Summer in Suzhou

Back from a quick 2-day trip to Suzhou! The amount of time spent on the road for this trip is some kind of ridonkculus, but well...when I arrived, I fell right into the lap of luxury thank the lucky stars. Stayed at the Kempinski Suzhou where the freaking bathroom is bigger than my own bedroom. Apparently Suzhou is mainly developed by Singaporeans, no wonder I didn't get the typical Chinese vibe there. Everything's well-planned and man-made LOL.

Anyway I was there for work (and some play of course. My fun colleagues from all over the world, we manage to have the best parties no matter where we travel to.

Overall it was a really tiring but fulfilling 2 days. After the party I just filled my bathtub at midnight and soaked till I almost dozed, and crashed into the comfy bed. Luckily managed to get up to catch the bus back to Pudong.

Spent Saturday travelling and luckily managed to get on an earlier flight back. Love Singapore Airlines!! :) And glad to be home!

Insta-Updates

Hello world! Been refreshed after the holidays and been working like a maniac the past week plus or so. In between, went for lots of sushi....

 

 

Some new fusion wanton ramen thingamabob at Ramen Champion. They changed all the stores so sad my favorite Taishoken has gone back to Tokyo sobsob....

 

And dyed my hair shocking pink/purple...NAH I kid! It's like a dark purple/brown/red shade but somehow that day when I was trying to snap a photo of it in the sun, it turned out to look like this! How pictures deceive! Case study man!

 

Other than that. I've also been doing SO MUCH LAUNDRY IT HURTS. Crap! My laundry box is never-ending, over-flowing with so many garments it's starting to resemble my wardrobe. While waiting for the laundry, we're also finishing up the Korean drama Faith which is kinda weird and confusing and interesting but Lee MinHo is such an eye candy. And tonight I gotta pack my luggage again, off to Suzhou with a pit stop in Shanghai for the next few days!

+66 Down the Chao Phraya River

This was the first time we stayed by the Chao Phraya River in all our trips to Bangkok, and I have to say it is quite a refreshing change from a typical Bangkok trip. I've been to Bangkok several times and always stayed in the city centre - Pratunam, Sukhumvit. We tend to book boutique hotels with more space and near a BTS station, so it was quite a change for us.

It definitely is a more quiet environment, and at some points, it even felt like I was in a beach/seaside property in Phuket. Also to get a 5-star suite at such a good rate, of course we had to compromise a little on location. But the view....speechless....

I also got to ride down the Chao Phraya River canals in a private long-tail boat and it was quite a "scary" experience at the end when the waters got choppy =.=

Hotel staff helping us get on the boat. The entire trip lasted for an hour and cost about THB700 per person.

 

You get to see the river-side residential of the local people, and everyone who saw us were so happy and waved at us. Which got us thinking....how real was everything that we were looking at? Were the people at the temples paid to feed the fish so they would jump about when tourist boats passed by? Haha. Nettie even suspected this giant turtle we saw when the boat slowed down was a robot -_-

 

If you are deathly afraid of vendors, the boat only stopped once for this lady. We politely said no to everything she tried to sell us, until she said "How 'bout a beer for your driver?" And we were like, oh, okay, that can be his tip! And as she sailed back to pass him his beer, she was probably chuckling that this trick works all the time. Haha. Ohwell, little joys of life.

Not really a temple person, but the river-side religious artifacts were quite a sight. Behold!

We spent quite long on the last evening contemplating if we should even walk out to find food (cos we're lazy and it was raining and I had started coughing) or to dine in at the international buffet. Unlike the city centre where food is everywhere you don't even have to think. In the end, we settled for the international buffet dinner with BBQ seafood, pleasantly surprised that there was a 40% discount for in-house guests when we reached the restaurant :D

As our flight was in the evening, the hotel kindly gave us a free late check-out as well so we could nua like tofu until the late afternoon. But in the end we sadly had to pack up to catch our flight, but not before some afternoon tea at the lobby lounge :)

+66 Filling our tummies

Greetings! Bangkok is known as a shopping and food paradise. As I already explained in the last post that I'm not a crazy shopper (at least not in Bangkok, can't say the same on taobao), we spent quite a lot of time nomming on all the crazy nice food / refreshing coconuts!

Since I'm already on the topic of eating, the breakfast spread at the hotel was super sumptuous and I had something new to try everyday! Pancakes, waffles, charsiewbao, naan, sushi, cereal, soup noodles you name it, I had it! I remember I had 3 chocolate donuts and hashbrowns on the last day before check-out -_- However, I only captured 1 shot of my food, so there you go fried egg white with cheese, a croissant and tomatoes.

 

 

Prior to the trip, I had read on many other blogs on their café adventures in Bangkok, but the cafes seemed to be in off-the-track locations (you gotta understand me damn lazy). So imagine my delight when I realized that Siam Center housed a couple of them all under one roof! Siam Center is directly linked from Siam BTS Station.

The malls in Bangkok are very very stylish and the design themes flow from shop to shop. I think it's very important for the consumer to understand the concept of the mall he/she is visiting, and that's the major reason why Iluma failed and Bugis+ is thriving. In Siam Center, even the toilets are super stylish (although you can only find toilets on levels 4 and basement, so don't hold your bladder there!).

As we had a heavy breakfast at the hotel, we shopped around a little bit before lunch. All major brands are available at Siam Center, which is also sort of linked to Siam Paragon and MBK in case you get bored.

For lunch we went to the much blogged-about Greyhound Café. It's so famous now it even has a branch in Hong Kong, but that day we were at the original branch. There was a queue since it was lunch time, so we waited close to 30 minutes for a table. Lots of Singaporeans around us too haha. With affordable prices, great ambience and yummy flavours, I can see why this outlet is so popular with both tourists and locals alike.

 

Happily nomming on the free warm bread with unsalted butter. Also in this picture spot the prawn bisque and refreshing lychee shake!

The whole purpose of this trip was the chicken wings! Tasty but it tastes like har chiong kai to me. I found it easy to eat and rather addicitive!

The star of the day, however, was Nettie's scallops served with pesto on a bed of mash potato. It cost less than SGD20 and look at the size of the scallops! Albeit it could have been a teeny bit more flavourful but for the price I don't think you can get such standards in Singapore.

We shared everything as we didn't want to overeat. But after lunch, I couldn't resist going just down the corridor to Mr. Jone's Orphanage for desserts!! It's really the cutest place ever and so whimsical it hurts, but my conclusion, that's the only selling point. The desserts only LOOK nice but the taste is meh. I chose the apple pie with vanilla ice cream - it was a little bland but on the positive side it wasn't sweet haha. Nettie smartly stuck to free water. Come visit for picture purposes only. Desserts cost about SGD4-6 per serving.

 

Some other random meals we had - steamboat at MK and coconuts everywhere I walked. I don't remember being such a fan of coconuts ever, maybe because the coconuts in Singapore suck. But in Bangkok, especially the small ones by the roadside are really sweeeet, I want one now!!