Shanghai Dumplings
Posted by Prashant Katwa
So we get off the tram at Flinders St. Station and walk down a couple of block to Little Bourke St. We’re look for a specific street name. I forgot the name, but we do find it. It’s actually an alleyway-kind of sketchy. It’s in the middle of Chinatown, so the alleyway has a few restaurants. We’re looking for a dumplings place whose name we weren’t quite sure of. All I knew was that it was called something-dumplings. After a few minutes we find it and its actually called Shanghai Dumplings. We get there and there is a line out the door. We decide to just walk around it because we’re supposed to be meeting up with a group of people. When we get to the front, we see a couple of people try to go upstairs. I don’t know if they were going to try to find a table or to go use the restroom or what, but the host, an old chinese man, stops them from going up. This chinese man seems to be running around trying to do like 10 things at once. He asks us “how many”, and we say that we are looking for a group. He appears to hear us, but then walks away. We decide to sneak past him and go upstairs to find our group. We look around for a while but then determine that they’re not here yet. So, we go bak downstairs. We get back in the line that starts our at the door and goes out into the alleyway. We tell Mr. old chinese man that we need a table for 8. He then says “how many? 4?” and we say no 8. He again seems flustered and asks everyone in line, which is now more like a bunch of groups, if there is a group of two. The rest of our group soon arrives.
I was there with my friend Timur and one of our friends who is in fact from South Carolina, here in Melbourne doing here graduate degree. Actually Timur and I didn’t really know the rest of the group, we were there accompanying our friend. She had invited us to come with here to a going away dinner for one of her friends. So we wait for a while and eventually get seated by a younger guy who works at the dumplings place.
The restaurant was very very busy that evening. In fact, I would surmise that it is busy on most nights. This is mainly because of their amazing dumplings of course. We ordered family style and got tons of dumplings for very cheap. They were very good. Now, many restaurants across Australia are BYO, meaning bring your own (wine, beer, etc.). So, one of the guys in our group when next door and bought some beer and brought it back to our table. Now, because this place was so busy, they had apparently ran out of plates and all we got were these small bowl things, which could fit like one dumpling. Anyway, the other odd things, was that they didn’t serve any water. All they had was this hot tea stuff which I thought was pretty bad, but apparently Timur didn’t have any trouble drinking. But other than that, the evening went well and the dinner was delicious. I was so full afterwards.
Halfway through the dinner, I was looking at the menu again and I saw that there was a picture of some chinese dude on the back. Turns out, it was the same man who was running around the restaurant. I think he must’ve been the owner or manager or someone. Anyway, haha, the menu said his name was Bobby or something. This dude was hilarious. Like no joke. We were like messing with him when we left. haha.
Anyway, I guess there’s no real point to this post, maybe just that Shanghai Dumplings is a pretty good place to eat. In fact, Timur, myself and a few of our other friends are going again tonight for Timur’s birthday dinner. I’ll let you all know if we have another interesting experience.
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Aaj Ka Dhamaka 2008
Posted by Prashant Katwa
Every year Sangam, the South Asian awareness student organization on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill, hosts an annual intercollegiate dance competition known as Aaj Ka Dhamaka. For the past three years, I’ve had the opportunity to serve important roles in the planning and execution of this major production. In addition, I’ve designed the shows website (www.uncakd.com) for the past three years, a new one each year. The South Asian dance competition features professional college dance teams from across the U.S. and its proceeds benefit the Mahatma Gandhi Fellowship, the first university-recognized, student-run scholarship at UNC Chapel Hill. Please visit the website and if you’re going to be in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area on November 1st, 2008 I highly encourage you to attend the show. (Be sure to purchase tickets beforehand.)
Below is the event poster designed by the Sangam Publicity Committee and event details are found below.
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Vote for Hope
Posted by Prashant Katwa
Obama ‘08 – Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.
I came across this video promoting Obama the other day. I found it to be well made and the motion graphics are pretty awesome. It was created by MC Yogi, produced by Robin Livingston, and animated by James Curtis.
It has already received over 5000 diggs on digg.com.
Obama ‘08 – Vote for Hope [Vimeo.com]
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Apple Event on October 14
Posted by Prashant Katwa
Apple is holding an event on Tuesday to announce updates to its notebook computers. Rumors suggest a new portable laptop line, cheaper MacBooks, MacBook shell carved out of a single piece of aluminum, and perhaps new NVIDIA chipsets instead of Intel’s chipsets.
We’ll have to wait and see what Apple has in store for us.
Here’s a roundup of most of the rumors: Apple MacBook Event 2008 [Gizmodo.com]
Info on the supposed new NVIDIA chipsets: Apple dumping Intel chipsets for NVIDIA’s [AppleInsider.com]
And to get live coverage of the Apple event by the folks over at Gizmodo, check out live.gizmodo.com
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University (and things I disagree with)
Posted by Prashant Katwa
The following is a list of things that I happen to disagree with in regards to university studies. Please excuse me if I sound like I’m whining.
Lectures longer than 1 and 1/2 hours
Honestly, a college student’s attention span is very limited. After about 45 minutes of lecture, more than half the students are waiting for the class to be over. Understandably there are some classes, such as labs, which are exceptions and require long periods of work. But for the most part I think long classes, mainly lectures, are not very conducive to learning.
Classes earlier than 9am
The lifestyle of a college student simply does not cater to an early morning. I think that it is inevitable that after you’re first semester in college you realize that you can’t sleep before midnight. Most nights are late nights. That’s because things just don’t get done until the night. That project that you’re working on with a fellow student, can’t get started until you both have free time…aka at night. Read more
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Random Header Image Rotation
Posted by Prashant Katwa
So, if you didn’t notice, I changed the default image that was at the top of the Australia section blog template to reveal a series of real photos from my trip! Every time you refresh the page, you should be able to see some of my favorite photos that I’ve taken while here. In total, there are 15 possible images (so far).
I found the CSS integrated php image rotator at A List Apart. You simply link to a php script on your CSS stylesheet instead of an image. The php will then pull a random image from the images in the same directory. You can find the php source here.
Enjoy!
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Trip to Sydney!
Posted by Prashant Katwa
Yes, yes, I know that its been a month since I updated my blog. For that I apologize but I just get busy. I have like 5 blog posts that I’ve been meaning to write. Hopefully I have time to write them all before I forget.
Also, if you didn’t notice, I changed the default image that was at the top of this blog template to reveal a series of real photos from my trip! Every time you refresh the page, you should be able to see some of my favorite photos that I’ve taken while here. In total, there are 15 possible image. Enjoy!
Now, on to my post.
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So about a month ago, my sister came to visit me here in Australia for about two weeks. It was good to have family around for a while again. It was around the time that I started to miss home, so I guess it worked out well.
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Tar Heels! …in Australia?
Posted by Prashant Katwa
Okay so I’ve been in Australia for a little over three weeks now. Australia is probably as far as you can get from the East Coast of the US. So I thought that I’d never really see anything related to the East Coast or North Carolina or even UNC here.
But to my surprise, up until today I’ve probably seen like 4 or 5 sweatshirts on the streets of Melbourne that read “Carolina” or “Tar Heels”. No joke; I was most definitely surprised! Read more
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Photos from down under!
Posted by Prashant Katwa
Although I’ve only been here for like three weeks, I’ve taken over 200 photos. I’ve uploaded most of them to Facebook and I’ve provided the links to view the first two albums on my last post. The main reason I’ve added them to Facebook instead of like Flickr or my blog itself is because I have to pay for my Internet per gigabyte used here, and Facebook’s upload feature actually drastically compresses the photos and reduces upload size. Read more
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Orientation Week!
Posted by Prashant Katwa
Sorry I haven’t written a blog for like a week, but I’ve just been busy doing things here and there. This past week was orientation week for the Study Abroad / Exchange Students. It was alright, pretty boring as I would expect any orientation to be. But now I guess i’ve “settled in” if that really means anything. So let me tell you a little bit about what I’ve been up to.