bouncer's birthday party

Daph msged me on tues to ask me to go to bouncer's birthday bash at no.5 emerald hill, and i was wondering who the hell bouncer was. turns out, bouncer's the plastic golden retriever in cold storage that we used to put coins into when we were kids -_-" who would have thought that, that dog had a name!

ssssssspppaaaiiiinnnn

Hola once again! it has been eons since i last blogged :) and i have finally got down to transferring my spain pics into the laptop, and then to posting them on my blog. so here they are :) scroll on down...................



left to right: #1 & 2: milan airport - super bare and boring looking, i don't even know how to describe it. #3: in the cab on the way out of barcelona airport.
on the streets of sagrada familia. we had to go for a one hour stroll because our hotel room was not ready yet. the busker who pretended to be christopher columbus looked so life-like.
15 out of the 1000 pics of the la sagrada familia temple that we took. it's been under construction for hundred over years, and they are not going to finish it anytime soon. the last two pics at the bottom were taken at the back of the church. the architecture here is pretty different from the front, more on the modernism side.

on the way back to the hotel, we found a grocery shop tt sold huge ass tomatoes! and happy yellow traffic lights.
took a train to barcelona city centre. didn't really know what to do, so we took a long stroll, ermm....did a bit of shopping...haha and headed to the rambla (dunno how to spell).
the market. aren't the sweet shops colourful? i think i can stand there and gaze at the fruits, sweets, gelato, nuts etc for hours!
this is the rambla...tons of buskers, artists, and shops selling birds/fish/rabbits/hamsters/squirrels/other weird animals on this street...very interesting :)

this is the harbour at the end of the rambla. check out the sky...so clear and blue! oh and that's the butt of good old colon...he's standing on top of that huge post.
my dad's ex-colleague's daughter..erm...i suddenly forgot her name. but she's really cute. she has this skin condition that causes her to constantly gives her rashes all over, so her parents taught her the importance of being clean, and she's obsessed with it! she CANNOT STOP cleaning the table and her hands. i think if this goes on, she's gonna have OCD. haha...and she gave me this really dirty looking old frog puppet from her school, and i had to entertain her with it -_-" i'm such a loser...even kids try to take advantage of me, and make me their entertainer

:( maybe clowning can be my new career.
we had our first paella after that, at this pretty posh restaurant. yes....we were so not dressed for dining there. but aiya whatever...
the next day we met another of my dad's collegue, and he brought us to montserat. we took a train up the mountains to the cathedral/monastery up in the mountains.
that's my dad's colleague, antonio. he reminds me of the man in mary poppins who laughed so much he floated up to the ceiling, and he had a tea party up there :P

the cathedral. the third picture from the left, on the third row shows the room in the cathedral where people leave their items - that represent various things that they have gone through - to give thanks to God. some things we saw there...the driving p-plate, baby bibs, socks, photos, leg/arm casts, neck brace, letters, toy cars/guns, dolls etc.
this is on the streets of barcelona again, in the oldest neighbourhood of barcelona. we had lunch in a restaurant that's located in an old castle off one of the main streets. and my sis and i had a pretty good chat with antonio's sons - xavi and alberto - exchanging info about our culture and all that stuff..but errrrm... there were times when we both just like laughed at what each other said but had absolutely no clue about what the other was talking about. haha
photos that we took from the barcelona tour bus. tons of architecture by gaudi, the tallest building in barcelona (building of their local bank)
madrid...madrid...the pic on the left is the posh hotel that we stayed...across from. haha! ours is the one on the right..with all the scaffolding. breakfast was included, and every morning we got one slice of bread, one croissant, some jam, a cup of coffee/tea and a glass of very sour orange juice :S
on gran via in madrid. and in the chinese restaurant...first taste of chinese food in like 4-5 days. it felt like heaven! but then we had like all the rest of our meals there, and then it started to feel like hell...sigh....

real madrid palace. my dad kept asking us to hurry cos he was late. and then we asked him what he was late for..and he said he was late in going to the veranda to wave to his subjects who were waiting for him below, to greet them for the day. sheesh....
dinner at the florida park. damn blardee expensive dinner this was, but we went coz we wanted to watch the flamenco performance. how can you go to spain and not catch the bull fight and flamenco right??? but we didn't manage to watch any bull fight, coz the season was over in spain and madrid.
ok i have no idea what these buildings are. the sound system on board the madrid vision was dam bad...so we just snapped away like mad, with utterly no clue as to what we were looking at.
this is the......ermmmmmm....i forgot the name,but i gotta go check. see that picture at the bottom right? tt's ham and hammier.
my art piece...heh...not the fat blob of a sister of course..but the pictures.

holy toledo. erm i forgot the name of the cathedral already....i am hopeless with names...
still at toledo......

hah! this i know....the synagogue (which has since been converted into a catholic church) and the st joan monastery.
sevilla. the macdonald's signboard here is black, and because it is black, we can never find it. you might think it's bullshit, but it's true...you can look down the entire street and not notice that macs is there. and that's yet another one of the gazillion cathedrals that we visited, and the yellow walled area is the barrio.
the end of our journey and the start of our 30 hour journey home! we took the renclaffe trenhotel from sevilla to barcelona (12 hours) and then the plane back to sg (13 hours) i almost went crazy. it was damn fun to sleep in the bunk of the train...reminded us of the scene in sex and the city..heh.

stewie rocks!

to all who have sons or will have sons in the future...i hope your son will be as cute as this little terror! (minus the part where he constantly plots to kill his mom of course....and also the part where he plans to dominate the world with his laser toy gun..)

back :(

good day! ok not so good a day, but anyway, i'm back in singapore..and...sadly...back in the office too :( don't really have much to do today, or rather i can't really remember what i have to do. ha! so the long break that i took not only relieved me of all my work burdens and stress, but has also helped to erase my memory. Hence, i am very much still in a holiday mood, and have absolutely no intention to begin on my work (plus, it's one day to the weekends!).

more about spain. didn't manage to blog after i left barcelona coz i didn't have access to the internet while i was in madrid, and i was too lazy to blog when i was in sevilla. madrid's a very nice city too, but it's more busy and modern than barcelona. a good way to picture the difference between barcelona and madrid, would be to imagine the difference between melbourne and sydney (that's if u have been to melb and syd before..). barcelona = melbourne, and mardrid = sydney.

we stayed in an aparthotel (something like a service apartment, but a smaller one) in madrid on gran via (sort of like the city centre) and were right smack in the shopping district. I spotted a chinese restaurant 100m from our hotel, and stupidly pointed it out to my parents, so we ended up having our dinner there for all 4 nights that we spent in madrid, and we even had lunch there on one of the 4 days. sigh. on the second day that we were there, we bought a one day ticket for the madrid vision (something like the hippo tour bus in singapore) and spent half the day sitting on the top deck of the bus, going around madrid, looking at the architecture and getting baked and burnt in the hot sun. on the third day we took a one day trip to toledo, and visited tons of cathedrals, walked like mad dogs up the steep hills in the hot sun, and took millions of pictures again.

the next day we took the bullet train down south to sevilla and spent 2 days there. sevilla's damn hot and dry! it's like a freaking dessert. i think the temperature there was about 37degrees celcius. we were quite fortunate, because one day before, it was 41 degrees celcius there! i wasn't that impressed by sevilla even though many people said that it's VERY NICE. we took a walk from the hotel to the real palace and cathedral, and we also took a walk through the barrio (a typical neighbourhood in sevilla). the barrio was like a maze, and we almost got lost in there, and erm...it was supposed to be very beautiful, because of the small white houses and all, but honestly it didn't impress me. in fact, i felt pretty claustrophobic in that place. the walk almost killed us, because the sun was scorching and if u burn easily, u'll probably become chao tah 3mins after stepping out of the shade. humidity was probably zero, so we constantly felt dehydrated, and by the end of the walk, we had finished 4 bottles of water, our tongues were practically hanging out from our mouths like dogs, and we almost did a rain dance in the middle of the streets, and then another celebration dance when we managed to buy a 5L bottle of mineral water. oh...my sis said she started to hallucinate in the heat. she thought she saw a dog walking by when there was not a soul in sight, other than us.

on our second day in sevilla, we randomly boarded one of the public buses, paid 1euro each and spent like half an hour in the bus travelling to we have no idea where, and then got off at where we started from. then we took a walk through one of the many lanes, and ended up at a weekend flea market, where all the artists where selling their own art works. we spent close to an hour there looking at the paintings, then sitting under a tree and watching the world go by. we all had to cramp in a single room that day, because the hotel did not allow us to rent our double rooms for half a day, and we didn't want to pay that much because we were going to take the train back to barcelona at 8pm. it was damn tragic, we felt like we were squatters and refugees in a refugee camp, but we survived. haha!

ok i am getting lazy...to cut the long story short. i spent 30 hours travelling from sevilla back to barcelona, and then from barcelona back to singapore,by train then aeroplane after that. will post photos soon...i have 708 of them! *gulp* gotta go now...tons of ppl hanging around my area...not too convenient to blog anymore!

hola again!

just had breakfast, and waiting for everyone else to be done with their´s.

yesterday we went to montserrat. it´s a famous mountain in barcelona where a black figurine of virgin mary was found. it´s amazing how they managed to build a whole train track through the mountains, and my hands and feet were all clammy when i took the cable car up because...erm...well u know ...i am scared of heights :P the cathedral up there was very beautiful and yes, once again i took a million photos..will post them when i return!

after that we had lunch with my dad´s colleague and his colleague´s family, then we went shopping. the summer sale just started yesterday! i got a dress from zara that probably costs abt 120sgd for only 60sgd..haha! gonna tour the city of barcelona today...then more shopping..we spotted the H&M shop yesterday when we were about to head back to the hotel..so that´s a place that we must head to for sure!

anw...a bit out of point, but i must say this...the spanish women have freaking huge boobs that are constantly spilling out of their tops...or in other people´s way! gulp....

Hola!

Hola from the land of bull fights, zara, topshop and mango!

i´m currently staying in a hotel that is near the la segrada familia church and the weather here is absolutely beautiful. Everything in spain is nice, it takes about a million years to fly from singapore to here. thank god for SIA though, because the plane we took here was the new boeing i dunno what and the inflight entertainment was superb. but of course i had to stay out late for 3 nights before the day that i was supposed to fly, and i ended up sleeping 80% of the 12hour plane ride. We stopped over in milan for one hour, and i have to say...as the world´s fashion capital, it sure has one of the ugliest and barren airports in the world. there went my hopes of getting some good cheap branded handbags/wallets deals!

haven´t done anything much since we got here. we only went to the church and took maybe two million photos of it, and a walk down gran via - the main shopping street in barcelona. there is a hugeass zara there which i have yet to check out...and of course other shops like topshop, mango and all those brands that we singaporeans are suckers for. however, we did go into this other shop called bershka and they have nice and pretty cheap clothes there too. and because it is summer...the clothes are all in pretty and bright colours...woohoo!

we also took a loooooong walk down this other place tt i forgot the name...haha...and there were a lot of buskers along the street. pretty interesting sight. there were people posing as statues, singing, dancing, painting, and a whole load of shops selling birds, squirrels, hamsters, tortoises and yabbits. we had paella for dinner and...erm...sorry but i don´t like it. spanish food is freaking salty!

anyway one thing that amuses me is how the spanish people can ramble on in spanish trying to explain things to us, without a single hint in their faces tt they know tt we don´t understand a single thing they are saying. but nevermind, i will forgive them for they are a bunch of pleasant people...ha!

ok..time to head to the mountains...adieu!