Tsuruya

Mei mei suddenly decides that she wants to go out for dinner and asked me if I wanted to come with. She arrived at my house just moments after I agreed. I took a quick shower and we head out for Tsuruya, a Japanese (duh) restaurant where two of our old primary school friends are working at.

They were still preparing when we got there and was shoo-ed away by an employee whose English was horribly incomprehensible. We walk around the whole I-Avenue building before going back to the restaurant to ask if we could wait inside.

Opening time came and we made our orders. The dishes were awesome. Very nice. I highly recommend this place. Definitely a must for Japanese food-lovers. Heck, it's definitely a must for anyone who love eating.

Right, enough words. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. I'll be rating the dishes out of 5 stars.

Some lighting to set the mood. Or for mei to play with. Atmosphere: 4 and a half stars.





WenLoong and HooiKhim a.k.a. Miss Smiley Lemon (or just Lemon) who were our waiters for tonight.

Having a nice chat since we haven't met in a while.

Taking our orders. Lemon still has that bright beautiful smile on her face. I wonder if she ever stops smiling?

Other customers have arrived and Lemon gets to work.

The garlic chahan (fried rice). 4 stars.

The Spider Maki. 2 and a half stars.

The Tsuruya Special Maki. 5 stars.

The Nama Ika Teriyaki. A whole squid. 4 and a half stars.

Again, mei won't allow a picture of her without me being in it with her. Oh yeah, customer service: 5 stars, but just because they're our friends.

Bake-Fest

Saturday morning started out slow, dizzy and sleepy. Mei messaged me and said she's coming to pick me up for breakfast. I took a quick shower and nearly fell down the stairs. I got into her car and off we go!

We drove around for a while, not knowing where to eat. This is saying something, considering it's Penang, the so-called food paradise. We ended up having breakfast at Sunshine Square's McDonald's. How very anti-climatic.

After that, she dropped me back home and she went for some training for her job at the coming PC Fair. I crashed on my bed and slept the day away.

Later in the afternoon, mei and a friend, Yen, came to pick me up again to go to QB to look for the required ingredients. But first, we went to the food court to have lunch. Or was it dinner? Oh, well. Oh, and only one of us ate, the other two just watched. After the meal, we went off to Jusco to purchase said ingredients, which turn out to be a complete waste of time. It was kinda my fault. Sorry, girls. XD

We went back to my place and bought some stuff from the mini-market behind my house, much to the girls' frustration (again, I'm sorry!), before starting on the cookies. My mom supervised them and gave lessons on the first batch. The result tasted pretty good. Except that they didn't look anything like fortune cookies. On to the second batch!

The girls worked on number 2 on their own, without my mom's help. Again, the result tasted not bad, but they were stuck to the wax paper and they didn't have time to fold them before they hardened. It was all downhill from then.

We surmised that the problem was getting the cookies off the wax paper. They tried greasing the paper, which gave similar results to when they didn't. They tried greasing the pan without the paper, which became a total disaster as the batter stuck to the pan. They had to soak it in water and scrape the stuff off with forks and buttering knives. Ugh.

We gave up and my mom suggested cupcakes. Well, it's up to them. Cupcakes should be easier. I think. We cleared up and went out for dinner at Sungai Dua. Hidden Recipe was pretty good. After that we went to Tesco Extra to walk off our meal. We just strolled around, had a few laughs and went home.

Phew! What a day ...

At QueensBay Mall. Mei mei in red, Yen in white sleeveless.




Buying waffles. Mmmm ... smells nice!

A lesson of baking from my mom.

Time to try it out themselves!

Aww ... how cute! Oh, I was referring to the plushie, but the girls are cute too.

They're trying to make them as perfectly circular as possible. Okaaaaay ...

Half-baked cookie batter stuck to the baking pan. My mom's poor poor baking pan ...

Mushroom soup and buns. A part of the set meals at Hidden Recipe.

My main course. BBQ sauce fish fillet! Yummmm ...

Mei takes a picture of her every meal. No idea why.

5th April 2009 - My Birthday Celebration

I woke up early Sunday morning, not knowing that today would be one of the best days of my life. It was my birthday the day before (4th April) but tradition requires that I join my family for ChengBeng, so my birthday celebration was postponed to the next day.

As usual, I boarded the ferry over to the mainland, alone this time, as CY had to join his family for ChengBeng. It took them a while to come pick me up as it turns out they got lost on the way to the jetty. No matter, I needed some fresh air to wake myself up and the sea air pretty much did the trick.

For some strange reason, we found ourselves in front of Pacific instead of Sunway, which is where we were headed. A few more lost and confused moments later, WenC finally managed to drive us to the intended shopping mall.

We bought tickets to Shinjuku Incident and were stopped by the ticket-collector to check if we were indeed old enough to watch this movie. Unfortunately, Ying wasn't and we got into a tiny pickle where the ticket-collector kept scolding us with an unnecessarily loud voice. Oh well, we got in anyways in the end.

We found out why it was rated for 18+. The movie was incredibly violent and had people's face being slashed and hands being chopped off. Well, it was pretty much expected as it was a movie about yakuza: notorious Japanese organised crime-gangs.

2 hours of violence and confusing plotlines later, we went to pick XinMay up at her house and headed for a nice cozy little place called Sunday's Café. And here's where it gets fun.

They made me open the small gift they gave me when they picked me up from the jetty. I wanted to open it at home but there were 3 girls and only one me. Many jumbled up illogical reasoning from them later, I gave up and started to unfold the paper wrappings.

I unwrapped. And unwrapped. And unwrapped. And unwrapped. This thing was wrapped beneath layers and layers of newspaper! I was getting mildly frustrated and a little suspicious. They told me it was a Jack-in-the-box. A trick. Yeah, right!

Countless layers of newspaper later, I came upon a small box which contained a small plushie of some weird black thing with a suction-cup thingy for you to hang on walls and one of those things you hang on mobile phones. I was like, okaaaaaaaaaaaaay ... It wasn't that I didn't like it. I did! I just found it weird that WenC deliberately wrapped it under so many layers of newspaper. Hmmmm ... something didn't feel right ...

And my hunch was right. The instant we finished munching on the toast we ordered May and Ying suddenly said they were still hungry and wanted to order something else. They scribbled something on the order form and showed it to a waitress, who then brought over a huge box with a ribbon tied neatly on top. At first my mind went blank and wondered what this is. And it hit me the next moment: this was for me!

I was speechless. What a surprise! No one's ever done this for me before and I didn't know how to express my feelings then. I was so touched that I could cry right there on the spot if it wasn't for my feeling shocked and surprised. The massive gift-box contained an assortment of items which ranged from plush-toys to T-shirts. The plushies, key-chains and other matter of collectibles had a similar theme: they were either in black or in white or both and most of them featured the skeletal character Jack from The Night Before Christmas.

After paying for our orders (which, to my annoyance, they did) we decided to go to Ying's place for some singing. Karaoke time! The karaoke room in Ying's house was a cute and cozy little in-between room upstairs. It's an in-between room because it's in between the upstairs hallway and the master bedroom.

We spent pretty much the rest of the day in that tiny little room singing whatever songs we find, which is a lot. It'd take us like 5 years to finish listening to every song they have. Non-stop. It was a really nice place to just sit, relax and sing so Ying, can we visit again sometime? XD

We went out for dinner, which was pretty uneventful except that I finally got to pay for something that day. WenC drove me back to the jetty so I can catch a ferry home. Heading home, I carried the huge boxful of gifts and an even bigger smile on my face, which stuck there until I went to sleep that night.

Thanks, girls, for everything ... It was by far the best birthday I've ever had ... *Sniff* :')

The gift they gave me for the first phase on their plan to surprise me.



The enclosed birthday card.

The contents of the card.

Picking out songs from a list of infinite choices to input into the singing list.

Some nifty lighting to set the karaoke mood.

Let's karaoke!

Singing got boring. Stuffed-doggie fight! That's WenC's head in my lap. *Blush*

This is Jack. He's uhhh ... gettin' jiggy with it. Whatever that means.

This is all the stuff I recieved from them ... I love you guys!

At the End of Penang Island

WY a.k.a. Aisling a.k.a. my mei mei pulled me out from in front of the PC and out of my comfortable little cul-de-sac to accompany her on a search for a place that neither I nor her have heard about: a Penang National Park.

So we took off with her in the driver's seat. We took a wrong turn at PCGHS and wound up lost in a residential area for a while. We managed to find our way out on to the main road and just followed along it.

The journey was pretty uneventful from here on out. We had a little chat and repeatedly listened to a song called Our Song by Taylor Swift for pretty much the whole length of the journey.

I found out that HooiKhim had been thinking about making our next primary school class-reunion a hike or trek through said park. Yeah, as if those spoiled rich brats would want to walk through a dense forest in the early hours of the day. (Good thing none of them visit my blog.)

About an hour and half of driving later, and passing by many beaches that tempted us to stop, we found ourselves at a dead end and considered asking around for directions. But when we got off the car we saw that the dead end was exactly what we were looking for. It was the main entrance into the park. She went to collect some information at the counter and we proceed to lunch at the Gurney Plaza.

A modest meal at Kim Gary later and we headed for home.

We got lost and ended up on the Penang bridge! ... Yeah, right. Nobody's that stupid.



The Pejabat Taman Negara Pulau Pinang building.

The fishing docks.

Seaweed-flavoured fries and cheese-baked rice: My staple meal at Kim Gary.

Wasting some time by filling out a feedback-form. Mei mei made some pretty useful comments that they should observe.

She wouldn't let me take a picture of her without me being in it with her. You can see how annoyed I am with this.