my kryptonite

Some of the things I can never say “No” to, even though maybe these days I have become a little better at resisting the temptations, or maybe circumstances have made it easier to turn away.

Does Wala Wala not serve Kronenbourg Blanc anymore? The last time I was there, it wasn’t on the menu anymore, instead a sticker was pasted over it that read Grimbergen Blanche, or something like that. I didn’t like it as much because obviously it tasted different, more like the usual white beer of other brands and definitely without the fruity flavour that was what drew me to K.Blanc in the first place. Tried Kronenbourg 1664 too and reaffirmed my opinion that I still do not like it.

One of our favourite bar grub, porkys! Sinful and most likely unhealthy, but another of my weakness is carbohydrates. I am a major carbo freak, which is also a reason why I haven’t been very successful where weight loss/dieting is concerned. I compensate for any exercise done by overloading on carbs whenever I have the chance. Hrmmm. But porkys are really fantastic, even better than the polenta chicken bits that I usually order at Acid Bar (because they don’t have porkys).

The biggest of them all, the mother of all carbo-weakness for me, would be french fries. Deep fried to a golden brown… how can I ever say no? I am quite partial towards french fries, and generally I enjoy fries from most places but the ones I am extremely fond of are of the shoe-string variety. Walas does fries rather nicely, so does Paulaner at Millenia, Brotzeit, Brewerkz and P.S. Cafe (their truffle fries are TDF). But according to my friend, sometimes these fries are fried in ‘old’ oil, i.e. oil that has been re-used numerous times, making the fries taste a little stale. I didn’t really know what she meant initially, but I think I know now. Fries fried in fresh oil, or at least oil that isn’t too ‘old’, really do taste better.

I know sometimes we think that fries with wine is an odd combination but when we don’t feel like having beer and would like to have wine instead, what’s to stop us from sipping wine and munching on fries? It’s all meant to be a moment of enjoyment anyway right? Even if there are days when we would do the usual wine-and-cheese, but it’s not everyday that I feel like having cheese. Fries, on the other hand, do not require seasons or reasons.

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we are young. or so we hope to be.

Special edition Apple Caramel cake. Spot the dried cranberries and it’s sea-salt cream cheese coating on the cake. Extremely yummy but equally sinful. Good things seldom come in healthy proportions.

Kronenbourg Blanc was dry. Kronenbourg 1664 doesn’t taste as good but we have to make do at some point. Grimbergen Blanche comes close but is nevertheless still different. Less fruity and tastes like any other weiss bier methinks.

Hello porkys and hello late-night carbo-loading. Still one of the best bar grub ever. Second to shoe-string fries, if they are not deep-fried in oil that is too old. Not really a chicken wing person but I can acquiesce sometimes.

tgi-friday!

It’s hard to break a habit. And I recalled I had a bad habit where I’d become even lazier than I am when the weekend comes, even where one of my supposed passions is concerned. I love writing, there’s no doubt about it, but I usually slack off when weekend swing by, because the other parts of my life take over. So I’ll try to remind myself to be a little more conscientious, as I take a break from revising for my Korean test tomorrow morning…

One of my friends was back in town this week for Easter break (how nice that they get a whole week off why don’t we have that here) and we met up on Wednesday evening. I’m really glad this was a shorter week since today is Good Friday and Thursday was already the last day of the week… We met at ICB for a first round of drinks and her favourite fried chicken wings, before moving on to one of our past favourite live music joint. Past because due to whatever reasons we don’t go there that much anymore. I don’t know how long we stayed or how much we drank but that wasn’t the last of it. There was a third place we headed to to meet some more other friends, before I (and I think she too) called it a night. It has been a while since I drank that much and felt so tired and again I went to the zone that I think I should avoid getting to. I went to sleep past 230am that morning. And I was in the office by 9.

This, I can’t afford to indulge too often but I suppose for a long-time friend, maybe. Once in a while.

I went through most part of Thursday morning nursing a headache and perhaps a hangover and surprisingly still managed to get work done and left only at about 630 from the office to town for coffee and dinner. My body probably can’t take this kind of stress too much too often but I survived the day.

Last night I was still on a 6-hour sleep cycle because this morning I woke early again. There’s something wrong with my body clock or do I just subconsciously fear not having enough time to get things done?

service… not.

I have come to realise that when I don’t get enough rest or sleep, I tend to be more irritable and grouchy. The smallest and trivialest of things can get under my feathers and make me flare when on normal days (when I am well-rested) I would just ignore it and let it slide.

After C’s wedding on Wednesday and having little sleep the night before, coupled with an already huge sleep debt building up, I was seriously tired but still insisted on making the best of my waking hours. I met up with M (or should I say… R) last evening and she suggested Wala because initially she had wanted to check out the band. Until I told her that the band that she’d heard of doesn’t start until about 930pm, so anyhow we still met there and sat downstairs for dinner.

I would consider myself as a pretty regular customer at Wala Wala but more than 90% of the time I’d be seated upstairs because mostly I was there for the band. I don’t have many complains about the level or quality of service because we do give concessions during times when it’s crowded. We’re not unreasonable people, so even when our food or beer take longer to be served we can live with it.

But last night it was different. I can blame it on my inherent grouchiness but the waitress who was hovering around our table really pissed me off. I don’t mind that the moment we were seated and given the menus (by someone else) she came over to ask if we’re ready to order. I replied no, and asked for a few minutes – this happens all the time so it’s no biggie. But it’s when we were eating and drinking, and of course catching up, she kept coming to interrupt us and asking, “Are you done?” with the food and drinks. We were almost sort of done, yes, although we didn’t finish the food, but maybe a better way of putting it would be, “Would you like me to clear that for you?” instead of the brusque “Are you done?” like she can’t wait for us to get off our seats and leave. The thing is, it wasn’t even super packed, because there were still empty tables around so I don’t understand why she was so bent on shooing us off. Even on one Friday night when I was having dinner downstairs with another friend, nobody came to shoo us away although they were operating at full capacity.

This is probably the first time I’m getting so annoyed with any wait staff at Wala because all the other times they were generally ok, just slow or forgetful. Perhaps they weren’t trained to ask properly to clear customers’ plates, or maybe saying “are you done?” is much easier than the more polite way of “would you like me to clear that?”

hurts.

Gosh, I can’t believe it has been an entire week since I last blogged. Yes, I was tired of a lot of things, and to a certain extent there just wasn’t much to write about.

At this point, my life is pretty staid because day in and out, I will be making a tedious commute to the office, spend a few hours in a freezer-like environment, before thawing myself out in the perpetual sauna that Singapore has become in the last few days.

I penned a couple of long wordy entries that I just deleted away though, because I felt it was pointless to write about them since I would rather just keep the comments to myself. So… what has been happening in this boring life that I call mine?

Went to cast my vote for the first time in my life, although it wasn’t exciting or life-changing. To me, it was more of a necessity to vote rather than me being in anyway passionate about politics. I wasn’t, am not, and probably never will be. As much as this round of elections garnered a lot of attention at the national level all the way through the community as can be seen and heard almost everywhere I go to, I still am not interested in it at all. I believe everyone just wants the best for the country that we call home, just that the way they go about it is different, so everyone has their own opinions and thoughts about the scene and so be it. There really is not much point getting all rifled up for nothing.

Caught the Last Bladesman starring Donnie Yen on Saturday, since I was in bad need of a cool respite anyway. It wasn’t too bad, because although if you ask me about Chinese classics like Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the likes, you will most probably draw a blank, I really enjoy movies that are adapted from these classics, or rather anything adapted from historical events. Maybe it’s an easy way out of learning about history in bite sizes, since I gave up studying history after Secondary 2 because it entailed too much memorising that I wasn’t at all fond of, although what I chose eventually also involved a lot of memory work. I loved Donnie Yen in the 2 Ip Man movies but watching the Last Bladesman was like watching Ip Man fighting with the crescent blade (this is what the huge sword/spear thing is called based on a quick scan at wiki), so it was a bit weird.

Spent the rest of the Saturday evening wining and dining at Wala, where Luthfi from the Common People was standing in for Shirlyn that night. The repertoire of songs was definitely different from the usual Saturday night gig by the Unexpected but it was still all good, although perhaps the chemistry seemed a little different. And I think we encounter the oddest people at Wala! How many times has it been since we met strange people?

And tonight, courtesy of my dear cousin and F3, I got a pair of complimentary tickets to watch Hurts live in concert at the Esplanade! I really love their songs and especially Theo Hutchcraft’s vocals! When I first heard them, I thought they reminded me of Depeche Mode, infused with a little bit of New Order perhaps? The concert was a really short one at about 60 minutes, but the crowd that turned up was definitely not disappointed at all! I would say that most of us are still pretty reserved in showing our love for the performing band, but well there is some improvement because I saw a number of people up on their feet and getting all excited each time the first few notes of a song were played. But from where I was seated the spotlights/strobe lights (or whatever) on stage made it extremely painful (on the eyes) to focus on the stage and the band because the lights are shining into our eyes and they are just too glaring for comfort. Theo’s microphone-swinging reminded me a little of Brett Andersen when they were here for concert eons back when I was still in school, albeit the style of swinging and perhaps the manner differed greatly; compared to Brett’s languidness, Theo’s antics were a tad more erratic and forceful. I hope they will return for another concert in future!

a state of comparison

How often do you hear people comparing one thing with another, one person with another, so on and so forth? It goes that it is with comparison that we can more confidently make an opinion of which we prefer, favour, dislike, etc.

I was watching this teen idol drama (ok, go ahead and laugh but they can be therapeutic in their own ways, believe it or not) where this guy tells a girl he likes and who likes him back, that as much as he can’t ignore his ex-crush when she comes to him after quarreling with her boyfriend, he feels more ill at ease when he knows that this girl is upset, and his heart aches more for her. Well, I suppose some girls will probably swoon at that, especially when the person speaking these lines own a good-looking face, but that’s besides the point now. I was quite taken aback by her response, which stated that she doesn’t care for his feelings in that case, because if he can only realise that by comparing her with the ex-crush, then she doesn’t want him at all. Hmm. Food for thought?

Anyway, I was at my usual Kronenbourg-drinking hole on Saturday, having come out from a very angsty week that somehow warranted some beer methinks, and the Unexpected band was playing. They are one of my favourite local bands in addition to Timmy Band and more recently, 53A (although I only like the latter in a full band), so being able to chill out on a Saturday night to beer and nice music was one of my life’s enjoyments. I was comparing the 2 bands (Unexpected and Timmy) in terms of the songs they sang, because at such live gigs, there are some songs that will inadvertently do their rounds as sort of live band anthems, a very good example of which would be “Use Somebody” by Kings of Leon. I preferred Timmy band’s version of this song, by the way, because Ngak’s voice in delivering the song win hands down over Simon’s. No offence to the latter, but perhaps Ngak being the lead vocalist of the band makes the difference.

After the 2nd set ended past midnight, I thought to head home since I’d already been there for a number of hours and was honestly struggling to keep my eyes open by then. Somehow, time at Wala passes really fast, because even as I may stop counting the drinks that I consume, the minutes and seconds just tick by without even me realising it and soon it’s time to go home. On the way back, I was thinking how alike and different the 2 bands are… they both play live sessions at pubs and such, and definitely I’ve heard Timmy more than Unexpected since I frequented Wed-night Wala during the period when I bumming around, but the sound of the Unexpected seemed more rock? Based on the songs that they sing anyway, on the few occasions that I’ve heard them. I should probably check out more live acts, although there are some that just don’t do it for me. And oh, being someone who doesn’t listen to radio programmes at all, I think live bands provide a very good source to learn about songs that I may like.

mid-week

Ok I know the post-title is quite the odd thing to put since it’s Friday. But I wanted to write about something else. And I’m a little bored currently, trying to keep my eyelids from shutting altogether.

I commented before to a friend how it always seem that when we do drinks during the week itself, Wednesday seems to be the popular choice, as with a lot of many other people. She replied that it’s to break the monotony of a week, and which better day to do it than on a Wednesday? Tuesday’s a bit too early into the week since there are still 3 more work days to go, and Thursday’s a bit too late since Friday is just a few hours away.

So this Wednesday that just passed, we gathered again at one of my favourite Wed night watering hole, Wala Wala, at Holland V. I have been there on other days and it’s still good because of the happy hour beer promo that saves me lots of money (although if I don’t drink I can save even more), but Timmy Band plays on Wednesdays! They didn’t disappoint yet again, and I think I actually stayed all the way till the last set was done just before 1am. The last set was a very short and abrupt one, cos I think it was to recompense for a longer 2nd full-band set. But anyhow, it was great to eat and drink and catch up with friends while good music is being played in the background, or in this case on stage in the foreground.

Best part is… they played some of my favourites that night: my current happy song of the moment – Hey Soul Sister by Train, and Fix you by Coldplay. Of course nobody can beat the way Chris Martin sings this song (duh it’s a Coldplay song afterall), but it was a good effort nonetheless and I had requested this song weeks before for W’s birthday but it wasn’t played then!