beloved bel

Today we did a day trip out to Oxford, a 1h+ train ride away and we finally visited Christ Church College, where the first 2 Harry Potter movies were filmed! Remember the huge dining hall where the students always sit in long rows of tables? Yup, that was filmed in Christ Church Hall in Oxford. I'm not a Harry Potter fan but still, I thought it'd be nice to visit the grand hall. Hmm we wonder if they also filmed the scene where the played Quidditch on the college grounds? We set off from Paddington train station, being here two saturdays in a row if you remember hehe. Weather was cloudy today. Had lunch at this Top Table recommended authentic english restaurant called The Oxford Retreat when we reached. Ordered a cajun chicken burger which was nice (restricted myself from finishing everything esp the fries heehee) and then we started walking to find the college. This is another academic city, just like Cambridge altho I feel Oxford's bigger. It was so so crowded...

wow one week just zoomed past like that. So my team just had a new intern and she's from Hong Kong. She's quite chatty and we get along pretty well. This gal is stick thin and she started sharing some dieting tips with me and that she lost 10kg in 3 months can you believe it! (A living example of dieting tried and tested!) So I have decided to heed her advice to have a no carbo dinner now. Thus dinner now consists of just meat and veg and no rice. Before my family gets worried, for the record, I must announce I am still eating normally.. just replacing rice with more meat and veg! I think there are many schools of thought of dieting and all, and I am not very well versed in this area so... will follow this plan for now and see if it works! heehee Besides new intern, work has been pretty yucky with my P&Ls. One thing I don't understand is they are making BIG bucks but yet they are mostly in a foul mood? Bear with me while i rant on... like on monday, this b...

heehee so the first time I published our weekend getaway plans, it fell through! What happened was we had a rail discount card and Cyn has some other similar card and we could use it but wow when we went to Paddington train station, the lady at the ticket office said that Bath was "out of the boundary" and train tickets are GBP49 each! so ex rite?! We were shocked coz a few days ago Cyn said the online price was only GBP17. So now we know we must buy online earlier to get cheaper prices.. (but seriously this is the first time we enconter exhorbitant train fares. Group save is still the best. (Pay 3 for the price of 2) Sleepyhead- maybe if you bought yr Manchester train tix online prior to yr trip it would have been much cheaper. Still remem you paid like GBP65 fo r it. What a rip off . We were so looking forward to spending a day leisurely in Bath and were very disappointed.. sigh but what to do, we think we can spend GBP49 in a more fruitful way haha.. so we just had...

hey peeps, realise this blog is coming to be one year old soon (Yay.. big thanks to all my ardent readers like YOU). bel is tired of looking at the same old layout and thinks the blog needs a change.. Hope you like this! one more day to the weekend! I think Spring is finally here, hurray and we can't wait to change our wardrobe to spring clothes. Enough of thick and heavy jackets! Temperatures are now hitting a high of 10deg... mmm we think it's time we spend a day trip outta London this weekend. Bath, here we come again :)

Have been talking about going over to Sabrina's for breakfast for the longest time and finally we decided to do it last sunday morning. My first trip to the Hackney neighbourhood and again, due to engineering works, I had to take a bus from London Bridge to her place. (When will these engineering works ever end??) Really nice and cosy apartment she has and squeaky clean too may I add (am sure she's inherited that from her mum, or rather as she says, her mum sets the standards which I totally agree hehe) and Oh the breakfast, it is a mini replay of what we had at her parents when I was there for Christmas.. simple yet yummy. Such a spread of food too- bread rolls.. with homemade jam, nutella, ham, german salami, cheese, some anti pasti, an egg and a glass of juice! I ate till I could eat no more. Her mum's homemade mango and nectarine jam.. best! Now she has set the standard for me when I invite her over to mine for breakfast! Nice simple things like that just makes my day!

major milestone for bel last friday night.. keke.. cooking dinner for 7 people! wow never imagine I could do this but anyway I initially invited alicia and JL over for chicken stew (cyn claims it is my speciality) and somehow we ended up inviting eric & gin and sze chien over. I think I was so stressed coz never confident of my cooking... plus with encouraging friends like Eric who asked if they need to bring any bao ji wan (pills to counter stomachache) and Zed who asked if my friends were up for some horror on Friday the 13th... *roll eyes Anyway for stews, the longer you cook it for, the better it is. Hence I decided to cook the night before and let it stew for about 2.5h. Started preparing after dinner on Thursday night and officially cooking the chicken at 10pm meant that I cooked till past midnight! Eventually, I had a big kuali of stew and the whole house (including myself) just smelt of stew (with the spices n all)! eww felt a bit overwhelmed but still hoping things w...

We've been lying low on travelling as it's winter so what else better than to explore London! Many people have told me Hampstead is absolutely beautiful with the big mansions and where many stars live so I thought we should go take a look! I googled it and found this interesting article on Hampstead.. what's most interesting to me is the list of people living there currently. Big names like Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Hugh Grant, Jude Law (!!), etc. When I told Cyn about this, her first question was "Must we dress up then??!" hahaha (and she really meant it.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampstead Alicia and Jianliang, also recently on a "project discover London" decided to join us and Alicia heard from her cousin that there is this awesome crepe place in Hampstead. wow food (I thought we were gonna see mansions?) but well being Singaporeans... 0_0 ok weather for the day.. freezing cold. Not very advisable to take long walks.. we walked a...

well very eventful week with the snow and all, huge relief that monthend's over and I had to face the brunt of trader's bad mood at not making money this week which was damn irritating but anyways, shall forget about work stuff after work hours, esp when weekend's here :) It's been some time since I met Alicia and Jian Liang and she invited me to join them and two other colleagues for dinner at Canary Wharf's GBK. We were just talking abt the sheer size of these burgers. When we first came, we could only finish half a burger each.. unfortunately, 9 months later... I can finish 3/4 of one burger easily! Bad sign :( Avocado Bacon beef burger; Habenera burger Have updated some posts below as well as posted a new one on my last meetups in S'pore, so scroll down and enjoy reading! Do leave comments so I know who's reading my blog ya.

This snow sculpture is done by some unknown talented neighbours.. Cyn n I can't stop giggling when we saw it coz initially we can't decide if it's a lion or a sphinx. Eventual conclusion was that it's a hybrid of body of sphinx and head of Da Chang Jin! hahaha due to the "hair"! Somehow we were seriously amused by this. outside our apartment wheeee we are like kids again and getting all so excited when we woke up this morning coz the blanket of white has gotten thicker and the sights so serene and lovely! Managed to dissuade Cynthia from going to the gym and instead, go work together and take lotsa pictures!! at Canada Water Transport is really bad in such "adverse weather conditions". Most tube lines are suspended and we were lucky there were trains to Moorgate although subject to severe delays. London came to a standstill. There were no bus services as well. Our journey took more than twice as usual and they were packed to the max. From...

Before I post my "even more meetups" in Singapore, I'm now back in my London home comfortably snug in my duvet with 3 layers of clothes and socks... and guess what? It's never snowed so much since we came!! when it just started... looks like rain but it's snow with very strong winds I read that this week's gonna be freezing (once again), apparently a cold wave from Russia and BBC weather forecasted it to be light snow so I thought it might change and wouldn't snow afterall. Boy was I wrong.. it snowed in the afternoon after lunch and then intermittenly throughout and by dinner time, we were shocked when we looked out of the window. after an hour or so? the slow buildup begins... By dinner time... everywhere white! So nice!! A blanket of thick white snow even on our balcony.. and some people are out snapping pictures! We are lazy (and even more imptly, don't want to appear overly enthu haha) so just took some thru our w...