life in singapore

Singapore has been home to me for the past nearly one month and I must say I’m starting to adjust to the lifestyle here though still massively missing my family, dogs, friends, god daughter, food etc in KL.

Though everyone keeps telling me that Singapore is a VERY small place, I am still stuck in the little girl in big city syndrome (for now). I am still discovering places and restaurants (mostly) but am still not satisfied with the knowledge I have (or the lack of it) of shopping places in Singapore. In KL / PJ I know exactly where to go to get what I want and know my way around almost every major shopping mall. I know where to park, where the shops are, how to plan my shopping....and most importantly, I can DRIVE myself there. Honestly I don’t know what a luxury driving is until I got here. I am not referring to the morning and after office hour jams but more of the weekend shopping driving and driving myself around to run errands kind of driving.

Over in Singapore whenever I don’t have Oscar with me I have to take the CAB. Before you think I’m being atas or uppity-markety and all that, let me just say that the nearest MRT station to my place is about 25 – 30 minutes walk (in slippers, may I add) and the nearest bus stop is around 20 minutes walk (in slippers too). So it’s virtually impossible to get real public transport – just about the only thing I hate about where I am living!! So I have to resort to taking cabs – it costs me roughly SGD12 to get to work (when Oscar can’t drop me) with the stupid ERPs and about SGD9 to get back from work. But the beauty of it all is, I am actually early every morning and it takes me less than 10 minutes to get to work. On days where Oscar does drop me at the other end of the road (it’s easier for me to turn back to his direction which is the total opposite of where I work), I get a very relaxing walk by the river along Boat Quay, and it takes me about 6 minutes to get to my building.

This was taken at about 8am

peaceful....

looking back at the famous stretch on boat quay

my office at the bank of china building, which is next to the fullerton hotel

Oscar and I have spent a fair bit of time happily exploring the restaurants around Muhammed Sultan, which is within walking distance to our place though we have vowed to cut down considerably as it is NOT a cheap way to feed ourselves!!! Hence he is subjected to my cooking (which he says he likes – I’m not sure if it’s because it’s really home-cooked food that he misses or it’s the fact that he doesn’t need to pay crazy amount of money to feed us... hehe). It’s quite nice to chill out in front of the TV with a bottle of wine and chilling out at home sometimes, as Oscar likes to call “normal things normal people do at normal times”. Doing all these little things together is bringing us closer together as we both know how precious these moments are, especially when we were deprived of doing all the “normal everyday stuff” two years ago. Plus, it helps that we have a pretty good view of Singapore from our place...

view from our place

muhammad sultan at the foreground and part of Spore behind it

Oscar’s been really sweet, taking me around to various places in Singapore for food and wine – this is one thing we definitely have in common – we’re both foodies!!! I think I will do some justice and try to document these trips so I can at least remember where he takes me. I do remember a few though...

I absolutely loved L’Angelus, the French restaurant at Club Street. I will remember to document my next visit there as the food was absolutely excellent. I had the best Duck Confit (sorry I don’t remember the exact name of this dish – but it was a damn good duck confit lah!) and the Escargots were simply heavenly. I have always felt a bit icky about eating snails and my few past attempts at eating GARDEN SNAILS were not very pleasant so I politely declined when this arrived. After some coaxing and his “mmmmm......this is sooooo good...you sure you don’t want to try?” I agreed to try the sauce. And then I thought if the sauce was that good the damn snail can’t be that bad. And I ended up finishing half of it! I can’t remember what wine we had but it was so good we ended up having 2 bottles. See lah, this is why I need to start taking photos!

Another place I liked was Picotin at the Turf Club Road. We went there for brunch one Sunday and I ordered the wild mushroom soup and the pan seared scallops. YUMMY!!! Oscar had a rabbit leg which I refused to try because I cannot get over the fact that he’s eating what was once a fluffy white bunny. Yes that’s just me being very food-naive but hey I got over the snails thing maybe one day I will have one small nibble of the poor bunny rabbit. In some yummy sauce (I know because I dipped the chips into the sauce – but I DID NOT eat the bunny).

There’s this other place near our house called Boomerang – an Australian restaurant by Robertson Quay that serves Fish & Chips like the ones I used to get at Freemantle in Perth. I have tried nothing else on the menu so I can’t comment but have been there at least 4 times for Fish & Chips (such a nostalgic feeling) and shared a couple of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc (which is like our favourite type of wine to order) and copious amounts of Victoria Bitter.

Would write more but am going to head home now.....more to come!