a whirlwind of stuff!

Wow post HSC has been quite busy, truth be told I was hoping for more rest lol.

NBA Lockout set to end weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee yay start christmas day :D:D:D how awesome cuz its always the mad teams playing on xmas. One time we spent xmas in Hong Kong and they were showing heat v lakers xmas game in the elevators :D

Went to Singapore, that was very cool. Or very hot. Locals were full like ang mor buay tahan singaporean weather" but cmon, its not too different from an Australian summer; muggy 33 degree days with thunderstorms every arvo! Haha on a bus, I was talking to cousin and cousin's friend, and they were like "Show us your chinese" and all I could see were blue skies and trees so I started describing those. Apparently its almost offensive to talk about to the weather to the very to-the-point singaporeans lol. So I kena whacked by them two.
It's also made me a miser... too much cheap eating at hawkers and kopitiams. I regret not taking a photo of my ice kacangs/other desserts that were gigantic and only 2sings, compared to the tiny ones we get here for $4 =/ And freak. A huge plate of kway teow is 3sings...about $2.30AUD... compared to $10 here. And a bowl of laksa is like $3, and done in a minute. woooooow. I really must stop drawing comparisons between prices here and there, otherwise ill never end up buying anything!

But yes it was food heaven there :) quite annoyed that i didnt bring my camera on my biggest food safari day, which started with brekkie at the closest kopitiam; "Set A" - kaya toast, two runny eggs and kopiO :D then roti prada+ curry + tauhuay mid morning at the bus stop. then got off at bedok interchange and walked around the hawker there and passed over like freaking 6 chicken rice stalls, sorry leow, and settled on yong tau foo mee + ngor hiang. Then had a mango drink thingo. then kept walking around to try to find the legendary Hill Street Fried Kway Teow Stall. A few days before I went to Bedok in search of it, but turns out i walked right past it and ended up taking a taxi to some malay-dominant hawker centre, but that was cool because I picked up 6 sticks of satay and a delightful nasi lemak and kopi O for $5. But yes on this fateful day... I FOUND THE DAMN STALL... right opposite freaking temasek JC (its teh-maaah-sek, dammit.). but yeah ate. was beautiful. absolutely wow. then had ginger drink, whilst chatting with old uncles. Wow seriously theyre all like (in hokkien) "ah boy CPF not enough leh borrow me money to go Batam for chicken business" amongst other stuff. Anyway, then went to another stall and picked up pisang goreng (banana fritters) .... yuumm. And i think from there I ceebsed and mrt'd back to choa chu kang... where at the station I went back to the kopitiam and downed a quick bowl of laksa. Then ran home in the rampaging thunderstorm; fun fact HDBs are designed so that you can get around completely undercover! Smart engineering/architectural design. Anyway, got home, aunty prepared some bah kut teh, then we went out to eat chilli crab. woooooow. and finished up with dessert :D Agar Agar (jellies, like the stuff you add in science) and random fruit ices. And then balled for a bit, and then some guy gave me a sour plum. Ok, that concludes my food safari for that day. My heart and waistline still have not forgiven me. I really wish i'd taken my camera along.

other highlights: 3 am ChubbyBubby with cousin and roommates, s'porean style i.e. with longans lychees and dragonfruit pieces (because we ran out of the other two). Loser had to eat these really disgusting spicy cinnamon jellybeans we found ==. thankfully one of the roomies lost... us other three had fit 16longans and 4 lychees in our mouths =O. so weird. we started communicating by passing an ipad around lol. the game lasted 1hr 13min. next day auntie brought a bowl of longans into the room and was like "here you go, you may be wondering how i still have longans left. thats right, i know what you did :D"
forgot to go to the beach at Sentosa... ==.
talking to randoms on mrt and buses and while balling.
had the most awesome taxi driver on the way back, Tay Joo Keong Richard (I didn't forget) telling me about his experiences in Australia and how he gave his bosses a huge piece of his mind... and also how he worked in Saudi Arabia just after they'd started having their oil boom, and how they didnt know what to do with all that money so they paid $50000USD + a monthly $2000USD Bonus for converting to Islam. He took the offer up for twelve years, though never fully able to integrate himself. He says he got owned for eating pork once, and then being caught eating during Ramadan. (he didn't really care for the customs, he says the money was too attractive.) then the conversation went to how his mother wanted him to stay muslim upon return to singapore (where he wouldve still received that bonus) because they were a peranakan chinese family. And then the conversation went to why he sucked at mandarin (i'd tried speaking in mandarin and we only got like 3 words in, before we went to english/hokkien) and he was saying how messed up it was, never really needing to learn mandarin in his day, then being away from S'pore when the mandarin boom began, so he was stuck with english hokkien and malay. And so the conversation about languages continued and it made me realise how crap my english had become in the space of just over a week, being so used to using singlish lol. And also how crap my chinese was... farr auntie is a chinese teacher who teaches at after school tutoring kinda thing, where Primary 1 + 2 students go to learn/be taken care of because they finish school midday and parents working cannot watch them. So I sat in and holy I thought my chinese was bad, all the kids there are like "teacherrr... datone dunno oso how to do leh?" ... ok that makes no sense but it was quite weird.
On the MRT they usually give announcements in english mandarin tamil and malay, i.e. they'll announce Bukit Batok (english/malay) then say it in chinese (wujibadu) then say it in tamil. But then there's this one notice they do only in chinese... and its along the lines of "if you see and suspicious unattended packages or suspicious people, please report it to police or MRT Staff". I was waiting for the malay version to come on, and when it never did... haha .
Ooh! Lol registered for something other, and I actually got my name listed as Joe Teo Kio ... o0

National kindness day was pretty cool! Im glad I was on orchard that day!


ah! Formal was really cool too, being able to see everyone, looking very smart, almost one last time, take a whole lot of pictures, ceyons speech :D and subsequent "HIT IT" hoooly can roger shake.

been working a bit, takes up heaps of time.

Houseparty next weekend!