Dee is ebil! She tagged me… XD

So here goes….

The Rules:

Link to your tagger and post these rules.

List eight (8) random facts about yourself.

Tag eight people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).

Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving them a comment on their blogs.

1. Why I am the way I am has a lot to do with the way my mother raised me. I am my mother’s son. Not to say my dad didn’t have anything to do with it, he’s done alot for me too… But my mom’s been the more dominant parent in my life. Tho I’m not “Momma’s boy’ either. I believe in a lot of things my mom doesn’t agree with… but that’s another story for another day.

2. I count more ladies as friends than I do guys. I just find it easier to get along with the fairer sex, plus they do make for more intelligent conversation (tho sadly it’s not always the case). Plus I find it’s easier to talk about things like my love of food and it’s making, relationships (and not just romantic ones), art and so on too. Not to say that guys are disinterested in the above or anything like that, I have some really interesting guy friends too. Just that we’re outnumbered at the moment.

3. Despite the above, I’m hopeless at dates and even worse at keeping a relationship. I’m so bad at it, at one point my dearest babe (yes you know who you are XD) suggested maybe I was gay and I barking up the wrong tree…

3. But I’m straight. I know because… well… like earlier while flipping through a book featuring 700 covers from Penguin’s (the publishing house) portfolio, i still paused to look at a stylised depiction of boobs… …and it wasn’t the stylization, it was the boobs. XD

4. My birth certificate says I’m buddhist, but I identify myself as being an unbaptised catholic. But strangely while I believe that God, in whatever form he may be in, exists, I do think that a lot of things that make religion is a good measure of history mixed with fiction. Why do I believe then? Well, I believe in the church’s mission to do good in the world. That in the face of human suffering the church has been there to help feed the needy and champion the oppressed.

We may not have been created in 7 days, but we are all still Gods creatures and we should at least be kind to one another and strive to better ourselves as a people instead of harping on fictional semantics on Godliness and so on.

5. I think love is something we learn. Sure, we all fall for people, but i think what keeps people together after all the fireworks are gone - love - is not something inherant in a relationship, it’s not something produced by a magical chemistry and it’s not a case of “it’s there or it’s not”. Love is something you develop. It’s made from many things and people make it differently, but in the end it’s something we make and have to work to maintain.

Give me time and on a whim, someone i fancy, or out of necessity just about anyone, and I could learn to love and care for her, deeply, truely and forever.

6. I love the arts. And I contribute my time in support of it not because of the career development aspect of it (tho it’s a nice bonus) but because I’m always the dreamer believing that the world can be bettered, and that because of the way it’s neglected the way it is by the powers that be, it’s a very powerful medium to slowly drive change in society.

We’re a society of sheep and robots. There are too many morons in charge doing things totally devoid of even a train of reason, let alone a sound one and I feel a strong artistic movement will help open the minds of many. We’ll work on the sound part after the train gets moving.

7. I’m a jack of all trades, but really a master of none. At times I feel I’m just too far streched. Right now the tech geek and the cook in me are feeling a bit of neglect, but the artist is having a pretty good run.

8. I want to be in love again too Dee…

Tags:

Calvin
Doreen
Andrew
Justine
Patricia
Michelle
Phoebe (I demand you get a new blog and post XD)

With reference to this.

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Mmmm.. my blog is a lil harder to understand compared to Irene’s….

So the bloody tight asses can afford to send a monkey into space, but won’t pay for photography? They can seriously just take this line art and shove it down the minister’s throat.

Sure, I’ve been known to do Photography pro bono, but thats only if I feel the cause is worth it, and frankly the government can very well PAY.

/end rant

More pictures coming.. i just have to sort out all this work first >.<

I’m back from Bangkok and.. OMG the FOOD! and the Shopping! I really enjoyed myself. It’s such an eye opener, Bangkok is such a city of colour and contrasts, in it’s food, the way it’s built up, in it’s people.

Bangkok is just the Awesome!

Anyway, I brought back a lot of pictures to share, too many to fit into one post. So what I’ll do is I’ll break it up into a few posts. Right now I’ll do the food and shopping, next I’ll post about the trip and finish off with a post about the very Discovery T&L-esq cooking lesson we got.

So here goes.

First meal I had after we landed. So sorry it looks a bit plain, we dug right in because we were so hungry after the flight I forgot to take a picture.

Ditto the Tom Yum. As some of you might know, I’m not a big fan of Thai food, as over here it’s just really kick-you-in-the-face spicy. Nut the food is just so different in Thailand. It’s so much more defined, earthy. Sure it’s still spicy, but it doesn’t just drown out everything . I officially love Thai now :D

Case in point, a Thai pork and prawn salad. It’s actually refreshingly tangy while spicy, and the heat works with the tanginess, as opposed to just salty and chilli hot you might expect from something here at home.

Sweet and sour prawn. They are very big on prawn over here, they are so big and juicy.. and Cheap! :D

One way you know the Thais are very big on food, is that everywhere in Bangkok there are street vendors. Selling everything from noodles to BBQ skewers to sweets. But then again, when you have a city with six million people living in it, there’s a lot of feeding to be done. It’s such a pity i quite literally don’t have the gut for the street food.

But it’s OK. For one thing you will notice about the Thais is that they really give a damn about what they do. No matter if you’re a business person, artisan, cook or just a security guard, they do things with a certain standard of care.

So it isn’t surprising then that despite the sanitary conditions of a high end department store food court

the food still tastes good…

well… on it’s own it tastes good anyway. I can;t really tell you how it tastes compared to the stuff hawked on the streets.

BBQ pork, lamb and chicken on skewers. It’s not satay because these are actually marinated in something a mildly spicy caramel with santan. Sweet, creamy with a tangy spicy tone.

Thai sausages. It’s meat mixed with a generous helping of local herbs. The taste of herbs is much stronger compared to the western verity we’re used to.

Like us, they also eat a lot of “spare parts”

Heres the scene in a market we were at on day two, after some sightseeing, we dropped by to pick up some stuff for the following cooking lesson.

One thing you’ll notice about the wet markets here…

They are actually clean!

If you’ve ever visited a Malaysian wet market,

you’ll notice that the floor are usually wet, if not all together muddy.

And here we are in a wet market out in the outskirts of a country we perceive to be an example of a 3rd world nation

but surprise surprise they seem to have done it better than us!

That’s a “Tom Yum Kit” my mom is holding, all the herbs you need to whip up a pot of Tom Yum

Greens

and more greens

and this concludes our trip to the market.

After that we headed off for cooking lessons…

where we made Thai Fired Rice Noodles…

That’s my sister… Interesting thing about these noodles is that instead of being softened and then fried, the ingredients are first cooked into a broth, and then the noodles are put in in their dehydrated state, so as they soften they absorb the broth and with it all the flavour.

Green Curry…

served up on fresh rice noodles…

Tom Yum…

Home made fish cake

served with home made Thai chilli sauce

and a really refreshing

papaya salad. For whoever is interested, I’ll post the recipes for all the above along with more pics later :D

and we end the day with some Pandan Coconuts.

Lunch…

and dinner from our last night in Bangkok.

My last day in Bangkok was spent shopping. And OMG I don’t think I’ve ever bought so much in one go, but the stuff was so cheap i couldn’t resist. I must have bought like 7 shirts in 2 hours. This shirt cost rm 18

Here’s a bottle of Jim Beam steak sauce. Something you’ll never find in Malaysia since it contains actual Jim Beam. and it only cost rm6.50

This thing that looks like a bird of sorts is actually a face mask for riding. I’ve been trying to buy one of these here since my days of riding a bike, but i could never find one. So i just had to buy it. rm 40

and of course…

i went nuts at the duty free.

what can i say? i love rum.. yarrrrrrrrr!

of course, I think the most interesting i bought, is this. The Original Lensbaby! :D All you photographers out there would know what this is.

The Malaysian Distributor is selling it for Rm525… i bought this for Rm310 *happy*

I shall leave you with this quick sample from the lensbaby. It’s not very clear as I haven;t gotten the hang of it yet.

Seriously.

So two Fridays ago I visited a few Interior Design firms seeking proposals to redo our kitchen at home. So I was pretty excited when one of the firms I visited, called Lifestyle Kitchen in TTDI called on Friday, saying their proposal was ready and we could drop by to see what they had in mind.

So today after a family lunch in Seremban, we drove all the way to TTDI to see them.

OMFG was I disappointed.

See when I visited the place, I took the trouble to redraw our entire kitchen with a complete set of measurements and included a 360 degree panorama of the kitchen. I specifically said that

1) We wanted to tear out the whole front section and start again
2) In the current design, I only have 1ft of useable prep area, which is totally unacceptable.
3) It is totally acceptable that the material used doesn’t match the back of the kitchen, as long as it doesn’t clash, as i understand the difficulty in finding the original materials.\
4) We wanted to replace the Hood, Hob and added built in oven.

What the people at Lifestyle Kitchen did was they COPIED the existing kitchen, added an oven and called it a design. Not only that, this blatant rehash of an already BAD design was their ONLY proposal. WTF, if I did that at my job, I’d get my ass chopped off and handed to me on a plate. What are they trying to do? Insult my intelligence? I may be in a different field of design, but I can spot laziness and indifference when I see it and let me tell you the person who drew up this proposal was either lazy or just plain didn’t care!

And you know the part that shits me the most? The lack of workspace, something which I spent the better part of our first meeting explaining to the person there as being a MAJOR problem is still there. 1 ft. seriously…

Lifestyle Kitchen, you all FAIL!

Thank God my mother is supportive of all I do, but the above is so true of so many things in life.