A very causal Saturday

There is nothing that I love more than a super casual weekend (apart from maybe a weekend away), and since Nick and I have been on best behaviour for most of the year so far, chilled out causal weekends have been on the agenda for all of January.

            Following a particularly hectic and busy week at work, this weekend was thankfully no exception to our January norm!

            After all the excitement of our Friday night, Saturday dawned bright and early, so I kick-started my day with a trip to Tekka wet market to stock up on fruit, veggies, meat and fish. We’re out of town for over half of this week, but following a Tekka trip I always end up with a gloriously full fridge, so an early Saturday shop meant that my Sunday would also be wonderfully filled with cooking-to-freeze entertainment too.

Beautiful, crazy Tekka Market

Once the craziness of shopping at Little India’s Tekka was accomplished I spent the rest of my morning drinking Starbucks and getting my hair cut, coloured and poofed. Sadly I don’t ever seem to look as elegant as other people while they are being preened.

Seriously lacking "beauty parlour elegance"

Then the latter part of our day was filled with picking out our wedding invites and then a lovely lunch out in the sunshine at a place we stumbled upon by accident called Artichoke. It’s tucked behind an old church building that is now being used as an art gallery space, and it served us some truly amazing, but incredibly naughty lunchtime treats.

The lovely Artichoke Cafe

VERY naughty fried chicken lunch

Thankfully our evening plans were just for a very low-key fish BBQ supper with our neighbours Liv and Matt, so luckily we managed to just about cancel out the damage to the diet plans that we did at lunch. Oops! 

Wedding plans are go!

Because there is still almost a full year to wait until our wedding, we’re trying not to over-plan things too early. I feel as though putting too much focus on the details of the plans this early on will mean that by the time December rolls around we will either be bored of all the details, or there’s a chance that we may have changed our minds about how we want things done, and we’ll end up having to start all over again from scratch.

            So, with the venue, church, band and photographer booked and the wedding dress on order it feels like all the main time sensitive things have been ticked off the list for now. We’re going to try not to focus on planning bits and pieces until later in the year, but this weekend we did get a couple of additional jobs done.

            Our website is now live and good to go, and our wedding invitations are on order and will be made and ready to go in the next week or so. Onwards and upwards! 

Do you believe in magic?

It all started out so well!

What was planned as a very low-key, very well behaved Friday evening went ever so slightly awry tonight.

            Sita, the gorgeous Indian Princess was back in town this week, and as Friday was the only night that we were all free, we arranged to meet for a very quick, very early dinner in the courtyard of Raffles Hotel before Sita went out to partake in some heavy drinking and Nick and I slinked off home for tea and a lot of sleep. We’re just living the dream out here!

            We arranged to meet at 6:30, and so we all made our way to the courtyard with the best of intentions and in good time as soon as we finished work. That is where the plan started to go a little squiffy.

            To start with, we hadn’t seen Sita since we got engaged, so prossecco was deemed essential for celebrating, so we went ahead with a cheeky glass each just to mark the occasion. Then, as we were taking a look through the menu to work out what sort of salads to buy, a lady came up to our table and offered us free tickets to the big magic show that was taking place in the Raffles Hotel Theatre that night.

Freebies and bubbles, don't mind if I do!

Joe Labero has been hosting a magic night at Raffles for the past six months, ending in mid-Feb, and Nick and I had actually looked at the cost of tickets to see if it would be worth going along. With the cheapest tickets in the $150 range, we decided that it was absolutely not necessary, and we were quite happy to miss the event, until the freebies were on offer. I just can't say not to a freebie! 

            We had twenty minutes to finish up our drinks and make our way into the theatre, so seeing as it was still fairly early in the evening we thought it was worth popping in and then if we found it really wasn’t worth watching to the end, we could always sneak out a little bit early…how wrong we were!

            The theatre was empty – there were maybe 50 people in there, maximum, and rather than tucking us in at the back of the theatre they sat us up in the third row from the front, so we were clearly visible from the stage meaning that we would really struggle to make a subtle exit.

Sita getting involved in the action

Thankfully, the show was great fun and we didn’t feel the need to leg it half way through after all! Some of the tricks were a little bit basic, and perhaps just because we were sat so close to the front there were a couple of details that it would definitely be better if we couldn’t see them.

            Regardless, it turned out to be a great night, and one that saw myself, Nick and Sita all being called up onto the stage to participate. I wasn’t really very enthusiastic about having to join in initially, but it was great fun in the end, and we were lucky enough to be involved in some of the best tricks of the night!

Me, hoping that my phone made it through this trick in one piece! 

I am not sure if I would have been really pleased with the night out if we had spent $150 a head on it, but as a free night of entertainment it was a bit of a classic!

Street food fun

Grilled Stingray for dinner

There are a number of hawker centres in Singapore, most of them are pretty dirty, but the are the perfect place to go when you want dinner for less than $5.00, and you aren’t too worried about the ambience of the location. Hawker centres are Singapore’s equivalent to a greasy spoon café, and they are widely regarded as the best places to get cheap and cheerful local specialities – chicken rice, noodles, fresh juices and satay are easily some of the best buys on offer.

Lau Pa Sat in the middle of the City 

Whilst most hawkers are the same, there is one in the centre of the CBD called Lau Pa Sat, which was closed for renovation for two years, and which has recently just opened back up to the public. Being in the middle of the City, it’s one of the nicest, cleanest and most efficient hawker centres, and as a result it makes for quite a nice spot to grab dinner and take in the sights and sounds of the city.

BBQs in action on Satay Street

This Thursday we had plans to meet up with my buddy Mike, and as we were doing out best to avoid really naught food and booze, Lau Pa Sat felt like the perfect spot to meet up.

            Running alongside the edge of the centre is also a road that gets closed off after dark, and with numerous make shift BBQs and carts being pulled up, it turns into what the locals call “Satay Street”. Offering fresh bbq treats, the satay is amazing, but the grilled stingray is also pretty special, and the fresh bbq prawns are also incredibly tasty.  

Murtabak deliciousness 

We met up with Mike, made a base out on Satay Street and we dined on all the fresh bbq food that we could get our hands on, with some of the local lemon and sour plum juice on the side. We broke with our good behaviour rules and ordered a murtabak too, which is something like a giant samosa that is served with curry sauce to dip in it. It wasn’t as healthy as most of our weekday meals have been recently, but it was very delicious!

           

 

Making friends with some Geek Girls

Most of the industry events that I go to are full of loud, smelly men. All of who think they are gods gift to online advertising, and more of who are clueless fools. It’s great fun!  

            Yesterday, to celebrate the fact that not everyone in my industry has to shout in a loud Australian accent to be successful I went along to a launch even for something called Geek Girls Meet Up. It’s a global initiative that started in Sweden and has spread through London, Brazil the US and is now coming to Singapore, designed to bring together girls working in design, tech and start up companies to bring them all together into more of a community unit.

            I’ve never had any issues with working in a male dominated environment (other than the fact that I always seem to have very low respect for direct male managers – who knows why!) but it’s always good to have a little girl power session every now and then. Also, championing females in the tech industry has become one of my targets for the year or so ahead.

            This week I was nominated to join the Leadership Council for the governing body of my industry. I have absolutely no chance of getting in (which I am quite happy about as I still Chair another fairly big committee and there is only so much time in the day), but even being nominated is a pretty big deal.

There are 25 nominees for 8 spaces, and I am up against people who all have titles along the lines of Managing Director, CEO, Co-Founder and Chairman – all of them for representatives of huge local companies (including Google, LinkedIn and some other very important local companies). The fact that I won’t get in doesn’t really matter, but the fact that I was nominated has made me realise that I really ought to be doing more with my time than just waiting until I can move back to London again. I am not sure quite what steps to take next, but hopefully there are some great new initiatives that I can start working on within the industry soon. There’s nothing I love quite so much as a good CV building project.