So where are the restrooms?

I didn't know those picture-symbols we take for granted -- the ones at airports and other large public places showing us where the restrooms or exits are located and other such important information, originated with the International System of Typographic Picture Education. The ISOTYPE story is fascinating and starts with a Vienna museum director, Otto Neurath, who in 1926 hired a young graphic artist Gerd Arntz, to work on a public education project Neurath got involved with after a study tour of poor rural regions of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Neurath's objective was to educate people who could not read or write on important social, economic, political and scientific issues by creating a pictorial system of symbols designed by Arntz. These symbols went on to become one of the 20th century's most successful information design projects and the basis of those picture-symbols we follow so automatically these days.

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In defence of Ikea

In the beginning I was a classic 'anything-but-Ikea' type of person; now in a complete about-turn I am a committed Ikea person. I could spend hours doing the complete walkaround at its Park Hotel store in Causeway Bay (admittedly the smaller of the design company's Hong Kong stores); browsing through the Market Hall; scribbling product reference numbers with those little wooden pencils on scraps of paper pulled out of my bag; studying room arrangements and storage ideas...
I think the reason why Ikea is Ikea is that the Swedish company has remained true to its basic calling -- creating simple basic stuff with smart thoughtful design. My fascination with product design tends to focus on simplicity. Big overly-done pieces are not my style, but it is the small things that catch my fancy like Ikea's heavy yet very simple garlic press or the stark black photo frame with the tiny silver magnetic circles or the thick eggshell colored canvas laundry hampers that I love to bring home, not just because they look good but also because they are so functional and neat.
While Ikea furniture can never become a family heirloom it does serve its purpose well enough, I find the shelves and cabinets particularly useful. I just picked up a nice light wood cabinet-shelf combination that has an easy unfinished, slightly industrial look about it. The piece is slim yet the cabinet is deep enough to hold a fair amount of stuff, the open shelves work well for books, pictures and other little objects. For our present home I'd rather buy this sort of furniture than heavy Chinese lacquered cabinets or plasticky Big Lots sort of stuff.

Eating out with a brief review of DB's Mirch Masala

I am a fussy restaurant goer. I'm not looking for bells and whistles and when I go out to eat, I'm looking for delicious well-cooked straight forward food. My husband agrees with this philosophy and though we eat out a fair amount we have only a handful of really treasured dining out memories. Some of the best of these are from our time in Seoul when we would eat out frequently at lovely little places full of atmosphere in touristy Insadong in central Seoul. We ate delicious hot stews, scallion and seafood pancakes, the classic bibimbap and some really basic Korean fare including fiery garlicky khimchi and claypot rice meals that were all freshly cooked and always delicious.

During one trip to Phuket we ate amazing home-cooked food at the Ban Nana beach shack restaurant on Bangthao beach. We still remember the tangy, fiery papaya salad with a crunch of fried cashews and shrimps; freshly caught crab cooked simply with black pepper and delicious curries and shrimp rolls all made without fuss by the owner's wife using simple basic Thai cooking techniques and the freshest of ingredients.

In Athens a small cafe near the Acropolis served delicious breakfasts -- omelettes, hot coffee, flaky layered nut filled baklavas and other Greek pastries -- all carefully cooked by the owner and her small staff each day. In Hyderabad we once ate a fantastic Andhra thali lunch in a small unassuming restaurant a short auto ride away from the Banjara Hills area.

Fresh ingredients, strong clean flavors and unfussy recipes usually produce the best meals. Too often restaurant dishes have fancy names and poor quality ingredients combined to create unmemorable and over-priced dishes.

Take the meal we had this evening at the Mirch Masala restaurant in the North Plaza. It was a terribly disappointing experience (unfortunately many of our experiences at Indian restaurants end up this way). We decided to sit outside taking advantage of a really pleasant evening as Hong Kong gets ready for spring, and this was probably our second mistake (the first was choosing to go there in the first place); the lady who came to take our drinks order about 20 minutes later (it may have been faster if we had we sat inside) looked like she was having an awful evening -- she muttered all sorts of things about there having been many complaints about poor service, how overworked she was etc etc.

Anyway drinks order got taken and then the ordeal over the dinner menu began. None of the South Indian dishes were available (which was so disappointing because we chose the restaurant only because we were really longing to eat a nice crisp paper dosa!) -- though of course nobody bothered to tell us this when we were ordering the south indian dishes! And then folllowed a long period of discussion between the wait staff and the kitchen and more explanations to us before we finally figured out what was available and what we could eat.

The starters arrived in a slightly crazy way, the lady who was having a terrible evening just kept bringing things out and bunging them all over the table, it would have been nice if she had remembered to bring out the essentials -- plates, flatware, napkins, glasses of water -- first. Everything would have been forgiven had the food been good but sadly the chicken pakoras had bits of raw batter hidden under all that red tandoori masala; the buttermilk was watery and over-salted, and we could have used an electric saw to cut through the boti kababs. Oh and the paani puri was pretty awful too. The Hyderabadi lamb was anything but Hyderabadi and the rumaali roti was tough and doughy.And the last straw: they forgot to bring out half the food we ordered which actually was a blessing because my tummy certainly couldn't stand the rubbish any longer!

How it all began

Not only have I been checking Facebook more than once a day, I have even begun to tweet! Why? I am not sure...but I have to say I enjoy blogging the most, because it is the closest to the old-fashioned Dear Diary. I began keeping my first diary when I was around 14 years old, it was very soon after I finished reading The Diary of Anne Frank so my diary was called 'silver' though I really wanted the name to be 'kitty'.

My first diary entries were all about all the stuff going on at home and in school and had I recorded everything faithfully I would have probably filled dozens of diaries in a month, but as it turned out I was a pretty lazy diarist and often condensed several days' entries into a single line. I hardly ever identified people in my diary, using initials and code names instead; I used bad beginner's French to write paragraphs of stuff that would have gotten me into trouble had the diary fallen into adult hands. I kept the diaries on till I got my first newspaper job in 1995 and then there was quite a journal hiatus till I began this blog in 2005.