Chardonnay and Lambs Testicles

Ill miss New Zealand. People are so cool and relaxed. No bullshit at all. Weather was fantastic and the meetings were a howl. Everyone I met looked like they had just come from a serious night out, no matter how senior. Nice guys.

I caught a flight from Wellington back to Sydney and decided to stay out in the boonies for a rest. I was staying in a local "pub", now there seems to be a lot of confusion over the terms "pub" and "hotel" out here. A hotel is in fact a pub, and the pub I stayed in had a load of rooms overlooking a lake (picture to right). Walking down any main street there are tons of "hotels" which are clearly not hotels at all, but in fact boozers. How does that work? I reckon its a plot deliberately set out to confuse those of us walking around with jetlag into thinking we are loosing our mind. Strange.



My hospitable colleagues dropped me off at the "pub" around 11:30am and we decided to have a pint and something to eat and discuss what we were going to do later. 9 hours later we were still there, after polishing off in the order of 9 bottles of local Chardonnay and worked our way through most of the menu.

The food as I mentioned earlier is quite good and often ambitously exotic. The dish that sticks out in my mind is a bowl of what the menu described as "Lambs Brains", a dish of unassuming deep fried rugby ball shaped stuff arrived. After biting into these things the texture was a little confusing, meaty bits in the middle surrounded by a layer of softer/moist "stuff", and finally encased in a deep fried coating. It turns out "Lambs Brains" really means "Lambs Testicles", another hotel/pub screw up. Even the aussie contingency began wretching on hearing the mixup. All I could think of was the poor castrated lambs running around depressed because their right to procreate had been cruelly wrenched away from them.