surprise! brithday party

It was actually a birthday party for Hitomi, as meiqing has planned. It was just supposed to be the 5 of us (me, daryl, mq, hitomi and her husband). And then, I had to prepare food for her birthday party... I cooked mee fen. When we started eating, the other guys came in with candles... And so, i was shocked.. like what are they doing here. And they started singing happy birthday so i happily sang with them until the part.. "happy birthday to ..." .. i still thought that they were here specially to make up numbers and celebrate for Hitomi. Until they sang my name! haha..

Look at my ice cream cake that meiqing and hitmomi baked for me,

and the chocolate cake meiqing and i baked for hitomi!

Sharing the joy of our birthday cakes! In Singapore, we would never have bothered to bake cakes ourselves...

I love my cake alot!!!!

Present from Hitomi

And we had lots of food... 2 cakes, mee fen, sushi which hitmoi's husband made, 2 pizzas, green bean soup, nuggetSs! ate till super full...

and of course, champagne!!! We were screaming "yuuuuuuuuuum seng!"

Jorge's place

Yesterday night my flatmates and I went to a mexican dinner prepared by a guy friend here... His name is Jorge.. you would most probably pronounce it as "george"? Cause I did.. but it is pronounced is the weirdest pronounciation that I will never have thought of. It is "hor-hay".

Anyway, the dinner is simple, but really delicious!

This green mixture is avocado. Its nice leh...

Some meat with peppers and tomatoes

Put them together with salsa sauce. Yummy! I like the salsa sauce alot.

And i fell down.. :(

It was morwenna's fault (just kidding). daryl and i took the lift then she used the stairs. And she pressed the lift at every floor so we stopped at every floor. Sigh. So when i got out she started running and so i chased her.. and i lost my balance somehow and fell. And there are bruises and blood even though I was already wearing jeans loh. Sianzz.

weekend shopping n travel plans

Daryl bought an external hard disk, 320GB for 99 euros! Its cheap right? I really feel like buying one for myself, but I think I've no use for it at the moment cause can share with him. But what if I need one next time? Can't decide whether to buy or not...

I finally ate reindeer meat! Well, it tastes almost like deer meat I guess. I like it! Cannot really see the meat from this picture, its all hidden. We bought this from the Market square in town. The bread is quite special, a little bit like doughnut kind.


This is a street in my school. It is not clear from this picture, but the sky was really red and beautiful when the sun sets. The colour of the sky is really pretty, sometimes i can see rainbow colours too! It was the beginning of spring a few days ago, and the weather can be quite nice somtimes. Like there is cold air/wind, yet there is sun that adds a little warmth.

Our travel plans for easter break. We lengthen our easter break and are going to the following places! :) Tight budget to stick to... sigh.

2 - 3 apr: Sweden, Stockholm

3 - 4 apr: Belgium, Brussels

4 - 7 apr: Holland, Amsterdam

7 - 9 apr: Austria, Vienna

9 - 12 apr: Czech, Prague

12 - 16 apr: Germany, Berlin

pia-ing project in school

We are finally done with the "major" part of the project! (hopefully) Actually, we are only done with the minor part and not the major part because what the professor proabably wants to see is the report which is essay type. And what we have done are all the difficult calculations before we can start on the report. Haha.. And this project is those simulation type, and so it is hard to say whether we still have mistakes or "bugs" in our work... We were all very happy when we were done for the day :)

And this is our little cosy corner in the ISE department where we do our project. Its a place for eating and reading and its really quite nice cause the seats are so comfortable. I think if NUS has this environment, it will be filled with students studying all the time! Haha.. Here, it is peaceful and quiet, and most of the time empty.

Daryl made fun of me. *sobs* But i think its rather funny!

And i went running in the cold today! It was really cooling. Haha. Quite nice to run, i just had my t-shirt and a jacket with trackpants on. It isn't cold when I am running... but its quite ma fan cos need to wash the jacket after sweating in it.

I had a bad time baking a cake myself that day... I stupidly put the margarine into the mixture without melting it first. So i had a lot of difficulties trying to melt it. I tried taking them out again, melt and put them back into the mixture.. it was horrible.. i guess some of the egg was cooked in the process and all the margarine didn't melt. In the end i had to seek my flatmate's help cause I was so upset and didn't know what to do. She said it was alright with the pieces of margarine inside so I continued to make the cake. It turned out nasty of course, but still edible. Sigh. What a cake...

Estonia - Tallinn

We took a ship (3hrs distance), to Estonia, Tallinn at 9pm. We spent a night on board the ship and came out the next day early at 7am.

Tallinn's old town is small, we only spent less than a day there... The buildings look rather cute to me. A building can have windows of different sizes anywhere they want. One thing that really disappointed me was that the souvenirs are not cheap at all! Not like what I hear from other people... "Tallinn is cheap!" A fridge magnet cost me around 9 sing dollars. And the worst thing is, we stupidly exchanged money at a super lousy rate with service charge. Totally sian diao.

Fat Margaret Cannon Tower

I really like the shape of the tower... its really cuuuute to me!

The traffic light is different

Town hall

Three sisters

Alexander Nevski Cathedral

One of the shophouses selling chocolates

Beer House for Lunch!

In the beer house! Those big menus...

The Singaporean GANG

Sharing a meal makes me feel less fat...

Along the town wall

Toompea Castle

Church of the Holy Ghost

House of the brotherhood of the Blackheads

One of the reasons why I can list out most of the names of the buildings is that they have this brochure of the map of the Old Town, which looks like an amusement park map to me. :) oh how I love Tallinn's cuteness. Just look at those buildings behind...awww... i really love them.

I want these souvenirs... haha...

Have you visited a chocolate factory b4?

Yes I visited Finland's very own chocolate factory! The company's name is Cloetta Fazer. When we first reached the place, the aroma of chocolate/cookie greeted us... it was really grrrrreat! I feel that I can just die happily ever after just smelling it.



Picture of the entire factory


We watched 2 videos about the origins of the chocolate and chocolate factory. Cloetta was originally a Swedish confectionary company while Fazer was Finnish... A few years ago then they merged to form the current company. But mostly fazer owned it, because fazer owned themselves plus 40+% of Cloetta! (hope my info is accurate..) The videos were rather lame. Haha... We didn't get to see the real chocolate making process, but nevertheless, it was a super great trip! here are some photos...


We wore this "cap" for hygenic purposes and looked at the showrooms that they brought us.

At the entrance


And we were given free chocolates to eat! :P Really free.... but we cannot bring them out. However, a few people slotted some chocolates into their jacket... I did "steal" some small ones. It was really great eating chocolate like nobody's business. But after awhile I became sick of the taste and stopped eating. Too much at one go can really make me sick. But i still LOVE chocolate, of course.

The free chocolate eating station


Pillars of chocolates...




Free goodie bag!


Of course, I bought chocolates at the shop in Fazer.... I was abit crazy and grabbed alot of chocolates. Luckily Daryl stopped me from buying too much. But in the end, I still spent about 30 euros on chocolates. Haha. They are for my friends and family, yesh. Now you all can't wait for the me to come back right? :)

Fazer chocolate is really great. Yum, i love it.

Last snowman before snow disappears!

Some good buys! I bought this addidas shoe bag from a 2nd hand shop at only 3 euros... Its condition is still almost as good as new, maybe the model is old, but who cares? Hehe... its really cheap and useful to me!


And daryl loved this figurine... it is made of metal and its playing tennis! is it going to be a good serve?


Say hi to Ruva, the snowgirl that me and fauve made this evening. She is so girly with fauve's scarf and cap :) I thought it wasn't going to be a success cause most of the snow have melted and winter is ending, but luckily we found an area where there is still snow and the snow still sticks together well...


Looks like polar bear~

haha.. yes, FOOD again.

We had another dinner with the french girls and fauve (my the other room mate) today. I should call this a failed dinner somehow... haha. We were supposed to cook gratin (a french dish), and apple crumble. But lucie just had something similar a few days ago, so she decided to try something new together. And so we made milkies... I am not sure how it is spelt.

It turned out quite nice, I feel. But Lucie said the real one taste so much better. Anyway the process of making it was really funny. First we cooked the potatoes, and mashed them and then we add butter, eggs, salt, pepper and flour to the potatoes. Next we tried to put them into ball shapes and throw them into the boiling water... but it was a total failure because they were too sticky together. So we added more flour, and tried again, and more flour.. and more flour.. n more. And then we decided to stop because it was not working! In the end, Fauve came out with this brilliant idea of wetting our hands, so that the mixture doesnt stick to our hands that much. And it worked! So we just, aiya dont care just do it... After cooking it for awhile in the water, we took them out and fried them. And then put them into the oven with alot of cheese on top. And here it is.... The little balls looked like dou sa bing to us. They were supposed to be round, but they weren't cause 5 itchy hands were doing it and so we had alot of different shapes and sizes.

some carrots and sauce to go with.

The apple crumble.

Nice on the outside, bad in the inside. The apples were not soft enough...So we put it into the oven again... Morwenna was laughing like a crazy girl high on happy pills when she served us the final product of the apple crumble. They don't even allow us to look at it! They also added some vanilla ice cream to our servings. The food just went wrong the whole night... haha, not our day! (because the other time, lucie made really tasty apple crumble)

We played some games... The french actually play a simplified version of tai tee... They don't look at the colour of the card, just play by the numbers. and they had nothing like our 5 cards patterns, we can put 1 or double, triple or 4 cards. And once the person put a card "5", the next one has to put "6" or bigger. So it is really simple! haha... and then they also played like the loser gives the winner 2 cards and the 2nd last position gives 1 card to the 2nd position.

The next game we played was to write a sentence on a piece of paper, and the next person will see the sentence and draw it out. It is then passed on to the next person, and he is supposed to guess what the drawing is about and write something out, ( the first sentence will be covered of course) and so on. Quite funny!