This week I’ve started evening Mandarin classes and I feel quite lost. I signed up for Level 2 because when I took the evaluation test, I scored enough to be in Level 2… but the students in the class seem to be much more advanced than me… it’s going to be tough but all I can say is that I’ll do my best. I have class Monday and Wednesday evenings for 2 1/2 hours so we’ll see how long I can last with working and taking classes.

Today I got to meet up with Joyce and we had dinner together at Holland V at Thai Express. It’s the first time we’d been there and the food was either really good or we were really hungry. We ordered pad thai and green curry. I liked the green curry because it was spicy but still a bit sweet. But I think my favorite part of the meal was my avocado shake, I love the creamy texture of the shake and the flavor of the avocado. It’s pretty hard to find avocados here and if you do find them, they’re quite expensive.

Since Joyce has been having a tough few weeks, we thought we’d better go have some decadent dessert. So I suggested Coffee Club for their mud pie.

She and I were very happy girls. She got her chocolate (she ate the whole piece by herself!) and I got my fruit tiramisu. My camera ran out of batteries so again I used my camera phone…

I had to work yesterday which was okay but I still didn’t really feel like doing anything once I got home. I ended up watching Jewel in the Palace until 2am…

Then today I completed the the series. I watched almost 20 hours worth of TV. But if you’ve seen the show, you know how addicting it is…

But I still managed to get out of the house. Ron and I had dinner with a few friends in Holland V at NYDC, a pizza and cheescake place. The pizza was pretty good but the pasta was not. The cheesecake looked really good but was quite expensive so instead we headed to The Coffee Club to have dessert. I didn’t bring my camera so unfortunately had to use my camera phone to take pictures of the dessert.

They had this fabulous mud pie with an oreo cookie crust and oreo cookie crumbles plus two layers of ice cream.

I tried their almond latte which was only okay.

I’d definitely recommend the mud pie and look forward to going back to try their fruit tiramisu (which Ron wouldn’t let me order).

We had our own small group Friday Foodie and suggested to go for steamboat. We thought we’d head to Marina South again like that time for BBQ Steamboat.

When we all got there though it was like a ghost town! We were shocked to see as we were turning the corner to the bowling alley that there was absolutely nothing open! No cars, no people, no buses, no neon signs… no steam! It was rather disappointing.

Thank goodness our taxi driver had an idea of where to go for steamboat and he took us to Beach Rd where there were a few steamboat places but none of them do the Korean BBQ part. We had to search the whole street and finally landed at the place where our taxi driver had dropped us off. The restaurant had an upstairs so could seat all of us.

Spicy and regular soup stock.

Now we’re cookin’!

The selection of food wasn’t as good as Marina South and it was disappointing not to have BBQ but I think we all walked away quite satisfied.

Now we’re in search of a place that does BBQ…

I have been quite stressed all week because I had to prepare a presentation for Thursday morning. Each month, 2 or 3 pharmacists present a 15-minute patient case presentation for the other pharmacists and pre-registration pharmacists to listen and hopefully learn something. I felt like I didn’t have enough time to prepare because I didn’t get all my information about the patient until last Friday and had to research the topic (ovarian cancer) a bit more since I’ve still got a lot to learn about these solid tumors. But although I was stressed, I don’t think I really needed to be because everything worked out in the end. I think it’s just that I hadn’t given any sort of talk in many months and because I tend to talk quite fast so that some people cannot understand me. Oh well…

But one piece of good news, I found out I passed the pharmacy forensic exam! The Singapore Pharmacy Board sent me an SMS on Monday that I passed! So did my friend Joyce and I’m taking her lead and posting my SMS message on this blog… hehe…

Yes I know, kind of nerdy 😛

However, I didn’t have time to celebrate that evening and have been cooped up working on my presentation that I just wanted to go out somewhere. That somewhere ended up being Takashimaya Basement 2 for dinner. We didn’t really know what to eat and there wasn’t any space for us to sit so we just ordered some things to eat while standing:

Southeast Asian version of a hotdog, black pepper sausage wrapped in a prata

From the okonomiyaki stall, fried noodles mixed with egg

Bacon and cheese takoyaki

Original takoyaki (squid)

Sometimes it’s just nice to get out of the house, it doesn’t mean you have to go anywhere fancy, just to breath some fresh air and not be at work or home.