Another week, another batch of good intentions

As is now my standard start to the week, Monday kicked off early with a gym session before work (no swimming sadly – a thunder storm was in full swing, and despite my love of swimming in the rain, Singapore doesn’t just do rain, it does bucketing it down to the extent that I don’t think I would have been able to breath from all the splashing in the pool). Followed by a night of eating veggies and chilling on the sofa.

            Tuesday had a slightly different routine from normal. As we have a day off this Thursday, we’re having a little dinner party for six at our flat on Wednesday night. This meant that, in order to get all the prep sorted in time we had to pay a little visit to our meat man in Tekka market on Tuesday morning. We were there by 7:30, mixing with the local restaurant owners, stocking up on lamb, Thai curry spices and limes for gin cocktails – all the essentials.

            I made up for the lack of morning swim with an evening swim ahead of my aqua spin class, before heading home (slightly exhausted) to whip up a chocolate torte for Wednesday dessert and to eat – I was famished!

            Sometimes (often) when I get home from spin, Nick has made the most of the free time to work his way through a couple of levels on whatever shooting / killing Xbox game that he’s currently enjoying, but last night was quite a spectacular exception to this general rule.

            I walked into the flat to discover Nick skyping with his friend Bri whilst grinding up a marinade for the lamb (to soak up over night), cooking pasta and bacon for dinner and straining a lovely chilled red wine to drink with it.

            I would never sign up for a maid, even though it seems to be the norm over here, but when there’s food and wine waiting for me as I walk in the door – now that’s something that I could get used to!

            

One night in Indonesia

Having finished up Friday night fairly early, legging it from my golf less on to meet up with Nick, Liv and Flash for dinner at the pizza place just near our flat, Saturday morning kicked off at the crack of dawn, with a 6am alarm getting us out of bed ready for our little weekend adventure to Batam.

Batam is a tiny little island just a 45 minute ferry ride away from Singapore. Despite it being so close, it’s one of the many Indonesian islands, so with it’s own currency and an hours time difference being factor in, despite the fact that we got to the hotel within a couple of hours of having left home, it still felt like a real holiday.

Kate and Duncan had signed up to come along with us (taking advantage of the same GroupOn bargain deal as us), so we gathered as a four for an early morning coffee at the ferry port before working our way through passport control and boarding a ferry for a journey that takes about as long as getting from Portsmouth to Cowes on the fast cat.

We arrived well before breakfast time, and a fully half day before we could officially check in, so we did what any sensible people would do in that situation – we got into our swimmers, covered ourselves in suntan lotion and settled in for a fabulous day of lazing around by the pool. There were drinks being served in a waterside bar, where you sit in the pool to enjoy your beverages, so we obviously spent a fair amount of time there.

There was reading, there was sleeping and there was eating – all the very best things! In the evening we enjoyed Happy Hour at a bar nestled half way down a beautiful old rickety pier, enjoying the last of the sun and some very strong drinks! Then dinner was at a teppanyaki restaurant, with the chef working his magic right at our table, followed by a couple more drinks out on the deck.

Sunday was very much more of the same – sun, swimming, beach time, sleeping, reading, eating, a couple of drinks and lot of lazing around. Our ferry home was leaving Batam at five, getting us back to Singapore in plenty of time for dinner and a bit of life admin to ensure that we were back on track and ready for another busy week at work. Thankfully, this week is only a four day week as we have another public holiday on Thursday, so that’s definitely taking the sting out of being away from the beach and back in the office.

Finally Friday

It’s finally Friday! Thank goodness for that! For some reason, as this week has started to draw to an end I’ve found myself more tired and frustrated with work than I’ve been in quite a while. I really can’t wait for the weekend now!

            This evening I have got my golf lesson, rescheduled as I’ll have to miss the Sunday session. Then at the crack of dawn on Saturday, myself and Nick will be headed over to an Indonesia island called Batam with our friends Kate and Duncan.      

            Two days and a night on a beachy island with nothing by relaxing on the scheduled. I can’t wait!

Good for laughs

When I first moved to London, Debbie and I would make a weekly visit to a comedy night held at The Mason’s Arms, just out the back of Vogue House where Debbie was working at the time.

            The night was arranged and hosted by the GQ Photo editor, who was a friend of Debbie’s and who always gave us the heads up when there was something particularly good to see. Sadly, they stopped the comedy night to refurbish the pub, and the newly decorated rooms weren't considered to be the right venue for comedy, so the nights relocated to another part of London, and our regular attendance ended as a result. 

            This meant that for the first year of my London years, comedy nights and Tuesday evenings were squiffily spent in the small upstairs function room of a grimy pub, making friends with comedian and laughing at a lot of recycled jokes as some of the better comedians warmed up and tried out new jokes in preparation for their bigger gigs in the coming months.

            Since those fabulous comedy days, I haven’t been to much comedy at all – I’ve seen the odd Comedy Club offering, and managed to catch a few professional, TV comedies when they have been live in bigger London studio tours, but it’s been a while since I spent an evening in a grimy pub that seats less than 30 audience members.

            That is, until last night! When I heard that an International Comedy Festival was going to be making it’s way over to Singapore, I jumped at the chance to buy tickets, and having scoped out most of the options, I ended up buying tickets to see an Australian chap called Ryan Coffe who blends comedy and music in what turned out to be an utterly brilliant show!

            The second act that we saw was slightly less entertaining, and the local hosts who filled between the main acts really were bad, but all it all it was great to be back in a very English style traditional pub (called The Penny Black). If it weren’t for the slightly more aggressive aircon units, I could easily have tricked my brain into thinking it was back at The Masons for one night only!  

Cooking up a Singaporean storm

Although I manage a very different side of the business, last night I was invited to join our sales team as they took 25 local agency people out on a bit of a social. Sometimes these events can be a bit tedious, especially if they are heavily work focused, but fortunately last night was not even a little bit about work and was entirely based on having fun, so I was more than happy to join in the action!

            Having left the office early to go and set up the venue, we made our way over to My Private Chef, a private kitchen near the City where we had planned an evening of cocktail making classes and a cook-off competition.

            Once we had covered the place in company branded goodies – cocktail glasses, shakers, chopsticks and placemats, we waited for our clients to arrive whilst munching on some pre-dinner Korean fried chicken that we had picked up from the takeout window next door, and then we were ready to start cooking.

            With a glass of wine in hand (of course) we learnt how to make two of the simplest cocktails there are, the Singapore Sling and a Cosmo, before entering into a competition to make the tastiest and most inventive cocktail. There wasn’t really an excessive amount of ingredients to work with, but regardless, yours truly most definitely won the prize – a fairly random giant branded spatula, of course!

Once we were sufficiently lubricated, we broke into teams of three and competed to create four servings of food. We learnt to make very exciting things like nasi lemak, sambai ikan bailis and kair lime leaf chicken. Despite the fact that some pretty random ingredients went into the mixtures, we ended up with a delicious (if not slightly spicy) plate of food.

Sadly our team didn’t win on taste (way too much chilli pasta was included) but we got a little comment on beautiful presentation, and we got to eat all we wanted once we were finished, so I was more than happy with the one giant spatula to take home.

I’m practically a pro at this Singaporean food now. I wonder what we can have to eat at our next dinner party that might involve either the branded chopsticks or the first prize spatula. If only we had a nice outside space for a BBQ!