A piece of York on a Wednesday night

Family nan

For Ken's farewell dinner we went to Akbar's, an Indian restaurant - in fact a chain with branches through the UK. It was quite good, I nowadays manage to order something from an Indian that I actually like - either my selection skills have improved or my tastes have expanded. The company was enjoyable and quite international, ranging from Rumanian (Radu Calinescu, travelling back and forth from Oxford every week), Greek (Nikos Matragkas, who offered to take over my bike when I leave), Spanish (Adolfo Sánchez-Barbudo Herrera, have to find out which shortened version of his name it is allowable to use), and of course Canadian (Ken himself) and German (Susanne, his girlfriend). Representing the English were Andrew Schofield (who thought the food was not hot enough despite him having asked for extra inflammatory spices - no one else shared his objection) and Louis Rose, from whom I hope to learn everything regarding Epsilon. (I'm leaving out everyone sitting at the other end of the table. Well, there'll be other occasions.)

The nan bread was especially good, not just in flavour (lots of garlic, I should remember not to stand too close to anyone else today) but also in presentation: they hang them from a vertical stand, which not only looks nice but is quite practical too, as it hardly takes any space this way.

Emigrating to New Zealand is a very different deal, obviously. Right now they are waiting for the visa formalities to conclude, but of course that's just the start of it. Lots of luck and good times to Ken and Susanne!

Afterwards we paid a brief visit to a pub close by, which turned out to have been converted into a restaurant but still had a living room-type bar where I tried out several ales. They even served them in smaller sizes than a pint, for tasting purposes. I won't claim that I remember the names of all of them, but the left one (with a sweet, chocolatey taste) was called Bad Kitty :-$ Nevertheless, I think ale will never really be my type of drink.

Another bonus of the outing was that I found out about the York short film festival to take place early November. There's an extensive programme, I'll certainly check it out. Also, in December there is said to be a Christmas market and an ice scupture exhibition. So much to do!