Unions

I hardly receive wedding invites and the times I do, I am invited simply because of association. Am I and my circle of friends just relatively young for marriage-age, or do I really have that little friends?

Anyway, I usually spend most of the time at the wedding trying to amuse myself and my company with the food, and talking about our ideal dream weddings.

I actually have 3 rather interesting pictures to post, but lunch is beckoning, and its Dad's cooking!

Wendy's Waste

Singapore's 'Wendy's' turned out to be such a waste of time and money :(

Soggy burgers, tiny patties, flat drinks and sweet beef chilli.

To think that I usually associate burgers with laid back, happy, chill-out moments where one can forget aobut weight watching and just sink the teeth into juicy chunks of meat slathered with salty relish and thick sauce in a toasted crisp bun.

What a horrid experience :(

The Great Photograph Excuse!

My attempts to blog are always thwarted by many external factors and 1 overriding internal factor.

I always have to complain about the slow picture upload rate, the wireless connection dial up boxes which can appear in rapid successive troves everytime I do something new and the self-destructing capabilites of Internet Explorer, and sometimes, Moz too.

Then sometimes I just get too lazy to actually come up with a suitable narrative for my blog entries. One which could, hopefully, tie my very random photographs together.


Case in point: Coffee that Jie and I had today.

Anyway, the new year is coming soon and I am excited!

Maybe, I should move to another platform.

At Long Last

Finally. After weeks of hunting high and low for the elusive shaved ice stall in Chinatown. Hooray for Dad and his trademark spontaneous food trips!

I was mistaken in thinking that Mum would order the durian shaved ice. 'Durian should only be eaten as it is, from the shell.' The mango ice was sweet and dense, such that the fresh mango cubes actually tasted sour in comparison. But they formed a perfect harmony of sweet and sour when eaten together.

I had the green tea shaved ice, which was very cool and refreshing and went delightfully well with the fresh red beans. Real red beans! You could actually seperate them bean by bean from the lump, instead of those dark purple paste with broken skins that you find in those run-of-the-mill dessert stalls. My only gripe was that the thick green tea bitterness did not permeate the entire mount of shaved ice, leaving the insides only about half as tasty as the outer crusts.


Dad and Jie went for hot desserts. The walnut paste was very smooth.

We tasted really good steamed milk and egg puddings during our family holiday to Hong Kong. Jie ordered the steamed egg custard with ginger, but it wasn't as smooth as those in Hong Kong. Jie only finished half the bowl.

Chinatown is such a haven for good food!

Its over for now

I have finished my last paper (is there any symbol which would be the equivalent of combing a fullstop wth an exclamation mark and a question mark at the same time?)

Somehow I felt a distinct sadness stab at me once the mechanicised voice chiming 'you may leave the hall' rang this time. I had heard that phrase 14 times before, but today, the 15th was just incredibly poignant. In fact, I even thought the voice sounded sad. So, after the exam, I walked down to Popular to get a roll of PVC wrap and bought myself a packet of MnMs too. I kept telling myself not to get any food from Popular bookstore, cause nobody else does and whatever is n the food rack is bound to be at least 2 years old, or even if it were younger, taste like it were that old. And I was right. Bland chocolate encased around peanuts that were not crunchy, but not even soft. They were simply, tasteless.

Now, I wonder if I looked silly hauling that PVC wrap all the way home without a plastic bag. Or would it have looked worse if I had used a plastic bag?

Anyway, I shall give myself a lot of things to do during this holiday break, though work is not one of them. My head tells me to go to the gym, now. Just 2 minutes ago it was telling me to go to the gym instead of blog, but here I am, to pen my thoughts and post pictures of some glorious food I had a few days ago:

Tender, tasty jiu he, fresh and crispy kangkong and beansprouts soaked in a tangy spicy and sweet broth and topped with crunchy peanuts. $2!

The best ngoh hiang I've ever eaten! Everything about this plate of deep fried Teochew style fritters was excellent, and the hae pia stayed crispy throughout the 2 bowls of sauce I went through (2nd one was topped up for free).
And it was served piping hot, from this stall in Chinatown.

I must go back again. The food there is awesome, and the atmosphere a blast!

Now that I've come to the end of this post, my head is yelling at me to put on my jogging shoes, but my eyes are telling me to just, sleep. What would I do when I get away from the computer? I will find out soon enough.

Keeping the Pieces, Cut.

The long, snaking queue for the ATM at West Coast Market reminded me of you, and I finally decided to cut up those snapshots you took, of both of us smiling like idiots at a blinding light in a made-in-japan camera trap.

I sat in my room. In front of the computer, my mind swathed in Romanticism, Modernism, Literature, Music. Art.

It was so much harder than I imagined, but when I finally closed the open blades onto that line, an imaginary one that I drew in between us, the cutting got easier. But I did pause, after i severed the first image. Initially, I thought we looked like two tourists trying to toggle a neoprint machine in some Kabuki Cho parlour. I was completely unaware that you had actually slotted in a coin, and thus the camera caught me at the point where i was staring aimlessly outside of the box. Now I remember, I was actually looking at the escalator, feeling very absurd then at the thought of feeding the hungry camera trap. But then you paid for it. So it was fine with me. And you. You really looked like one of those cheaply thrilled individuals who get high over spending ridiculous amounts of money on tiny, garishly glossy photographs. The cheesy smile on your face, which was pressed so close to me as I looked away from the screen, looked like a knee-jerk happy reaction to another of your cheesy, cheap thrills.

Cut after cut was made till the frozen moment broke away into 8 fragments. Then Mum had to enter the room. And ask me what I was doing. Please, I do not want to go through the trouble of explaining it. I am already annoyed, so fed up over the upcoming test on Monday which has rendered me the only one in my group of friends who is not enjoying their holiday already. Did you walk in on purpose, at that specific time? Or was it just another of your unannounced forays into the study room?

And so I put the scissors down and returned to Chekov. And i placed the cut pieces of you and me back into the pink packet, thinking that, I rather have cut pieces of You and me, than to throw them away.

Somehow, I feel so much better, to see You and Me, cut.