I had a nice nap after writing the draft to my last post. I figured it’d be okay to sleep to help me adjust my schedule. I stayed up for the last few hours of the flight. They served us breakfast about an hour and a half before we landed.

Had some yummy yogurt.

Breakfast of very fatty bacon, veggies, and mushy rice patty.

An American guy was sitting next to me and he was like my personal aisle monitor. I guess I’m pretty clueless when it comes to flight attendants coming to collect things in the aisle so he always helped me to either pass my tray or just to let me know they were on their way by. It was funny too, the flight attendants seemed to think I was Japanese so on both flights they spoke to me in Japanese but I’d answer in English and I’d get a bit of a perplexed look. They did it through the entire flight.

I arrived around 11am and went through immigration quickly but my luggage was slow. I was so glad to exit and see the following sign:

Ron came to pick me up and we visited his dad at work to say hi before heading to have dim sum with my parents in Dublin. They wanted to take us to Koi Garden, which is related to one of their favorite restaurants in Daly City called Koi Palace. They now have 4 restaurants, the original in Daly City, one at Thunder Valley Casino, and these 2 in Dublin called Koi Garden and Just Koi. We had some interesting dishes when we were there.

On was the Swallow’s Nest Egg-White Tart. Swallow’s Nest is supposed to be good for your health. Since it was also made only of egg-whites, I guess it is pretty healthy. It was quite tasty too.

We also had lobster for lunch. The fry the lobster but use the tail meat to make lobster and shrimp dumplings. It was quite a large dish but very tasty.

The shrimps inside the dumplings weren’t shrimp paste but actually large shrimp cut up in small pieces. Although Singapore has a lot of seafood, I don’t know where you can get stuff like this there.

My dad also ordered this Scallop with Sea Urchin Cheese Rice. It may sound a bit gross but actually with the cheese, it was really good. But by this time, we were so stuffed because we also had other dim sum and beef hor fun as well. We brought home a lot of leftovers.

Here are my Mom and Dad:

Afterwards, we went to hang out for a while at their house, this is the beautiful day we had and some views from their backyard.

I got to meet their dog, Happy, for the first time. She has this bad habit of peeing everywhere when she gets excited. Seeing me for the first time was no exception. When she came into the house to greet me, she peed all the way, all over the kitchen floor. She’s a very friendly dog though, very hyperactive, but very cute.

My cats weren’t to happy to see us though. I think they were a bit scared or maybe a bit upset with us. They wouldn’t come out of hiding underneath the bed. Tomorrow I’ll spend more time trying to coax them out and make friends with them. I was so looking forward to seeing them, it made me a bit sad they weren’t as glad to see me…

In the evening, it just happened our friends Christie and Conan were having a BBQ at their new apartment in Pacifica so we decided to drop by and say hello. They live in this beautiful apartment right near the beach in Pacifica. We got there just in time for the sunset.

I got the chance to catch up with some friends and also to hear about the current situation at UCSF. It was good to catch up with friends and enjoy some good American food. We had chips, fresh salsa, spinach dip, fresh green salad, hummus… yum. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you miss things unless you have them again.

It’s about time to get to sleep now. It’s been a very long day, it’s really like I had 2 Saturdays… but I guess when I get back to Singapore, I will lose Monday. Oh well… gonna try to make the most of my time here while I’ve still got time.