Thursday, May 25, 2006

lesson #001: the revival of the lessons

So I met up with Jing last night. We had Asian Kitchen @ Marina for dinner (not bad, but loses out to Crystal Jade's la mian) and then went to Times Bookshop. She bought Kazuo Ishiguro while I got myself some chick lit (been craving for some dumbing down amidst all the work stress and all) (it's very stressful trying to look busy when you've got nothing to do). And then she did a pedi at ProfessioNail, which is next to Times.

I think ProfessioNail's pretty good. For the price of $15 you get your toe nails done and you get to sit in a massage chair for half an hour. Mmmm. An express mani is $12. Might go back there to prettify the nails one of these days.

Speaking of nails, Substance opposite SMU's SoB (or LKCSB... whatever...) has an even better service. They give 30% discount to students, so a full pedi costs only $24.50. Very worth it. Went for a haircut there a couple of days back as well, and it wasn't half bad. If you're looking into trying out new places for a mani/pedi or a haircut, you can try it out. It's especially great since nobody goes there, so you'll be spared the horrible Waiting Time that usually plagues most hair salons.

OK. After much plug-filled digression, we shall resume with the story of how I met up with Jing Once Upon A 24th May. Yeah. So... where were we. Ho hum. Right, the pedi. So after a short while spent admiring her toes, we went to Esplanade to get dessert in the form of $1 ice cream. Took some pictures (shall put it up one of these days, it's rare that both of us take a picture together, but then again, the pictures weren't very flattering) (babe, we gotta put full make-up and then meet up to purely take pictures one day) inside Esplanade before settling down by the sea licking our melting ice creams.

It was nice catching up with her and listening to horror stories of her school trip to Malaysia. Here's an extract from her blog, which has been re-published henceforth with the author's consent:

"it was an eye opening trip. for me it was more unpleasant than enjoyable, as i got to experience first hand the general poor attitude of our dear neightbours. for the first 6 days we stayed at a university hostel, and on the 3rd day of our stay, 2 of the girls' rooms got broken into, INCLUDING MINE. the interesting thing is, the theif stole weird stuff. she took my Pantene shampoo, ignoring my Bodyshop shower gel. she took my star earrings and i am very pissed about that because Mike paid for it. she took a necklace i bought the day before and never got to wear it. she also took a pair of shades i bought the day before and only wore for 2 hours. she fucking took took my pencilcase which contains a whole load of expensive stationery including a 256MB thumbdrive. she ate my Meiji chocolates in my room and dropped some on the floor, and leaving one of the empty boxes on my table. she took my room mate's slippers and phone charger and opened her contact lense case (for fuck).

from the other room she took another pencil case with twice the amount of expensive stationery, and 5 tshirts of total worth $95. the funny thing is she left my Island Shop spaghetti top and tube top alone, which these 2 alone add up to 140RM and are new. and so from the stuff she stole we concluded she was a girl with size 5 feet and only wears clothes which cover more skin. uh huh. probably using a Samsung phone or has a boyfriend using one, never ate Meiji chocolates before and doesn't shop cos she left all the brand names alone.

so we took it up to the hostel administration and the way they handled this matter was most impressive. under stress they slow down (even more than normal) and look very stressed, all the while effectively solving nothing. and after 3 days of prodding and angry complaints from us all (there were 16 of us), they said they found my necklace.

hooray!

the next thing they did was hand over this envelope which was damn heavy. and opening it we saw..waaalaaa!

some random Indian style gold bracelets.

fuck lah. they sit around in their offices all day long doing nothing and can't even solve an internal theft case. even when we insisted on checking the contractors and the cleaners (who were most likely the ones who opened all the doors of the rooms on our floor and ransacked our place), all the stories they told were different."

On top of which, her professor, who's in her fifties, was robbed when they were in another city and suffered from fractures as a result of the Grab'nGo.

Hokay, enough of traumatizing stuff. We decided to call it a night. At the Esplanade bus stop, saw an advert for a comedy show. May go on a double date to catch this:

Esplanade Presents
160 Characters
Vanilla Productions
Australia
2 - 4 Jun 06, Fri - Sun, 8pm, Recital Studio

Sometimes 160 characters is all we need to express ourselves. The 160-character-limits of phone text messaging is explored in this highly interactive, often hilarious work of improvised theatre.160 Characters asks its audience to forward their most intriguing text messages to an onstage phone. Each text message is used to inspire an improvised comedic sketch by six Australian cast members. The results are wholly original, spontaneous and fantastical pieces of comedic storytelling.

Sounds interesting hey? I was intending to ask my potential date if he'd be interested in attending a comedy show once I got home, but I never got the chance to. Once I hit the bed, I closed my eyes to catch 12 winks before I watch Project Runway (was feeling tired and kinda sick), but the 12 winks became 8 hours and I woke up the next morning feeling crap as I didn't manage to get anything done. And I bloody missed Project Runway's premier episode. GAAAAAH!

Anyway, as I was waiting for my bus to arrive just now, saw yet another advert for a play at Esplanade called Shorter & Sweeter. Wanna catch that too! Hmmm. Feel so artsy-fartsy now. Teehee!