Brazil baby!

With the Worldcup on the road, I shall post something in accordance to this hot event. Not the whole thing, but one particular country, which is also the favourite of most people, Brazil.

During exam period last semester, while having breakfast and reading newspapers, boyfriend and I found this irresistable offer, 1-for-1 Brazillian Dinner buffet. Well, I myself have never tried this exotic country's food before and since boyfriend is a meat lover, we decided to try it. (Relaxation in the middle of stress period is very important). So we cut out the coupon and boyfriend called to book a seat for two. On the designated day, we trained all the way to Novena for Fiesta Brasilia. We reached there too early for dinner, so we just walked around the shopping mall (Got some chicken pie because we were both too hungry!)

Before we go into the food, let's talk about the ambience first. This Brazillian store, certainly knows how to keep everything authentically Brazillian. On the television, was the football. On the billboard, was a beautiful lady dressed up in sey Samba costume. On the menu, also some Samba-ing ladies. The napkins are green in color and even the chefs, I suspect, are Brazillian. This store is located in United Square Novena, on a waterfall deck. So great ambience, great scenery, away from all the hustles and bustles of shoppers and traffics.

Now it's time for the food. This store practices churrascaria, which means barbecued with charcoal for all their meats. Besides that, they have a salad bar for those people like me who are omnivores. After the salad, then out came a few tall chefs, or more accurately passadors, that serve us cut meat straight from the metal bar. Well, the picture below will tell you more.

From top to bottom: Chicken heart, beef steak, beef flank, pork rib, chicken wings, pork ham and pork sausages..to name a few dishes

They serve meats, ranging from chicken, beef, mutton, pork and fish. Well it's just 5 types of meats you think. But it's different parts of the poultry that you can eat from the normal meat to it's internal organs. For me, I dislike internal organs, so I skipped all those. But I enjoyed eating most of the meat except the fact that the beef are a little bit too raw for me. To me, the best servings were the garlic bread (Charcoal-baked), the bacon-chicken wrapped, and also this roasted pineapple.

Garlic Bread, Grilled fish, juicy pineapple and chicken-bacon wrapped

The pineapple was extremely juicy and sweet after being roasted. The heat, melted all the glucose (sugar) inside the pineapple, causing the juice heavenly sweetness. And as we know, with whatever roasted food, it smells so good.

Oh and did I said that they have ice-cream as well. Ermm....nothing special. Hahaha... but by the end of the day, boyfriend and I was so stuffed that we have trouble walking straight (but managed to keep posture somehow). After another short walk around United Square, we headed back to school to face the reality of studying.

It was too bad that we could not stay on longer for the passadors to perform for their guests. They will play Brazillian musics and well, interested people can dance along. I might even get to see the real Samba! But nonetheless, Brazillian food is delicious!

The friendly passador

Well, let's just wish good luck to Brazil for Worlcup 2010.

Mourn oh mourn for my iTouch

15th June 2010. My iTouch DIED. I can still remember vividly how everything happened. It was raining heavily that Tuesday morning. Yeap it was also the day that Orchard flooded. Well, was rushing to work in the rain that morning and didn't realised that my water bottle joined in the rain feast. By the time I realised it, half a bottle of water was gone! So quickly on the bus, took out all my belongings and after that I reached my iTouch, it was pitch black all over. Oh no! my heart broke into pieces. I feel so bad that I didn't realise my whole pants was drenched!

Boyfriend then took it to the office, in hope that when the water dried up, the iTouch will revive again. But after a whole day's work, iTouch still have no signs of improvement. So, we thought off buying drying agents and put it into a ziplock bag. I prayed, prayed so hard that it will regain it's life the next day. But, the iTouch was no where near to being alive. I was so devastated. I want it back. Days without it are no music and entertainment. *Sigh* Now I can just blame myself for my own carelessness.

iTouch, we still can't find a suitable "hospital" to admit you in. I know you are also suffering. I promise you'll be ok soon and you'll regain back your every ability to bring entertainment to me. I miss you iTouch!

Wonderful Wide World

Everyone after the closing ceremony

This post will be dedicated to the 8th ASEAN Cultural Youth Forum which was held in National University of Singapore, Singapore from 7th to 12th June 2010. So to start offmy experience, I did not quite volunteer myself to join this forum as I need to work. But after asking around, we still can't get anyone so I decided to leave my job (for one week) and sign up for this forum. My initial mindset was it'll just be another of your average camp. Everybody will be assigned into a group with all the cheers and stuff. But slowly I realised I was wrong.

First of all, this forum was not like any other camp. Just judge by our accomodation and you'll know the difference. We, for one whole week, stayed in Prince George's Park Residence in NUS. This residence deemed to be the most high class on-campus accomodation of all and in deed it is. Our room is a single, en-suite room, with your own toilet, air-condition and only you. Next, it comes to food. Normal camp will have packed mixed rice, but ours is buffet spread after buffet spread with various ASEAN cuisine (we even have sausage mcmuffin for breakfast haha). Well definitely no cheers and the most interesting part is, we have a lot of free time! (well that's not the important part).

The theme this year is "City, Traditiona and Technology". For opening ceremony, we witness how different countries merged their traditional dance with modern musics, or how technology could be used to improve the aesthetic values of their different dances. For NTU, since the school chose our dance club, we performed Latin dance. No link to tradition. But if you think harder, you'll realise that Singapore is a cosmopolitan city, an international hub. And people around are getting more and more interested to social and ballroom dancing. So, we are potraying the modern side of Singapore(Crap!) Hahaha. Anyway, we have people from different universities of ASEAN countries. It was so interesting chatting with people from a different world and a different culture. If it's not for this forum, I wouldn't know that in Philippines, it is a norm to have a driver to drive you around. If it's not for this forum, I would't know that Thais are great dancers. If it's not for this forum, I wouldn't know how friendly people are (although for some nationalities, we have problem communicating in English). And I wouldn't have known the history of Singapore and I wouldn't have the chance to make so many new friends:D

For the closing ceremony, two universities will be paired up to come up with a performance. We need to incorporate all the things we learnt (the technology part) into our traditional performances. We were paired up with Vietnam National University, Hanoi. They were really sweet people. Friendly and helpful too. We end up doing the Vietnamese bamboo dance with five different types of songs (Chinese, English, Tamil, Malay, and Vietnamese). We even add in some acting. We thought our performance was quite playful and the feed back from organizers were good. They said our performance was very relax and refreshing. Hahaha...But the Vietnamese were so sweet. The girls even gave us their traditional hat as souvenirs. :D

The five days to me was too short. I hope the others could stay longer in Singapore. Now that I flashback, I hope I could still be in PGPR, with all of them. I wish we could still walk around together, chat with each other about our own country and culture. All of it was so fun. But it ended. I am back to reality and back to work(new internship!). I hope I could meet all of them again. I promised myself that I will go over to their countries to visit them when I have the ability. It's such and eye opening event and thank god for "forcing" me to sign up. If not, I'll missed all the fun:D

P/S: We even get to learn how to do Noh(Japanese traditional dance), Wayang Wong and Beijing Opera!

Long Weekend

Two Fridays ago, it was Vesak day. This means, HOLIDAYS! Yes and so happen it fell on a Friday so this means LONG HOLIDAYS!! So me decided to take a bus back home after work without realizing that it was a huge mistake. Ok! I nearly missed my bus home but thank god boyfriend and I reached exactly a few minutes before the bus left. But no dinner for both of us. Anyway after that, it was another 4 hours of travelling back to grandma's in Perak the next day. On Sunday, when we were supposed to take bus back to Singapore, boyfriend miscalculated his travel time and caused us to nearly miss our bus, again! But luckily, we spotted the bus and stop it right before it went to nowhere land. Phew... This long weekend was really exciting with loads of running, chasing and travelling. But my nightmare didn't end here, when we finally reached Singapore's Custom in Tuas (normally people especially buses don't use this lane because by entering, you'll need to pay), I thought we could reach school soon. But what appears in front of me was a long stretch of buses, and beside me on the car lane was EMPTY!

Empty car lane vs long stretch of buses in the bus lane

Apparently there were more buses during the long weekends. So wait, wait, waited for one hour before custom clearing :( By the time we took a cab back to our room (after 12 midnight, no more buses) it was almost 1.30 am and boyfriend and I had to have instant noodles for dinner (but it was delicious:D)

After that weekend, everything was good especially for boyfriend. He got a second scholarship from Capitaland which gives him more benefits in terms of money and future. So happy for him. So we went to New York New York for a small celebration. The food was good but I'm not sure if it was because it's been a long time since we had such good food or because we were hungry and happy. Haha but anyway, yeah their burger and was awesome. Especially the beef patty, it was 3/4 cook (I think) but it was so juicy and mind you, no blood smell. Here are some pictures of our food.

From left to right, up to down: Whole spring chicken, baked mussels, beef burger, chocolate smoothie (I can't really remember the exact name for the food)

This week, I'm not going to spend anyday in NTU. (Yes! No more shabby motel) Hahaha I am going to NUS for ASEAN Youth Forum. I am very excited because I get to perform in front of people from different country of ASEAN and also get to know more about their cultural and country. Most importantly, we'll be able to see how's their performing arts.