thoughts escaping my mind
We had to get chains for Yosemite. And the first car we got couldn’t be fitted with snow chains. So we made the 1.5 hour drive back to the airport to change the car.
When we returned to get chains, we realised that the chains cost $65.55. No choice. No chains = no Yosemite.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve done more shopping than I have in the last 10 years.
Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I think I’m close.
In the Straits Times today, 19th October 2009, the article “Food bloggers face legal heat over reviews“, caught my eye.
Here we go again.
The Primary Sixers are taking their PSLE and they’re not pleased the Mathematics paper is harder than they anticipated. (See Parents Up In Arms Again Over PSLE Mathematics Paper)
Even the top students felt the bite and some were unable to complete the paper.
I don’t know why such things make news in Singapore. But since it does, I wish that when such reports are made, they’d interview someone else that puts things in perspective.
Since they don’t, I’ll volunteer some thoughts. And I’ll get right to the point by dealing with points brought up in the article.
As a child, during mooncake festival, there was nothing more I loved than the Lotus Mooncake with two yellow yolks. I despised the nut version, which I found lacking in nuts, and full of winter melon. It was too sweet and too rich.
Somewhere between then and about 8 years or so ago, when I had almost completely stopped eating mooncake, both lotus and nut version, I decided to taste a nut mooncake again.
That was the turning point. Not only did I start to eat mooncake again whenever mooncake festival came, I switched from my preference of lotus mooncakes to nut mooncakes.
During this time, of course, snow skin mooncakes had come up in popularity and they seem to be going strong still, judging from the new flavours coming out every year. But it never won me over. It’s the initial taste of flour that hits the tongue that I can’t get over. And some snow skin mooncakes have an overwhelming stench of artificial flavouring, much like the smell of cheap perfumed cards, that’s such a turn off.
Even though Mooncake Festival has come and gone, it’s only today that I managed to sit down with the nut versions of the mooncake from the popular Hong Kong bakeries of Wing Wah and Kee Wah.
My TransitLink Guide 2004 has been with me on every single bus trip. My well-thumbed guide, with sections that have fallen out and now sometimes out-of-date, has even taken me to places I didn’t intend to go because of route changes. Which is okay, because I get to go to places I would not have, and discover things I wouldn’t have seen. That’s the joy of travel in a country I call home, but don’t know so well.
Now, four years on, I decided to upgrade to a shiny new TransitLink Guide 2009.
For years, the then Bus Guide, now TransitLink Guide has seen very little change in format. Today, for S$2.50 including GST, I’m now the owner of a copy of the hefty mini Yellow Pages of the public transportation system.
Is the new TransitLink guide an upgrade, a ho-hum side-grade or worse, a downgrade?
Today is the first time I’m spending Mooncake Festival alone in a long while. It used to be that my mother would make us have mooncake, tiny yams and that horned coconut tasting thing, which I don’t know what it’s called. We would consume this with good Chinese tea, sitting under the full moon.
So, I decided to conduct my mooncake tasting tonight.
Originally, I wanted just to compare the mooncakes I’d gotten from Hong Kong from Kee Wah and Wing Wah, since out of four people who spoke to me about mooncakes, the preference was split 50-50. But, my sister brought over a specimen from East Ocean, so I put that to the test too.
hese are all the maps for my travel from 27th July to 15th Sept 2009. They are dated according to UTC time.
First the main overview of the trip in USA, with two problematic spikes, it’s generally quite accurate.
And then the one of Hong Kong.
So today was an early day for me. 6:30am out of the house to the market to get some inspiration for Friday’s barbecue, but I found none.
Instead, what I did find was a pack labeled “animal meat” at Sheng Siong.
