Come visit my virtual city : http://cahaya-remi.myminicity.com/

Pretty....


....empty at the moment. Oh well.

Grats to Sam for winning the White Pepper Draw (Menu for Hope 4). Prize will be heading to you in the mail.

On the other hand, since I'm playing World of Warcraft for the last 1.5 years, I've started a forum for Malaysian WoW Players called "Jom Wow!" Was kinda tired of how the newcomers were being treatead in some of the forums as well as getting irritated with the moderators in others. Minimalist site because it's free and hopefully will answer questions to WoW. Postings and community chats are slow but hopefully traffic will pick up.

Labels: food, jom wow, Menu for Hope, world of warcraft, wow

It's now round 4 for the next Menu for Hope. I help out in the first round and it was a fun time giving stuff away for a good cause. For more information about the raffle, more details are listed here. And as always, Chez Pim is ever the gracious host.



So, my raffle prize is 500g of Granny's homegrown white pepper. It'll be mailed anywhere in the world. The pepper is definitely more mellow than the white pepper found commercially because it is grown organically and Granny, of course, took much care growing it. And as she claims, it is not soaked with dried chilli in water. The taste is different and the peppery taste comes slowly after a few seconds of tasting it.

Prize code is AP09 so donate USD10 now for a ticket to win it. Don't forget to put down the prize code (which is the raffle ticket number for the draw, in the Special Message column. When entering your details, please make sure it's (number of tickets) x (ticket code). And it's USd10 per ticket!

Here's a list of what's available in Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific, hosted by Helen from Grab Your Fork. It's a lot of stuff. But the worldwide list is even bigger.

It's pretty easy to win it and this year there's a lot of prizes to be won. I'm going to try and see if I can win AP14 Demonstration of Chef baking beautiful cakes. So it's basically just 2 prizes from Malaysia this year.

Postnote to Australians : You might want to select another prize. The Australian Quarantine Laws in Australia looks to be pretty tight so most likely, the above item will be consficated. Since the pepper is considered dried herbs, it will be picked up by the sniffer dogs. Sorry about this.

Labels: charity, Menu for Hope, raffle

Having slept most of Saturday and Sunday away, here are some of the details of the journey to Erfurt, Germany.



From Frankfurt Airport, we caught the high-speed InterCity Express (ICE) train from Frankfurt Airport to Frankfurt Mains where we changed trains to Erfurt. The journey took a little over 2 hours to reach there although the speed of the train was very fast. Speeds were either over 200 km/hr or 168 km/hr, depending on which part of the land we were. Not sure why the train speed was different although probably the railroad tracks had something to do with it.

We stayed relatively close to the train station at the Mercure Hotel Erfurt Altstadt. It's tuck away in a little corner right in center of where the trams meet. Erfurt is a very beautiful and picturesque city where many of the old buildings are still standing up to today. It's also the state capital city of the Thuringia state. Here are some pictures of the city :



This is a picture of a building built on top of a few bridges. There's a little brook running underneath the building which is split into 3 small channels whilst flowing underneath the bridge.



Another side view of a nearby building near this bridge.



This is how the bridge looks like from the top. It's full of quaint little shops selling handicrafts and also very very old books.



A lot of the older part of the city looks like this although some of the facades are different from the others. The city council subsidies some of the maintenance cost of maintaining the facade of the building.







For lunch, we had something to eat at a quaint little Italian restaurant nearby. The square that you see is known as the Firschmarkt a.k.a. the Fish Market. They no longer sell fish there anymore but the name stayed.



Me, being me, was feeling very cold so decided to have some of the traditional German mulled wine known as Glünwein. The one at this restaurant wasn't that great but it was hot enough to keep me very warm.



A bowl of minestrone soup for me. Yes, I was feeling very cold throughout the trip.



Seafood spaghetti is what my boss ordered. It came with some mussels (which I had later on for 3 days in a row in Rotterdam but that's another tale).



My colleague had a risotto instead as he wanted something with rice.



I went for the Gnocchi without knowing what it was. But suffice to say that it was very nice and everything ended up in my stomach. One of the major problems about food blogging from another country is knowing the names of the food that you're eating.



As I post new pictures up, I'll also be updating my Google Maps link on all the places I've been during this trip. Here is the link to Google Maps.

Labels: bridge, Erfurt, food, Germany, shop