Noiz Waves

Over here, Starbucks has a monopoly on the high end expresso coffee market. There is literally a Starbucks on every corner. The other week I picked up a couple of coffees on the way to the office. They looked like this:

Starbucks also sell other coffee related paraphenalea. In their stores, they sell cakes, coffee beans, travel mugs and regular mugs. Before I leave, I want to pick up the largest Starbucks coffee mug I can find To my surprise, there were actually people working at Starbucks. at 8:45am, literally half the tables in the store were filled with people having meetings or working solo. There was even some nerdy guy with headphones Skyping away to someone at a table in the corner.

Grocery stores also sell some Starbucks products. Typically it’s just coffee beans, but they also sell pre-made coffee. They usually come bottled in a four pack, and resemble iced coffee. However, by far my most favourite product is the coffee in a can. They are stored in the fridge section, and very closely resemble iced coffee. They even sell a “Doubleshot” version that is essentially an iced coffee energy drink. Pure heaven!!

Nice Rental

Last week one of the guys from work was in town for a couple of days, so he stayed at the apartment. The car rental company upgraded his car on this trip. Last time he had a Mazda, this time he got this:

This Mustang had a decent amount of power, despite being the auto model. Also, the front passenger leg room was seriously amazing! It must have the most leg room of any car I’ve ever been in. I could almost stretch my legs out all the way.

Foodies

As usual, here’s some pics of some goodies I picked up at the grocery store (aka the supermarket):

Weather

In typical Kansas style, the weather has been totally random over the last week. Mid week we hit a high of 70 F (or 21 C), and then it goes and snows this weekend.

Don’t worry, its going back up to 60 F for mid next week

On one of my first nights here, I had dinner at Bill’s house. Nicole (his wife) had cooked white chili, and it was damn tasty. Needless to say I was pretty keen to get the recipe and give it a go myself. It goes a little something like this..

Ingredients

• 2x chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1/4 cup of flour
• 1x garlic clove, chopped finely or crushed
• 2x cans of navy (any white) beans, drained and washed
• 1x can of corn, drained
• 1x can of chicken stock
• 2x tablespoons of cumin

Cooking

1. Saute chicken in 2 tablespoons of oil until done.
2. Add floor and cumin, stir until it looks like a gluey mess
3. Add beans, corn, chicken stock and some water.
4. Simmer until hot and bubbly, stir occasionally.

Serving

Best served warm to hot, with large croutons/crackers, or on toast.

Last week at work I picked up these couple of donuts for my lunch. I may have eaten both of them, maybe…

Had to do the grocery shopping yesterday as the fridge was getting a little empty (and what was there was getting a bit old). As well as the usual fruit and veges, here are some of the more interesting things I picked up:

Finding the pop tarts was pure chance, saw them out of the corner my eye! Haven’t seen them at home for years, and to stumble upon them here was fantastic. They’re limited edition too

Achievements for this week:

• used dish washer for the first time
• cooked real bacon for breakfast
• washed sheets and towels
• mopped the tiled floors

So Sunday was my birthday, and I managed to do a couple things to celebrate

Hitting the Bars

One of the other guys at work turned 30 on Friday, so there was already a shin dig organised for him. They were so nice and let me join in on the celebrations, and they even sung happy birthday to me! I still can’t believe how friendly everyone is here.

We got to the first bar at 7ish, and stayed there until 1am. We a room upstairs (3rd floor) booked. There were some tables, some lounges, a pool table and a Foosball table. The place had a very history feel, with open brick interior, lots of memorabilia around the place. After this, we went to some other bars, and ended up going to some other bars, but this was after 2am, so they were starting to close up. We ended up leaving at about 3am. During the evening, I drank some Budweisers, Jack n Cokes, and Tequila shots. Maybe too much variety, hehe.

That afternoon one of the guys from work arrived at the apartment, and he staying here with me for a week. Before getting home from the bar, we stopped off at a very authentic American hamburger grill and got a hamburger and omelette to take home. This place was full of characters, and one guy even shouted us our meal.

Mexican for Lunch

So after waking up on Sunday morning (at like noon) we were pretty hungry. No pizza shops would deliver before 5pm, so we decided to head out and get Mexican. We went to Das Meanes. I got a chicken burrito meal with beans, and it was soooo good. Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of the meal, so you’ll have to take my word from it.

Volleyball

Then a few hours after mexican, I played volleyball with one of the guys from work. He plays casually with a team each week, and they offered to let me play for them! How nice is that?! Although we lost, the game was fun, and I even scored a few points and made some blocks.

Hooters

So the highlight of the day was definitely going to Hooters for dinner So we told our waitress It was my 23rd birthday, and she brought me out a cool balloon:

We ordered a lot of finger food for dinner (no big meals, we were pretty full from lunch). We got some fried fish, chicken wings, and shrimp. After the meal, I asked the waitress if I could have my photo taken with some of the girls, and the resulting money shot:

Best. Birthday. Ever! On the way out, I picked up a couple of birthday presents too. The girls also signed the shirt. How nice!

Leftovers

So the other day I cooked WAY too much stir fry mixture, so much so it made a nice meal sized portion of left overs. Not feeling like stir fry, i mixed it with some bolognese sauce, cooked up some pasta, and turned it into spaghetti bolognese. Cooked some brocolli, and it turned out like this:

Lunch

Today for lunch we went to Hyvee, which is like the biggest Woolworths or Coles you could ever imagine. As well as selling groceries, they also have a good selection of lunch foods. They have a DIY salad bar, which is about 10m long, all different salads, lettuces, cold meats, veges, etc etc. Regardless of what you put in your container, it costs US$4.95/lb, which works about to just over AU$16/kg. So today I made a “4 corner salad”; on top of the usual lettuce, chicken pieces and bacon bits, each corner had either mushrooms, kidney beans and chickpeas, tomatos or egg, as well as a healthy covering of olives and halepenos. Mmmmm. I also picked up a 500ml Red Bull and a chocolate mousse dessert.

Right now I am:

• playing sport
• playing a sporting video game
• watching other people play sport on TV
• watching other people play a sporting video game

God bless America!
To be fair, I did go to the gym this evening, and work out for about 30 minutes. It is open 24/7, so I can see gym visits becoming a regular occurrence here.

Picked up some uber icecream shopping today, and hoed into it after dinner It was soooo good. Waffle Cone Overload is mmmmmm soooooo gooood!

So today marks my 1 week aniversary of ariving here in Kansas, and things are going very smoothly. Did my second lot of food shopping this morning, cooked some dinners (and i’m still alive!), and did some cleaning (shock, horror)

Food

On Wednesday night I cooked up a stirfry using some frozen veges, mince (aka. ground beef), 2 minutes noodles (aka. Ramen noodles) and a stir fry sauce made from a sweet and sour sauce concentrate. It tasted better than I expected, and i haven’t been sick since eating it. A good result over all! It looked like this:

This morning after I felt like a change from cereal for breakfast, so I did a cooked breakfast. This was “inspired” by a “refridgeration malfunction” which lead to my milk being frozen and consequently having no milk for the cereal. As all my bacon was frozen, I just cooked some ham in the frying pan, and it worked just as well. Mmmmm:

The Apartment

Today’s achievements:

1. Cleaned the bathroom, kitchen, and vacuumed the whole apartment. Woohoo.

2. Assembled indoor clothes line, from this

to this

3. Discovered the gym in the apartment complex:

Weather

Today was an awesome day! For the whole week the temperature has hovered around -6 C all day, but today’s high was 21! Everyone was out and about; kids on bikes, LOTS of people on motorcycles, the golf course car park was packed. Kinda reminds me of a nice Perth winter’s day.

Anyways, I’m going to try out the gym before dinner (left over pizza + side salad w/ jalepeno and cheese stuffed olives, mmm).

So today marks my second day at work, and it’s been going well. I’ve been taking a lot of notes on what everyone does, with the intention of isolating some problems that can be easily fixed. This is what the main room in the office looks like:

Yesterday was also Australia Day, and being the loyal Australian that I am, it was my duty to enforce Australia Day on all of those around me. Luckily I knew this in advance, so I had plenty of supplies to make the celebrations a success:

Yesterday also marked the first day I cooked dinner. As there were lots of eggs and ham in the fridge, I decided it was time for an omelette, a big omelette. So three eggs later, it looked something like this:

Forgot to put the capsicum in the omelette itself, thats why its kinda semi cooked and sprinkled on top. Regardless, it still tasted awesome! Today for lunch we ordered from a Japanese resturant. However, the food that came resembled Chinese. Must be an interpretation. See for yourself: