Nik


you can put anything here

Sunday, January 12, 2014 @ 7:35 PM PERMALINK

December is usually a whirlwind of activities as everyone returns from overseas. Needless to say, it is one of my favourite times of the year. Although work was particularly busy the entire month, I'm glad that we all still managed to find time for friends and family.

Here's my little re-cap of what we were up to in December! More behind the jump...













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Labels: Adventures in our backyard, christmas, family and friends, new year's eve

0 comments | Leave a comment Sunday, August 19, 2012 @ 2:46 AM PERMALINK

Michelle got a room for the weekend at Marina Bay Sands and we all headed there for a chill Sunday of relaxation.

The view from the 38th floor. 

This is where we unintentionally played lift tag with Yi liang whilst waiting to go up to the pool. We managed to find each other in the end. Although, we didn't do any of the finding. Yi Liang had to randomly select floors to try and find us.


FOOD! 

The truffle fries here are really amazing, everything else is pretty mediocre. Oh, except the service we got; the waiter that served us was downright awful.




How cute is Michelle in this photo? 


Brenda in her H&M bikini


Sexy NUS hotcake Irwin


Boys trying to have a secret conversation in the sunset 


I'm a seal trainer and this is my seal

His name is Shiam. Sometimes he does tricks and I feed him fries. He is very disobedient, I gave him away after this.  Kidding. I had to feed the swimmers cause I very greedily climbed on the platform to get dibs on the fries.




All the girls 


Trying to get as high above the water as we can





What do people do when they get free hotel rooms? Camwhore and jump on beds.




Look at these three adorable monkeys


Sometimes we can pass off as being pretty normal (cept Beat, as you can see)

After everyone had showered and changed, we headed down to the food court to get dinner.
I had a bowl of really nasty beef noodles at the food court. I'm not sure how you can get beef noodles wrong but they somehow managed to.

After my sad dinner, Ale and I went to Au Chocolat because I've heard that the hot chocolate is really good. The ambiance of Au Chocolat is amazing and the both of us went a little crazy.

We had intended to just get some hot chocolate to take away but after we stepped in, we decided to sit down to enjoy it.




Look at those beautiful chairs



Chalkboard menus, a beautiful mural on the ceiling and a toy train running on hanging train tracks. How is it possible not to love this place?


Food & Beverage mistake number 2

This day was just not a good day for me and food. Almost everything I ordered was unfortunate tasting. I got tempted by the iced mango white chocolate. When my drink came, it smelt heavenly. However, it tasted like ice and milk with some fruit flavoring. Very disappointing.

Luckily Ale doesn't waiver when it comes to fancy drinks so I got to taste some of the hot chocolate she ordered.  Take our word for it, the hot chocolate is a MUST TRY. $9 will get you a teapot of hot chocolate that is thoroughly delish and not too heavy.

The food and desserts at Au Chocolat look great too even though we didn't get to try anything else. I will definitely be back.

After filling our stomaches with chocolate goodness, we headed back to the room where we watched the synchronized swimming duo finals.


Woke up in the morning to this sight 

After we checked out, we headed back to Serangoon and had some pretty decent ramen (Bad food streak ended. Thank god) before heading our separate ways.

Pretty good weekend despite all the minor hiccups and my bad day of food. I guess that really shows that company really can make up for everything.

I leave you now with this new band I've discovered from the CD that came with the latest issue of YEN (Lovingly brought back by Brendan, Jordan and Chris all the way from Melbourne)


This is the perfect song for the long weekend.

Labels: Adventures in our backyard, Au Chocolat, food adventure

0 comments | Leave a comment Monday, August 13, 2012 @ 11:53 PM PERMALINK

A couple of weeks ago, Ale and I went for The Bake Off. This year's Singapore edition was held to help the Cat Welfare Society raise funds and they managed to raise $4535! 

We set out pretty early in the day and with the help of Maps and Ale's pretty accurate navigational skills, we managed to find the place. 


The BakeOff was held at Flea & Tree which is a really great shop. 

Ale and I went a little bit insane when we saw all the amazing accessories for sale. It is a good thing I hadn't gotten my salary yet. If not, I'm pretty sure I would have spent too much of it there.




We shared a booklet of cookie dollars. This meant $10 worth of baked goods for each of us. YUM.

All the baked goods contributed looked fantastic and it was so hard to figure out what to buy.

Ale decided on a chocolate cupcake and a gingerbread girl.




Yes, baked goods & cats make future cat lady Ale a happy girl

And after a long and hard decision making process, I decided on a bubble tea cupcake, some hello kitty shortbread and an apple cinnamon cupcake.


Amazing earl grey bubble tea cupcake

Isn't the presentation so cute? The cupcake itself was soaked in earl grey milk tea and tasted almost like a bread pudding. It was really scrumptious. I was so tempted to buy another flavour but I ran out of cookie dollars.


How can anyone resist Hello Kitty shortbread cookies?! 


Apple cinnamon cupcake

I actually got the name card of the bakers that did this cupcake but I have no idea where I put it. The cupcake was really moist and they were very generous with the apple sauce filling in the cupcake. Yumm.




Shades from Flea & Trees. I really need to go back there to get some earrings 



After spending too much of our money on baked goods and shades, we decided to look for somewhere with air conditioning to hide in. We tried a couple of places but they were all either full or closed until dinner time.

We eventually managed to get a table at 40 hands. I know that I should really have tasted their legendary coffee, but it was too hot a day for coffee (iced or not). While I waited for my turn at the cashier, I spied ONE last bottle of cider sitting in the fridge. If that's not a sign from the universe, I'm not sure what is.

Ale had an iced mocha. It was pretty good.



This is a pretty good cider. Not too sweet with a very crisp bite. I actually usually only rave about super sweet ciders that don't really taste like beer at all but this was very refreshing. Perfect for a hot day exploring.

After we had our drinks and recovered from the heat, we went exploring some more. The Tiong Bahru district is really a juxtaposition of old and new. Some of the amazing low rise flats are still occupied by senior citizens while others have been taken over by trendy shops or offices. There are popular chinese restaurants just a road away from the new cafes & bars.

There is real old era charm in the estate though. The huge balconies, green glass windows, not recreated exposed brick..it would really be a dream to live in an area like that. I just googled this though, those flats cost like $1m upward and have like less than 60 years left on them. Boohoo. My dreams are dashed.

We found a couple of cats lying around and Ale was quick to make friends with them.






While the weather could have been heaps better, exploring Singapore is always a fun thing for me and it's even better when I get to contribute to animal welfare and get to go shopping as well.

Labels: Adventures in our backyard, Charity, The Bake Off

0 comments | Leave a comment Saturday, June 16, 2012 @ 5:49 PM PERMALINK

The day after we came back from KL, I had arranged to meet Long and his friends to accompany them around Sentosa.



I met Long when Jasmine and I went to Ho Chi Minh in July last year. Dora had first told us about this volunteer tour group called Saigon Hotpot that her parents had engaged during their trip there.

The guides at Saigon Hotpot bring you around for free, show you the sights and are able to cater their tours to what you would most like to see all for the chance to interact with people and to practice their English. I know what you all are thinking, there has to be a catch. Well, there isn't.

All you have to do is pay for the admission fees for you and your guide and buy lunch for him/her (actually, I'm not so sure about lunch, I'm pretty sure its not an enforced rule but its just basic courtesy anyway so please do) There is no hard selling or commission based selling for the guides to bring to you certain places, you can be sure that you will get a really authentic experience.

Long was our assigned guide and he showed up at our hotel first thing in the morning, taught us how to order Vietnamese coffee on the street and even tried to help Jasmine find an optical shop that sold contact lense solution.

For the super detailed post on our adventures with Long, please refer HERE.

Saigon Hotpot is becoming so popular that they now only take tour arrangements via the website I linked. If you are thinking about going to Ho Chi Minh, I promise you will not regret booking a tour with these amazing people.

Anyway, long and short of it, Long and I have kept in contact via Facebook so when I heard he was coming down, I knew I had to meet up with him and bring him around Singapore.

For someone that has lived 23 years in Singapore, when I started to think about where to bring him and his friends I started drawing blanks. I felt like I didn't know enough about Singapore or its buildings and culture and even went to borrow a guidebook from the library as reference. Long was so informative when we were in HCM and I really just wanted to be able to provide him with the knowledge.

I bought earlier mentioned guidebook to KL and only ended up flipping through it on the way back to SG before falling asleep.

Anyways, as I was in KL when Long and his friends Andy and Phuong arrived,  I wasn't able to contact them until the morning we were supposed to meet and they had decided to go to Sentosa, so the decision was already made for me.

I really love Sentosa so I was more than happy to go along with them. I brought them to the beach because they really seemed excited to be by the sea and we walked around for a bit before the heat got the best of us.

After some discussion about what to do, we decided to head straight to the Images of Singapore.

Now, the last memory I have of Images of Singapore was when we went as a school for our heritage lessons in Secondary 2. We were all mega creeped out by the place and a few of my friends even claimed to have had ghostly encounters.

Well this time round, I am pleased to say that it actually is a really informative museum. It manages to compress a ton of Singapore's history, culture and tradition into a building and it really isn't too expensive.

The three of them very sweetly paid for my admission ticket even though they really didn't have to as I was glad to have the chance to take a look at the museum for myself anyway.


Before you enter into the main museum, you have to wait in this holding room decorated with loads of fun looking old things for you to take pictures with. The doors only open when the countdown is completed and you are led into an area, invited to sit down and watch a short video clip.




I kind of panicked and thought that they had changed the entire format of the 'Images of Singapore' into some sort of digital experience and apologized to Long thinking I had just made them pay $10 for a 4 minute video.

Thank god it was just an intro about a fictionalized Four Winds trading company which the museum used to create an analogy of the different races that settled in Singapore.



The museum starts with exhibits about the founding of Singapore and moves on to World War II, Post War Malaya,  newly independent Singapore and then wraps up with great exhibits about the culture, festivals and traditions of the races in Singapore. It served as a easy to digest introduction into Singapore and our culture and I was surprised how much of my history and social studies lessons came back to me.









After we were done at the Museum, I wanted to bring the group out for lunch. When I asked them what they felt like eating, they asked if they could have McDonalds.

I was a little puzzled for awhile before I remembered that the Golden Arches have yet to arrive in HCM.  So off to McDonalds it was!

Their first Macdonalds meal (for 2 out of 3 of them anyway). Andy did a travel-work experience in America so Macdonalds is not new to him at all.

We parted ways after lunch because the three of them had arranged to meet a Singaporean family (who they also knew from conducting tours) that was going to bring them to the Night Safari.

The three of them were so sweet and even brought me gifts from Vietnam.


It is moments like this that really make me remember why I love traveling so much.

Traveling really opens your life up. It exposes you to both the good and bad in the world. I've been very lucky so far *knock on wood*. I've never been in too bad a situation that many travelers face. Never been cheated out of too much money (a little bit here and there via taxi fares and restaurants definitely but nothing major), never been robbed (although Jasmine got pick pocketed and I lost a handphone once), never been attacked...

I have however, met a ton of genuinely sweet people who go out of their way to make me feel welcome. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to talk to strangers you just met or how much they will help you.

My advice to anyone with the spare time and money, take a chance of traveling. For me, there is really nothing more fulfilling than finding out how different we all may seem yet how truly inherently similar we human beings all are.

Love to yall! Have a great weekend!

Labels: Adventures in our backyard, Sentosa

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