Skip to main content

Because it's a never ending Christmas for us

I've blogged about our Christmas party with friends.  Now I shall blog about what K and I did over Christmas.  We had anticipated for a quiet Christmas but it turned out not so quiet after all.  In a nice way of course.

Christmas Eve


K and I decided to have a homely meal at home for dinner.  Plus, everywhere else is closed anyway.  What do we eat with the cold weather here?  Something probably not too far off from my already familiar German-Tews tradition of raclette, we decided on hotpot!  We had half day at work and I wasn't quite thinking like a local then because I suggested to K to attend the carol service at St Paul's Cathedral at 4pm.  We met in the city and had a coffee and cake before slowly making our way to the cathedral at 330pm.  We were so shocked to see a long snaking queue outside the cathedral, all the way round to the back!  We were told that we would not be able to get into the cathedral from where we were in the queue and were encouraged to join the rest at Paternoster Square where there was to be a live screening of the service.  We were thoroughly disappointed!  Standing out in the cold watching a screen wasn't quite the idea.. and after 15min, K strongly suggested we take the next train home and look forward to our Christmas eve meal.  Oh well.. I guess so because I was starting to lose feeling in my fingers then… too cold!

We love hotpot dinners!

We even had time for a snooze before I started laying the table for our hotpot meal.  It was also really nice to FaceTime Pris and everyone in the Tews family.  Physically apart but not quite that far apart mentally!

The advantages of having a multi purpose rice cooker


Do we look fresh faced? haha

A random thing.. we always hear of the song "I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, underneath the mistletoe last night…"  Anyone knows how a mistletoe looks like?

Yup that's mistletoe with berries and all

Christmas Day

Christmas morning, we woke up to NO snow.  No surprise there.. me and white Christmas doesn't quite go together.  And it didn't help that for the second time, Germany was snowing loads when I'm not there for Christmas.  Why oh why…?!

Never mind, at least let's have a nice breakfast… I bought a panetonne (Italian fruit bread, traditional during Christmas) for breakfast.  It's massive and will last a good few days for us.  I also bought a wintry looking bouquet with fake snow on them as well, very pretty.





Breakfast over, we called home each and soon we needed to get ready for lunch at TW and YY's place near Canary Wharf.  In summary, it was a very simple day of sleep - eat - sleep - eat and eat some more.

After lunch we went home, again K snoozed and soon 5.30pm we needed to get ready for a Christmas dinner at JX and RX's.  Whoa… such a shiok lifestyle!  The Kims put in lots of effort for this 3 course sit down dinner.

We had some canapés as welcome nibbles, followed by homemade mushroom soup with cheese toast.  Mains was this huge roasted turkey with roasted vegetables.  Dessert was homemade Oreo cheesecake. Followed by tea/ coffee.  And wine and juice served in between.  Seriously these guys are too kind to us.  I joked saying we should have brought stretchy pants!

Dinner companions
JX and the roasted turkey

6 of us probably ate only half of the turkey

RX's homemade cheesecake

Of course we needed a shot at their Christmas tree

Boxing Day 

It was another day off for us and we ventured out to Bluewater, a massive shopping mall not too far from us.  K went to watch the Hobbit movie whereas I shopped around.  It was such a win-win compromise.  And no, I didn't go crazy either.  It was a very mild shopping trip for me.

Christmas Weekend

Saturday we stayed home and did nothing.  Love doing nothing.  It feels soooo nice.  I remember the Tews love to have some biscuits and tea in the afternoon and I followed suit, using the teacup set they bought for us last year, no less.  A touch of the Tews :)



If only everyday were like that!!

Today we met a couple friend for dim sum and we thought we'd do a walk along the river… after this pic was taken, we both thought running to the car and driving home was a better idea.  Too cold!





Ahh what a wonderful festive period it has been so far :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Murder Mystery Dinner Party

Two Saturdays ago we were invited to the Kim's for a themed dinner, specifically a Murder Mystery dinner party.  What is that, you might ask.  It was our first time attending such a dinner too, and so how it works is: a group of people attend a dinner party.  Each is assigned a role and will be given a script to read that night.  The aim of the party is to identify a murderer in the midst of us by the end of the night.  The hosts would work off a dinner game set (they got it off Amazon) and it comes with proper invites, setting/ scene, table name cards, scripts and even a suggested menu.  Clearly RX is an Agatha Christie fan. Two weeks beforehand, we received our invites in the postbox, telling us what roles we each have been assigned and the suggested attire (and props if necessary).  Interesting yes? The dinner was to start at 7pm and we were to have 8 people that night.  It's all very mysterious… Our invitation cards assigned K the...

Cooking mee pok dry | bak chor and fishball noodles

When I touched down at Changi airport a few weeks ago, I was very hungry and K suggested grabbing a quick bite at the food court.  I immediately went for the queue at the bak chor (minced pork) noodles stall.  This one dish is very local and we simply can't find it here.  London's Chinatown has a few Malaysian restaurants with fried kway teow, chicken rice, laksa, etc but there is no authentic fishball noodles or minced pork noodles. When my friend Corinne shared this link last week, I was intrigued and I didn't know K was too.  He suggested going to the Asian supermarket on Sunday to get the necessary ingredients.  We found Dodo fishballs from Singapore here - what a win!  Unfortunately the mee pok (yellow, flat noodles) is of a darker shade here and tastes slightly different (maybe a different type of wheat?).  We found fishcakes too. http://delishar.com/2015/12/fishball-noodles-mee-pok-tah.html This is a healthier version of the hawker center'...

Our Seoul Adventure (Part 1)

Gosh life has been non-stop since coming back from Seoul.  Work has been very busy, and then Izzy had stomach flu and I was a bit under the weather too.  With this, one month just zoomed passed. Been meaning to continue our Seoul adventure. Day One To be honest we had a rocky start on the first day.  Our 2am flight was delayed till 3am and we were super groggy when we got on the plane.  Kids were sleeping and we had to wake them up.  The stewardess served us food at 4am and we had no appetite whatsoever.  Made worse by the turbulence which scared us so much.  I think in total we each slept about 4h that night.  So thankful that our kids love traveling and did not whine, but i did feel like i floated out of that plane into Incheon airport.  My original plan for Day One was to explore the palace area, have the famous ginseng chicken soup, and then visit the Bukchon hanok village.  Followed by a nice Korean BBQ for dinner.  The mo...