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Had I not lunched with my cool friend next door, I would have missed a great opportunity to attend to a pretty high level meeting. I don’t normally blog about work at all but this one is a more inspiring one for me at the personal level.
I will save the story of our lunch for later. Upon returned to office at 1pm (pretty rare for me as I usually take a more leisure approach if you know what I mean), my partner dragged me into a meeting that I had no idea what it was about. Before I knew it, I was driven in her S-class Mercedes to HP and met the top guns from HP as well as a 3-Star General (and a 1-Star too). In my course of work, I have not met anyone beyond 1-Star so it was a big deal to me. The Managing Director of HP as well as the Asia Pacific Japan MD are both ladies. They are both very charismatic and articulated, especially the APJ MD. Just listening to them sharing their experiences made the trip worthwhile.

Then we traveled to SingTel and met the CEO and his team. A totally different feel and it was very business like. And the top floor of SingTel’s Comcenter has a great view of Singapore.

Now, back to my lunch with this cool friend JD (his picture below). I met him during the training at British Council. JD is a Vietnamese who works in Singapore for a couple of years and he took me to this wonderful Vietnamese restaurant just behind Boat Quay.

I let him made the order and the food was delicious. We had two starters and the main course was a dry beef noodle with soup that has a raw egg! He scoped the egg up and took it down in one gulp. I was like … oh wow … you do that?! And I followed suit.

And to round up to story, I can’t help but to post the picture I have taken on the way to lunch.

A day of ups and downs …

An old friend of mine called me up for lunch and he brought another old friend of ours. They have decided to dine at New York New York and there we were, seated around a small table not unlike the movie setting of the three MoD (Mob of Death) in “Thank You for Smoking”. Except that I am now no longer in their industry anymore. And throughout the meal, the topics were all about what money can buy and how much more money they want. I guess moving into the non-profit industry does open up my horizon in a sense that there is a bigger picture out there whereby people are not only motivated by money such as national defense and nation building just to name a few. One down.

New York New York took over Nooch (that took over half of HMV at Citylink) and I thought the Western food concept must have worked better than Asian noodle. There seems to be quite a crowd. To cut a long story short (so that you can skip to the next paragraph), I will not go back there again. The service was bad as most of the servers cannot speak English (I joked that this is not Beijing Beijing). The servicing is slow (from food to bill). And the burger was the worst burger I have ever eaten in my life. The meat was soggy and tasted nowhere near to beef. The bread was soaked in butter. Just bad. One down.

Round the corner, I visited HMV, my favorite music store in town. Found Iron Maiden’s new CD and I was overjoyed. I listened to the first song and I fell in love with it. Then I walked around and found Tata Young’s new CD (she is from Thailand). I looked at the front cover and I was really tempted to take one home. THOSE LEGS! (see picture below) I did some serious sampling and concluded that if I was to buy that CD, it would have been for the cover. Some songs are nice. Most of them are pretty bad. So I just grabbed the Iron Maiden CD. One up.

Have you ever been inside a meeting room full of executives and you think to yourself, hmmm, perhaps this meeting could have been done in 10 minutes and why do we all have to sit for hours? One down.

Tuesday is usually the day when Cynthia, TK, and myself get together for a movie and a nice dinner. TK was not free so Cynthia decided to dine at Rice Table and do some shopping at Orchard. To those who are new to Rice Table, they serve Indonesian food in a sampling style. Upon arrival, they will bring along 14 dishes with rice and soup. We used to love the place. It is still hard to get a seat inside as booking is always required. Today we tried the food and the standard has gone down. I don’t think I will go back there again. One down.

I am impressed that Cynthia, who are not into high end cosmetic products, actually know more about SK-II than me. Okay. I confess. The only thing I know about SK-II is that it is an expensive but popular skincare brand. She told me that SK-II has Miracle Water. “Miracle Water? Ya right!” was my reply. And behold … one moment I was teasing Cynthia about Miracle Water, another moment, a rather decent looking beautician – fair skin with big eyes – was pouring Miracle Water onto Cynthia’s hand. I saw no miracle but I was too mesmerized by the ritual that I have totally forgotten that. While Cynthia has gotten herself some SK-II stuffs, I did some window shopping myself and decided on getting either Polo’s Black, Armani’s Code, or Dior’s High Energy, or all of the above the next time I transit Changi Airport (which is very soon). For such a happy shopping experience, one up.

Cynthia asked me if I wish to join one of her colleague’s farewell dinner. This guy is a cool dude so I gladly said yes. And there I was, dining with one of the International consulting firms. Gosh, how I missed that sort of environment compares to where I am now – more of a local setting. All the beautiful people with interesting stories. Too bad, my phone ran out of battery. Otherwise I would have taken some cool pictures as testimony. Let me recall … we have the front desk receptionist (*cough*), a Chinese lady from the US office (oh how I love those LA stories), a friendly India lady, a Chinese guy who grew up in Holland and we clicked immediately when it comes to music, a dude who plays violin, Cynthia’s boss (hmmm), and the dude who is leaving the firm and becoming a brand strategy consultant. A brand strategy consultant? What’s that?

All in all, a lovely evening. Cynthia paid for my share and I had 2 pints of beer with all these beautiful and interesting people from around the world. What more could I ask for?

Since I was going to have a jamming session at my home, it was unsightly for my guests to see the stacks of magazines, piles and piles of CD, opened and unopened letters, and miscellaneous junks on the coffee table, on the sofa, on the dinning table, and on the floor. All the possible places where I could hide all my junks were all full. I even have boxes of junks outside and inside my home.
I was pretty ambitious on Tuesday night wanting to spring clean all my cabinets from toilet, to bedrooms, to living room, to kitchen, and to storeroom. In the end, Cynthia and I only managed to clear one side of the wardrobe in our common bedroom (there were no clothes inside) and the TV cabinets. We ferried the junks from our home to the trash container downstairs and with multiple trips, we managed to nearly fill up the entire container. I mean, the container is not small at all. It is amazing how much junks we collect over the years. On the bright side, we have uncovered money notes of various nationalities including 100 American dollar bills!

More to come I guess.

I don’t remember buying roasted meat in my life for the dinner that I cook. Well, when I was back in Hong Kong, my mother used to ask me to go downstairs and get some roasted meat but I never cook anything back in Hong Kong. Last week, ran out of idea what to cook, I wanted to try something new. I thought of duck, I thought of porridge. So duck porridge it shall be.
Since I have not bought any roasted meat in Singapore before, I really did not know how much it cost. I always thought that it is expensive. Perhaps S$40 to S$60 per whole duck. Although the roasted meat seller and I conversed in different dialects, I gathered that half a duck only cost … S$11.20! I have no idea if it is a reasonable price but S$11.20 sounds … cheaper than what I thought!

Then I was thinking, perhaps I shall use duck neck to cook with the porridge and not to waste all those seemed to be tasty duck meat. I asked how much the duck neck cost and in a different dialect, the seller answered S$0.50 per piece. Ouch! That sounded expensive!

The seller asked me how many pieces of duck neck do I want (in dialect) and I answered, “Erm … how many do I need (bear in mind that each piece is S$0.50) for making duck porridge?” He frowned and hesitated and just when I was about to answer “four please (that will be S$2)”, the seller held out 2 whole pieces of duck neck (that came with heads) and said, “That’s all I have and probably not enough for duck porridge.” I was like, “Erm … that looks good. I will take both please”. S$0.50 for a whole piece of duck neck with head? That is just so … reasonable!

The roasted duck meat was really good, probably one of the best I have tasted in Singapore. The stall resides in one of the HDB blocks off Boundary Road. I guess they use quite a fair bit of red dye though because my porridge looked a bit … erm … reddish.