It’s been a crazy, crazy weekend and half-of-week! I haven’t written in quite a few days because I was working late on Friday night as well as Monday night, and over the weekend I spent Saturday photographing The Blurst of Times Festival in Sydney. Not to mention I’ve had some very late (up to 3am) nights going through the 1400 photos I took that day. You can check out my photo gallery at Casual Band Blogger, but I’ll probably be sharing some later this week, too.

Lil and I caught up last Friday but since it was the first time having lunch again, we did it this week too. We spent a long time chatting since she had more time, and I wasn’t too busy either.

The Place

We were going to go to a new burger eatery near our workplaces but it hadn’t opened yet. There were rumours of a “soft launch” but they weren’t letting members of the public in. It officially opens on Friday, so we’ll probably try it another day. Instead, we went to Sushi Hotaru, which has two restaurants in the city. All sushi is $3 a plate, and they also sell sides (edamame! edamame! edamame!) and desserts.

I like Sushi Hotaru for their affordable menu items and their variety. They have some interesting sushi that isn’t served in other restaurants. My favourites are their very nice (not so) spicy grilled salmon, and a salmon and scallop combo. Lil had some takoyaki along with some cooked tuna sushi. I tried a cooked salmon one wrapped in cucumber slices, it was delicious. And yeah, we shared edamame!

The Chat

I suppose we just talked about what we got up to recently, how work was, and so on. We reminisced on the first time I drank bubble tea (back in 2007 – holy cowbells!) when we were hanging out with a bunch of friends at the local shopping centre. I remember having pearl milk tea and disliking the pearls, so I ended up obnoxiously spitting them out. In public. Hahaha.

We talked about a lot of other things, including the upcoming The Minimalists Tour. The Minimalists are two guys, Joshua and Ryan, who gave up a lot of their “stuff” in 2010 to live a minimalist lifestyle and focus on being happy – and have been spreading the word about it ever since. In a few weeks they will be having an event to share their story and talk about their book Everything That Remains. I invited Lilian to come along because the event is free, and we are both looking at how to live more minimalist lives. Woohoo. Hopefully she can make it, I think we’ll both find it very eye-opening.

The Selfie

My dad bought me an authentic 1991 polaroid camera (that means it’s older than us!) from a garage sale a couple of weeks ago. It was still well packaged, with the $170 price sticker on it, and he bought it for just two dollars. I spent $36 on a film cartridge with just eight shots. Film is quite expensive these days, but I do see the novelty. I took a test shot last week and it turned out alright, but this time it took a few tries.

The first shot was washed out probably because it was sunny or we didn’t cover the photo to let it develop properly. But we took two photos after that and somehow they ended up looking almost the same.

I think the camera isn’t so great, as the photos are turning out pretty washed out. They are supposed to be black and white though – I didn’t want to buy the colour paper because they only had a special edition available with a weird leopard print border, and I didn’t like that.

I am still trying to figure out what to take photos of with the film. I don’t want to waste it, haha!