Another Packed Saturday

It rained on Saturday. WY had his Chinese lesson at Katong Mall in the morning. CP and WS accompanied him there. After the lesson, they braved the rain to go for some Japanese food at a restaurant next door.


In the meantime, R, WF and I went to do our grocery shopping at Carrefour Suntec City. Specifically, I wanted to buy the twin-pack Extra Virgin Olive Oil which was on special offer at $29.50. Mother has been convinced since some time ago to replace her rice-bran oil with olive oil in her cooking. I took a total of 5 twin-packs and arranged for them to be delivered to Mother's place. I was quite impressed that they did so within hours the same day. Hmm, that's better than Giant, whose delivery service would typically take 2-3 days.

There was a Chevrolet roadshow at the atrium outside Carrefour. At the same time, there was this "Transformer Challenge" on-stage. The organisers were inviting people to go take up the Challenge (ie transform the car to robot - wait a minute, or was it to transform the robot to car? I am not sure). A few boys did, the rest only watched or tried it out at the demonstration table off-stage.

R and WF tried the 'transformation' at the demonstration table, and as they fiddled with the robot-car/car-robot, the 'Transformer' mascot arrived! Many boys started to pose for photos with the mascot. It's amazing that even a grown-up man in his late twenties (I would estimate his age to be 28 years) was amongst those excited Transformer fans! And to think, the mascot did not even look a teeny weeny little bit like the one shown here!

To my surprise, the organisers offered to take photographs of the fans with the mascot and have the photos printed for free! So, WF went ahead and was amongst the first to be photographed.

Since the photo would be ready for collection only in half an hour, we decided to go have our lunch first. WF was the only one amongst us who had had breakfast, so both R and me were famished.

After looking around, we picked the Soup Restaurant at the basement. Although the origins of the dishes were said to have been some humble background (dishes which the poor Samsui womenfolk would have in the earlier years), the prices of the dishes were hardly anywhere close to being humble:



A platter of de-boned chicken breast/thigh cost $13.50; a 2-person serving 'pot' of soup of the day cost $9; a mini-size claypot tofu was $8 and a serving of sambal stir-fried potato-leaves cost $8. Plus the steam rice + steam groundnuts + plain water + wet hand towels, the lunch worked out to be quite pricey. Food was good, service was ok but price wasn't.

Anyway, after that, we got a cake from Crystal Jade. Heeheeee.... I have a card which entitled me to a 15% discount for the cake.....

After the cake, R brought WF to try out those Chevrolets. I collected WF's photo. While looking out for R and WF, someone from HSBC dressed in a clown-suit invited me to play a 'game'. All I had to do was to pick a marble from her bag, which I did. Depending on the colour of the marble picked, I would be 'rewarded' with different gifts, ranging from a ball-point pen to an iPod Shuffle. Eventually, I picked a blue marble and that got me a keychain-torch. What cheap thrill, I thought to myself. But it felt good nonetheless. Hahahahaa....

On the way home, WF shared a small cup of Bravissimo with me. He declared in the car, "I love ice-creams!"

Did I mention that WF is now into the question: "What is XXXXX made of?"?

Well, he started his strings of questions in the car:
What's ice cream made of?
What is chocolate made of?
What is cream made of?
What's milk made of?
What's cow made of?
.................

On our way home, we picked up Mother's luggage which was sent for repair (one of its wheels had to be fixed because it had come off during Mother's Japan trip). We also collected the Amway soap powder which Mother had ordered from Ah Yee.

When we got home, WS and WY came up too. They had a game of some newly-acquired PC game. WF watched his "The Magic School Bus" dvd after his shower. Then at about 6:30pm, the 2 older boys brought WF to Mother's place for dinner. I went later after hanging up the laundry.

Dinner was a simple affair. The 'star' dish for the day was the 卤鸭 which YP bought. It was very huge and I thought, a bit dry. For dessert, Mother cooked the barley and beancurd with gingko nuts dessert.

At about 9:30pm, we had this for the fathers present:


R, WY, WF and I went home just after YP and the rest went off too. We had to sleep early because we were going with Mother on a One-Day Tour to visit some farms the following morning.

As we prepared for bed, WF started to quiz me, "Mama, what are we going to do tomorrow?" "To visit the farms," I replied. Then he started it again, "What is farm made of?"..... Ahhhhh!!!!!.............