Crazy Elephant Anniversary

Sunday 14th Dec brought about the anniversary party at Crazy Elephant, and it was expected to be rather good, and it sure was. The whole place was kitted out like some hippie hang out complete with makeshift tent inside, decorations all over the place and a second temporary bar setup outside.

The music was fantastic as allways and everyone was dressed in various highly colourful hippie clothes. Even the floor was decorated with stickers and flower patterns. The event went on well into the early hours and towards the end of the evening they even started giving out free pours of shots to everyone, it was an insane party, and the the place was packed all night. This has to be one of the best anniversary parties I’ve seen for awhile. This was already one of my favourite venues, and it certainly didn’t disapoint!

5 Weeks In… Hotel Living and Rudeness at Gyu Kaku

Its been over a month now and I’m still living in the same hotel in Geylang. I picked the hotel knowing its location due to its exceedingly cheap room rental rate, however it has some side effects, namely the hotel is busy 24hrs, due mainly to the close proximity of the “ladies of the night” and the constant sound of the elevator bell and the sound of high heels on tiles can get a little annoying. I am now eagerly awaiting the move in date for my apartment, just 2 more weeks.

Last week me and collegue decided to pay a visit to Gyu Kaku – a Japanese Barbicue Restaurant in Chijmes, I!’d been there before with some Japanese friends and it wasn’t bad, so I figured a second trip was a good idea. Wrong. We arrive late in the evening, and they took us in without hesitation and gave us a table. About 30 minutes into the meal, it became apparent we were not eating fast enough. Suttle hints like unpacking the foil warpped parcels at 10x normal speed, mashing the fish insted of lifting it out etc. We finally finished the main part of the meal, ie the barbicue part, at which point the waiter thought it would be highly funny to inform the rest of the staff we’d finally finished, and shouted out “And they’re done!” in Chinese, which was followed by a loud cheer. Clearly not knowing that my collegue can speak 7 languages, including Japanese and Chinese. This was the rudest behaviour I have ever seen in any type of eatery, and was appalled. When the waiter came back a few moments later, my collegue cut him off before he could say anything, and said “Ice Water, because we’re done!”, the look on the waiters face said it all, and the staff suddenly went rather quiet. We had our ice water, then ordered some ice cream, for no other purpose than to slow it down a bit further and make our point. We paid, collected the change and ensured no optional tip was left – we were foreced to pay a 10% service charge which was auto added on the bill, but they werent getting anything else. They tried to be super friendly as we exited, we ignored them and walked out. We will never, ever visit any of their restaurants again, Singapore or Japan. I suggest you avoid them as well.

Other activites over the last 4 weeks include a mamoth book hunt, we have been checking out the local book shops quite a bit, and as a result I have managed to double my manga collection. I was very pleased to find Hayate The Combat Butler and have now got all but 1 of the first 9 volumes. I do now also have the complete set up to vol 19 of Tsubasa “Reservoir Chronicles”, including Vol 14 – which was apparently quite hard to find, according to someone we met in Borders Orchard Rd, as it turns out a trip down to Kinokuniya Book shop just down the road had a huge stock of said volume. I have also increased my DVD and CD collection with new albums from Guns n Roses and Yui and some more Korean horror movies.

We also took a day out to visit the Anime convention in Suntec the other week, lots of lovly cosplayers, lots of model kits and some manga and dvd stands. Bought a couple of mangas, but nothing else of real interest.

Back to work and visiting the family…

First week back at work over, I left on the Friday and spent the weekend with my parents, after a month away and a week or so either side of the holiday its been some time since I been up there. I also needed to continue the mammoth task of sorting out my stuff which has been stored there since I finished Uni back in 2004. Its incredible, the amount of crap I managed to collect, mainly computer junk which was used, or intended to be used while studying.

Back then some of those things were like gold dust, so rare, so unique, and on student money worth a fortune. In reality, its nearly all just junk, and especially now after so long, totally out of date and useless. I know some of my ex-class mates will hate the idea of getting rid of it, but its just not practical, and its all in aid of my latest “dream”, part of which involves moving abroad, and therefore means having to reduce the amount of stuff I have – and I have a lot of stuff, way too much, no matter how much I get rid of, more just seems to appear.

Besides, I’ve never been a geek – I studied computer networking, and I work in IT, but I cant be involved with it 24/7, computers annoy the hell out of me, the dents in my desktop pc case will testify to that, when it really plays up it gets a hell of a kicking. There stressful, “fun” is not something to be associated with them. So why do I do it? Because I’m good at it, and its just been what I have been doing since college. Computers are not my life, there just in it.

What I love is travel, seeing the world, new places, meeting new people, doing different things, just spending time with friends. I love music, and even play the guitar really really badly, but that doesn’t matter, its making the sound yourself, putting the feeling and emotion into what your playing (or trying to) and just enjoying that, and also photography – as this blog shows, quite a bit is travel photography, which brings me back to the main point, you cant travel with a tons and tons of junk weighing you down. Just now I wish I hadn’t got quite so much stuff!

Here is a picture of my metallic blue Yamaha Pacifica, I love this guitar, one of my favourite possessions.

My Yamaha Pacifica 012