Good Friday Weekend: Traveling back from Singapore to KL

Just a few days ago, I journeyed back to my home-city KL from Singapore.

As it was the Good Friday holidays, we braced ourselves that the usual 5 hour bus ride would most like extend to 6 or 6.5 hours, seeing as we took the Friday (holiday itself) morning bus back.

However, the entire ride took us 10 agonizing hours.

What happened?
1) We departed Novena Square at 9.30am (punctual)
2) We arrived at the Singapore checkpoint at 10.15am (still alright)
3) We left the Singapore checkpoint at 10.35am (okay)
4) We were stuck on the Tuas Second Link (in between Singapore and Malaysia) till 2.30pm

Seriously?!

Technically, a 5 hour bus ride would indicate that we would arrive by 2.30pm.

This is stupid.

WHY?
1) There was a Singapore-Malaysia football match going on that weekend (WHY?!)
2) Singapore apparently sent 80 bus loads of supporters (no idea if its true, not going to check)
3) It was timing that caused that JAM. We were stuck in that limbo due to the Malaysian Customs and Immigrations' staff going for their weekly Friday Muslim Prayers.

Imagine this, there were 13 counters at one Immigration center, only ONE was being operated.
By the time our bus arrived at 2.30pm, they (the customs officers) were calmly and coolly gallivanting back to their counters and finally all 13 counters were operational.

STUCK, due to ridiculous staff management.

Just one border, so much shit separates us.

ARGH. Buck up my homeland! What's wrong with you!

Homemade Chinese Corn & Spare Ribs Soup

Day 2 without the boyfie.
LDR is stupidly not-easy. I've lost my appetite from the emotions I'm experiencing, but, I still take liquids.

For example, day 1 without him:

Breakfast
My colleague bought me a breakfast set from Ya Kun:
- Teh
- Two soft-boiled eggs
- Butter sugar toast

I only nibbled at the toast and didn't even finish. Sigh. So unlike me. But I finished the tea and the eggs.
For the two months before he left, the boyfie wasn't working so he made me breakie everyday, it would either be a substantial sandwich (the whole works with dressing), or omelettes, cereal, etc.

Even for lunch, I ordered a Loh Mee, which kinda sucked real bad, but even so the normal me would've eaten it as it's lunch time, but no, I had one bite. I then bought an avocado milkshake and demolished that pretty quickly.

I'm not ignorant to my body's needs for food, I feel the hunger, but just have no appetite.
But I realised that I was still alright with liquids.

So today, I woke up at 10.30am, and headed to the nearby neighbourhood supermarket and bought some ingredients for homemade corn spare ribs soup.

Ingredients list with the estimated cost:
- Spare ribs (250 grams - $2.60)
- Corn (1 whole corn - $0.70)
- Dried oyster (2 pieces - $0.10 approx)
- Tiny dried scallops (3-4 pieces - $0.25 approx)
- Dried cuttlefish (half a cuttlefish - $0.20 approx)
- Water (1 to 1.5 liters)

Less than $5 leh for soup!!!!

You might want to add red dates, just a handful, bout 5? I didn't have any.

Steps:
Preparation (5-10 mins)
1) Put spare ribs into a bowl and pour hot water over it until the level of water covers the spare ribs and leave it to clean the spare ribs and remove impurities. (takes longer if pork is frozen)
2) Prepare pot of 1 to 1.5 liters of water
3) Take the dried items - rinse and place in water
4) Peel corn and chop into 4 pieces (carefully!) - wash and place in water
5) By this time, pork should be nicely cleaned - remove pork from hot water and place in pot with other stuff

Cook & Serve
6) I use a vacuum pot so I just bring to boil (10 -15 mins) and throw it in the vacuum for the rest of the hour
- (If no vacuum pot - Boil the pot with ingredients for 45mins to 1 hour)
7) Add about 1 teaspoon of salt (to your taste)
8) Add some pepper for awesomeness
9) Serve with rice or without for a healthy, homemade, and CHEAP meal

-yum yum yum for only less than $5!!!-