beloved bel

My close girl friends back home would have heard this story via Whatsapp from me.  Meihui asked if I wanted to have dinner together this week since it has been a while since we met up (I got to know her through Kian; she's a fellow Singaporean).  I suggested Wednesday and that was how it started.  I was walking to the restaurant when she suddenly texted me asking if it was alright for her friend to join us.  I thought ok why not, plus it might be rude to turn her down? I saw her approaching with her friend who I must say had a pretty funky hairstyle and when we were introduced, she said her name was Vince.  She said she is from Hong Kong but studied in Singapore before (we even went to the same university and the same business school).  And then I asked Vince, "Oh why are you in London?  Did you say you will be here for a month?"  (You know, creating the smalltalk.. trying to be friendly Bel here.. hehe) And out came her interesting response.  She told us she was here t

We did it!!  Can I say it is a big relief now as I sat here typing away on my MacBook.  Yesterday I was very excited about today, and especially lugging all the ingredients I need for today.  Loads of food and  they were heavy as you can imagine.  Luckily K came to my workplace and joined my colleagues and I for drinks at the pub before we carried all the stuff back home. Bright and early, this morning we both woke up at 7am.  This has been an annoying phenomena between us - on weekdays we struggle to wake up at 7am and on weekends, we wake up automatically.  Maybe it's made worse by the lack of curtains in our room, but this morning we had the local handyman Andrew come over to install the curtains for us and already I feel the difference it has made to our room.  Hopefully more weekend sleep in time from now on. I got out of bed at about 8am after tossing for about an hour, feeling all anxious and excited.  After all I am gonna whip up a 3 course meal for 8 people - no eas

We just crossed the 5 month mark counting from our Chinese wedding date, although we would officially count our wedding anniversary from 29th June 2013 so that makes it coming up to 9 months! I have done up an online wedding album of our special day in Singapore on the 8th September 2013, so here it is!  You need flash player and so it would most probably not work on your iPhone. http://www.milkbooks.com/flip-book/default.aspx?ProjectId=66fcf4e4-3836-49d9-af71-73ee6d322c1d&OId=191426&OLId=1131637 Enjoy! :)

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!  Much love from us in London! Time is 10.50pm and I am again huddling near the fireplace in our new house.  We had another night in this Valentine's Day.  Two years ago I cooked for K at my English Cottage, and last year K went home to Singapore whilst I spent Valentine's Day alone.  This year K volunteered to cook a nice dinner for us. No prizes for guessing it right if you had read my blog enough.  K's favourite thing to cook is beef steak and tonight was no exception hehe.  This morning when I went into office, I said good morning to Virginia who sits next to me.  Virginia is a British girl a few years older than me, and since sitting next to each other we have had a few moans (ok maybe more than a few) and a few laughs.  She has been with "her partner" Matt for 16 years and counting which is amazing.  It's interesting how I have met a few girls here who have been with their partners (no longer calling boyfriend

It has been a very busy but fulfilling weekend for us. Love how the blooming yellow daffodils match with the mandarin oranges we have on our dining table First things first, the weather has been quite terrible of late.  It has been raining with high winds plus the tube strike last week for 48h did not help at all.  Everyone at work has been so mad with this tube strike.  When it happened on Wednesday morning rush hour, my manager instead of taking his one hour journey, ended up taking 2h 45min.  It was ridiculous and he was fuming mad when he came in.  But what can we as commuters do?  The Jubilee line had a reduced service which only worked for certain sections and only stopped at a few stations.  Fortunately we are now on the train line and so it didn't affect us.  Guess what, this tube strike is happening again this coming week for another 48h!  I look at how people here moan and cope with it, it makes me thankful of our MRT back home, and also how much I hear about Singa

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!  Hope you had a great CNY so far! Ours is a memorable one this year.  We spent the whole of Saturday steam-boating: we had two steamboat parties.  Lunch at TC and Cecilia's, and then dinner at Jixian and Rongxuan's.  We felt blessed to have friends around during this festive period.  And then on Sunday we finally completed our move!  So officially we have stopped shuffling between two properties.   Understandably everything feels new and foreign right now.  It would take some time for sure to get used to it.  And we still need to get some bits and bobs here and there.  On Sunday we did probably the most important thing of all - changing the locks on our front door.  We didn't feel very safe using the existing locks, and so K managed to find a locksmith to come down.  We wanted to invite some friends over for some festive cheer in our new place but as it was so last minute with the locksmith coming and boxes everywhere, we though