Road trip 2 (Continued)
So after some laughs and jokes about our stupidity from the dry road incident, we finally arrived at DA TULIP FARM! Being the resourceful me, I have done my research on the website and knew of a group discount if we are able to get people to pool $ together to buy tickets as a group. Our initial attempt to persuade a angmoh family was disastrous, mainly because I think the father is a racist! He has this 'stupid asian want to cheat my $' look on his face!

Of course, we weren't going to let this racist pig ruin our tulip experience! There was a wise Asian family who overheard our attempts and took the initiative to offer to purchase the tickets together for cost savings purposes! Woohoo! I think it saved us half the tix price. Now now, who's the stupid one? Tsk Tsk. That's why I tell you, not all angmohs are smart lor and, never be a racist!


Tadah! Apparently, this tulip farm is a family owned business. All year round, they family hosts events during the tulip season and charge visitors $ to see the tulips. On top of that, they sell tulips and have merchandise stores come in to sell their stuff as well. This week was the Dutch Festival. Check out the pics below.

Lots of couples dancing the Holland dance. See the big yellow clogs they have! Hee, it is the trademark of the Dutch!

Now, how can we ever leave this place without eating our fair share of Dutch pancakes? :) After all, it is the Dutch Festival!

A little knowledge on Tulips for flower lovers. ;)

Ha, don't you think the dancers look funny? Notice that the dancers are all old couples? Hmm, does that tell us anything?

Of course, we gotta take some pictures when we are there and flaunt our beautiful faces right?

More tulips! Aww, if only I have this whole garden to myself!

Cool eh? Looks abit like an wedding aisle walkdown in a tent. Haha.

Now, what's all these huge poles for? Oh well, as long as they make me look small, I'm cool about it. Haha.

I think with Yishan around, the poles make me look even smaller! KUDOS! HAHAHAHA....

Road Trip 2: Tulip Farm!
It's Spring time...Spring time...That means Tulip time! Armed with a traveller's enthusiasm in venturing all festivals all season in my short time span in Australia, I make it a point to do whatever activities listed on websites at each season! So here goes, our adventure to Tulip Farm in Dandenong! But first thing first, we gotta fill our stomachs right? And our housemate, Lynn, has recommended us this to-die-for place, Miss Marples! It is a quaint English Teahouse that is adapted from a story book and is apparently very famous.

When we got there, I thought, wow, what a fairy-like town! It's totally Hansel & Gratel! :) But all things great require patient people. Miss Marples does not accept reservations, only sincere people who are willing to wake up early can eat there. Though sincere, we were of course not placing Miss Marples above our warm and fuzzy beds. Hehe, so what happened? We had to wait 30mins just for a seat! Patience, my friend, is what you will learn in Australia. Simply because everything requires your patience here with the speed! Tsk tsk.

Off we went to explore the small town of Miss Marples somewhere in the Dandenong Hills. Just beside Miss Marples is a 'out of the world' coffee & tea shop! Such a wide variety of chocolate coated coffee beans, tea pots, coffee bean grinders, coffee makers, beans, and so much more! I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland.

This is just a small area of the store! Though the store ain't big, it certainly exercises great space efficiency!

Just look at the amount of coffee pots, tea leaves and tea plants! :D

Next up is a tarot witchery store! Look at all those voodoo stuff!

Of course, how can a witch store be without tarot reading? Hee, they even had women dress like fairies to tell your future! Ha, how reliable is that man...

Tadah! The long awaited MISS MARPLES! Cool quaint cottage eh?

Check out the size of the table! It's of course not true that we ordered too much. I mean, how can food ever be too much? Haha. Just looking at the cream and jam and you know we are going to have scones! Woohoo! The pot of tea is apparently some golden tea, that actually honestly just tastes like Lipton tea lor. Bleah.

This is the well acclaimed cottage pie! Being Australian, everything just gotta finish off with tomato sauce! Haha, but it's Miss Marples tomato sauce so nobody's complaining!

Just look at this! Can you believe it is actually a scone? I mean, it looks more like some frost tall bread! But then again, who is to tell Miss Marples that she is wrong?

Ha, this. This, my friend is simply mouth watering. It is called fingers. Toast topped with campagne ham and toasted with cheese on top. Awww. I can't even describe the wonder of this dish, except that my saliva is dripping as I'm typing away now.

Now, for the classic story that I will NEVER grow tired talking about. DA DRY ROAD! Haha, after our wonderful meal, we thought, what a smooth sailing journey to our tulip adventure. Little did we know our adventure has only started.

As we were descending the Dandenong Hills, I was manevouring the car like Jay Chou in Initial D. Suddenly, Yishan just announced with the cock sure map reading skills she has acquired in Melbourne.

Yishan: Ok, now, turn left.

I took a look at the dry road (refer to picture above, YES), looked at her in disbelief.

Mich: You're kidding, right?

Looking at me with the unperturbed expression on her face.

Yishan: No. The map says so.

Mich: ..............

Cindy: .............

Haha, so okay...Given that the map said so, we attempted our ascent up the 'dry' road. Ha needless to say, how can our steady 1 litre Daihatsu Charade possibly be able to withstand this blow? So halfway up the road, our car rolled backwards and got stuck at the side of the road, along with bushes.

Yishan and Cindy had to get out of the car and push to break the car free away from the clutches of the Amazon monsters. I was scared yet relieved. As I was at the driver's wheel preparing to start the engine, I had to juggle between not stalling the engine and at the same time, not allowing the car to slide back.

I tell you, never in my life I was so freaked out, trying not to endanger the lives of my friends. I never remember myself praying so hard to God for everything to be alright. Haha, by God's grace, we managed to free the car, afterwhich we had a good laugh and did a spot check on the car. Woohoo the car was fine! So off we went, unscathed, off to the tulip farm!

Ha, as I always told Yishan, it's yet another cockadodo thing we should add to our 'cock' list. Haha, but I'm really glad we escaped safe and sound, only to find that the car was leaking oil afew days later. Bleah. Oh well. :D

Hills and Vales, Trees and Flowers - a Cameron Highlands Trip (Day 2)


The next morn, we woke up too late and missed the breakfast at the hotel. Therefore, we decided to take a walk down to the market area to find some food. We ended up having nasi lemak and maize. The maize was simply amazing - easily the sweetest maize I ever savoured, no seasoning need to be added to enhance its taste. The delightful taste of the maize was only matched by its own glorious golden colour.






Having satisfied our hunger, some of us went on to shop around the marketplace for a second round while the rest of us decided to go about snapping photos.




Eventually, some of the group went back to the apartment to slack while Chee Weng, Godmom and me wanted to linger around the flowers a bit longer. Check out the photos below, they speak for themselves as to how beautiful Cameron Highlands is.










The three of us had a really relaxed time down at the gardens. We strolled from picturesque spot to picturesque spot, snapping photos and chatting and laughing. Finally, we ended up at the edge of a hill and glanced down in awe at a farming village at the bosom of a beautiful valley.




It was mid-noon when we returned to our apartment - time for the second round of our planning session. Sean was rather distracted by his bottle of beer.




I was getting a bit restless towards the end of the meeting as well, so I decided to entertain myself by locking Jo out in the balcony and leaving her there to freeze. Check out her contorted visage of anguish.




By the time we were done, it was time for dinner. There's nothing quite like hot and spicy steamboat up on a cold mountain top, yum yum! And the star of the night was the succulent and juicy mushrooms! Everyone was enjoying the food so much that we ordered many more side-dishes.




When everyone is bloated and screaming "very full..", we went for a stroll in the nearby night market. It was buzzing with people and filled with stalls from street to street, much like the pasar malam back home. These stalls sold all kinds of food and sourveniers, and we bought some wild honey back so that we could enjoy honey-gazed strawberries. The combination proved to be heavenly.




Back in the apartment, Chee Weng was getting too relaxed and was sprawling on the sofa and stretching out his hairy legs in a bid to look sexy. The pose struck me as that of a dead insect.




After a while, people started getting bored so the guys went to the hotel lobby to play pool. I was feeling lazy and my toes were cold so I snuggled in my bed and read my comic. However, no rest for the wicked. I was soon arrowed by Boss to take photos for him and the girls. Apparently, they have been playing with some facial products and it was beginning to look like a freakshow. I made an excuse that I needed to join the guys for pool and made good my escape. Enough nonsense for a day.

Hills and Vales, Trees and Flowers - a Cameron Highlands Trip (Day 1)


Last Fri my department travelled to Cameron Highlands to have our annual planning session. Upon getting off the cab at the peak, we were taken aback by how cold the weather there was. Only an hour's drive from the foot of the highlands to the top and the temperature fell drastically from 30 plus degrees to 11 degrees. It seemed a world out of place. Below are some photos I've taken during the trip.

This is the apartment where we stayed. The interior is very spacious and the charges are cheap. However, there is no internal heating so it can get very cold. Well, you get what you paid for.





After settling down, some of us relaxed by slouching on the sofa and sipping a cup of warm tea as boring soap operas play on the TV.




Others like me, were more keen on exploring our surrounding from the balcony.






After some rest, we took a short walk to the strawberry farm near our apartment. There we saw various kinds of strawberry products including strawberry jam, strawberry-cream biscuits, dried strawberries, strawberry-flavoured lollipops and the most savory of them all... strawberry ice-stick!




Strawberries grow on wooden frames like grapes in a vineyard. You can pay 40 riggit to pluck them and keep them but I wonder where's the thrill in that.





We went slightly downhill to the market area of Cameron Highlands after we were done with the strawberry farm. Besides strawberries, the hills bring vegetables, flowers and other agriculture produce as well. Fresher vegetables I have never tasted. For one, the maize was juicy and sweet, better than any found in Singapore.






Strawberries were sold everywhere. The locals depended heavily on selling these reddies to tourists hellbent on buying local products in order to sustain their living.




The weather up at Cameron Highlands is volatile. All of a sudden, the sky looked like the boiling surface of a witch's cauldron. I couldn't resist but vainly try to capture the majesty of the clouds with my camera. Of all of God's created natural world, the sky enchants me the most. You will never grow bored of watching the sky. It is constantly in flux, it is ever varied. No two sunsets are alike and no two pieces of cloud similar. Yet, despite the sky's diversity, it is also the most consistent presence, the most enduring picture. Like its Maker, it is a certainty in an uncertain world.




All the walking and sight seeing had made us tired, so we went to the town for food. Our manager brought us to this cafe which he heard prepares the best beef steak. The steak lived up to its name, and the mutton was excellant as well. After the main course, we all shared lemon cheesecakes, scones, mud pies, and the famous strawberry cheesecakes.




This is my godmom and also, my fellow sister in Christ. She has a very kind heart and is generous to people. One of the many things I admire in her is that she greets every security guard, food stall aunty and cleaner she meets and befriends them. People like her in return; the food stall aunty always gives her extra portions -laughs-




Finally, after a long day of touring, we returned to our apartment for official business. People are dozing off as the manager goes on and on.

Life away from home

Some days, I sit down thinking about home. It seems like I have made some foreign part in the world my home in a short span of 3 months. Some nights, I sit down by the computer wishing someone would keep talking to me, perhaps just so I will feel less lonely.

Yesterday, I made my way to a suburb to get my car's oil leak fixed. The mechanic is supposedly cheap and good. While waiting, I made my way to a shopping centre nearby. Turned out it was like a mini vietnam. All the shops were endorsing something vietnam. The bakeries, supermarts, etc. I wasn't aware that there is such a large vietnamese community in Melbourne till yesterday.

On my way back to the mechanic shop, I was chatting on the line with a friend. Little did I realised that there were so many nice flowers growing out of people's homes. I stopped, took my time to admire them and let all that beauty sink in. I thought to myself, what a nice day it is out there! It's been such a long time since I did this. Always too caught up with figures and sitting in the office during the day.

Yesterday, I missed Mr Low a great deal. Yet in my yearning for his presence, I managed to upset him with my tantrums. Sigh, why can't everything just be perfect?

Food craze

Ha yet another update on what great food I have been eating! How to be the Aussie babe I aspired to be before I flew off to Melbourne. Have been gaining unwanted undeveloped muscles all around my body! :'(

Anyway, we decided to make brekkie 1 saturday morning! 1 of my goals in my 2 year stint in Melbourne is to be able to make pancakes the standard of Macdonalds when I get back to Singapore! Ha, tada, we had pancakes, strawberries, fried spinach, toasted tomatoes with cheese and bacons! Woohoo, what a hearty brekkie! Nice!

I have been wanting to try out this hamburger place near the DVD store I always rent my weekly dosage of films from. Andrew Hamburger. It is a family owned burger takeaway store. The aroma of the burgers never fail to tempt me in walking in to order 1. So on a saturday night, we decided to do just that!

Of course, we ordered the famous burger with everything inside, tomatoes, onions, beef patty, special sauce topped with an egg! All for A$7.50! I tell you, this is awesome stuff man, mouth-watering! :)

Ha, this took place just yesterday. We decided to eat steamboat on a cold spring night! So we went marketing in the morning! Tadah! A feast on the table! It was just pure happiness. But Yishan was a flop, she bought the most expensive prawns. A$28 for a kg. And she didn't even realise she bought cooked prawns! Haha, "domestic" woman she is. Tsk tsk. ;p

Till then, stay tuned for more feasts coming up!