The People:
Noders from Sydney (Proquar, Dirquar and Dirquar’s dad, and Kalon, Inoshiro_K and Typhen) and Melbourne (bexxta) and Canberra (Taliesin’s Muse and Mardy) met up in Sydney from midday Saturday to Sunday evening.
The Locations:
In order to celebrate the best of noderSydney, we visited the Palisade restaurant and hotel (twice, thus involving our favourite kitchenmeister, sneff, in the nodermeetlove) and the Glenmore hotel – site of panamaus does the Antipodes, or Get yer shorts on Sydney, there be a NoderParty! and I love the smell of Yum Cha in the morning (Spring 01 Sydney noder meet) Malarkey? or Effective Way?. We revisited the site of An un-named Sydney nodermeet as we drank (more) at the Australian hotel. We tested out Kalon’s aforenoded praise of Café Hernandez – he’s right – it’s fantastic.
To truly celebrate the international flavour of the meet, we visited the Spanish Quarter Festival, to promote international relations we spoke with Dharmaraja, Kalen and UncleM in Beijing – passing on the time zone torch, and with Red Pawn in Thailand (because we could). To include a geeky note we hung out in an internet café and a really, really large bookshop: Kinokuniya (oh, my aching wallet).
And we sat in Hyde park, and concluded that Strawberries, sour cream and brown sugar should have its own writeup, but that there’s really nothing else to say about it. Try it. It’s fantastic.
The Food:
We ate pancakes, and tortillas, and eggs on toast, and wedges and calamari and burgers and then we ate at the Palisade, which deserves another whole writeup to describe sneff’s masterpieces. Oh, the sambucca sorbet! Oh, the chicken and the soup and potatoes…
The Drinks:
Beer. Lots of cold beer. And wine, and Drambuie, and a strange Hibiscus juice in the Spanish quarter, and lots of iced tea and orange juice and coffee. And more coffee.
The Weather:
Keep in mind that I drove up from Canberra on Saturday. Having scraped the ice off my windscreen. And Sydney was 28 degrees. Wow. It was HOT. It was the first day of spring fer chrissake…we had to hide in the shade and drink beer. And more beer.
The Conversations:
One day you will get Inoshiro_K and myself together and, miraculously, The Lord of the Rings will not be mentioned. But it is not this day.
We talked of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax…and more Tolkien. And everything, and nothing, which is what a nodermeet is all about. Serious kudos to spiregrain for organising The Nodermeet On Which the Sun Never Sets, and to all involved. We gotta do this again, sometime.
And, just so Kalen doesn't think he's better than me, I, also, have gained a downvote and an insulting softlink. No aftermath w/u is complete without these accoutrements.
**The Nodermeet On Which The Sun Never Sets - Portland, Oregon | The Nodermeet On Which The Sun Never Sets - Beijing**