Sunday, November 30, 2008

Are you bored of seeing western food posts?

Are you? Because here is another one:

Yesterday, my family and I went to Dezzert Lingo to eat our dinner. Dezzert Lingo is located at 384 East Coast Road, near Telok Kurau.

The newspapers said that their Fish & Chips there were very nice, so we decided to go there to eat. Outside of the shop was their food menu. We got a shock when we saw the prices of the food. Wow! A whole $10.00 for the Fish & Chips! Thats 65% more expensive than the one we had at Tim's!

Although the price was expensive, it had air-conditioning and there was a chalk board outside the shop, saying something like this:

soup of the day

+

Fish & Chips/(2 other main courses, I forgot.)

+

Tea/Coffee/Coke



ONLY $13.50!

Wow, I thought. The soup and breverages are so expensive! Nevertheless, we decided to give it a try.

We went in the store to see pastries, the cold ones in a cooler, the warm ones on top. To the right was a New Zealand ice-cream "store", one scoop $3.90, two scoops $4.90. The ice cream was also served in pints and quarts.

First, they brought 4 mugs with hot water after taking our orders (Water is complimentary, you can ask for more! :D).

After a while, they served us the soup of the day, mushroom soup. I looked at the soup and saw that the soup was actually half of the bowl!

I tasted some, and realised it was very thick, and that it tastes like cheese. I'd rather have a thinner soup with real mushroom taste.

Then, I thought: Now, where is the pepper and salt? I glanced around the table and realised quickly that they DIDN'T have any pepper nor salt.

Well, time for the main course to come. My main course was Fish & Chips. The tomato were cut into 2 wedges and the cucumber were nicely sliced into 3 halves so that you didn't have to stuff the vegetables in.

The cucumber were nicely stacked so they resembled part of a spiraling staircase. There was also shredded cabbage so you don't have to stuff the whole leaf in.

The chips were a little crispy no the outside and soft in the inside. There was little salt added to it.

Now for the fish. the fish was curled like a small, stationary wave at one end and flat at the other. A thin wedge of lemon was put beside it. I squeezed it over the fish and took a bite of the fish. The fish was very hot, the batter very crisp and the meat very springy. I took another bite with tar tar sauce and it was perfect. I had never eaten such nice fish before.

After everyone in my family finished their meal, they served us our breverages. I had ordered tea. The tea was placed in a mug with the same design as for the water. The level of the burning hot water was high, and the small teaspoon was nearly drowned.

The water was almost 1.5 cm from the top of the teaspoon. When I touched the top of it to stir my tea, it burnt my hand! I quickly took up the spoon and put it in my empty cup to let it cool. Maybe they should've used a longer handle or maybe they should've placed the spoon in some kind of servette, which they did earlier on with the serving of the mugs.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

PSLE Marks

My heart was racing as I queued up to get my results slip from my form teacher. Numerous parents were standing outside, craning

Normally, I would get only 232++ in school for the aggregate score, but I was amazed when I got an aggregate of 248 for PSLE(Primary School Leaving Examination) !

I did very badly for my PSLE. My 2 compositions were in a mess. I thought I could only get at most 235, but I saw that my result slip shows 248! Why?

Some students in my school have higher marks than other schools, above average. That is why I could get so high. You see, if you are above average, your score will shoot up. If you are below average, your score will shoot down. If you are average, nothing happens to your score. It's like a "transfer" from below average to those above average.

A little bit like the reverse of "Robin Hood".

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

What? Western food again?

Yesterday, I went to Paramount Hotel to learn about social and dining etiquette. We were first given a talk about social etiquette then dining etiquette. After all that, we were given our food to practise on our dining etiquette.

First came the bread with some unsalted butter, we learnt that we should pluck some bite-sized bits of the bread and put it with butter.

Then came the soup. We learnt that the spoon should sink in like a dolphin diving in water (withOUT the splash!). After waiting for a while, the main course came.

It was chicken breast with mushroom sauce, broccoli, cauliflower and raw carrots. Then came dessert. It was "chocolate cake", but there were bits of plums inside so I preffered to call it a better "blackforest cake".

Then came orange juice. By then I was so full that I could hardly drink it! I learnt a lot about eating at formal places. The money for this workshop was indeed well-spent.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Tim's Restaurant and Cafe

Today, my family and I went to Tim's Restaurant and Cafe. There were a lot to choose at the menu, e.g.: Fish and Chips ($6.00), Grilled Fish ($6.00) and Grilled Chicken ($5.50). There was also steak and lobster with fish or chicken or beef (around $16.00 each). We each added $2.80 to make our main course a set meal, which includes soup of the day at first with crispy garlic bread.

The soup was chicken noodle soup and it was thick. A while later, water was served. The water had a lemony taste but I found out that there was a slice of lemon in a jug holding water when the waitress attended to us for the refilling of water.

We waited a reasonably long amount of time for the main course. Mine was Grilled Fish with Mango Salsa. The Mango Salsa sauce was a little spicy with a dash of sweetness, a little like sweet and sour sauce but with a little chilli. It went well with the two pieces of fish that were below it. The fish was a little salty, but it went well with the bland potatoes, carrots, long beans and some kind of gourd that tasted like winter gourd.

The next two dishes that came up was tea and cake. The cake was quite hard to cut with a fork, but when you put it in your mouths, you will feel that the cake is not that hard. There were strawberry sauce, what seemed like custard and something I presumed to be cocoa (the bitter ones as I thought that the strawberry sauce and the custard were aldready sweet).

The teh tarik*, as they call it, was frothy, light and sweet (I think it's a little too sweet!). It looked like Milo but had the hint of the aroma of tea and bubbles on the surface of it. The teh-tarik was machine made.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Oral Examinations

Yesterday, I had my english and chinese preliminary oral examination. When I was in my school canteen, I waited only 5 minutes as I was nearly late. We, the morning group, then went to the school hall.

There were chairs aligned neatly with labels on them telling us our group and the room number. We went to our chairs with our assigned groups. We were then told to sit in our register number. Although there were 7 classes and six numbers in my group till me, I had to wait for an hour. As I waited for the hour, I revised my oral examination notes and read a science fiction book that I brought.

I made a mistake for each of the examinations, Chinese and English. For the English examination, when I said that my neighbourhood was peaceful, I said something that was different from it.

For the Chinese examination, I didn't say anything about the driver looking very surprised.

After the examinations, I walked to the Lecture Theatre only to find that there was a movie going on about Raffles. (They did not tell us about that.)

Monday, July 7, 2008

Killer litter


Warning: This article contains chinese characters.

While I was reading my much loved Reader's Digest, I heard shouts coming from the opposite flat. I immediately rushed to the balcony to see what had happened. A couple were standing beside the window.

At first I thought the shouts were from the man, but when I saw another man throw down an incense burner, I knew the shouts were from him. He started to throw other things down, like a bicycle, a potted plant, a red cloth, something that looked like a dustbin and its cover. He shouted at the residents who were looking outside from their windows.

It was not long before the police came, and the man kowtowed to them. The man was arrested.
There was a post on about the litter, by 小彬彬.

"今天早上真是有够drama的!

早上八点多还在睡梦中,就被巨响吵醒。以为没什么还想再睡,就听到楼下很多人七嘴八舌,还有很多人跑来跑去的声音。于是走到窗口往下望。不得了,早地上一堆杂物,有鞋子,盆栽,还有脚踏车,和烧冥纸的桶!

听说是一名男子突然攻击一对男女,据说男子还想抢女的项链。后来男子追到楼梯口,见到东西就往下抛!所以咯,把人家的脚踏车、鞋架、盆栽什么的都往下丢!就连烧冥纸用的桶也不放过,全部一律往下丢。

还好警察及时来到,把男子押上警车。不过男子好像想逃走,在警车里大喊大叫!

不懂后来男子怎样了!幸好他丢东西的时候,没有人再楼下,要不然就惨了!"


(By the way, the man was throwing the things down from a staircase, almost similar to the case my dad saw.)

Thursday, May 1, 2008

A Trip to Taiwan: 2nd Day in Taiwan

Passed by a cemetery.

If you Singaporeans haven't gone overseas yet, you probably haven't seen a PADDY FIELD in your life. How miserable. Here's your chance to see one:

We stopped at a souvenir shop. Unfortunatley for the owner, nobody bought anything.

There were wine bottles,


crystals,

teapots,

fish (the kind you hang during Chinese New Year, not the one you eat),

and Mahjong dice.


We then headed off to a place where we had our tea. (How high-fashioned!)

Nice scenery we passed by.

Here we are. What's this?


We arrived at somewhere with lush greenery.

The stairs leading to the store was quite steep.


Saturday, April 19, 2008

FreeRice!

I interrupt this part of "A Trip to Taiwan: 2nd Day in Taiwan" to get you addicted to donating to charity without paying anything (except for your electrical bills) and helping you to build up your vocabulary at the same time, for example, I learnt that a dermatologist is actually a skin doctor. Sponsors are donating money to help end hunger.

FreeRice.com is a website that helps people who can't afford rice to eat. It uses a vocabulary game, very simple. They will just give you a word, and you'll have to click on the word that has the closest meaning to the word that they provide.

For every 3 consecutive correct answers you choose, your vocabulary level will increase by one. As it increases, the words will get harder and harder. For every answer you get correct, you will donate 20 grains of rice to charity.


But for every question you get wrong, your vocabulary level will decrease by one.

Every time you reach hundreds, your rice bowl will be empty. The amount of rice would be recorded on the sides of the bowl. Right for hundreds, and left for thousands. Every time after you get correct, it will show you how many grains of rice you have donated.

When you reach 10,000... SOMETHING will happen. Find out yourself! Go and donate! Hurry up and stop reading this part of text! Because the text is getting smaller and smaller until you can't read it.. ... ..... .. .... . .. . ..

Actually, 1 kilogramme of rice has about 40,000 grains, and every 1 kilogramme of rice went up by only $0.30, so if you donate 10,000 grains of rice you will be helping other people save $0.70!

If you want to see the total number of grains of rice donated every month, every day, or the total number of grains that have been donated, just click on "TOTALS". However, the "day" count ends every month, so if you want to see the amount donated every day, rush to the website now, before the month ends!

The most number of grains of rice per month was donated on December 2007, when 6,948,988,060 grains of rice was donated, probably because the holidays were there, and most people can use their computers!

Sunday, February 24, 2008

A Trip to Taiwan: 2nd Day in Taiwan

After eating our tummies out, we left for the seaside to take a walk or something. It was raining there. Our tour guide said that you cannot trust the weather at the beaches nor mountains. One moment it will be shining, and the other moment it will be raining!


On the way, our guide told us to not pick up any valuable rocks there. ( I can't quite remember, but I think that it was because last time a lot of people came here to pick rocks and there were less and less... )

At the seaside, there were a few stray dogs. I noticed one of them had got their foot injured! The dog was limping as it moved.



There were also a couple of stalls, one selling sausages and the other selling squid, smelly tofu, small intestines in big intestines, and intestine vermicelli.




When our tour guide mentioned "you yu", I thought that he was referring to oily fish!

We hopped on the bus, and continued on our journey.

Monday, February 4, 2008

A Trip to Taiwan: 2nd Day in Taiwan

We waked up at 6 a.m. to brush our teeth, pack our things and went to the place for breakfast. We were stunned by the astonishing view of the hotel although it was a three star one.

If you leave soya bean milk for too long, it will have a silky skin on the top.

The cup dispensers are too hard to see. Even when my father pointed where it was, I still couldn't see it.A cook was standing someplace cooking fried eggs. But their eggs are special, they are white, but their insides are the same as the beidge eggs!


We took the bus to the train station.Nearly everywhere, there is a "7-11" store. It is different from the ones in Singapore though. It is bigger and has a giant container where they put the eggs in tea leaves with water and they will become tea eggs. They are quite nice. At only about NT $7 ( about $0.31 Singapore Dollars ) , it is a cut-off price of 1 being $0.66 at my school's lantern festival.



This is the ticket for the train from Taipei to HuaLien:


On the way, I took some photos. Here are some of the best:






We took a short bus ride to a restaurant, and left for the seaside.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

A Trip to Taiwan: 1st Day in Taiwan

After 30 minutes of waiting, we were finally in Taiwan.



We saw the text in marquee:




I noticed that we were asked to stand on the right while using the elevator.


We went onto the bus and saw our tour guide.

He joked:"If you call me tour guide, no one will know who you are calling, so you can either call me 'xiao yu' or 'shuai ge'." On the way to Shi Lin, the guide explained that Taiwan's bitter gourd is drier than green bitter gourds and can be made into drinks like: pineapple carrot bitter gourd.

Soon, we arrived at Shi Lin.

We passed by a fried oyster egg store. They cooked the egg on the round stove. There were vegetables under the egg. It was extremely oily and there was a layer of oil under it. Eeeeyurgh!


After walking around for a while, we decided to try the white bitter gourd drink the guide told us. We went to "A-Zhong's Drink Stall".


They had a wide varirity of fruits displayed in a very beautiful manner:



The carrot, pineapple and bitter gourd drink was very sweet and sour and has an after taste of bitter. It has some kind of DRY bitter
taste.

We had 15 minutes left so we decided to walk around again. Then, we saw a stall selling prawns with claws ( very much like tiny lobsters without a claw ) !


You had to fish the prawns with small fishing rod-like things and put them in buckets - of course, its not free!

There were also games in the night market like: basketball! Pay NT$10 and you'll get to play! Here's a video of someone playing basketball:


He is professional at basketball! In just 30 seconds, he scored 128 points ( 2 points for each ball ).

We then checked in to our hotel, called Yaward Hotel.

It is actually more of a 3-star hotel because it only has 3 stories and one lift!





Here is a map of the hotel.


By the time we were getting ready to sleep, it was already 1 a.m. in the morning!