Hi From The New Year

Hello guys, how's the new year has been for you? I spent the last day of 2013 with 2 movies and a lunch. Watched American Hustle in the morning. I thought the cast were really strong. Interesting story and outrageous outfits :P Then I met up with la Gioia at Wild Honey at Mandarin Gallery which I thought was so so. The place was annoying for me and I'm not interested to come back. They invested on what I saw to be only 2 ipads for the whole customers to browse the menu. Other option is for people to look at the board which doesn't have pictures. I'm pretty sure printing your traditional menu is cheaper and will be more appreciated for your customers. I believe the menu in the ipad is incomplete, there's no drink option there and there's no price and none of the service staff made sure we had all the information. Then customers need to queue up and tell the counter the order and pay up, another turn off for me. I also think that's bad, what if we want to order more? No, I'm not interested to queue up again to place another order. So yeah, totally don't like the place and the food was kinda not enough to make me go to the branch in Scotts which according to la Gioia didn't have such a weird service. Anyway we then had our desserts at Antoinette which brought back memory that the place is strangely super cold and that their servings are pretty big. We couldn't finish our desserts. Then we decided to head back home and got away from the crowd. We did make a detour to the Abercrombie & Fitch store. Since I'm not a shopping kinda girl, it was my first experience in that store and it was ... interesting. Quite a sensory experience. Felt like a maze which at first was an annoyance but it became pretty interesting for me. Love how good it smelled inside. Overall though, the conservative me just felt weird inside the store and now I am dying to know if all Abercrombie & Fitch stores are like that.

Reaching my room, I decided to take a nap and then in the evening I decided to keep up with last week strange choice of watching a heavy movie. Found Schindler's List and decided to watch that. I was preparing myself mentally for its 3-hour length. Glad that I could pause and go to the toilet. Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley were awesome in it. It was seriously moving and I cried quite a lot at the end which is weird because though I was stumped during The Act of Killing, I didn't actually cry watching it. I found out that Schindler's List was released 20 years ago which I thought to be quite an interesting luck for me to finally watch it now. It is seriously quite a big contrast to The Act of Killing. These people were put in situation of power, in the The Act of Killing one chose to ignore goodness and be committed in being bad while in Schindler's List one chose to be good and do the right thing. That makes me think that there's always a choice, you can choose to be good, to be a hero, though perhaps Schindler might disagree that he's a hero since he felt he should have done more. So guys, I do totally recommend you guys to watch this classic.

Last weekend, I managed to spend sometime with one of my cousin, Helen, who was in town. Well Saturday morning was spent by myself first. I decided to go to the 2Degree Ice Art exhibition. It was expensive for the tiny size that it is. 32 bucks for admission and 5 bucks for coat rental. The coat was recycled and not cleaned after being used by other people, but I think the dry cleaning bill for your own coat would be more than the 5 bucks, so just bear with it. I spent around 1 hour plus. It was cold as expected but was manageable for me. I wasn't chattering or feeling like I was going to die. Let's just say it wasn't the coldest I've ever felt. Perhaps it did help that as I went in, I was actually feeling pretty hot from walking to get there in the hot sun. The display weren't all that amazing or big for that matter. There were these frozen branches which I'm not sure if the inside were real branches or wires.



Then there's buildings.


Dinosaurs. I seem to be seeing a lot of dinosaurs in Singapore in 2013.

When I have like circled the area twice, I became more interested to see the grain (not sure if it's called that) inside the ice blocks, perhaps it's called ice crystal and so I started taking pictures of that.

My point and shoot camera auto itself in focusing though, so some of the shots were focusing on the droplets which was still good because the colours still came out great and artistic for me.

Oh I also tried the slide twice in which I was embarrassingly didn't really slide smoothly. I got stuck so I kinda had to push myself down. Not sure what's the deal with that :( For more picture from the exhibition, you can go here. Then I went to Marina Bay Sands to wait up for the cousin and then I realized that there's condensation in my camera. My point and shoot camera gave me this.

Suffice to say I was rather panicking because it wasn't clearing up. While I think I can just opened up my DSLR and clean it, I wasn't sure about the point and shoot. So I just switched it on in the hope the battery will warm it but then I thought I'll be running out of the battery so I just hold it so that my warmth can somehow clear up the condensation. I did think of getting it warmed and dry using the hand dryer in the toilet, but luckily it was finally okay on its own.

Me and the cousin went to Gardens by the Bay. Since I'm not a member anymore, I decided to only go to the flower dome and my cousin followed suit. It's not your typical Christmas decoration in the flower dome this time around. There are a lot of vegetables, like this cabbage and bell peppers below. By the way you can see a bit of me in the cabbage picture. Never say I never take a picture of myself.





Then there's also these cute things, the pineapple boy, Ananas, and the strawberry girl, Berry. Ananas is actually looking cuter.


Then there's also the moss covered little car.


To end the day, we watched the OCBC Garden Rhapsody at the supertrees.


For more pictures, you can go here.

:) eKa @ 1:49:00 PM • 0 comments

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