flying solo

sleepless in beijing
on this second trip to china in 2 weeks,
i was hit by insomnia.
it was a trip marked by tossing and turning in bed,
channel-surfing and lousy telly programs,
swimming in the icy hotel pool,
and exploring the city alone.

i set off early in the day and just missed the peak hour jam.
armed with a "please take me to..." card given by the conceirge,
i hopped into a cab and made my way to the forbidden city.
after shelling out RMB60 for admission, and RMB10 for an english map,
i entered through the gate of spiritual valor
(shenwumen aka the north gate/backside of the city)
and trooped down the "middle route"
that brought me past different halls and palaces of
heavenly peace, tranquility, purity, and harmony.

flying solo

bronze lions, grand architecture, tourist-filled gardens,
musky halls, sprawling grounds and some construction sites later,
i emerged unscathed (but for a slight sunburn)
through the meridian gate (wumen aka the main entrance).

i learnt that many chinese cannot take good photos,
and that even more are rather unfriendly.

walking on, i took a snapshot with chairman mao,
gazed at a very sunny tiananmen square from across the road,
and padded down a tree-lined street to my next destination:
quan ju de peking duck restaurant!!!!!!

quan ju de & counting down to the beijing olympics @ the museum

compared to da dong restaurant (went there on my first beijing trip),
quan ju de's duck's more tender, fatter and much yummier.
da dong's grander though, with proper queues and cheongsum-clad waitresses,
while quan ju de had hollering dian xiao ers and a rather fastfood feel.
i shared a table with a pair of chinese parents and their brat of a son,
and enjoyed a leisurely lunch before heading back to the hotel.

it's quite fun traveling solo
and i foresee having to do it quite often
seeing that every other crew seem to have been to each place a million times before
and all they want to do is sleep in their hotel rooms. hrmph.
i am a tourist hear me roar!

sillybilly @ mint

there's something about china that hasn't failed to make me ill. i had a fever the last time i went to beijing, and this trip to shanghai saw me coming down with a bad flu and a hacking cough. *blows nose violently*

it's a good thing my hotel was great. a nice clean chinesey room with a big comfy bed and all the amenities one would need. i walked into the bathroom and was greeted by two rubber duckies with "take me home" tags round their necks.

duckies

they're sitting in my luggage right now. very cute.

shanghai itself was terribly hot and hazy - the dirty air certainly didn't do my throat any good. the people in the streets (and there were MILLIONS of them!) picked their noses in the open, and spat on every surface in sight. they spoke so loudly and sharply that they sounded like they're quarelling even when they weren't. and when they were, ear plugs wouldn't have kept their voices from hurting your ears.

shanghai

i managed to convince 3 of the other crew to join me in exploring qi pu lu, which is like the lousier version of beijing's xiu shui. didn't buy much other than a necklace and a flower-pin. the clothes they sold were....weird...

was feeling all grimy by the time we went back to the hotel after a quick dinner. took a good shower and a nap before heading out again, this time to meet *drum roll* TINY!!! haha he happened to be in shanghai, so i had someone to hang out with, and and laugh at (whenever he attempted to speak mandarin) haha. we checked out a very empty vault bar at the bund where he had to finish my lychee martini for me, then went to mint (apparently THE place to be on a wednesday night).

sillybilly @ mint

mint was so full of expats that it didn't feel like shanghai at all. the asians there weren't hot, and the music kinda sucked, but everyone else seemed smashed and happy and it was good getting a glimpse of the shanghai nightlife - certainly wouldn't have had the chance to do so if tiny wasn't there! =P

think i would have enjoyed shanghai a whole lot more if i was feeling better, and if i had more time and not have to be back at the hotel to catch a 2-hour rest before flight. but ah well. off to beijing again next week, with hope, i won't still be ill then!

the parents just bought us a new apartment. what with all this en bloc-ing going on at my current place, the folks have been running around trying to get us a new home. and finally, finally, after looking at what must have been a million places, and falling in like with a handful of (totally overpriced) properties, we've found THE one.

it was love at first sight for my mum - the place isn't too big (which will take some getting used to), and we'll be right next to the PIE (which kinda sucks coz it'll be noisy but we're high up and at night, the lights are pretty, and if anyone needs to know if the PIE is jammed up, i'm just a phonecall away)...but there's a great use of space and the rooms are larger than the matchboxes most of the other new condos pass off as rooms, and it's in kembangan (so i'm still an eastie), and the name doesn't sound dumb, and we've got a great view from the non-PIE side, and it's brand spanking new and we're on the topmost floor and i get to pick out new furniture and and... ... ... i'm excited, can you tell?
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i had a 2-hour traditional balinese massage last night when i stayed over in denpasar. the lady came to my room (nothing seedy) and it only cost me USD15, plus some rupiah for tips!
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toe nails are such annoying things. they grow a little and i just can't wait to cut them short. but then they won't look good short and painted. and they are disgusting dirt collectors with an affinity for the black stuff from the insides of covered, black-insided shoes.
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crazy msn chats, 3 in a window and doodoodoods aplenty. i love my gracie and my minmin (so much so that i missed CSI for you girls)!
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touching down and rushing home for a shower before running out to meet you for an yipee dipee afternoon out - i can't stop smiling.

i love happy sundays and i hope this feeling stays forever =)

new asia bar

one year after our last red outing at new asia bar, parts of the gang returned for yet another national day celebration on the 71st floor. the planes, the fireworks, the aerial view of the tiny, faraway stadium...and the red-and-whites (except for gracie who's the birthday girl and so is allowed to be deviant)...

new asia bar

four of us went downstairs after the (not very impressive) fireworks display, and had a yummy rationed meal at kuriya coz gracie wanted to prepare us for war. hungry monsters though sometimes value quantity over quality, so we adjourned to ya kun for more food - kaya and sugar toasts, half-boiled eggs...*munch munch munch*

kuri-ya-kun

from there, minmin drove us to zouk, where we were early birds at members and had the whole place to ourselves. clever loon managed to get us a cake (thanks iannie for trying too, sorry i gave you wrong info), and the whole lot of us gathered to sing gracie a happy birthday tune. it all went alcoholic after that and even i drank a couple of shots and a lychee martini and a few sips of this and that. thankfully, i managed to stay sober (*phew*) and gracie got birthday drunk in the most ladylike manner.

zouk

happy birthday hon!

ayasofya and sultanahmet mosques

so my first solo turned out to be much more enjoyable than i'd thought it'd be. most of my fears were banished when i saw how the rest of the crew were so friendly and fun-loving, and they were terribly patient with me and guided me along throughout the 6 sectors. of course, it helped heaps that my batchgirl - the lovely sharon - was on this trip with me. it was a journey filled with singing cheery tunes, playing silly pranks, eating way too much chicken tikka and briyani and playing foosball in the lounge - a perfect recipe for a memorable first solo indeed!

our first day in dubai saw us baking under the cloudless blue sky. sharon and i ventured out of the hotel but only managed to make it to the supermarket down the road - the only thing that was open on a friday afternoon - before we retreated back into our rooms to feast on a lunch of tuna and crackers while watching movies and mtvs on cable. i got so bored i was pacing around my room like a caged animal, jumping on the big bed and tearing my hair out until i finally decided to go for an evening swim (after slapping on a whole bucket of sunscreen).

istanbul the next day was much better. it wasn't as hot as it had been in dubai, and everything was open for us to visit. sharon, first officer nicholas and i (all first-timers in istanbul) walked and walked and walked till our feet were sore, and covered much more ground than necessary to get us from place to place (coz everyone seemed to point us to a different direction and the maps were really useless). it was a good thing that the roads were all kinda interlinked so we did eventually see what we'd set out to see, but we definitely did go in circles.

our first stop was the ayasofya mosque, where we took in a bit of istanbul's colorful history and saw this church that has been turned into a mosque. with muslim inscriptions added on the walls, (rather ugly) drawings painted over angels, and arms of crosses removed to turn them into lines, attempts have been made to muslimize this church, but its christian roots still came through in various mosaics of jesus and mary.

ayasofya and sultanahmet mosques.

we walked over to the sultanahmet after that. also known as the blue mosque because of the many blue tiles used in the building of the interior, the sultanahmet didn't appear to be very blue to me, so i left feeling kinda blue. arhaha. jokes aside, the sultanahmet is a working mosque with a large, cool interior with segregated male and female praying areas. we had to take off our footwear before entering, and women with bared arms had to wrap themselves with a large scarf before they could go in.

we took a long walk down and up the pebbled streets of istanbul thereafter, and ended up at the grand bazaar after stopping by a small street stall for some turkish kebabs. the grand bazaar is like a larger, corridored version of melbourne's victoria market and housed thousands of stalls selling everything from jewellry to apple tea, lamps to pashmina, leather jackets to fake LV bags, turkish delights to magnets. it was HUGE and everywhere we went, it was as if the merchants were playing a "guess where they come from" game: "konichiwa!", "ni hao!", "you from singapore?", and even a "united states of america?". we tasted some turkish delight and apple tea at one of the stalls manned by a bunch of very cheeky and friendly men, and came away a fair bit poorer but happy with our buys.

we spent ages at the grand bazaar and after a while, every stall looked the same and every corridor we walked down resembled the previous one. leaving the grand bazaar, we walked even more and found the spice market (though we didn't see many spices) and discovered another, busier part of istanbul that we don't know the name of. this area seemed like where the locals do their buying and selling, with shops all lined up selling everything one would need, and it was so crowded that we thought we'd been transported to india.

the grand bazaar and the yerebatan sarnici.

the yerebatan sarnici, or the basilica cistern, is an underground cistern built in the 6th century by the romans who were famous for their aqueducts. the cavernous cistern covers a total area of 9800 square metres and there are 336 marble columns holding everything up. the main attraction in the cistern are two medusa heads that have been carved into two of the columns. one of the heads is upside down, while the other's lying down like it's gone to bed.

we could walk no further after the whole afternoon of exploring, so we settled in a little restaurant near the cistern, for some good old turkish mixed grill, turkish pizza, turkish beer, turkish apple tea and turkish raki! raki is brandy flavoured with anise and sipped by the turks during meals, and contains a potent 45% alcohol. it tastes quite licorice-ish and needless to say, i didn't enjoy my sip much. bleah. the staff at omar were great though - they played pranks on us like the one on me where they told me that the restaurant didn't have a restroom and gave me directions to walk to one outside, complete with the restaurant's namecard for discounted entry and a coin for payment (the loo's actually on the 3rd floor); chatted with us, made us laugh when one of them whipped out a hand-held vacuum cleaner to clean the table after our meal, folded serviette tulips for us, gave us free drinks, and generally made us feel very at home.

dinner at omar restaurant.

in the end, the manager even gave us a lift back to our hotel! this is one country that doesn't need a smiles campaign to make good ambassadors out of her people.

back in dubai the following day, sharon and i managed to make our way to the city centre shopping mall that houses shops like mango, topshop and zara (being renovated though). window shopped and rack-browsed but didn't buy anything except for the least-ugly magnet they had to offer as a momento.

dubai byebye.

it might have been the heat, but dubai turned out to be terribly boring. hopefully the next time i go there, it won't be so hot and i'll be able to go to the desert for some sand boarding and for a camel ride!

*and yes, i've got photoshop!!! all thanks to my laling minmin - i lub chew deep deep!!!!!!!

hard at work

sharing a simple night...

chatter and laughter,
hard work and some fun;
shoebag tussles and childish chases,
top secret documents and a frivolous magazine.

quiet, playful, sweet.

shhhhhh...

she bought the entire mustafa

gracie and i decided to head over to little india on tuesday night, to get stuff for her kids' poetry recitation competition and also for some indian food. we hopped on bus 65 from my place and rocked our way to serangoon:

gracie-on-the-bus: "why is it taking so looooong?!?"

our first stop was a restaurant on norris road, where we ordered enough food to feed a family of 4 and were entertained by bollywood mtvs:

sumptious dinner at little india

ate so much we could hardly move. but we eventually made it to mustafa:

she bought the entire mustafa

i practised lots of self-control and only ended up with one bag of goodies. and did you know that mustafa has a water-jet full-body massage machine that you can try out for the lowlow price of $10 for 10minutes, fully clothed and won't get wet? (no guarantee that you'll ever smell the same after that though) heh