You are the controller

I'm not the usual type of girl. I'm not very girly. Apart from my love of shoes, clothes, handbags and chocolate I seem to relate to men more than other girls I know. It might have to do with my interest in sciences and IT. So it isn't unusual that since young I always loved playing video games on my cousin's Gameboy and Amiga computers before I had my own computer at home.

Once we got our first computer at home, I managed to get my hand on ten floppy disks containing games. Games that had only one level each. It had never passed my mind at the time that I only had trial versions of these games. I just assumed that the boss to be killed at the end of the level was the end of the game!

Time improved the technology and graphics in games. I spent hours in my teenage years playing on the Playstation, completing one game after the other. More recently the Ninetendo Wii came out. It was so much fun playing with it at friends. It introduced a new level of gaming were movement is part of the game. The controller and joysticks weren't static any more. You could now play with the movements as well.

This Christmas I decided to buy the Kinect for the Xbox for my boyfriend. It was such a good decision, it felt like a present for myself. The difference with Kinect and the Wii is that you don't need a controller any more to play. You play with your whole body. While playing you forget that you're playing in the game, you just feel that you are in the game.

What's even more fun is looking at your friends moving like they're martial arts combatants in my living room!

An evening with the ladies

After a long wait Restaurant Week is upon us. I had 2 dinners planned this week, one with my girlfriends and another with the boyfriend.

Us three girls headed to the first restaurant earlier this week onn a tiny street full of coffee shops (the Dutch coffee shops not cafés where they sell actual coffee and cake) next to the Dam. None of us had visited the restaurant before so we were a bit concerned about the location of the restaurant. What can you expect of from a restaurant in such street? However we were wrong and on entering the restaurant we noticed that it's going to be good once we saw the number of wine bottles on display at the entrance. The wine selection looked good and seeing my French friend face light up while walking to our table was enough to assure me that if the food was bad then we could focus on the wines!

The evening was lovely, the atmosphere warm and the food was very good. You can only expect a good evening if you put three ladies together with food and wine.

The girls choosing another wine

Note: The restaurant and wine bar mentioned above is Graves which is aptly named seeing that it's located in Gravenstraat.  However that's not all since Graves is also a sub-region of the Bordeaux wine region in France. This made it clear how they managed to get the name of the restaurant on most of the wine selection! Unluckily graves in English doesn't strike as a perfect name for a restaurant, unless you're targeting goths!

While the cat is away, the mice come out to play

The man of the house is away for the week. He's currently hiking a glacier on the Italian Alps. It sounds difficult and it is actually quite difficult. I do hike with him sometimes but I can only manage a number of kilometres on flat ground. On the other hand they will be doing hours of hiking going up and down on snowy mountains!

In the meantime the apartment feels quiet and empty. This means I have more free time on my hands, so I decided to catch up with my girl friends in Amsterdam.  A planned picnic turned into drinks and dinner due to rain.  I did say we are having tropical weather, it's still quite hot but we also had rain and thunder yesterday. We decided to go for a Teppanyaki dinner. Eating Teppanyaki involves having dishes of meat, fish of vegetables that is fried in a cast-iron griddle over a heat source placed next to the dining table. It was my first time eating this type of food and it was an enjoyable experience. Seeing the cook preparing the food directly in front of uswith such precise technique is pretty impressive.

Nippon is the restaurant we went to and is located in the center of Amsterdam, on Reguliersdwarsstraat. The service was of high standard and the food was great.

Alicia Keys concert

A few weeks ago we went to a concert of Alicia Keys for my belated birthday present. Her concert was a mix of up-beat songs as well as calmer songs which she played directly on the piano. One of her songs in her third album Unpluggedis Streets of New York has a special meaning to me and my boyfriend since it became popular just before we went to New York. Each time I heard it I imagined our trip and after the holiday I relived the memories of a very wet weekend in New York with local Maltese friends. The weekend we spent in New York was definitely one of the wettest weekends this year, I doubt there was another weekend in which a flood warning was released in all the New York state. Luckily friends took us out to one of their favourite bars (Tonic) which I had heard about several times!

Her voice is astounding and I would suggest you to try and see her live.

The video shows part of the song Streets of New York. The out-of-tune voice you hear in the background is my darling boyfriend's!