After work and another talk tonight, Alex, Joyce, and I headed to Bugis to have dinner. We headed to a steamboat place which I don’t know the name to 😛 but before that we were walking through Bugis Village and there was a mass of girls waiting in line. According to Joyce, they were waiting in line to see this group called MayDay.

The lined snaked around and around all the way down the block. After letting Joyce check them out for a few minutes, we headed to eat steamboat 🙂

It was all you can eat and we stayed until after 11pm. We ate our fill… but still had dessert at this place down the street.

They ran out of ginger steamed milk so I had the mango instead. It was kind of cool as you started eating into the steamed milk, the mango puree made it look like a parboiled egg.

Alex with his “Ying Yang” which is black sesame and almond.

Joyce with her shaved ice dessert.

Happily full but ready for dessert 🙂

Ah, what a day…

We had an early morning lecture that ended early so we had a free day to enjoy. I went with my friend Alex to run some errands and we ended up at IKEA. At IKEA we had lunch at the restaurant. At IKEA here they have a “Friends of IKEA” program where at every visit, you’re entitled to 2 free beverages (either coffee or soft drink) plus 2 special priced meals. Today’s meal was 10 Swedish meatballs plus potatoes for $5SGD. Unfortunately I didn’t know you needed to collect the tickets for the free drinks at the front so I ended up having to go all the way back to the front and return to the cashier. A bit inconvenient, I don’t know why they don’t just put it onto the membership card they give you.

Anyways, we decided to splurge on a dessert called “Semla”.

The description on the IKEA site:

The delicious Swedish semla is a wheat bun, lightly cardamom-spiced and partially filled with smooth almond paste. The bun is crowned with fresh fluffy whipped cream and almost floating on top of the creation is the cut-off bun lid, sprinkled seductively with fine powdery icing sugar.

In Sweden, the semla was traditionally eaten as dessert topping up the festive meals that was taken in preparation for Easter fasting. The Swedes would indulge in rich food on the last Tuesday before fasting and this last Tuesday became known as Fettisdagen – literally means Fat Tuesday. Today, the semla has became a traditional dessert between Fat Tuesday and Easter. And each Swede consumes on average five bakery-produced semlor each year, in addition to all those that are homemade.

The semla has also had a historic impact on Sweden: King Adolf Frederick of Sweden died of stroke in 1771 after consuming a luxurious banquet which was topped off by 14 servings of semla.

I don’t know how a person can eat 14 servings of it. That big dollop of whipped cream and the sweet almond paste in the middle would be overwhelming after a while. Those glutinous kings!

Maybe it was too much sugar for me because I had a headache during the evening and only felt like sleeping. I missed out on going to “The Clinic” and dinner, instead I stayed home to rest.

http://picasaweb.google.c…RestRafflesCity

To cap off an educational afternoon at NUH, our guest presented almost 5 hours of material, we went out to dinner at Shahi Maharani North Indian Restaurant at Raffles.

The restaurant had a trio there performing music and singing. It was quite relaxing listening to music that we didn’t understand the words too.

The food itself wasn’t extraordinary but was still quite good. The garlic naan was yummy.

We went shopping for a bit at Raffles and the Citylink mall before calling it a night.

My friends Kevin and Tasha stopped by Singapore on their way to Bali so we met for dinner. After work I took a taxi over to meet with them. My taxi driver was a bit odd. The first question he asked me after I told him where I wanted to go was “Do you go to church on Sunday?” and when I answered No, he asked “Why not?” so I told him because I was a foreigner and didn’t know where to go. I didn’t want to outright say that I’m not religious because I didn’t want to offend him. So he goes on to ask me if I’m Korean, or Japanese, or Vietnamese and do I live here now? Etc, just asking away… then he asks me if I like Singaporean food and we get on the subject of “hot pot”. He kept on asking “What’s hot pot? It’s called steam boat! In Singapore we call it steam boat.” He was very insistent. He said while in Singapore, I should learn Mandarin because everyone here speaks Mandarin, even the Malay can learn to speak it. He kept on talking all the way to my friend’s hotel.

But it was strange, once my friends got into the taxi, he stopped talking. At least he stopped talking to us, he started mumbling to himself. My friend was wondering if he was talking on the phone but he really was just mumbling to himself.

A bit weird.

But we did finally arrive at Newton Circus to have dinner. My co-workers recommended some specific things to try there:

1. Sugar cane juice with lemon
2. Chili crab
3. Satay
4. Oyster omelette
5. Chicken wings
6. Sting ray

We tried all. Just the three of us.

The stall owners there are a bit irritating though, they try to lead you to their stalls, called “touting”. You really don’t know where to go, you just sit and they bring you food.

The sugar cane juice with lemon was refreshing ($2SGD). The chili crab was not bad, actually spicier than I’ve had ($30SGD for a small crab). Chicken and beef satay ($0.50SGD per skewer). The oyster omelette wasn’t that good, a bit fishy tasty ($6SGD). The chicken wings were crispy but not much meat ($1SGD each). The sting ray was quite tasty with a nice sauce ($8SGD).

We called it a night after dinner as they were leaving for Bali in the afternoon and going to head to Sentosa before they left Singapore. I have meetings to attend this weekend given by our visiting expert so was also ready to head home to rest.