Back in KL due to the Hari Raya Haji holiday. By the way, first half of 2023 is over.

First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to wish to all my Muslim friends a belated greeting of ‘Selamat Hari Raya Haji!’. Yesterday was the day of the festival. I also returned to KL from Singapore yesterday due to this long 4-days break (many are taking leave today to get that 4-days break). I took flight to return to KL this time. Bought the flight tickets long time ago due to an earlier plan that could not materialize yesterday. There has been a lot of ‘what if?’ in my mind recently.

It was upsetting, but I have to look at the bright side; I get to cut down on my travel time a lot this time compared to my usual lengthy and tiring travel time back to KL by bus. Not everything goes according to plan. That’s life. You have to accept what it is and move on. At least I know I did put in effort with genuine intention (even if people is not aware or couldn’t care less). I tried my best and it just didn’t work out the way I wanted it to be. No regret and staying positive is the way forward.

I also have to accept the fact that AirAsia does really like to delay their flights. My flight yesterday got delayed by two hours and I only got to reach home at 4am. Urrghh…I’m taking AirAsia flight again in two weeks time (to Hong Kong). Hope that one won’t be facing delay.

For this trip back home, I will be spending quality time with family (having meals together and playing my favourite rummy game with them), meet up with a close friend and satisfy my craving for durian. I can’t believe the durian season this time dies down so quickly. So yup…that’s how I will spend the weekend and ending the first half of 2023.

The first half of the year has been very melodramatic for me. I don’t think I have experienced this much of ups and downs (really a rollercoaster of emotions) wthin only 6 months in my entire life. Anyway, I also am very appreciative of how the year has turned out for me so far. All the good and bad events (particularly the bad ones) that happened this year allow me to truly reflect, grow up, move on to the next stage and learn to be better in future.

Just today alone there were 2 unfortunate things that happened. I couldn’t manage to snap any ticket this morning for Jacky Cheung’s additional show in Singapore. Too many people were eyeing for the 2 extra shows on top of the earlier planned 11 dates. No luck when I got into the online queue this morning. Then later this afternoon, I received announcement that the Sammi Cheng’s Hong Kong concert next month will be postponed to a later date. I managed to buy tickets for that one and have been anticipating for it for a very long time. Now, I have no choice but to continue to wait (the concert will likely to be postponed to many months later or even next year because she has to rebook the venue for an entire month). What a sad news. No choice, we will still have to continue with the trip to Hong Kong next month as all the hotels and flights have already been paid and cannot be changed. It’s just that I have to spend extra bucks for another trip to Hong Kong again for the concert (and also take more leave).

There were also some great stuff especially the trips I had in the first half of the year; started off 2023 with a trip to Sydney & Perth in Australia with a friend (right after ending my working holiday in New Zealand), then trip to Hokkaido, Japan with parents during the Chinese New Year holiday, and lastly my first ever solo vacation to Dubai, UAE just last month. It doesn’t just stop there; I will be heading to Hong Kong next month with my siblings, and then currently planning for a year-end trip to Penang with my colleagues. Each trip to different place with different set of people. Perhaps, I really needed these for me to cope with all the depressing events this year too. Looking forward to the much better last half of 2023.

(Images in this post are from various online sources)

Visit to Mount Faber Park and back to Marina Bay again this weekend.

Wow…it’s almost end of June now. Less than a week left before I return to KL for a long 4-days break due to the incoming Hari Raya Haji holiday. And less than a month left before I fly to Hong Kong with my siblings for a trip to the city and also for my much anticipated concert show by Sammi Cheng.

However, I had a little concern recently as there is a possibility that she may postpone her 13-shows to a later date as she still have not fully recovered from Covid-19 effects (she got infected last month). A month later and she still lost her voice, had shortness of breath and constant cough. She is now trying all possible remedies and is still continuing on her rehearsals and practices for the concert at the moment. I hope she will recover very soon and the concert will not be postponed. It will be very inconvenient for us who have planned everything (bought all the flights and accommodations) and I don’t know how long I can wait further anymore to watch her perform in Hong Kong Coliseum for the first time.

Anyway, back to the main topic of this post. I went to Mount Faber Park for a walk this weekend. The park is part of the larger Southern Ridges area close to Vivocity mall. The walk first involves quite a lot of steps up as the park is on a hill. Mount Faber is also the place where you can take cable car to travel to Sentosa Island.

Faber Point is the highest point of the park and it features a small Merlion statue (it is one of the 7 official Merlion statues in Singapore). I have seen the famous Merlion statue at Marina Bay and also the one at Sentosa Island (so yup, I have seen 3). Maybe I will set a mission next time to check out the remaining 4 official Merlion statues in Singapore. From the Faber Point, I got to enjoy spectacular views of the concrete jungle of Singapore. Never ending horizon of concrete buildings. Fortunately, there are still quite a lot of green spaces remaining on this island nation.

After that, I made my way to the Henderson Waves, the highest pedestrian bridge in Singapore and it connects Mount Faber Park to Telok Blangah Hill Park. I was here before some time ago. I ended my walk after checking out the bridge. Southern Ridges has about 10km of open green spaces that connect Mount Faber Park, Telok Blangah Hill Park, HortPark, Kent Ridge Park and Labrador Nature Reserve. So I went to the first two. Will explore the remaining three parks in the future to complete the entire Southern Ridges walk.

I went back to visit Marina Bay last evening to check out the National Day rehearsal fireworks that is now happening on every Saturday around 8.15pm, all the way until the actual National Day itself on August 9th. That’s the way for Singapore to show off how wealthy the country is. Malaysia on the other hand, keep giving excuses to cancel National Day fireworks in recent years due to poor financial situation. Sigh…

It always feels good to walk around Marina Bay with many live performances (circus, busking, magic, etc). The atmosphere is lively and topped off with beautiful views of the city skyline especially in the evening. I met up with a friend and brought him to see the on-going ‘I Light Singapore 2023’ art installations event. I have previously seen them early this month. This weekend is also the last weekend for the event. We walked all the way from Marina Bay Sands to the Merlion statue before calling it a day.

It’s Dragon Boat Festival today! And my movie review for ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’.

Today is the 5th day of the 5th month of the Chinese calendar and hence we celebrate the annual Dragon Boat Festival / Dumpling Festival today. The festival is commonly associated with eating sticky rice dumplings. There are a lot of different varieties of the rice dumplings but I mostly prefer the small ones with red bean paste filling or the traditional one (with a lot of different filling inside including meat). I don’t think I will be getting any rice dumplings for this year’s festival though (don’t have the urge to eat it).

I wonder if there would be any dragon boat races going on today or on this weekend in conjunction with this festival. If there is, then it would be quite a sight to watch them. I also have these two days off and it’s perfect for me to do some of my personal stuff (without sacrificing the precious weekend time) and get some rest. I sent a parcel to oversea this morning and had a dental cleaning just now. It has been more than a year since I last did the routine dental cleaning. Definitely time for it although it is pretty costly to do it over here in Singapore.

I also had time just now for a movie. Movie on a weekday; why not? It’s cheaper and with lesser people. It has been quite some time since I last went to a cinema too. I watched the ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’. It is the 7th film in the Transformers live-action film franchise. The story was set in 1990s (as prequel to 2007’s Transformers) when a new faction of Transformers – the Maximals (led by Optimus Primal) – join the Autobots (led by none other than Optimus Prime) as allies in the battle on Earth against Unicron, a planet-eating dark god and his servants, the Terrorcons.

I’m actually a little surprised that the movie turns out to be quite good. It’s in a way similar and also different to the past Transformers’ films and that’s a good thing. I like how the special effects and action scenes are smaller and more intimate in this latest film as opposed to the bigger effects of the previous films (thanks to Michael Bay’s superb interest on making countless explosions in his earlier Transformers’ films). This is where you get to engage more into the fights between the robots and admire the details of the effects slower and closer.

There is also some genuine human drama element in this movie on top of some Indiana Jones adventure type plot which quite suits the storyline as well. Some minor drawbacks would be some obvious poor editing in some scenes, some unavoidable generic parts for the movie that we have seen so much in its predecessor films, and the dull climax. Out of 10 points, I rate ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ a total of 7.3. Not bad.

(Images in this post are from various online sources)

Played go-kart for the first time at a one-day trip to JB with colleagues yesterday.

It’s been raining for most of the day which makes it a perfect Sunday to just chill and get lazy at home. The rest is especially needed after a long day yesterday travelling to Johor Bahru (JB) with my colleague friends (Just got back home last night at 3am!). Kinda forget when was the previous time I returned home this late.

It took us 4 hours to go to JB from Singapore via Tuas Link yesterday. We started our journey in the morning and only reached JB by 2pm. I have crossed the Malaysia-Singapore land borders countless of times by bus and this was actually my first time crossing by private vehicle. We immediately went for a late lunch at a kopitiam at Mount Austin.

We then went to Mid Valley Southkey shopping mall. I have been to this mall previously and it has like almost every stores you can think of. It felt like a waste if I didn’t buy anything here. I ended up purchasing a new pair of walking shoes.

After that, we went to X Park Sunway Iskandar to play go-kart. The adventure park offers ‘extreme-fun’ activities such as go-kart, mountain biking, rock climbing, paintball, bungee, high ropes as well as other sports such as archery, badminton and kayaking. It was already evening when we arrived there. Hence, we only played the go-kart and we have no time to try the other activities.

It was my first time playing go-kart too and it was addictingly fun! The race only took 10 minutes. Only 10 minutes and still both my hands were so tired after the race. Unfortunately, in the beginning, the car I was in had a little trouble with the engine. The engine was able to be restarted but I was then at the back of the pack already. It was still really fun though. I still manage to be placed 8th out of 11 players at that race though despite the unfortunate incident at the beginning. One of my friends is very good in this sport and he got first place. The good thing is that the whole racecourse is sheltered hence you can still play even when it is raining.

It’s almost 10pm and that’s way past our usual dinner time. We made our way to Laguna Seafood BBQ Restaurant to have the free-flow seafood buffet. The restaurant is along the shore and you can see Singapore island right across. The variety of food and drink are not that much though but we still had a great dinner (or is it supper?…) there with a lot of time spent on cooking, peeling shells off mountain of prawns (haha…we took too much!), and chatting over lame stuff.

After that, we actually went to a McDonalds drive-thru to get ice cream (so this is supper! Haha…) before making our way back into Singapore after midnight. We thought of using the Causeway crossing as it is closer but due to serious traffic congestion (very surprising on the midnight of Saturday), we made a smart move to use the Tuas Link to cross instead (and there’s isn’t any congestion at the latter fortunately!).

One day isn’t enough with these bunch of good friends and cool activities. Let’s plan for our next trip to JB or somewhere else again…haha. By the way, I went for my usual cycling routine on last Friday’s evening and took some cool shots at around Marina Bay that I would like to share at here as well to end the post.

That’s all for my post today. Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

Went to Marina Bay this weekend to check out the ‘I Light SG 2023’ festival and National Day rehearsal fireworks.

The annual ‘I Light Singapore’ festival is back this month (until 25th June evening) with many interesting light art installations (with the theme of ‘A New Wave’ this year) scattered around Marina Bay (and two at South Beach Avenue and one at Millenia Walk mall). The festival give me more reason to visit Marina Bay this weekend.

But before that, I also did went to Marina Bay on yesterday’s night and saw some of the installations already. That’s because I cycled from National Stadium all the way to Marina Bay Sands last night. It was my first time cycling through the Marina Barrage, Gardens by the Bay and Bayfront area (these areas are much busier with more cyclists and pedestrians even in the midnight).

So for today’s evening, I went to Marina Bay again to check out the remaining light art installations (saw all of them this evening except for one because that one requires admission fee and so I skipped it!). It was much more livelier today as expected since it is a Saturday’s evening. I didn’t bother to read the descriptions of the installations though. I’m more interested on taking pictures of them from interesting angles just like the masses. Some are interactive installations too where visitors can engage/interact with to produce some sort of effects.

What I didn’t expect was that there will be Singapore National Day Parade (NDP) rehearsals happening on every Saturdays this month at the nearby Padang. This means there will be some fireworks display to watch this evening. I knew right away that it’s going to happen tonight as I saw many people setting up their cameras and tripods along the Marina Bay around 8pm just now (usual timing for fireworks display at annual NDP event).

I walked from Marina Bay Sands to the Promontory, and then to the famous Merlion statue before heading to the Esplanade. The lively atmosphere and the beautiful scenery made this a lovely evening walk. Singapore cityscape is no doubt gorgeous. The walk especially across the Jubilee Bridge also reminds me of the great time I had while celebrating new year on that pedestrian bridge few years ago (time flies but memories stay).

My walk didn’t stop there. I went all the way to Millenia Walk and South Beach Avenue to check out the remaining three installations. I realized not many people pay attention to those three installations though as compared to the ones around Marina Bay (understandable as Marina Bay is more popular with visitors). I actually took MRT and travelled back to Bayfront to quickly check out the Gastrobeats (carnival of food, music and fun and it’s part of the ‘I Light SG 2023’ festival as well) that I missed earlier before calling it a day.

Time to head back home after a long but satisfying walk.

It’s been one year since the start of my working holiday in New Zealand.

Today marks exactly one year after I boarded my flight to New Zealand for a once-in-a-lifetime working holiday experience with a friend of mine. Time flies. I dropped everything in Singapore, put a long pause in my career and got out of my comfort zone for that to happen. It was a huge step and a life changing decision that I have never regretted for a second.

Not only I was able to take a break from my work and the hustle and bustle of the urban living in Singapore (now already coming back to it), I was able to do things that I would have never thought of previously in my life; working in a restaurant up on a snow-capped mountain, skiing (although I’m still not great at it), doing challenging long hikes with rewarding views at the end and completing a full-on road trip at the last half of the working holiday. What a journey!

And the views! You just couldn’t resist from taking countless photos in every corner of the country. New Zealand truly lives up to its name for being so magical from its breathtaking natural landscapes, friendly people and peaceful laid-back environment. I have been to quite a number of countries but there’s nothing quite like New Zealand.

Every experience does come with ups and downs. Yes, I covered a lot of places in my road trip from a very detailed itinerary. I think I have visited most if not all of the popular destinations in the country. The trip was smooth, but I felt it was actually way too smooth and jam-packed till I notice that there’s no room for ‘real’ or impromptu experience and no space for me and also my friend to actually truly enjoy or ‘breath’ from the trip some time. It comes to my realization that having a simple loose flexible plan is actually much better and more exciting than having a full plan to stick to in some occasions that has made the experience being too rushed and serious.

Along the way, I made some new friends from all over the world too; from my workplace up on the mountain, from housemates, from Facebook group gathering the Malaysians in New Zealand, etc. I have to admit that I’m not being good in socializing and I may be quiet and tense at times. Me not being proficient in Mandarin is also making things difficult for me to initiate or continue a conversation sometimes. In the end, I would just like to say that they still play a huge part to my working holiday and I do genuinely value their presence.

Nevertheless, my trip to New Zealand no doubt leaves me with beautiful memories and has opened up a part of myself that is no where to be seen before. I’m grateful for that priceless opportunity. I was also fortunate that the working holiday visa finally opens up for application last year after lengthy border closures due to Covid and it was my final year to be eligible to apply due to age limit imposed from the visa requirement. I believe it all comes at the right moment.

I did shared this writing at my social medias today too. There’s just so much thoughts in me especially today when all the memories come kicking in. It’s actually impactful in a positive way as it allows me to cherish, reflect and learn to be better in the future. Once a chapter closes, another one opens. I’m now finding myself leaning towards attempting new things/interests while resuming the reality life of a working adult in Singapore. It simply involves striking a balance between the simple everyday life cycle and doing things I like a.k.a. chasing dream.

The past working holiday in New Zealand is not just a pitstop but rather a major milestone in my life and I’m grateful for every piece of it.