Dateland: Las Iguanas

Will, being the delightful chap that he is, decided to take me out for dinner last night - I'm a lucky lady! We went to one of our favourite haunts - Las Iguanas. They are all about Latin foods and drinks - they serves tapas, Mexican and Brazilian specialties, and delicious cocktails! All manner of good things.

We decided to go for a tapas selection, and happy-hour cocktails...

Date rundown

Location: Las Iguanas

Occasion: Just felt like it

Food: Honey piri-piri chicken wings; prawns cooked in garlic, lemon and chilli; roast duck and caramelized onion wraps with chilli jam; sweet potato fries with aioli; dulche de leche and macadamia cheesecake; Mexican berry mess

Drink: Cherry fizz and Virgin fizz

High point: when we realized that pretty much everything we ordered had to be eaten with fingers and we descended into ungraceful pigging out     

Favourite things: Hannah

Hey all! Time for another favourite things post, this time from Hannah of Elendilkitten

Age: 22.
Occupation: Aspiring.

Book:

 Do I have to pick one? I love all my books. Terry Pratchett is my favourite
author. I love the Wee Free Men/Tiffany Aching series. I also adore Neil Gaiman.
Bought myself a few of his books a while ago and fell in love, now doing my best to get
the rest, as well as his Sandman comics. It's hard to decide! Um...Okay, so taking out
the series of books that I adore, my favourite stand-alone book is probably Perfume,
by Patrick Suskind.

Film: 

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It has Johnny Depp and Alan
Rickman singing a duet. There are cute tenors and crazy sopranos and blood and guts
and knives and corsets and people pies. It is the best film.

Breakfast:

 Porridge with brown sugar.
I would eat it every day but I can't always be bothered to cook in the mornings and
it's too hot in summer to have porridge, but it's so tasty.

Song/Artist:

 While My Guitar Gently Weeps/Beatles
My favourite music tends to change with my mood, but you can never go wrong with the Beatles

Drink:

 Apple and mango juice is all of the tastyness
in hot weather. Hot chocolate in cold weather. Baileys whenever.

Internet time-waster:

 Webcomics and fanfic. I follow about
10 different comics, and keep finding more via SU
I only follow a few pairings in fanfic so it can be hard to find decent stories.

Piece of clothing:

 Hoodies when I want to feel snuggly. My hand-made
flowery dress when I want to feel pretty.

Board Game:

 My Ankh-Morpork game! I've only played it once, but it's
brilliant

Sleeping Position:

 In a bed. I fail at sleep. Snuggled with my JontyKitten
is always the best.

Your best things in life:

 Books, friends, strawberries, chocolate and thunderstorms.
All at the same time would be amazing, snuggled up with a room full of friends,
eating strawberries and chocolate and listening to the storm rage outside. Discussing
books and listening to chillaxed music and generally having a lovely time.

Teacups adventure at Crook Hall

Well.

I think I've found where I want to get married...

We had a gig at the beautiful Crook Hall in Durham yesterday, and I have never found a place more enchanting! Every time I turned a corner I found more to love - secret walled garden! Moat! Attic room with giant, gilt-framed mirrors! Bandstand! Hedge maze! Courtyard! Roaring log fires! Beautiful antique tea-sets! Old books! 

I found it a little hard to concentrate on the actual gig...

However, it went very well, and people seemed to enjoy themselves. We ended up playing in the great hall (we were going to be in the bandstand (which I was later informed is actually a "wedding gazebo") but it started raining lots), which was all built of stone and had the most lovely acoustics. 

I'm in love...

 

Dateland: The Baltic center for contemporary art

The Baltic is just about to celebrate it 10th Anniversary - boy is that making me feel my age! I remember when it first opened! 

In those 10 years, it has hosted hundreds of works - some good, some not so good. Every time that Will and I go, there tends to be some things that are excellent, and some that are not so good.

 I follow my dad's advice about art galleries and museums - take it at a decent pace and wait for something to jump out and stop you. I always get very tired walking at "museum speed", so this advice serves me well. I also find it very important that the art has some aesthetic value - with modern art it can all sometimes get a bit meta, and you find yourself searching for meaning in the often (let's face it) pretentious explanations that they have at the start of the exhibition...

Nevertheless, they had some fun things on this visit. I didn't take many pictures as they have a strict policy regarding cameras, but I sneakily took one or two with my phone.

This is just one corner of one of the pieces, a giant chessboard covered with 65,536 stones - there was some kind of explanation about what it meant, but in my view, it was just nice to look at. And that's pretty important. 

 There are details of the other pieces we looked at here. 

Then we had a little too much fun playing on the giant staircase...

Then made fun of the notice telling us not to touch anything...