Before the Final Semester

hi all, i apologize for not blogging regularly. i foresee more irregular updates these few months because the final semester at NUS had started! :( projects, tests, deadlines, FYP. i'm about to collapse though it's only the first week of school. looking forward to graduation and graduation trips! :D

so before the last semester started, the pharmacy clique decided to meet up one last time for dinner before all hell breaks loose. we decided to meet in town, but since it was raining rather heavily by the time we reached, our plans changed and we decided to dine at Pique Nique as it was sheltered all the way from Orchard MRT station.

it was my second time there and i decided not to order eggs benedict like i did the previous time and like i always do. so i ordered Pique Nique's Big Breakfast.

2 eggs poached, scrambled, or fried, grilled bacon & pork sausage, grilled tomato, baked beans served with white toast and side salad, with choice of orange juice or coffee.

i had my eggs poached and chose coffee over orange juice. i felt that the price is reasonable; a couple more bucks for a drink as compared to ordering from their drinks menu which i thought is kind of pricey and not worth the price. but oh boy, i regret not sticking to the safe choice of eggs benedict. poached eggs without hollandaise sauce tastes horribly bland to me. and there was even water oozing out together with the yolk which makes the eggs even more bland :(

susan and jielin had Norwegian Benedict. 

2 poached eggs with toasted English muffin, smoked salmon, sour cream, served with side salad.

and i think junhao had Classique Croque Madame.

Classic French style toasted sandwich of home-made white toast bread sandwiched with Mornay cheese sauce and Paris ham served with side salad and fried egg.

and cheryl had the Classic Benedict which i wished i had ordered!

2 Poached eggs with toasted English muffin, steamed ham, hollandaise sauce, served with side salad.

we also ordered Texan Ranch Fries to share! this tastes so much better than that of High Society's. love the sour cream especially.

Pique Nique's fries with ranch dressing and sour cream served on the side.

overall, the food were really nice but rather salty for all of us. being future healthcare professionals, we joked that they were hypertension-inducing. we drank quite a bit of water because of the saltiness. 

the next day was meeting the secondary school bunch for our really late christmas gift exchange. it wasn't as exciting because most of us had already stated what we wanted - gift vouchers! and yay, thank you charmaine, for my capitaland vouchers! this means more shopping! :D the excitement was more for the guys especially when aloysius lugged a huge and soft package. he bought junwei a pillow the previous exchange so none of us, at least for me, wanted this suspicious-looking, highly-likely-a-pillow-again present. and yes, i'm not sure if this is considered lucky or unlucky, junwei got aloysius' present again!

junwei will get aloysius for his angel by default the next time. blanket, bedsheets and a bed set the next few exchanges!

felix got my present, which is one of which he requested, cufflinks! oh my, i had quite a tough time choosing one. what do you all think of it?!

and aloysius got the air purifier that he requested from sherlyn. so cute right! actually to date we are still debating if it's an air purifier or an airfresher.

before that we went for zichar dinner at tampines block 800 something, somewhere near temasek polytechnic. supposed to go i wanna get stuffed initially but aloysius and yanxuan were craving for rice and kang kong. each of us contributed $20 to the pool but the bill for the zichar amounted to only $80 for the eight of us, which is really cheap! and there was even free dessert, wow!

and here's a peek of what we had for dinner:

hot plate tofu and kang kong

 furong egg and fish maw soup

 cereal prawns and calamari. finding the orange sauce weird? it actually tastes similar to mayonaise.

and the complimentary dessert!

pardon the blur pictures, we were really hungry! took quick shots of the dishes because we couldn't wait to dig in. and i must say, this group of us devour the foods really fast.

with the remaining money, we headed to ice cream chef to spend some of the cash. ordered tiramisu and durian, and chayen and iced peach tea. durian was the bomb, the durian taste is really rich! needless to say, durian was the first to be finished and iced peach tea was the last. nonetheless, we gobbled up these two plates at amazing speed as well. 

still, we had some money remaining and this group of us just had to do something instead of sitting around. being extremely spontaneous, and having a tradition of staying out late over the years (not as late in the recent years as age is catching up with all of us), we went for midnight prawning at pasir ris!

and i must say, prawning requires some patience, good eye sight (so that you don't go crossed eye looking at the line) and skill (at least for me, because it took me 8 failed attempts before i successfully pulled out a prawn!). 

our first catch was caught by charmaine, and it was really huge! it clinged onto the net and refused to be put into the basket, and i found it pitiful. actually for every prawn i caught, i felt as though bad karma will befall me :( nonetheless, it's an amazing experience and i felt that i learnt something. thankful for the guys who did the work of putting the bait, setting up the rod and removing the prawns from the hook! :)

and there's junwei with the largest catch of our night, the bored people waiting for the prawns to bite the bait, and our pathetic few catches, 6 prawns, for the two hours. the uncle gave us extra prawns after that probably because we underperformed!

i will never forget how epic all of our reactions were for every prawn caught, particularly yanxuan's catches. she practically flings the prawns out of the pond and they were like "flying" being dangled on the rod. all the girls were taking cover, trying to avoid touching the prawns while the guys were frantically trying to catch hold of the prawns from the swinging rods!

next entry: my birthday! yes i'm 23 already. physically feeling the aging process :( hopefully i'll be able to update soon!

Christmas with Girlfriends

girlfriends decided to have our first ever christmas party at lois' place after having known each other for 6 christmases already. as mentioned in one of the earlier posts, we were playing secret santa and were supposed to get two items from daiso as gifts. shopping for gifts at daiso with mum was really fun since there were so many nonsense that we could buy. at the same time, the probability of getting an useless item is also high. mum encouraged me to get a weird but funny item from daiso, you can try to guess what was it!

and this was our dinner from cold storage that night!

there were sushi, ribs, hawaiian pizza, yami yogurt, alcohol cupcakes baked by jielin (awesome! but no alcohol taste haha!), and powerberry and wheatgrass juice! we tried to be healthy :) the powerberry juice tastes like some cough syrup actually.

we had no christmas tree to put our presents under so angry bird had to be the substitute. but it wasn't tall enough so poor spongebob was squashed underneath to be the base!

made everyone guess who was their secret santa. you have to keep guessing until you get it right before getting your gift. nobody wanted to get yiling's because she claimed that she bought nonsense! and here's us with our gifts!

and there's us tearing away at the wrapper and praying we get something useful!

haha yeah, jac got yiling's! 

and i got jac's. i finished the chips already! :P

yiling got jielin's; declared the most useful gift from daiso!

lois' secret santa is none other than yours truly. and yes, i bought that banana case!

and jielin thought she was lucky not to get yiling's present, till she got lois'... she just couldn't stop spazzing!

the two of them can compete whose bubble shooter can shoot more bubbles!

and this marks the end of a successful girlfriends' christmas party. not forgetting that we had epic rounds of bridge while waiting for jac to knock off and reach lois' place; confused over partners and burning one another's partners!

off to bintan tomorrow, excited much! but i'm feeling very lazy to pack :/

Overdued

woke up this morning to a full body muscle ache, something i haven't felt since my JC days. choked on my coffee this morning and coughing it out was so painful! dragged myself out of bed yesterday morning at 9.15 am to meet yiling for a morning run at the tampines stadium. so determined to make my $125.10 investment in the adipure 360 trainers worth it! having not ran ever since fitness test ended in 2008, that's like four long years, it's not surprising that i didn't even have any stamina to speak of! this run is long overdue. don't ask me how long or far i ran! nonetheless, it's a start, to healthy living and toned body! okay, that's still a long way to go i don't even know how long i'll keep this up.

lingerie buddy, yiling, and i headed to la senza in town since there's a 50% sales going on! it was so hard to resist the temptation of getting more pretty bras especially since there are still plenty in my size. but i did it, keeping in mind that i still have around 10 unworn la senza bras in the cupboard from canada! however, i bought undies though. they were going for 10 for $50 only! so i shared half with yiling :) pretty pretty!

and finally, the long-overdue gathering with the bunch from the summer exchange. have been trying to meet up during the semester but all of us were so caught up with school and our schedules are quite different. not that attendance was good, but at least some of us got to see each other. they searched for a few halal restaurants to dine in and we finally decided on breeks cafe at ngee ann city. prices averages about $15 or $16 and it's definitely worth it for the portion you get. they are really generous with the ingredients as well!

i had sauteed cajun chicken & sausage pasta, and we shared the waffle cheese melts which is awesome!

and since kelvin's birthday is today, we surprised him with a cake last night. it was so impromptu it'd be weird if he wasn't surprised!

the birthday boy with his finger puppet!

roamed the streets of orchard and decided to get our photo taken at the free photobooth! it was just cardboard props but it's surprising that the picture turned out to be good!

the girls headed over to forever 21 at ion thereafter, and it totally reminded us of the time we went crazy at the new york's four storeys forever 21!

us trying to carry off the style. pass or fail?

shopaholics! forever 21 from new york to singapore!

looking forward to our next meetup on christmas! :D