Today is the first day of 2013, and aside from the revelry of the past few days/week, it felt just like any other day.
For the past week Joaquin, along with the members of my extended family, have been here in Singapore - and it simply felt lovely. For the first time in many years, we celebrated Christmas as a whole family, just like how it was when I was growing up. Of course the nature of the gifts changed (from toys to a handbag), and the tree-decorating excitement was gone, but it still felt nice all the same.
On the 29th December I headed back to work for a day and progressively kept losing my voice. By my second class at 4pm, I had pretty must lost my voice in an onslaught of mucus and phlegm so the kids and I ended up watching 20 mins worth of Mr Bean. They loved it, hurrr. Then I headed over to my Grandma's house on the convenient Circle Line to celebrate my Aunt's birthday with a nice steamboat dinner.
On 30th December, Joaquin and I met up with Tiff, HM, Shu and ZW to have lunch at a super packed Crystal Jade in Ngee Ann City. It was great seeing HM, especially since I hadn't seen her in months. The dim sum was great, but the price not so much. We had much fun joking with the waitress, especially since Tiff was around as usual. We were waving in silly ways to get the attention of the waitresses in the packed restaurant, and when the waitress came over she asked us why we were waving so frantically. Someone replied that it was because we were very hungry in a cheeky voice, prompting the waitress to lean over and cheekily proffer her arm to eat. Tiffany, not missing a beat, asked the waitress if her arm was clean and if it had been marinated. LOL. Later the waitress came around and joked with Joaquin, especially when his dessert of durian pudding came.
We ended up wandering around Kinokuniya after lunch for a short while, before Joaquin and I headed back. I wanted to clean up and get ready for the family photo-taking session. At 4:50pm, we left the house and headed to the photo studio, where it turned out everyone else already was. Joaquin was tasked with trying to get Ryan to look at the camera properly, haha. After that, we all headed to Riverview Hotel to eat a Japanese buffet at Irodori, where we all pigged out on good sashimi. I'm sick of sashimi now. Joaquin and I ended up watching two documentaries that night about Korea. Nerdy.
On the 31st December, I brought Joaquin to see Haw Par Villa. He was highly amused and entertained. It's truly one of those spots where the old Singapore can be seen, before it became all modern and shiny. There were scattered spots of tourists around, all looking about interestedly. Pity it wasn't better kept, as some plaques were rusted by the weather and impossible to read. The ten levels of hell was, as always, charming. After that we headed over to Holland Village where it was raining like mad. We went to the Hawker Centre and had a simple lunch, then I decided to get my nails done while Joaquin got a back massage. Then we headed back to rest before heading out for a nice dinner at Greenwood Fish Market. I had a fillet of orange roughy which was tasty (and upon googling a bloody ugly fish) and a molten chocolate cake with ice cream. Then we walked to The Old Brown Shoe along Bukit Timah Road for a quick drink before heading back to watch Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood.
Joaquin and I were still in the middle of watching Unforgiven when it was about 5 minutes to 00:00 of 1st Jan. We ended up going onto youtube and doing the countdown with the Taiwanese show that was streaming live. Lol. Then we went back to watching Unforgiven. Simple, but best New Year's Eve I've ever had.
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Today Joaquin and I went to the Kampong Glam/Bugis area of town. We went to the Malay Heritage centre and he popped into the Sultan Mosque to have a peek. The Malay Heritage Centre was quite nice, I was impressed. It was also newly opened (didn't know that) and today was free entry. We had lunch at Minang and then went off, walking through Bugis shopping centre, Bugis Street, Waterloo Street before taking a break at a small cafe. Then we went to Bras Bersah complex before heading to Raffles City shopping centre, then Chijmes and finally Funan. At Funan, Joaquin bought a stylus for me, hooray. We also stopped for a quick snack at Qiji. Then around 5:30pm, we headed back.
Joaquin ended up taking a short nap after we got home, and around 7pm we left with my parents to get Peranakan food at Beauty World Shopping Centre. We originally wanted to go to Ivins but it was too full. Still the food we had at Dulu Kala was good. We even had chili crab.
It was throughly a good long day spent with Joaquin.
Unfortunately, sigh, he leaves tomorrow night for Korea again :/
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