Turkey/Tunisia

I'm off to tunisia tomorrow, where i'll be for the next couple of days until 11th septish. Will post pics and stuff if i can, should be a few elephants i can plug my laptop in to get internet.

moo.

tata (box), folks.

Published

So this is what i've been busy with over the past week ++++,

citylights chicago just got written about in TODAY. Which is really quite damn cool if you think about it. At any rate, the article is available here. The website is coming up too, and it's all very exciting.



In other news, Jem's parents are the most amazing foodies i've ever met, and the other day we were talking about these makansutra food tours where you pay money, hop on a tour bus, and travel all the way up west malaysia, stopping at particular sites for good food. Now i've heard of pilgrimages, but this takes the cake, specifically the cake at Batu Pahat lorong 4. What a strange fixation we Singaporeans have on food!

But so i've decided, hey, i can do that too. So for a small sum of money, we now have: Patch's Tanjong Pagar/Raffles Place Food Tours! it brings the whole concept of the suntec duck tours to a whole new level.

Schadenfreude

Okay this is really mean and i feel quite bad for the poor fellow who was probably super paiseh, but i was outside mandarin, where there's usually like yellow spiders and exiges parked in the driveway. Well today Mr. Lotus Exige was having a rather bad day. The poor chap ran out of fuel. and did so about 10m from the porch of the Mandarin, i.e. right next to the taka/mandarin road crossing, i.e. in full view of all the people walking on orchard road (which of course included me) (and my camera, but that goes without saying.)

So he got out to push.



poor dude. but he couldn't really move it (fat old ladies, these sports cars), so he called for help (F1 car mah).



And the Mandarin doormen and bellhop came along to help, and they pushed it to a side and kinda left it there and the guy went away. I went to taka and looked around and didn't buy anything but that's another story and I came back and I saw the yellow speeddemon at the side of the road with its hazard lights flashing, and lo and behold, my walking timing was perfect once again, and the guy came back to his car with a can of petrol, which he proceeded to fill up his tank with. Feeling insanely guilty about my intention of publicising his unfortunate situation, i took a photo.



He looks awfully young and casually dressed for the car. Oh well. I guess cool funky jackets just don't cut it in Singapore anyway.

bye rishi. =(

I take back what i said in the previous post.

Solitaire

So people are already starting to fly off, and by now, i'm kinda used to the whole coming and going of friends. It's been 3 years since people started disappearing for months at a time. It's reached the stage where i no longer really feel anything when people fly away, except "oh, well, i'll see them eventually in a couple of months or a year or so". Except one year is a bloody long time, isn't it?! Maybe i'm growing less attached to my friends, or that i just feel that having to actually see them is not as important as before. hmmm.

but then again, i'm still doing the rounds. It's interesting to see how much (or how little) people have changed in the time, and sometimes it takes a long period of absence to accentuate some differences. So i guess i'm just getting used to friends going away. What a strange social circle when people jet all over so often that it becomes an almost non-event!

Charlie and the tim tam slam

it's been a while since i blogged. Been first too busy with Absolute, then too busy with having fun. =)

At any rate now i'm at work blogging this because i've finished all my work (except the post-internship report and a viability survey on some online training material). And so i blog a long backdated post. Let's do this quickly and efficiently now.

First item on the agenda: Charlie and the Chocolate factory.

Esoteric and insanely twisted. The sets were really cool (I loved the house) and the colors were kinda all in muted psychedelic tones. Reasonably faithful reproduction of the story and special effects used to great ...er, effect, and it was quite *gape* omg so cool kinda show. Hilarious, if you suspend disbelief like all other tim burton shows. and suspent morals like all other roald dahl stories. I think those two are just made for each other. Johnny Depp was schizo and does all these vacant haunted expressions really well. Without giving too much of the plot away, you should really watch it just for the squirrels. mm.


Second item on the agenda:
Wireless speed-enhancing spray
'nuff said.

Third item on the agenda, and by far the most important:

Tim Tam Slam.

Tim Tam:


Tim Tam Slam:


Must try. Method: Take 1 tim tam (surely you've heard of them), bite off small bits of two opposing corners, enough to expose the middle layer. Place one end in warm/semi-hot drink (milo!), the other in your mouth, and suck. When the milo finishes travelling the length of the tim tam and you start tasting it, pop the whole thing in your mouth -quickly- before it loses structural integrity.

WHEREUPON. It begins.

The tim tam in your mouth will start to melt and ooze due to the hot liquid, and because it melts from the inside out, once the outer layer loses its rigidity the whole lot of molten chocolate will explode and flow around your tongue. Damn awesome. It's like swallowing a fondue time bomb. At a time when you're already high from snorting all those bits of choc cookie crumbs.

Grand lux molten choc cake? ha. now you can have one for the fraction of the price, and more precisely what you want, too, the molten chocolate, in your mouth, minus the mess.

drinking choc fondue? Ha, doesn't cut it, it's liquid all the way. It's the transitory period which is where it all counts, that twilight zone between hard bitey chocolate and ooooozing flowy liquid goodness.


These ozzies were freaking geniuses when they invented the tim tam slam.

Raw thoughts

Went for the med-fac play last night ("A Good History") which was particularly aimed (smart tactical move) at a nostalgic storyline of a class reunion 10 years after a bunch of doctors graduated. Particularly ingenious, and of course everyone could identify, and i saw people there who i haven't met in half a decade. OF course there wasn't particularly much to talk to them about because i wasn't really close to them (or why would i not see them in half a decade?) and it made me feel the close-knit-ness of the medicine community. Kinda like the Singaporean family at UofC, except, well, everyone's Singaporean! Almost, anyway. Good Job Chen Seong on writing and directing the whole show.

It also made me raise hopes for our own musical, beauty world. The medicine play took 8 months and S$45k. Looks like ours will be similar. Fun and exhilarating? Yes, and i wish i was part of it.

Raw theories:
1. The older you get, the higher the proportion of time you spend talking about the past (as opposed to the present and the future)
2. The only reason you sometimes feel your parents are nagging and saying things which are particularly obvious, is because they've been telling you these things for so long that they BECOME obvious, and if not for them you might have a completely different mindset altogether.