The weekend it rained

Rainy weekend summary :-
Food places visited - Hong Lim Complex, The Chambers, PS Cafe, Toa Payoh food centre, island creamery
Dvds watched - Riding alone for a thousand miles, Keeping Mum
Sports watched - World Cup (Eng vs Paraguay), French open finals (Nadal vs Federer)
ECA - visited RiverPlace apartments, spa at Goodwood Hotel


I had planned an exciting weekend last week...unfortunately, I can't plan the weather :(. Besides the usual shopping at orchard and apartment viewing, I arranged for some friends to meet at Botanical Gardens as there was a free latin concert showing..I even prepared the picnic basket in my mind - terra cotta chips (huge bag compliments of my darling sister Lynda), chocolate cake(compliments of eddie), drinks, mat, insect repellant...BUT, it rained the WHOLE sunday!

Nevertheless, it was a good weekend..Jin and I decided we had enough of expensive meals and wanted to try the local fare instead. We bought a book titled "Makan places lost and found - spore" and that took us to Hong Lim complex in Chinatown to eat Mee Pok. The shop had like 3 chopsticks from Mr Seto of Makansutra fame as well as several awards from different bodies. I personally would give it a 2.5 star rating out of 5. Maybe because I like my Mee Pok gravy to be spicy and the sauce in this place just did not do it for me. After eating, we walked by the other shops and found a long queue at a curry chicken mee store. Jin also discovered that this area sells Msian bak kut teh. So this coming weekend, we will bring our in-laws (visiting for a week) to try out the curry mee and bak kut teh. I can't wait!

Saturday night saw us at UE area where we watched a pathetic game of England beating Paraguay 1-0. Thank goodness for David Beckham to oogle at, otherwise Wee Hoon and I would have been absolutely BORED. There was a good size crowd at Chambers, however, the service and food gets a negative 5 star rating (if there was such a rating!). I will let IZ comment in his blog on how disastrous the service and food was. Thankfully, there was Canele where I had the Gataeux Chocolat. This was even more heavenly than the Opera I had the night before!

Sunday, Eddie and Yen Ling hopped over for a game of tennis..BUT, because it was raining, the guys ended up exercising their minds and fingers instead on the x-box. YL and I wanted to burn off some calories in anticipation for the brunch we planned at PS Cafe so we hit the gym for a good workout.

PS cafe - hmm, my 3rd visit there and I am still not impressed with the food (we had the pork loaf salad)..how I rate this aspect is based on VALUE. For a certain price, one must compromise with certain quality. A salad dish costing more than $S20 shld taste pretty good but at PS Cafe..not! I have to give them top marks for the gorgeous ambience..very relaxing and charming, a perfect place for brunch on a lazy Sunday morning (as you can see from Jin and Ed's faces). Their ginger pudding dessert which I had previously (they don't serve it a brunch) is what pulls me to come back. I am such a sucker for good desserts :p

We spent the remainder of Sunday being absolute coach potatoes. Watched "Keeping Mum" on dvd and the british humour cracked us up. My restless self got pretty irritated with the constant rain and seeing botanical gardens escapade was out of the window, we decided to calm me with tea ;). Again, we went to another local hawker site at Toa Payoh Lorong 5, one of my favourites due to the good number of variety and easy parking.

I usually go straight for the rojak and belacan stingray but decided to try the fish ball noodles this time round..the queue at this store is always a mile long so I was really happy to be number 5 in line instead of 20. My happiness was short live when I realised the lady at the front ordered like 5-6 packets..good grief! Anyway, back to the noodles..they were absolutely delicious! Jin was shocked I liked it so much as he knows I am not much of a fish ball noodle fan.

Tea would not be complete without dessert. Took Jin to check out Island Creamery, local ice cream shop which sells unique flavours such as bandung, pulut hitam, teh tarik, cendol etc. We bought a tub of teh tarik back for in-laws to try..it's surprisingly good!

Ended the weekend with a spa treat at Goodwood Park Hotel's Aspara spa. We both had the body bliss package consisting of an orange sugar scrub and balinese massage for 90 minutes. Can a girl ask for a more perfect weekend? yes, if only it did not rain :p