Nongsa Village, Batam (8 - 10 Aug 08)

Photo credits goes to my fren Brenda who's really got a good hand on the camera!

Enjoy the pics!

My Villa by the Beach, I wish....

The Backyard

Inside the Villa

Walking To the Sea

Eating Fruits a Plenty

Breakfast in the Back

Beachy

Guard Post

Kampung Provision Shop and Me savoring iced cold COKE in the sweltering heat

Village Life

Me at my Villa.... I wish!

Me standing at the end of the Jetty, thinking it over

Dinner @ Melt, Mandarin Oriental Hotel (2 Aug 08)

Tonight my family celebrated my belated birthday at the Melt - The World Cafe at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. There was the international spread of italian, thai, indian, japanese, western, bbq grill and outdoors for those who wanna indulge in durians! Oh, then there was the wide spread of deserts that included waffles with ice-cream, nonya kueh kueh, chocolate fondue with marshmellows, fruits, mini cakes, fresh fruits or fruit juices. My ultimate favourite? Its gotta be the bread and butter pudding that was served with vanilla icecream! Here are some pics!

Meimei enjoying her marshymellow

Daniel enjoying every spoon of his chocolate ice-cream

The whole family enjoying durians (except me a non-durian person, lol)

Korean Food and Friday Night Laughs

Had a great time wid some frens on a friday nite after a hard week at work. We had dinner at AWON, a korean bbq-steamboat place located at Excelsior Hotel. It was pretty fun as we joked about practically everything, lol.

The 'restaurant' was pretty rundown, I won't even call it a restaurant as the minute I stepped into it, it had a cafeteria feel to it. Either that or it felt like someone's house kitchen. We were given a private room so that made it feel even more like we were having dinner in someone's house, lol. Also, there were loose wire hanging off the paint-peeling walls with poor ventilation.

The food was not bad at all but not worth the price of $25.80+ even though it was buffet of limited food of marinated beef, chicken, pork and prawns and some other side dishes. It was steamboat style and due to the small surface area of the steamboat cooker, the pace was slow as we had to wait for the meat to cook afterwhich everyone took one thinly sliced meat each while we cook the next set of meat.

Thankfully, the company of people made up for the dining experience as we shared jokes and laughed so hard. Also we had a 30% discount as a fren used her credit card to pay first and so we each had to pay $20. We all left the place smelling like we had worked in a kitchen for ten hours.

Next, we headed to Starbucks for coffee where we had more silly laughs. We went into nonsense discussion about what the Starbucks logo meant. I kept saying the logo is a mermaid but they disagreed so we were all supposed to find out online. lol. Anyway here are some pix taken of last night.

In Good Company

ok...waiting for food to be cooked

Hanging out wid my girlies

Malaccan Fun (17-19 May 2008)

I was in Malacca last weekend to attend the wedding dinner of my second cousin. Thankfully it was a public holiday on the Monday and so we were able to spend two nights at Equatorial with sufficient time to do abit of everything including a hairwash at the Mall just before the wedding dinner, ate dim sum for brunch on the day we left, also spent some time with colleagues who were also there on the same weekend at the same hotel. Here's some pics.

went to this village in Tengkera where they made fresh local kueh kueh. Think you can imagine how excited Mama was when she was there, hehehe

Spent some time at St Paul's Hill, a touristy attraction that makes Malacca so rich in historical value. Since the early 1400s', Malacca saw the occupation of three European countries, namely the Portuguese (known by locals as the white bengalis) for 130years before it was surrendered to the Dutch. The Dutch later gave Malacca to the British to prevent it from falling into France's hands. This is one reason why I'm so in love with Malacca.

Attended morning mass at St Peter's Church. Notice the dutch-inspired tiled flooring that is dated from 1710.

dance dance on !

muahaha.... me and sulyn met up Friday night for dinner at Raffles City and decided to head to NAB (new asia bar) for drinks being the start of the weekend. Having not enough fun there (as the music was kinda switchy), we headed to Attica for some good music and danced the nite away!

We had fun!

Hong Kong 28-31 March 08

I did it again. Yet another impromptu travel decision and this time to Hong Kong!

FOOD

The food was fantastic (dim sum, meals at the cha chan tings, etc). I also tried the mango dessert they had at Mongkok, apparently its known to be quite popular wid both locals and tourists. Must eat at their tea houses, equivalent to our coffeeshops but smaller scale. Foodwise is good but not necessarily cheap. My bowl of wanton noodles was at Hk$28 (S$5) and it didn't come with char siew, only meat dumplings.Anyway my last meal in HK was at the airport where I ate at the foodcourt from a stall called Shanghai Lao Lao. I ordered a bowl of beef noodles, 3pcs pan-fried pork dumplings and 3pcs steam shrimp dumplings. The lady who took my order must have thought I hadn't eaten for days cos I ordered so much for one. The food was yummy!

TRANSPORT

Alot of walking though but it was all good. I'm impressed with the public transport there. I had the oppt to try out the MTR Train (HK$5-HK$8.50), Ferry (HK$2.20) and public light 16-seater bus(HK$5.50). My fav mode of transport? The ferry. The ride there was just kinda theraputic and had calming effect wid the gentle sea breeze blowing, it was soothing.

On the Ferry

On the MTR

Things to do or places to go would be:

MongKok - Bcos of its name, it kinda makes me think of Bangkok (even tho i've never been there! hehehe) Ladies market with tons of bags, shoes, clothes, belts and other stuff to make you go wahh... Then down the other street, there's a wide range of electronic goods.

Lan Kwai Fong / SoHo/ Mid-Levels - Its really more of the sights here than anything else. The lil shops lined up the hilly roads and alleys, things here aint cheap, its more of boutique shops and bars, pretty much an angmohs hangout

Central - This is a MUST GO station to get off and walk around. For one, you need to exit from this station if you wanna go to the mid-levels, SoHo and LKF. Secondly, they had a store called H&M there and the clothes are very much like topshop and dorothy perkins but at a way lower price. I found my perfect workpants there and tons of other clothes.

Causeway Bay - I wasn't overly excited abt this place where they had the Times Square Mall cos its very upmarket and carry brands like Prada, Gucci, Lane Crawford, Marc Jacob, etc. Like helloooo. Of cos they also had some other smaller shops but i just wasn't into this place but its just one of those places you gotta go so that you can tell people you've been there, hahah. lol

Will I go back to HONG KONG again? Hell yeah! =)

Dinner @ NY,NY

Had dinner tonight with some frens of mine. We had a good time catching up and making fun of each other. haha. miss times like these.