tuk tuk Cha toast

Toast Cubes

I'm coming back for these.

 

Absolutely. Definitely. :)

 

They make one of the most fun snacks anyone can have on an early afternoon. Especially if you're window shopping. It is a place where you can decide whether you want to sit down and have them, or if you want to take them along with you. They're easy to carry around, and pretty fun to just spear and munch as you go along.

I'd heard of Tuk Tuk Cha.

Past couple of months, they'd made quite a name for themselves in their drinks, snacks and boat noodles, and when I spoke to someone who shared with me a plan to work on his social media marketing efforts to attract as many millennials and foodies to their place the same way this franchise had done, it made me really want to give these thick toast things a shot. :)

We ordered one, trying to choose between the kaya dip and the Thai tea dip. The Thai tea dip won. I like the texture. It's thick and creamy enough without it being too cloying. It's like a sauce of sorts but is thicker than a regular chocolate or strawberry sauce. It gets absorbed into the toast pretty easily and a bite of the crispy, crunchy toast leaves the taste of Thai tea swirling about on your tongue. It looks pretty. Plus, it is served cold.

Thai tea dip

Actually, it reminds me of the cream in Meiji's Yan Yan chocolate and strawberry snack, and the way we'd dip the biscuit inside just to scoop out the cream, something tossing the biscuit aside. :P

You can't do this with the toast though. You won't want to. It's incredibly crispy. It's just the right shape. It's cute. And you find yourself trying to figure out which corner to bite off first. Do you eat up all the corners first or do you eat it one-direction from one corner all the way to the other side of the cube?

I ate it the latter way, munching through it all the way. Maybe I'll try eating it by the edges the next time. After all, they've made just the eating of a simple thick toast remarkably fun. :)



Bus Ride Sights: the ECP trees

You know, when our STB goes around the world saying that Singapore is a Garden City and that you can tell it from the moment you touch down at Changi Airport, they weren't kidding.

I agree. *_*

From Changi Airport, you travel along the ECP, passing by the entire stretch of East Coast Park and then you either turn into the newer MCE that is one of the longest expressway tunnels in Singapore and which at its deepest point lies 20m under the seabed heading towards Keppel, the Downtown Core and Sentosa, or you turn onto the Sheares Bridge that offers you one of the most gorgeous views of the Singapore Strait and the Marina Reservoir, heading towards Suntec City, Orchard and Downtown.

Neither were they kidding when they said you'd get to see one of the most scenic views along the expressway heading from the airport to the city.

This, I agree too. :)

The trees don't start only when you reach Downtown. You don't have to go to a particular park or a particular nature reserve to see the trees and urban planning. You see it the moment you get on the bus (the 36 bus specifically) or on the cab. :)

And you get to say goodbye to the trees too as you make your way to the airport, just so you won't forget the country as a Garden City. :)

These pictures were taken in succession one dusky evening the entire route on the ECP all the way until the first SATS building came into view and till we reached Terminal 3.

You'll see what I mean. :)

Near the Tanah Merah Golf Course

After the Golf Course

An Expressway Exit

Nearing the Airport

Terminal 3... Finally

 

pretty foods: rice & Chicken

Chicken And Rice

What makes this dish above a very Singaporean dish is the fact that it is not the famous Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice at Maxwell Market. Nor is this the chicken rice from its (rival) neighbor that has its own accompanying story of ownership.

 

Instead, what makes it uber Singaporean is that I bought it from a stall in a coffee shop under a block of flats in a housing estate somewhere in Serangoon Housing Estate.

Because it means that chicken rice is truly everywhere in Singapore. Every coffee shop will have more or less one stall. Every hawker center will have more or less one stall. And then there are all those stalls in odd places in between. You get the Chatterbox kind which is hotel-standard. You get the Soup Restaurant kind that is distinctly Hakka in presentation and taste.

You really can get chicken rice everywhere.

After the location comes the taste. Now, whether this is a fantastic-tasting chicken rice or not, I don't know, but I'm happy with it. Chicken's always good for everything, and chicken rice is one of our go-to meals when we've no idea what to have for meals. 

How it goes usually be something like,
"Eat what ar?"
"Don't know ley. Yesterday we had *insert dish*. Then the day before we had *insert dish*" 
"Eat *insert dish* lar."
"You want to try *insert dish* at *insert place* or not ar? I heard quite good ley. Don't know, the reviews say one."
"But last night I had *insert dish* already so today I need something spicy/soupy/clean/light"
"So how like that? What we eat like that?"
"Chicken rice lor." 

We like our chicken prepared in a variety of ways, and we can definitely wax lyrical about it. How we do it, how long we do it, how tender is it, how much ginger, how much of this, how much of that, how rounded is the taste, etc. etc.

Me, when it comes to chicken rice, I'm all for the roasted. It's the skin, that's why. Roasted skin tastes much better than steamed skin and I don't need that much ginger. :) I'm all for the meat of the thigh and the tender parts. I'm also all for the rice prepped in chicken stock. I don't care if it's oilier. Oilier rice or steamed plain white rice won't make really that much difference if you're already taking roasted chicken thigh when you're supposed to be eating steamed chicken breast plain anyway. :)

Quarter chicken

 

pretty foods: instant noodles

Comfort Food, ya!

Okay, I'll be upfront.

She doesn't look very pretty, does she, this plate of home-cooked instant noodles. But that's because I haven't added any garnishing or cherry tomatoes or any colorful prawns or fish or egg or lettuce or tomatoes or any happy looking, colorful foods of sorts.

She'd look different if I'd added them. :)

With Tomatoes!

But it doesn't matter to me.

Not one bit at all. Because, garnishing or no, veggies or meat or no, she's a great tasting little plate of noodles. Stir fried with a combination sauce of olive oil, sesame oil, worcester sauce, soy sauce, ketchup and a pinch of Himalayan pink salt, and the occasional dash of garam masala, she makes one of the simplest yet best meals ever. It's so good that I sometimes make special requests for it, and thankfully, I'm usually obliged.

Instant noodles are comfort food to me.

On cold, rainy days, when the winds are blowing and the season's monsoons are blasting, it is a steaming hot bowl of shrimp flavored instant noodles topped with an egg cooked just right and cuttlefish balls that I want.

Instant noodles have been a part of my family.

On days when instant noodles was on the menu, we'd each get out our own tiffin carrier pots, fill them with water, toss our noodles in, drop the ikan bilis cube in, and then put it on the stove to boil. And then we'd place in whatever we wanted from the frozen food stash in the freezer. One Parent would finish cooking first, cos the preferred texture of noodles was 'QQ'. The other Parent would follow after, cos the preferred texture of noodles was 'just right' with 'the right' amount of soup left in the pot.

I would be the last.

Always.

Because I like my noodles cooked to a texture that resembles pudding and which is clumped up together and is soft and chewy and slurpy all at the same time and I like seeing my cuttlefish balls bobbing around in the carrier whilst my egg gently poaches on top till the yolk turns orange and whenever I cooked, I'd have to watch my pot really, really carefully because the tendency to overboil was super high. With almost no soup left. 

But I love my noodles this way. I love how they're all slurpy and soft and chewy and how they've absorbed all the seasoning with that distinct taste that comes with them being this texture.

It's not only rainy days. It's any other day. Seeing a bowl of instant noodles on the table in the evenings for supper or in the afternoons for lunch, brings a lovely smile to my face. 

Soup instant noodles. Stir fried instant noodles. They're all comforting and reassuring to me.

I think it comes along with me being Asian. If there's one food that distinctly defines a person as Asian-Asian per se, it's gotta be instant noodles. As far as my mind goes, there is no Asian- never mind whether you're East or Southeast- that does not know what instant noodles are. From Japan to South Korea to China to Hong Kong to Taiwan and Indochina all the way down south to Indonesia, instant noodles of all kinds and styles can be found. You get the pho type in Vietnam. You get the vermicelli type in China. There's the ramen in Japan with fantastic soup flavors like miso and tonkotsu. There's the ramyun and the jjamppong and jajangmyun in South Korea. The Thais call their instant noodles Mama after their ubiquitous country wide brand and which has the loveliest creamy tom yum shrimp noodles I've ever enjoyed. And then there's everything else everywhere else.

Wherever we Asians are, chances are you'll find packets of instant noodles tagging along with us. Some of us have the most innovative ways of preparing the noodles- like throwing them into the electric kettle pot and watching over the water like a hawk. Some of us have come up with all kinds of ways to prepare our instant noodle meals and posted it online to boot. Some of us have featured cup noodles so much in the convenience stores that it has become a cultural export.

Which reminds me, I'm still waiting to buy my instant jajangmyun, stir in the sauce and eat it straight out of the Styrofoam bowl. :)



Bus Ride Sights: Paya Lebar

A bright and beautiful day means pictures and more pictures, yes?

 

So here we go.

 

Pictures from the bus that I took heading towards the east, beginning from.. somewhere around Upper Serangoon Road, I'd say. The other time I was on the other side. This time I was going the other way.

This side is as interesting as it is the other side, just a tad bit more. Maybe because there are all these houses and homes and condos that lie on the same side as the factories.

Make no mistake, this whole road is a literal industrial area, and the architecture and the building names and the whole street layout will bring you from the time of the 70s- where local manufacturing boomed- all the way to present-day industries.

And it makes things pretty cool.

Add to the fact that this road is a straight connector that intersects Central Singapore (the AMK) and Northeast Singapore (Punggol) to the East Coast (Guillemard), which makes it a very important road. :)

It's the middle part of this whole route that intrigues me.

Because that's the area I call the Luxury-Food-Lifestyle Belt. The name MacPherson might resonate with some, might not resonate with others, but around this area at Genting Lane is where we find some of the distributors for luxury brands in our territory. RSH is there. So is Jay Gee.

Nearer to this side is Tai Seng, where despite its unglamorous name, it got cool branding when one day LuxAsia decided that their name would be on the building they were in, by which then, Charles and Keith had already happily plonked themselves behind and by which then the food people had already jumped in, with the buildings of Sakae and Breadtalk sitting side by side.

Near Lorong Ah Soo

Bus Stop very charming lar..

Terrace Homes near the Factory

Industrial/Office Use

The Luxury Belt

The Food Belt

Present and Past

An Overhead Bridge

Under the PIE



the J65

They've always been welcoming, this place, from the time when they were Traders Hotel, and they're even more so now. Hospitality doesn't begin with the room. It begins with the one who helps you with the bags. It begins with the one who opens your cab door. It begins with the security who guides you through the doors and nods at you.

 

Here they double up their roles from time to time. :)

 

Where in the afternoon the previous day upon check-in, you'd might see him waving to you at the entrance, morning the next day you might see him again clearing plates and carrying trays at the restaurant they call J65.

 

I think it is J65, no?

 

Funny, I don't think of it in the name of the restaurant. I think of it as the place that everyone goes for breakfast, whether it be their buffet breakfast, or the breakfast of crossiants, sandwiches and coffee to-go.

 

What I eat, when I do have breakfast here, is pretty much varied, but it generally goes in the combination of both East and West. Depending on my appetite for the morning, sometimes there will be more of the West, where the like of scrambled eggs, sausages, sauteed mushrooms and hash browns make it to my plate. Almost American, except for the toast and the baked beans. I somehow tend to avoid the baked beans. :)

 

Occasionally there's the Continental, which is, for me, cereals, yogurt and a crossiant. No granola, I'm not that into the chewing stuff, but cornflakes and Rice Krispies and Coco Pops, which I know is meant for the kids but, hey never mind. Sometimes I take a muffin. A really small muffin, which I eat for the sake of wanting the joy of having a muffin for breakfast.  

 

Eggs and Fruit

Smoked Salmon

 

Eggs and fruit cocktail

I do go for the Asian too. But not wholly. Not the full works, but a bit here, a bit there. So I might take something like half a plate of char kuay teow or mee tai mak, two hard boiled eggs that I dip with salad cream(!), a fried egg, a bit of the laksa soup and maybe a pau or two. I might even take a small bowl of soba because I like soba and it's nice and cold and fun to slurp. But I've not taken a bowl of porridge.

 

Not so far as  I remember.

 

Maybe it's because I want to take a bit of everything, and a bowl of porridge would bypass it all.

 

See, that's the charm of buffets. You get to eat a little bit of everything. You get to choose- which is one of the greatest joys of having a buffet. You get to decide whether you want to go all healthy with muesli and salad and fruit and yogurt. You get to decide whether you want it all sugary and sweet with Honey Stars or Koko Crunch and follow it up with potong ice cream and toast with lots of jam. And you get to decide if you want to eat parts of the whole world.

 

That's what I do- usually. A bit of Asian on this plate. A bit of Continental on the other. A bit of American on the third and there's everything mixed in between. There're staples though. :)

 

Breakfast staples

Staples that I can't do without no matter what it is that I choose to eat. Like coffee. Good coffee. Good coffee from the machine that lets me choose between espresso, cappuccino and latte. Like juices. Juices that I get to mix between orange and carrot, or orange and pineapple. Like smoked salmon, which I try to go for cos I liked smoked salmon and I eat it either by itself or with scrambled eggs and toast. And like fruits, where there's watermelon and papaya and rock melon and canned peaches and canned sea coconut and fresh plums and pears and bananas.

 

Bananas are a popular favorite. :) They seem to disappear from the bowl really fast.

 

Having breakfast here is a relatively relaxed affair. There's no hurry. You don't get cheesed off by staff telling you that breakfast closes in half hour when you're down at 930. (That happened at another place once and never did I go back there again..) Here you don't get much of a view as you do all the action at the lobby, which, if you were sitting at the spot where I was that day, this is what you see.

 

View from My Table

But there's enough to look around. The restaurant is laid out very square, very neat, very structured, with the quirkiness, the minimalist and even quaint vibes that hit the right notes with xennials and millennials today.

Yogurt, Coffee, Cereal & Ice Cream

 

Tables and Chairs

But what stands out, really, ain't just the place, renovated or no. What stands out are the F&B crew. I'm not kidding. Somehow their team work stands out over many a place I've been to. Sure, people come and go; sure, staff move around here and there, but what doesn't change is the spirit that they have. They own it, the service, they own the service standards here I'd say, they've got a d*** good one. They're friendly, they're lively, they're gungho, they're efficient and some of them, I'm glad to say, have become, personally, more than just a rep of hospitality.

 

They have become friends. :)

keyboard Woes

You know how it's said that you never realize how much you really miss someone until he or she is gone? Or that we often fall into the habit of taking things for granted until the day they're really gone?

It's true, you know.

It's really true.

We tend to take stuff for granted sometimes. Like we assume that things will always work, that things will always be there, that there will be no anomalies or that everything will go sailing smooth as they have always done because they have always done. And it doesn't cover only the big ticket stuff like jewelry or a car or a house. Neither does it cover people around us, like acquaintances, friends and loved ones.

It also covers stuff normalized and regular too. 

Like a computer keyboard, or in my case, a laptop keyboard.

It happened last weekend. Rather, it happened on a Monday, the first day of a work week, the very day that I was planning to email an important document and which needed some sort of brief, but I think it must have been happening over the weekend.

What and why it happened, I don't know, but Monday morning I opened my laptop, tried banging in my password, and nothing happened. I thought it was just a key or two, cos' it had happened before, and so I updated the driver software (again!) and restarted the laptop and you know, it should work, right, since it worked the last time.

Nope, not this time round. I restarted the laptop twice over and then when I realized that even the Caps Lock and Enter keys weren't working, not to mention anything else, like the Ctrl or the F buttons of the Escape button or even the up and down arrows, I knew it was a goner. Complete goner.

I was stuck with a laptop that wouldn't let me type.

I was stuck with a laptop that had the mouse and touchpad functioning but not the keyboard, and although there was the onscreen keyboard, how in the high heavens was I going to read and reply to emails and write articles and send the necessary docs? How was I going to do anything?

I started wondering why, asking myself some of the weird questions that pop up whenever you're faced with a non-functioning technological piece of gear. What did I do over the weekend? Where did I plug it in? Was it because I charged my phone with the USB port? Was it because I'd been upgrading the keyboard drivers again and again and somewhere along the way I clicked the wrong thing? Was I not supposed to update the keyboard drivers this way?

Questions that brought no answers.

Questions that made me wonder whether I'd been doing the right thing and made me wish I had asked before jumping in to try rescue the problem.

For a non-tech person who mixes up her ports sometimes, having a keyboard go kaput on you is a very shocking, scary thing. I mean, it is not just a key or two. It's not a key that holds a function to which you don't usually use. It is the d*** CapsLk. The Shift. The Enter. The Ctrl. The Esc. The Spacebar.

I nearly wept.

What was I going to do without my keyboard? How was I going to blog, to email, to type, to do everything? How was I going to function? What was I going to do in the interim? Did I need to get a new keyboard altogether? Did I need to buy another new laptop altogether? Should I buy a wireless keyboard from Miniso and then bring it around wherever I went? What was I supposed to do? What could I do?

I googled. I tried some of the solutions. I flipped between Google Chrome on my phone and trying to figure out the problem.

Nothing worked.

So I asked someone instead and well, let's say that the technique of resetting the entire system worked. And that I had to transfer out all my data and wait for two days armed with pen and paper and notebook whilst my laptop underwent some sort of emergency triage, diagnostics, repair and recovery.

It's going well now.

I'm typing this from the laptop. :)

Should I say that I'm glad for what happened? Of course not.

But it having happened, it having taken place, I suppose there are lessons to be learnt. Lessons that involve a heck lot of Consciousness where you suddenly become aware of stuff that you weren't aware of before. Lessons that you keep with you for a few days after as you delicately rearrange all your settings and stay thankful each time they work.

You learn about behavior modification.

Like how automatically your fingers move over to the Shift button and the Enter button and the Spacebar button, completely forgetting that it was asleep when you're transferring the data.

Or how familiar you've become with all the keys even without thinking about it.

You learn about yourself. You learn to acknowledge and recognize and accept what you love, and what you really love.

Like how badly I loved typing and missed it like crazy, how terribly I missed writing on blogs and elsewhere and getting to reply to emails, and how much I really wanted to feel the keys depress beneath the touch of my fingertips all over again.

voices Done

I am very happy to say that the voices, all six of them, have finally said what they wanted to say and we are good to go.

 

Well, technically, it's not six, its.. umm.. four.. two can't speak, cos' you know, no access and all, but I think we've got fairly enough. We've got all, or if not most, of what we need from the four.

 

It's a milestone reaching here. And it has been quite a journey getting to where we are today.

 

Oh, it does sound cliche. I know that. But really, from the time when the options were given, more than a couple of years ago, I didn't think we'd get to this phase. In fact there was a phase where I worried we'd never even get here at all.

 

Sure, we had a couple of lines. Sure, I had a couple of notebooks written, rewritten and re-re-written, all with information and notes and ideas penned in full form but in different styles, but it wasn't getting nowhere. It wasn't like there was a set journey, a set route. Don't even mention the arc. There wasn't even a beginning, nor even an end. There wasn't even a middle.

 

There were just... pieces of the jigsaw.

 

And then when the time came to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together, I got stuck. Like, whoops, no moving forward, no moving backward, no moving anywhere! There must have been a few (not too many) deleted documents. -_- -_-

 

But here we are now. With a couple of voices talking about a few different scenarios. I've counted them. Let's just say that they make up more than what I originally predicted, and it is just so amazing that when you place them all together and slot them into a run or sorts, you realize that yup, it really, truly, is coming together.

 

With a bit of sorting, a bit of cleanup, a bit of coordination and we're ready... for the baker, and the Oven. :D 

 



little Sketches

I did five sketches with the Keep My Notes app on my phone today.

 

A teacup, a coffee cup, a coffee cup to go, a cloud, a coconut tree and a Christmas tree.

 

Okay, that makes six.

 

I should have had seven but I deleted the last one- the one about the nail polish bottles because I didn't know how to draw the glitter onto the bottle and the colors ended up looking like it were a pot of wall paint. Very ugly.  

 

Drawing and sketching can be quite a therapeutic thing.

 

I should know, I used to do it for a while, and then things got caught up in the way and then I stopped. I stopped copying pictures. I stopped making natural sketches from photographs. I stopped coloring. I've got a box of color pencils and a tray of crayons but they're just sitting there. I'm not quite using them.

 

Still I'm glad I do sketch on a regular, if not daily basis. Seeing little pictures mixed with words breaks up the momentum of reading and leaves a visual image in the mind of the reader.

 

I'm not good at it. I just can manage to draw spheres and cubes and a bit of 3D shapes here and there. But I can do bowls and cups and mugs and bottles. I can do a vase. I can do a rainbow and a cloud in the sky.

 

And drawing them in the midst o the writing makes one really relaxed.

 

Surprisingly.

 

You know what the funny thing was?

 

I wasn't actually intending to use the app today but it so happened that I saw someone do up a really cool picture instead of having to take a picture of paper and pen as I did, and so I went hunting around for techniques that would get me the same result.

 

And the Handwriting function in the app was precisely what I found.

 

Complete with stroke thickness, color palette and eraser. :)

Eng's wanton mee

PORK. PORK. PORK.

You can't really tell from the picture, but I'll say this nicely, honestly and truthfully. 

If you can't stand the smell nor taste of pork, if you abhor it to the highest degree, or if pork's just not your thing, stay away.

Stay far, far away.

You will not like this place where in this one single bowl of wanton noodles is as much pork as nowhere else that I've ever had- and trust me, I do take bak kut teh and century egg pork porridge and I love my char siew and dim sum.

We happened to be in the area, and it being that the (favorite) chicken rice stall was closed for the day, we decided hey, let's try this one cos' we're always seeing people inside and so it must be pretty good and after all we tried the neighbor's wanton mee the last time already.

So we did, and almost at once, I realized the reason behind this very packed, very busy place.

Because whilst there is wanton mee, and there is wanton mee, it is not every place where the wanton mee is so deeply infused with pork that you taste nothing else but pork, pork and PORK.  

It was in everything, mind. Every Single Thing.

In the noodles, which they did really QQ. In the gravy, which was thick and rich so much so that you had to mix it really well so that every strand got as much of the gravy as possible. In the soup, which was more like pork bones and pork meat double-boiled and double-bubbled with nothing else but a heck lot of pork meat.. In the veggies, which soaked up the gravy. In the wantons boiled and fried that had all that little lumps of meat wrapped up snugly inside them. And, in the oil.

Yes, even the oil.

In fact, the whole friggin' bowl.

Trust me, I'd never savored as much pork as ever there could be in a bowl of dry wanton mee.

And you know what, for someone who literally runs away from the kway chap stall in the hawker center, who decides to go occasionally kosher at the suggestion of ter kah, who dumps a load of veggies over the pigs' trotters just so she won't have to look at the leg whilst she's chomping on its meat, and who avoids the pig skins and pig tails in kway chap, I actually quite enjoyed the porky, pork, pork taste of this wanton mee.

And I certainly don't mind going back there again. :)

i got Donergy

Table and the Wall

I've been here a couple of times.

Well, actually, more than a couple.

I've been here long enough to see their wall transform from a plain whitewashed one to a wallpapered one filled with beautiful images of their Turkish homeland so much so that you want to drop everything and go visit. I've been here long enough to recognize some of the staff's faces. :)

I come here pretty often for lunch on weekdays.

A kebab wrap is great for the days when you're busy, when you've got stuff from work filling up most of your mind, when you know you're just wanting to fuel up and then get back to the laptop and the email and whatever you were doing before you decided to break for lunch.

Eating a kebab wrap can be pretty entertaining, cos' there is no way, no way, anyone can eat a lovely kebab wrap without dropping anything on the wrapper, or on the plate. If there's such a technique- and there must be one, given that kebab wraps are to-go foods that you eat on travel trips by bus or by car in a confined space- I'd love to learn it.

Right now I don't have that skill, and every time I have a kebab wrap, I'm dropping parts of the lettuce, dripping parts of the sauce and plunging sliced chunks of chicken on the plate altogether.

Which is why some days I have a Tombik for lunch instead, which is sort of an English-type muffin sandwiching sliced chunks of meat and topped with tomato, lettuce and a single pickle and which has got this burnt, burnt taste at the edges that make it somewhat special.

I've had dinner here some days, where I choose a plate of chicken kebab and rice. It's really different from our local version of chicken rice, of course, with olive-oil infused rice, chunks of sliced chicken, a heap of lettuce and tomatoes and the pickle, and the best-ever garlic sauce I've ever had.

I don't know whether it is meant to be salad dressing or not, but it is soooo good.

I always ask for more in a really polite, nice way... :)

One thing I like is that they sometimes spring surprises on the menu for you, which is as much as one can say about keeping with the customers' tastes. The other day I was wondering if I could try something different and when I bopped up to the counter, there was this Spinach-something and this Mushroom-something, so I chose the Spinach something that sounded really tasty and truly it did! :)

Lots and lots and lots of melted cheese... :)
 

Spinach Something

Funny thing is, I don't know what it's called, so I'm calling it the Spinach Cheese Boat for now, but anyway, it does look like it, don't you think? Next time I'm ordering the Mushroom Cheese Boat, and when I do, I'm going to remember to take a picture.

It's nice being here. There's a homeliness about it and a casual vibe about it that makes you feel comfortable every time you step in. There's that kind of vibe you get that you could be alfresco by the pier side or in the middle of the city with glass-windowed skyscrapers. It's.. familiar. That's the word. Familiar.

If you're not sure the first time, you'll grow into it, sooner or later. I like the ambience. I like the vibe, and I definitely like the telly they've screwed to the ceiling. Because they've chosen the telly programs well,  No CNA, no CNN, no CNBC, no latest news updates. No local programming. No long-winded drama series. No Netflix type series. No discussion type of television series. No sci fi even. Just light-hearted, simple comedy- they're having Mr. Bean reruns now- and cartoons- they got Tom & Jerry one time- and sensual, sexy, handsome, vacay-inducing Turkish pop MVs. :)