attended mass at risen christ today, just for the sake of taking smrt train at the newly opened circle line :p the stations indeed smelt so very new.. *sniff sniff* now I only need 20 mins to get to ang mo kio!

had zhi char for dinner today at devon's place. we ordered stir fried french beans, prawn rolls, curry fish head, fried toufu with minced meat, and mee goreng. the yummy gathering was then followed by boardgames session at friends' place. this was in a way a follow-up from last weekend's session where we had our citadels game abruptly interrupted by a movie screening. today's game session was more satisfying, we played citadels and stone age till almost midnight :)

finally changed my blog template, after struggling with culture shock in my brand new imac, the 'funny' navigation and command keys, the super bright super big screen, the demise of geocities, the absence of windows live writer, the absence of basic imaging software - finally had to be contented with gimp.


*wipe sweat*

go..
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GO!!

went to distant worlds: music from final fantasy at esplanade concert hall this evening. I'm no fan of final fantasy, neither have I played any one of the series. but I found the concert enjoyable nonetheless, with the famous composer nobuo uematsu present in the hall. he even went up to the stage and gamely accepted the conductor's request to join the choral in one of the songs :) the choir was good, but the soloists were not that impressive, sometimes the voices were drown by the powerful choir and orchestra.

tried the stock pot afterwards. we had chicken miso soup and mushroom ragout soup, accompanied by bacon and cheese sandwiches and ice tea. each bowl of soup came with bun. the soup was quite good, but a little small for the price. taste-wise, I still prefer the soup spoon.

managed to shield myself from all kinds of american idol spoiler today.. I avoided reading the news, browsing through portals and of course facebook =)

not only my personal notebook, my blog threw tantrums too. there's something wrong with template page in blogspot site. the HTML wasn't properly loaded, resulting in gibberish strings printed when trying to open my blog. couldn't fix it either as the IE always hang at the template page.

thank God for firefox, I managed to change the template. but I couldn't restore the most recent green template.. this greyish one is the most recent I could locate in my backup files. but it's ok, at least it's working for now.

managed to catch angels & demons today in vivocity, amidst the ad-hoc meeting requests by the project manager. had to rush back to office after the movie, though.

the movie itself was good, although I couldn't help myself to compare it with the book every step of the way. I just finished reading it for the second time early this month, therefore it's still fresh in my mind how the story unfolded in the book. certain parts were removed in the movie, obviously to keep it short, and a few was added. some others were told differently. all in all it's an entertaining one.

planned to go for mass in the morning, but cancelled it once I opened my eyes and realized it's raining buckets out there.

ended up rushing to meet a friend at nearby mall who's so kind to travel all the way to sengkang to pass me a packet of rosella tea and a wedding souvenir. had a nice, relaxing lunch at ajisen ramen.

went for the earliest evening mass that we could find at SPP. visited friends' house afterwards at aljunied area. had dinner at nearby coffee shop - it's famous for its claypot rice but too bad it was closed. but we shared a plate of bbq chicken wings.. superb!

next and final stop was a durian stall at geylang. sweet, yummy d24 durians..

spent my saturday morning working from home. thank God for vpn access, it's still better than having to come to office. the past week has been quite a blur as we're busy spotting errors and issues in the application, meetings and discussions with vendors, colleagues, bosses and bosses' bosses..

but lunch time has been quite fun as we're exploring neighbouring offices and buildings, different foodcourt and different food every day.

my personal notebook has been made redundant for weeks now, and I don't even bother to fix it or purchase a new one.. maybe later.

went out to watch star trek this afternoon with a few friends. a welcome break, although it's not my favourite. during the movie I kept wondering when it'd end.. haha.. it was then followed by dinner at lucky plaza's ayam penyet ria, as we couldn't think of other alternatives. I didn't know earlier that they open another branch at 1st level.. all along I thought there's only one branch in level 3 or 4..

my first attempt in making shepherd's pie.

a friend said it's a cruel food. the shepherd goes out guiding his sheep just to slaughter them afterwards to make the pie. it doesn't apply to me though, as I'm using beef :p

spent our long labour-day weekend at Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. We took Tiger Airways flight from budget terminal on Friday morning, and returned to Singapore with Air Asia on Sunday evening. the flight timing was just nice, not too early and not too late either. it took 2 hours and 15 minutes to fly between Singapore and KK. That was our second time taking Tiger Airways and Air Asia, and we have no complaints.

Kota Kinabalu or formerly known as Jesselton, has several popular tourist destinations beside the city itself - the mountain, the beach, and the rainforest. As we're not mountain person, and we felt like seeing enough of rainforest lately, this time round we aimed only for the beach - Tunku Abdul Rahman National Park, which lies offshore of Sabah.

This national park has an area of 49 sq km, consists of sea and 5 islands: pulau gaya, manukan, mamutik, sapi and sulug. on our second day there we were picked up by divedownbelow staff at our hotel lobby, and we proceeded to Jesselton point ferry terminal for boat transfer to pulau gaya. the boat ride took 10 minutes. it was a really bumpy ride, as the waves were persistently coming towards our boats, jerking it up and down, up and down. the weather was not that friendly too, it was drizzling.


we arrived at pulau gaya, went through briefings, settled the registration and payment. and it's time to go snorkeling!

snorkeling is not as hard as I've imagined. but it's not that easy either. since it was our first time, we didn't find it relaxing at all as we're still adjusting to the concept of breathing through our mouths and wearing the equipments (paddle, goggle with an attached tube for sucking air).

although it was called a fully guided snorkel safari, the so called guide wasn't of much help. he didn't handle real beginners really well. he just zoomed off real fast to the deeper water, not much instructions were given.

it was quite cool, though. we saw school of fishes, corals and many more.

a simple lunch was served at the beach hut. then we're off for another exciting activity - parasailing!

it was quite different from the one we did in bali last january. the parasailing started in the middle of the sea, on top of the boat. the staff tied us to the parachute and released the ropes. and up we went. it was more fun as we did it together - the parachute can accomodate 2 people. and we could also choose if we'd like to be dipped into the ocean - the wet way or the dry way. we opted for the dry way as I didn't wear my swim wear anymore that time. going back to the boat was quite scary, we're not sure if we'd be landed exactly on the spot, somemore the propeller at the back of the boat was running noisily. but we landed perfectly fine. the staff offered to take our photos too.. :)

we're back to jesselton point at about 4.30pm. walked back to our hotel smelt like sun and sea. needed a shower really bad. but not before we stopped by at some street vendor along the way. at first I was eyeing for the fried you tiao that was sliced in half and smeared with peanut butter. but once I laid my eyes on martabak asin.. final decision was made. it was a long long time since I last ate martabak asin. tasty!

dinner was at toscani's at the waterfront, overlooking the sea with sunset view. once the sun's gone, they promptly lighted up some candles and put one on each table.


talking about food, we managed to try out the famous seafood at ocean seafood village. it was a challenge to eat seafood for 2 person as there's a limit on how little you can get for one dish, and thus the limited number of dishes. we ordered butter prawns, sweet & sour garoupa fish and stir fried sabah veggie. our favourite was the veggie, hahaha.. it's really nice.


to me, kota kinabalu is a nice, laid-back city with friendly people. it's generally safe and most people speak considerably good english, although they had no problem understanding our indonesian. the city has a lot of shopping malls and plazas, considering their population. and new malls are being built, too. on top of that, there are also handicraft market, night markets and sunday morning market that opens every sunday morning. the sunday market was quite impressive, almost everything can be found there - from clothes, handbags, souvenirs and accessories, to household items, food, plants and pets. my only problem was the heat - it was super super hot!


for transport we relied mostly on foot and sometimes, cabs. foot because the city area was small enough and our hotel had quite a strategic location. the taxis, however, do not run on metre. there seems to be a well-known concensus for the price, like RM20 for trip betwen airport and city centre. we took the city bus once, from church to the city centre, as it was so hot then and there was no taxi in sight.

we also visited atkinson clock tower, kopitiam museum at australia place, segama waterfront and the sacred heart cathedral for sunday mass.