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!

More food!!

Remember the last post when I talked about the frozen roti prata? Here is the cooked version of it!! I didn't know that it would look exactly the same as REAL prata... and it tasted really crispy too! Totally wonderful.

Morwenna made scones today... And she generously gave us 4 big scones. Very nice! In fact, nicer than those that I tasted before at home~

And we tried to imitate how lucie and her cooked the pasta that day. And it turned out very very nice too. I think the creamy sauce can't be seen clearly on this picture though. :)

I simply love food... Wait till you see my size when I get home!

Shopping for food

Yea, that is always our hobby. Daryl and I crave for salmon nearly everyday, and we will always try to find expiring salmon in Alepa and Prisma (the supermarkets here). Expiring food will have discounts, and salmon will be on 50% discount when it is expiring! When our luck is good, we will manage to buy... They will disappear very fast from the shelf!

Today we managed to buy this pizza for 45cents euros! There are shrimps on it... Taste so-so, but well, it was a good buy.


And we went shopping for food in Helsinki with mq. We managed to find the Asian Shop and guess what we bought!! ROTI PRATA! Frozen one of course, but I really miss it!! So I bought 2 packets. One packet has 5 plain prata. We also bought red bean paste tang yuan, and CHILLI! Im so very satisfied with the xiao la jiao. It is very extremely hot (like the one I always eat in Sunplaza which comes with my dried guo tiao with fishballs, omg.. im missing it like crazy).

1.20 euros. Very worth~

We bought this crazy, ugly-looking fish at 4.60 euros after deciding for quite some time. Haven't tasted it yet.. it is 0.786kg.

Dinner with French

It was really an enjoyable evening with the 2 French girls that we befriended here! One of them is my flatmate (Morwenna), and the other is her friend (Lucie), who is also in the same faculty as her. They are in the forestry or "paper" department. Interesting right? We dont have forest in singapore.. so, we dont have such a course in nus.

I initially wanted this dinner because i wanted to know how Morwenna cook real pasta. The pasta that she cooked always have this smell that is really tempting. So i asked her if we could cook a meal together, and she invited Lucie along.

Morwenna wanted to taste something Chinese and she sounded excited when we were talking about it on msn (we talk on msn sometimes even though we are just next door... weird right?) So in the end, daryl and i decided to cook something in return for them since they are teaching us how to cook tasty pasta. And this is how it ended up...

During the dinner, we talked about our family, our names etc. And I found out that "Yvonne" and "Eugene" (my brother's name) are actually french names! Ha... (mummy.. u like french people huh). According to them, "yvonne" is a name that reminds them of old people, like a grandmother or some 50 plus year old women. Lucie also showed me through internet some places of interest to go in France when we travel. And surprisingly, both of them will be leaving Finland on the 20 May(same day as us)! And Lucie also said that she would show us around Paris for a day, because she really like the city. Yeah, we have a tourguide for a day! They also asked us about Singapore, and all that we could mention was the esplanade, sentosa and the high rise buildings. It is so different from them... they showed me pictures of nature, the mountains near their school, the parachutes etc. And we were laughing at how wikipedia described durian and how much i love durian. (they didnt know about this fruit)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durian

"its odor is best described as pig-shit"

"Comparisons have been made with the civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray, and used surgical swabs"

and something about sacrifising self-respect after eating it...

Our dinner

We had pasta with brocoli, mushrooms and fish (something like tuna but it is in bigger pieces) and they mixed salt, pepper, milk, cream and curry powder to make the sauce for the pasta.

Fry the onions.

With butter. Salted. (Morwenna loves salted butter)

Add mushrooms.

Boil pasta with brocoli.

Put onions, mushrooms and brocoli into sauce and cook with fish.

And this is what u get.

Its really GoOD.

And then it was our turn...

Fried rice and bah ku teh.

We put chicken floss on top of the rice...

Oh.. and I burnt plastic while cooking. I added the rock honey into the soup and left it near the stove so the plastic got burnt and the whole kitchen stinked. We had to open the window to let the poisonous gas out.. i was so paiseh.

Morwenna was very amazed at how chicken can turn into floss that looks like the PULP that she made from trees! Pulp and chicken floss really resemble each other. Really. Should have taken a photo of her pulp.

And then we had green bean soup for dessert. They have never tasted sweet soup before and I think Lucie didn't like it... but Morwenna finished the whole bowl that we served her! Good girl, Morwenna. and she ate 2 plates of fried rice too.

They love my pineapple tarts. Think they ate about 10? haha...

So glad that they have the same taste as me.

Say goodbye... it was near midnight.

Hope Lucie caught the last train n bus home.

back to sch work...

Well its finally time for us to settle down from our holiday and start working abit already... We have a few projects and assignments to complete and exams coming up, but they are nothing compared to when we were in NUS.

We presented NUS to the students in our department in TKK yesterday. I think our presentation was very simple and anyhow. Ha... But at least we did something, for our sep award.

By the way, the song playing in the background is the theme song (by Tank) for the Taiwanese show "hua yang shao nian shao nu". It is a show which Ella and Wu Zhun acted in, and taiwan is still in playing it everyweek on tv... Daryl and I are watching it everyweek too on YouTube. We love it. Highly recommended show! :)

a little More on Russia...

The Russian hat that Daryl bought as souvenir! Everyone tried it on... haha. Who looks the best in it?

My "thirst" for beer! haha...

Russian dolls!

A photo with Lenin.