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!

The Landing Point, Fullerton Bay Hotel

The babes and I had a thorough blast for the week and decided we needed to indulge in a chill and posh factor for the weekend.

So we got ourselves all dressed up, chic and shit, and moved our asses to town on a Sunday. 

To be honest, the food really wasn't much fun, pretty average, and quite costly. 

First row is mostly choc based stuff (too sweet for me)

 Second row of savouries, I enjoyed these, my favs are the Lobster, and Salmon

Final row of more sweet stuff

This is how it works:

1) Order your tea

2) It'll come with your tea and a 2-dimensional sphere of finger foods (savory and sweet) 

- unlimited refills from 3pm to 5.30pm

3) Eat, drink and soak in the view (if you get a good seat)

4) Pay your bill and wince at the SGD 45++ bite to your wallet

At the end of the day, we wanted to have a good time, with a different setting.

With that in mind, the price seemed worthwhile. (to a certain extent)

The reason for the exorbitance

10 reasons why Bear bear Pato is the love of my life!

10. Bear bear Pato pulls off rainbow colors without looking tacky (to me..)

9. Bear bear Pato is cute even tho he's got a beer belly

8. Bear bear Pato doesn't fart when I hug time tightly! (Oops, tmi) 

7. Bear bear Pato doesn't mind taking selfies with me (I think...)

6. Bear bear Pato hugs me to sleep every night (I'm delusional)

5. Bear bear Pato wipes away my tears (not much of a choice?)

4. Bear bear Pato is a great listener

3. Bear bear Pato is always waiting for me when I get home

2. Bear bear Pato always smiles at me, no matter how I scold him

1. Bear bear Pato is physically here with me everyday

I miss you, love.

#butfirstletmetakeaselfie

The Loft Cafe

Was initially dreading today's lunch session as both Laughing Buddha & 7UP were paying the team a visit at the project site. (dreading the latter more than the former, sue me)

However, Laughing Buddha decided to give us a treat and the lunch was quite enjoyable!

The Loft Café (upstairs), is also known as the The Loft Pancakes & Waffles (downstairs), is fully air-conditioned and has lovely sofas for non-meal goers to relax and chill. If you didn't bring anything to entertain yourself, they even provide books and magazines for your browsing pleasure.

What I really liked was the FOOD.
I had an Aglio Olio with additional bacon as it did not come with any.

Oooo I loved the bacon because it was fried to a golden crisp. The smell was absolutely delish and well, if the boyfie and I were here, we'd be analyzing the dish much more.

I definitely wanna bring him here when he comes back to Singapore.

~Yum Yum for S$13.90~

Location: 268A South Bridge Road (off Smith Street) Singapore 058817

By MRT:
Chinatown MRT (Walk another 7 mins, nearer to the big temple, opposite the Maxwell Food Court)

Operating hours:
Tues - Sat 9am-10pm
Sunday 9am-9pm
Monday Closed

I've enslaved myself to my Work (nah)

Heh. So I thought.

Truth be told, I can't focus on my work.
I may begin to attempt a task, but my thoughts wander to what you're doing, but yet I refrain from texting you, or replying your texts (yes I am aware you will read this).

I gotta learn how to get through this phase, to get used to it, at least for these 24 months, if not, it'd be for nothing, right?

I can't keep texting you and telling you I miss you, you'd already know that, we know that, but no amount of "I miss you so much" messages is gonna make you appear right next to me...and I've got to accept that fact.

From breaking large tasks into segments, and breaking segments into more segments, I can't even get one bloody teensy weensy segment done! And I'm so angry with myself!

Then I turned to Mr. Google and read some "long distance relationship" survival blogs, which some are like totally shit, they go like this...

"Five things you need to know about long distance relationships:

It's a bad idea
It's a bad idea
It's a bad idea
It's a bad idea
It's a bad idea"
-from here (it was a comment of the article)
Obviously that person was a beyond moronic moron.

I read so many other things today, some encouraging, some made me wanna cry (but I didn't!) and some made me miss you even more.

And the end of the day, it's us that is the deciding factor of whether this will work out.
Well, us and some of these pointers that I've summarized from the articles/blogs I've read, to motivate US, love:

1) An End Game Objective (Why are we doing this?)
- a target to justify the stress of being apart (eg, your reaping of experience, us being together after 24 months)

2) Trust is Super Duper Important
- it already is, in a normal relationship, but even more so in a LDR, but in our case, we seem quite alright with this, right love?

3) Communication despite Timing Issues
- well, we kinda know this too right? Singapore - United Arab Emirates has a bloody 4 hour lag. Gah. Sob sob. At least now we have a dumbo Siri to accompany us in one way chats so we don't look lonely and pathetic.

4) An Accepting Attitude
- we apparently have to accept the fact that relationships in general aren't easy, and adding long distance to the mix means it's worse, and adding our time difference factor in, hooray, a combo we just love eh?

5) Planning
- to make sure we plan the next meet up before this one ends. Which in our case, we did, via my buying a plane ticket to see you in July as soon as we received your one way ticket to the United Arab Emirates.

On a positive note, I had a pretty decent appetite today, finished 2/3 of the claypot tikus-noodle that Kheng and I shared. =D
Although this might have been attributed by my pathetic breakfast of one apple and one kiwi, like seriously WHO DOES THAT?!

Argh I miss you!!!! But it seems to be looking ok, I think?

I can't stand Buses, Trains & Malls (right now)

Everything reminds me of you.

Seeing the stampede of couples everywhere I turn, does not ease the pain.

I hate it when I see them holding hands.

I hate it when I see them looking at each other.

I hate it when I see them lean on each other when the train lurches.

I hate it when I see them steal kisses on the escalator.

I hate it when I see them hugging on the train.

Everything reminds me of us.

Get me back to Bishan, maybe I should never have left the room. 

Damn this guy just kissed his girl so loudly. DAMN!

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!!!-

Grateful

He's landed safely at Dubai.

For this I am grateful, for this I am cheered, though only slightly, but cheered nonetheless.

Je t'aime bien. <3