A day of ups and downs …
An old friend of mine called me up for lunch and he brought another old friend of ours. They have decided to dine at New York New York and there we were, seated around a small table not unlike the movie setting of the three MoD (Mob of Death) in “Thank You for Smoking”. Except that I am now no longer in their industry anymore. And throughout the meal, the topics were all about what money can buy and how much more money they want. I guess moving into the non-profit industry does open up my horizon in a sense that there is a bigger picture out there whereby people are not only motivated by money such as national defense and nation building just to name a few. One down.
New York New York took over Nooch (that took over half of HMV at Citylink) and I thought the Western food concept must have worked better than Asian noodle. There seems to be quite a crowd. To cut a long story short (so that you can skip to the next paragraph), I will not go back there again. The service was bad as most of the servers cannot speak English (I joked that this is not Beijing Beijing). The servicing is slow (from food to bill). And the burger was the worst burger I have ever eaten in my life. The meat was soggy and tasted nowhere near to beef. The bread was soaked in butter. Just bad. One down.
Round the corner, I visited HMV, my favorite music store in town. Found Iron Maiden’s new CD and I was overjoyed. I listened to the first song and I fell in love with it. Then I walked around and found Tata Young’s new CD (she is from Thailand). I looked at the front cover and I was really tempted to take one home. THOSE LEGS! (see picture below) I did some serious sampling and concluded that if I was to buy that CD, it would have been for the cover. Some songs are nice. Most of them are pretty bad. So I just grabbed the Iron Maiden CD. One up.
Have you ever been inside a meeting room full of executives and you think to yourself, hmmm, perhaps this meeting could have been done in 10 minutes and why do we all have to sit for hours? One down.
Tuesday is usually the day when Cynthia, TK, and myself get together for a movie and a nice dinner. TK was not free so Cynthia decided to dine at Rice Table and do some shopping at Orchard. To those who are new to Rice Table, they serve Indonesian food in a sampling style. Upon arrival, they will bring along 14 dishes with rice and soup. We used to love the place. It is still hard to get a seat inside as booking is always required. Today we tried the food and the standard has gone down. I don’t think I will go back there again. One down.
I am impressed that Cynthia, who are not into high end cosmetic products, actually know more about SK-II than me. Okay. I confess. The only thing I know about SK-II is that it is an expensive but popular skincare brand. She told me that SK-II has Miracle Water. “Miracle Water? Ya right!” was my reply. And behold … one moment I was teasing Cynthia about Miracle Water, another moment, a rather decent looking beautician – fair skin with big eyes – was pouring Miracle Water onto Cynthia’s hand. I saw no miracle but I was too mesmerized by the ritual that I have totally forgotten that. While Cynthia has gotten herself some SK-II stuffs, I did some window shopping myself and decided on getting either Polo’s Black, Armani’s Code, or Dior’s High Energy, or all of the above the next time I transit Changi Airport (which is very soon). For such a happy shopping experience, one up.