curry

Our first stop of the day was Krispy Kreme.  But first let me tell you why…

First of all, we woke up really late (by that I mean 9:30ish).

While in Australia we need to have Internet access.  The last time that we were here I found out to my disgust that I was not able to tether my iPhone to my notebook unless I was a post-paid/contract customer.  As I had bought a pre-paid SIM this wasn’t going to happen this time.  In South Africa Vodacom doesn’t care whether you tether (heh, that rhymes!), and neither should any phone company.  Ultimately all it makes you do is use your phone more for Internet access, and ultimately they end up getting more money out of the deal.  The only possible reason for disallowing tethering is if you offer unlimited data access, which isn’t the case here.

Any how, so with this in mind we paid $149 for a Cellular Wifi Router from Virgin Mobile Australia.  The device is a dream to use and is really fast for a mobile device.  The only problem is that this particular one didn’t want to recharge the battery.  It was perfectly happy to let me use it to access the Internet, but once the battery ran out that was it.  Ok, s**t happens, I’ll just take it back and get a replacement.  Off to Bondi Junction Virgin Mobile to be told that they do not have any more in stock and that I was welcome to go over to the Pitt Street branch to swap it out there.  Ok that’s a bit of a schlep but if it takes care of the problem then I’m willing to do it.

Forgoing a visit to bills we headed to the train station – paid $20 for a day pass (we wanted to go on the ferry later in the day), got to Virgin Mobile Pitt Street to be told that they can’t swap out the device because we didn’t buy it from them.  Uh hello?  This is the same company isn’t it?  So now we’re hacked off and went looking for other cellular companies to get a different device from.  To cut  a long story short (well maybe too late for that), there doesn’t seem to be anyone better than Virgin Mobile price wise.  I guess it’s a Yin/Yang situation – if you get something good in one area, like a good deal – something else must suffer, in this case customer support apparently.

We mulled the situation over a Hungry Jack’s burger (for breakfast – we were starving by this point) – and decided that the best course of action was to buy a new device from Virgin Mobile Pitt Street and then organise a refund from the Bondi Junction branch – all I had to do to organise this was to call their support line, explain the problem and get a return authorisation number – which is where we stand now.  We’ll see how we fare with actually getting the refund tomorrow.

So really this was all a lead up to the fact that by this stage we needed some serious comfort food.  Enter Krispy Kreme…

This is our selection.  Caroline’s at the top – original glaze on the left, and strawberry jam on the right.  Mine on the bottom, strawberry and kreme on left, and apple custard crumble on the right.

Caro’s first thoughts of the strawberry jam doughnut were that it needed to be apricot – that is a typically South African thing.  But she also said that it didn’t have a typical doughnut taste.  That was fixed by the original glaze doughnut though when she proclaimed that that one was perfect!

Mine were pretty good too.  The apple custard crumble was exactly that.  I love custard and the apple taste was attained by including tiny chunks of actual apple in the custard filling.  The strawberry and kreme doughnut was a little disappointing in that it didn’t really have much filling in it.  I’m sure this was just an oversight, because when I got to the filling it was very nice – there just wasn’t very much of it.

Here’s the close up of the whole apple custard crumble doughnut;

The original glaze, complete with a bite!

And an extreme closeup of a mostly eaten strawberry and kreme doughnut.  It was mostly eaten because that’s how much had to be eaten to show you the filling.

For lunch – well actually just a coffee stop since we ate breakfast so late – we went to Rion Corso Café in Manly.  It wasn’t a planned stop, we were mostly waiting for the return ferry, but we’re glad we stopped there.

Caroline had a tea.  I had a cappuccino and we shared a blueberry fridge cheesecake which was very nice.

After one of my last tweets my tweet was retweeted by @sydney_feed.  When looking through a few other tweets that had been retweeted recently there was one that said something like “good coffee and Sydney are rarely used in the same sentence” – Well I’m going to change that.  We’ve found some of the best (good) coffee that we’ve ever had in Sydney.  Sydney and, I would imagine Australia in general has consistently good coffee where-ever we have been – even the tiniest of outlets have at the very least filter coffee.  South Africa, while better now than a few years ago, still doesn’t have consistently good coffee.

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For dinner we visited Ichi-ban Boshi.  We didn’t have any of the ramen – we’ll keep that for another time.  This time we both had the chicken katsu curry.  The verdict?  Excellent.  There could have been more chicken I suppose, but what we did get was very nice, and that curry sauce was so good, once the chicken was gone I made sure that all the rice was coated in the curry sauce, and then gobbled that up with gusto!

Mmm, look at that “kare”

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Tagged as: cheesecake, chicken, chicken katsu, coffee, curry, doughnut, ichiban boshi, krispy kreme, tea

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