Saturday, December 10, 2005


andrew gross & jones the grocer

take my advice: jones the grocer is just the bccy kinda place. perfection! i love the dedicated cheese room -- and i finally picked up some pink murray river salt, which is one of my new aussie enthusiams.

it's heavenly sprinkled over excellent artisan sourdough bread spread with a little of the finest sweet butter you can get your hands on.

before my lunch at jones -- i had an organic chicken, pumpkin (what we in the u.s.a. would call a kabocha squash seems to be what sydneysiders call pumpkin), and arugula pie with a salad of baby lolla rossa -- awesome aussie barista judge paul haddon and i dropped by the regular saturday coffee morning held by the amazing andrew gross at coffee masters.

there several aussie coffee lovers checked out different baskets, sniffed green, and chatted on about almost every possible topic of conversation. if you're down under in the sydney area and haven't been to one of these yet, go!

further i briefly got to speak to the beautiful and talented 2005 aussie barista champ hazel de los reyes, whose coffee just happens to be sold at jones the grocer above. must find the time to catch up with her at her roastery!

she's such a sweetie. and speaking of sweeties and dreamboats, i also made contact with paul bassett at long last.

paul. . .paul. . .maybe i should just rename this site "the paul bassett cult." everyone just adores him, right?

with luck we'll have coffee next week before i head out to tasmania!

finally, i made it yoga synergy yesterday. wow -- all things are regional after all -- coffee, bread, chocolate and even yoga.

the synergy yoga style is a true aussie yoga style, completely unique to sydney, that moves at the challenging pace of a fast led ashtanga class, but incorporates ideas and sequences familiar to viniyoga as well as the primary series, and your average vinyasa class.

at the same time it incorporates unique poses and many dancer-like hand gestures the teacher (luke -- who happens to have one of the most beautiful and effortless looking practices i have ever seen, just from his in-class pose demonstrations) called mudras.

altho' these particular mudras were unfamiliar to me from my past yoga experience, i could see that they were incorporated into the poses in such a way as to increase the isometric effect and offer more intense arm involvement during standing poses when it might otherwise be tempting for yoga students to let their arms get lazy!

a very different and unusual pose flow, as well as an original approach to yoga. hard to follow at first, but still i recommend every yoga student check it out if only for the experience. personally i found much in this yoga philosophy to approve of!

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