McD

McDonalds is still called McDonalds regardless of which part of the world we are in :)

McRibs found in Trier, Germany. A favourite of many people here.

Mouth-watering pork ribs from McDonalds in Trier, Germany and they eat their french fries with  Mayonaise

Trier, Germany - The area

I was brought to Trier in Germany after arriving at Luxembourg. Trier is an older part of Germany. It was a 30minute drive from Luxembourg Airport. It has a University located so high up in the mountains that the people up there hardly needed to travel to other areas as it was like their own little town up there.

I was told that Trier was a shopping haven for most from Luxembourg and surrounding areas as there were plenty to buy and most importantly, reasonably priced. I visited this historic building called Porta Nigra.

Porta Nigra behind me

We also went on a train ride tour around Trier. I fell asleep while sitting in the train as it was really hot. Also, the tour guide was repating everything in three languages - German, Dutch and English. The English explanation was last, so yea.. I had a good nap. Took some pictures which were n ot very good given that the train had really horrible glass windows...

More to come in the next post....

Dictionary required

Currently in a place where English is not their first nor secod nor third language....
It felt awkward to be the one having to wear the headphones to get everything translated to english.

Also, everything sold on the shelves were not written in english too. Its always either french, luxemburgish, german or sometimes dutch. Needed help choosing a cleanser and buying groceries XD

Went to a milk/cheese/butter/yoghurt making factory and was back to wearing labcoats ;)

Climb

At the Reykjavik Zoo and Family Park on a beautiful spring day. (I'd rather not mention that the kid's pirate ship play feature is now sponsored by an oil company, with no less than five white signs posted along the ship's side, for all the spaced-out moms and dads to see...)

Pebbles

In macro, even the most mundane things in life show their true beauty. Here, a centimeter-sized stone, one of untold millions that provide softer landings in Icelandic playgrounds, does just that.

Harpa

The final touches on the Harpa concert hall are being put into place for the May 4th opening show with Vladimir Ashkenazy directing the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra.

This immense and oddly-angled building, which hunkers at the eastern edge of the Reykjavik harbor, was part of a grand pre-crash scheme to redesign the city center as an international center of finance. The award-winning Danish Bjarke Ingels Group of architects (be sure to visit their website because it is very cool) was commissioned to design a global headquarters for Landsbankinn bank, which Ingels himself said he was excited about in his TED lecture until he found out the bank had gone bankrupt in October 2008. Watch this video from 2007 to get a visual on the once-grand plans for the Reykjavik harbor area and also for a virtual tour of the hall itself.

The big question, then, post-crash, was whether or not construction should continue on the concert hall, which is also to be used as a conference center. After much debate, construction did continue and today I think we are all fairly excited to see the finished results. (There is still some grumbling at the cost of cleaning the hall's thousands of individual panes of glass, a whopping 8 million króna or $70,000 a year.)

Saga films has been documenting the building process since 2007, and you can watch a clip from the film online, though it is untexted and in Danish (the Henning Larsen Architecture group designed the glass exterior in concert with the Icelandic Danish-born Icelander Olafur Eliasson.)

Conceptually, this is a gorgeous design and I think we are all hoping that, when finished and glistening like a multi-faceted jewel in waters of the bay, it will live up to it's lofty aspirations.

Conned by bread

So, the time changed today - moved one hour forward, meaning I need to adjust my body clock by an hour too... which to me, doesnt make much difference during the night since I've been having horrible sleeping patterns. But yea, it'll be a struggle to wake up for lectures :p Good thing theres only two hours of lectures next week and its the end of semster not including the exams.

The time change makes the sky really bright at 6pm. It was still bright at 8pm! In a way thats good so I can still head to the bus station at 8pm to take 'a journey worth a lifetime' *beams*:):):)

Anyway, the whole purpose of todays post was to share about BREAD sold in supermarket bakery sections. You know sometimes when you are almost at the bakery section (well, sometimes even further), you get to smell the nice aroma of freshly baked bread, cravings for something warm, soft and fluffy comes to mind. So, you quicken your footsteps, push your trolly cart a little faster towards the bakery section in hopes of getting the freshest of the freshest bread/bun that was still steaming hot in its pack.

Alas, like the saying goes, "Sometimes knowing too much is not really a good thing." I read THIS! and it says that usually most of the 'freshly baked bread' were actually kept frozen beforehand and it can be kept that way for a year! The 'fresh warm bread' were actually defrosted food!

It states:

• It revealed that ‘fresh’ food had often been heat-treated, part frozen, industrially or chemically altered and stored for weeks on end.
• Another large supermarket supplier, Délifrance, which sells French-style baked products, offers thaw-and-serve rustic baguettes, ciabatta loaves, farmhouse rolls, multi-seed buns, cupcakes and croissants. Fresh baked? A freeze and serve policy has been described as a 'con trick' - and consumers have no way of knowing which products really are fresh. These can be stored for months before being defrosted and offered for sale without even being reheated.
• One of the company's representatives told an undercover reporter that its thaw-and-serve bakery products had a ‘year's shelf life at frozen, but once defrosted [are] best eaten within a day’.

Well at least it now explains why the expiry date for the doughnuts in Sainsbury were always the next day.