Catch-up

Christmas and Chinese New Year time is normally the best and busiest time to catch up with friends and have a good dinner.

Tonight's catch up dinner was a little bit different. There was 5 of us and we're all ladies in our 30s. We have so much in common and yet we are all world's apart. We are living in different stages of our life : being pursue, dating, getting married, married and expecting a child. These are the best time of a woman's life.

BUT....after all these stages, what are the things to look forward to except for raising a kid ?

my new eyebrows

i remember writing about my eyebrows embroidery story back in 2012. if you have not read it before, read it here. as time passes by, the eyebrows colour will slowly fade away and i got teased a lot for not doing anything about it. coz the more 'accepted' eyebrows shape now is one thick line (i call it crayon shin chan eyebrows or the chinese character "one").

i tried drawing thicker brows but it doesn't suit me coz i have a small face (perasan..hehe) but it is true. i look weird to be honest! you can say i look top heavy...haha...

what i wanna say or share is that, i finally muster up the courage late last year to get it done again. as most places are charging a lot for it, i was reluctant. but i found someone who charges a reasonable amount for eyebrows embroidery and she will come to your house to do it as well which is a plus point.

this is a pic of my eyebrows before i re-do my eyebrows. you can see how thin it has become and why people teased me about it. i look tired most of the time and blah blah blah. 

this is my eyebrows after i got it done. yes, i did use b612 to take this pic therefore i look fairer but those eyebrows are mine and there's literally no downtime at all. it was painless and i look fresh, don't you agree?

if you are thinking of getting new eyebrows before CNY or for whatever reason, you can contact Meng at 017-2455329. i'm not being paid to do this ok? i just wanna share my 'beauty' secret. if you want to see more of what she does, LIKE her on Facebook here.

p r o s c a s t i n a t o r

after so many years, i realised that i'm good at starting something but really bad at finishing it. i've started sharing my japan holiday stories up to day 6 and decided that it has happened too long ago to remember or my brain is not working as well as it used to and i kept forgetting things and what happened. so, i've decided to just end the japan travel stories at day 6.

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yesterday, my brother came over to pass me some of my old treasures (4 bottles of absolut vodka - unopened...woohoo!) and we were just sitting down there chatting about nothing in particular and having an affogato each (coz we're luxe like that..)

i finally assembled the lego that i forced him to buy me and got it wrapped nicely before giving it to me a couple of days ago. it's a camper van lego and it's kinda cute and all. if you are keen, the lego model is #60117.

i had fun assembling it and since he was at my place, i asked him to go take a look at it. he brought it to the table and started playing with it and mind you he'll be turning 33 this year. while he was playing with it i tot of an idea. i said to him, 'hey! why don't you make them do sexy naughty things in a series of 4 photos and it tells a story?' he obliged as usual and this is the result :

the title of this story is Todd & Anna Lynn : Camping Fun.

Japan Trip Day 6 (Osaka Castle, Kiddyland, Yodobashi)

Honestly speaking, there are not many places for sightseeing in Osaka city. I personally felt that we should've stayed in Kyoto a bit longer. I'll do that the next time I visit Japan again!

So on Day 6, we finally found time for a proper sit down breakfast at Komeda Coffee.

 
They serve the best and fluffiest bread every tbh and everything tastes so healthy.

Off we go to Osaka Castle and to reach the castle, we must first walk through a park. It's not as scenic as Kyoto and we all felt that the air pollution here is higher.

 

 

I took a photo of the area (in case we got lost) which is silly because there is no way that we will get lost in Japan. It's a beautiful castle and smaller than we imagined it to be. There are 2 options to get in to the castle. One is to queue for the elevator and the other is to climb up quite a number of flight of stairs to get to the top.

We chose the latter because it was too hot to stand under the hot sun to queue and there were a lot of old people and parents with strollers. It was pretty tiring to climb all the way but the view was beautiful and it was windy AF up there. We love, love, love it!

We were expecting to see the place as it was centuries ago but it was converted into a museum with videos and stuff. It was fun to sit in on some of the video presentation to learn about the castle and the number of times it was burnt down and reconstructed.

After our cultural walk around the castle, we head on over to Umeda for some much needed shopping and free and easy time.

  

 

 

We went shopping around Umeda area (Kiddyland, Yodobashi, Hankyu etc). Bought some Gundam and One Piece ship just because we love Gunpla. Another happy day in Japan.

Japan Trip Day 5 (Universal Studio Osaka, Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan)

We took a train to Universal Studio Osaka! Previously, we travel together to Universal Studio Singapore for Mr Hubs birthday. Being the kiasu us, we wore slippers and ended up being the only 3 human beings in Osaka doing so. Nobody wears slipper outdoor there, not even the tourist!! Lesson learnt!

 

 

 

 Here are some pics for you to see. I will not share everything because it is best to see it with your own eyes. 

Anyway, we queued forever on the Harry Potter ride. After that, we felt like half the day is gone and drained of energy. If you really want to try all or most of the rides, it is best to purchase the express pass. Don't end up like us, only managed to take 2 rides out of the whole place.

By the time we came out of the second ride and bought some souvenirs, it is already evening time. So we decided to take a train to the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan.

 

 

 Some sea creatures and the building itself.


This place is the most expensive entrance fee that we have paid throughout our trip (minus Universal Studio Osaka). It costs us 2300yen per person. It was worth it coz if I remembered correctly, there are 8 floors of sea animals.

This excerpt was taken from Wikipedia :

The walk-through aquarium displays marine life in several habitats comprising 27 tanks in 16 main exhibits with a total volume of 10,941 tons of water. The habitats are from the Ring of Fire area of the Pacific Ocean. The largest tank is 9 metres (30 ft) deep and holds 5,400 cubic metres (190,699 cu ft) of water and a variety of fish including manta raysand a whale shark.^[4]

The tanks used in the aquarium are made of 314 tonnes (346 tons) of acrylic glass. The largest single pane measures six meters by five meters by thirty centimeters and weighs roughly 10 tons. At the thicknesses used, regular glass would be unwieldy and would not have the desired transparency.

We then walked around the neighbourhood in search of dinner. I think the number of people on the street around 8pm then was less than 10. So we opt for a small lil japanese diner for yakitori.

 

 

 

 Look so delish right?


We can't read Japanese so we took a pic of the restaurant's name just in case if anyone wants to go give it a try. It is on the way back to the train station so you won't miss it.

Japan Trip Day 4 (Kiyomizudera Temple, Kyoto and off to Osaka)

It took me a year to continue this, sorry about that. I have busy! And it's a hassle to wind back to a year ago to check my Fitbit steps,so from now onwards there will be no info on this...hehe

 

Check out our inexpensive and healthy breakfast.

 
The walk to reach our destination. There are more photos but I won't be sharing it here. 

We checked out from our hostel and left our luggages with them while we head out to the final sightseeing spot in Kyoto. Kiyomizudera Temple (清水寺, literally "Pure Water Temple") is a must visit temple there. The temple sits at the top of the mountain area (built only with woods) with a busy shopping area surrounding its path and old residential area. Be sure to wear comfortable shoes because it is an uphill walk to reach the temple. 

The temple opens from 6am and closes depending on the season. Do checkout their website for more details here. 

Anyway, we took a bus there from our hostel area and walked for about 20-25 minutes and was sweating like pigs when we got to the temple.

 

The entrance ticket and the exterior of the temple. 

 See the wooden structure that holds the temple.

 

Purchase a love charm here if you want to get lucky.

 
 Interesting people that we encountered during our walk around the temple.

We had our share of absorbing the local culture and sightseeing. So we left the temple to explore the makan-makan and shopping area. By then, the place was bustling with tourist taking photos with their selfie sticks, children running around and last minute souvenir shopping.

 Downhill road from here and on the left, you can see how packed the place is. 

 Some Gudetama snacks and a pic of my husband eating some fishcake or was it a squid inspired snack. He was snacking non-stop during the trip. 

 We were lucky to run into 3 maikos. They are the real deal because they were accompanied by an older lady that acts as a chaperone that fusses over the girls. And on the left, we found a sexy trishaw boy that was flirting with 2 Japanese girls. 

We could not leave Kyoto with another visit to % Arabica. The coffee is just too damn good!

 

A picture of LINE Brown with a cup of coffee, me in front of the cafe (emo-ing) and last but not least a pic of my sister with the barista champion himself, Mr Junichi Yamaguchi.
















And so we left Kyoto with a heavy heart because we are emo like that. Rushed back to the hostel to grab our luggages and head over to Kyoto Station to take the train to Nankai Namba Station. We booked an apartment via AirBnB in the Namba area. It's a fairly new apartment from the looks of it and very quiet.

 

 

 This apartment have everything that we need and it sleeps 3 adults (max). The only thing is that we had to take turn to open our luggage to grab our stuff. Eventually we worked out a rota system to do it. 

We don't mind staying here again for our next trip to Osaka. The host was nice enough to include a wifi egg for use. So now we have 2 that we could bring out when one of it ran out of battery.

Off we go to explore Osaka city area nearby our apartment coz we were famished by then. I did some research beforehand that there is a place here that serves 100yen sushi. In case if you are curious to try, this is the site.

 This is what we ate there. 

 Namba area




That sums up our Day 4. Time to sleep!