popular form of eating out after work. In a way you can say that an izakaya is the Japanese equivalent of the Spanish tapas bar.

Anyway, this is a very nice place. I've been to this place a few times before. The time you spend there you really have the feeling that you are abroad. The atmosphere in this place is exactly the same as in Japan. About 90 to 95% of the customers are Japanese, which often is a good sign.

Here are a few pics. To keep a bit of the same kind of atmosphere of my posts from Japan most pictures you are about to see are foodpictures. The main dishes are barbequed meats on a stick, like yakitori, tori-miso (both chicken), buta-miso (pork), but they serve many small snacks, but also udon. The name of the place is Hakata in Amsterdam. Recommended!

This guy behind the counter prepares all night long the barbequed snacks that you see in the first three pictures.

I couldn't remember the name of the last two dishes, but I knew it was very yummy!

Japan (13) - The last pics

Well, the holiday is over. We got back from Japan last Saturday. Because of suddenly heavy snowing in Tokyo we left with a three and a half hour delay, but Sunday after reading the latest news on TV-text we realized that we had been very lucky. A few hours after we left most flights were canceled because of the winterweather and about 10.000 people had to spend the night at the airport.

Parts of Japan have been suffering from the most heavy winterweather in about 25 years. There were parts of Japan were they had more than three metres of snow, but those parts were still quite far away from Tokyo. During our stay in Tokyo it was only a bit chilly every now and then and we had one afternoon of rain, for the rest it was dry, sometimes a bit cloudy sometimes some sunshine, but basically pretty good weather. Anyway, we were glad we only had some delay and didn't got stucked at the airport.

Here are some of the last pics that were taken during our last night. Noriko and I went out to a Korean restaurant with some friends. The food was very nice and we had a good time. It was also nice to see some of Noriko's friends again. They are a nice group of people.

This was one of the dishes that I had. It's called bibimba (not sure about the spelling), a Korean ricedish. This one was very spicy (at my own request) and very yummy.

This was one of the dishes the others had. Forgot about the name, but it was also yummy.

This is the same dish after it boiled for a little while

Finally in my Japan (11)-post I wrote about the high-tech toilets in Japan. It seems that I'm in good company and I'm not the only one who appreciates the Japanese high-tech toilets.
Just check here, here and here.

Well from now on it's back to the daily routines sleep, work, eat and sleep again. Don't know yet about our next holiday. I won't be posting as much as I did from Japan, but I'll try to post at least once a week.