This is the May
May. 6th, 2024 05:22 pmThe weekend, unsurprisingly came with a bit of a Star Wars theme; on Saturday I joined Owen, Chester, and Carla for a regular session of the board game "Root" but we decided to design our own factions as a playtest. I built the Ewoks, with sacred forest sites, rituals to overcome their unaggressiveness, and ambush tactics. Other players had a realist participatory democracy and alien abductors. It all worked very well. We played the Star Wars trilogy in the background which holds up quite well, and even better once you realise it is a metaphor for the Vietnam war and the US is the Empire. I suspect that couldn't have been made too obvious at the release in 1977.
The evening previous I hosted an Ethopian-Eritrean dinner for Julie A., and Liana F., the first time I had tried to make such food; specifically Misir Wat (Ethiopian Lentil Stew), Shiro Wot (Spicy Ground Chickpea Stew), Gomen Wat (collard stew) and Tej (honey wine), with store-bought desserts, including date biscuits for Saudi Arabia and baklawa from Lebanon. Purists might be horrified that I used khobz rather than injera, but I'm actually not too fond of the latter - too sour for me.
In other cultural events, in my role as the local president of the Australia-China Friendship Society, the committee met with the new consul general for Victoria and Tasmania, Xinwen Fang, whose background includes working in Timor-Leste which, of course, we had a great deal to talk about. In general, we had exchanges about the ACFS, how we could have functions with the Consulate, and a few jibes at some of Australia's more regrettable local foreign affairs decisions. We also sampled some of Tower's crop of Bi Luo Chun tea, which will feature highly at this coming Sunday's Tea Tasting and Yum Cha event.
The evening previous I hosted an Ethopian-Eritrean dinner for Julie A., and Liana F., the first time I had tried to make such food; specifically Misir Wat (Ethiopian Lentil Stew), Shiro Wot (Spicy Ground Chickpea Stew), Gomen Wat (collard stew) and Tej (honey wine), with store-bought desserts, including date biscuits for Saudi Arabia and baklawa from Lebanon. Purists might be horrified that I used khobz rather than injera, but I'm actually not too fond of the latter - too sour for me.
In other cultural events, in my role as the local president of the Australia-China Friendship Society, the committee met with the new consul general for Victoria and Tasmania, Xinwen Fang, whose background includes working in Timor-Leste which, of course, we had a great deal to talk about. In general, we had exchanges about the ACFS, how we could have functions with the Consulate, and a few jibes at some of Australia's more regrettable local foreign affairs decisions. We also sampled some of Tower's crop of Bi Luo Chun tea, which will feature highly at this coming Sunday's Tea Tasting and Yum Cha event.