london was a dream. there's no other word to describe three nights of the best sleep in awhile, many many excellent (chinese!) meals and great company. so much for going there to be alone. am blessed with wonderful family and friends and i thoroughly enjoyed catching up with them. it was a good balance of solo time and time with the near and dear. i'd mornings to myself so, from out of nowhere, i managed to muster up the discipline to jog in kensington gardens the first two mornings. it was hardly a chore because i love the gardens. have spent many happy hours there as a child, picnics with my parents and the babies, the gramps too, so it was a walk (trot?) down memory lane. i remember didi charging at the pigeons, and in more recent times, boyfriend doing the exact same thing :) i remember the gramps sitting on the grass nibbling smoked chicken sandwiches, i remember C (eldest cousin who just got married) on another trip, tucking into M&S trifle on the picnic mat. and after the gardens, i did the taitai-in-training (haha) thing and languished in the steam room until i felt like a xiao long bao (more about that later) before primping and preening and heading out.
the hotel was superlative and i was over the moon when i found out about the mates' rates and upgrade. mmmm :) couldn't have asked for better location. kensington gardens on one side and high street on the other. 30m (literally!) to uniqlo??? it's even closer than in singers, when uniqlo was in tampines. ok, so it's opened at ion too but that was only after i'd left for stocks. and because it's high street ken, there were all the other usual suspects a stone's throw from my doorstep. talk about elation, and subsequent depletion of the already limited bank balance. am going to have to subsist on carrots and onions back in stocks, until the cash injection visits in november.
so here's the rest of london in photos!
four seasons duck. words can't describe how i felt when i tucked in, cold and hungry from the arduous (9h door-to-door!) journey. although a special shout out to N for making it feel so short. thanks for your gallant company! if nothing else, this (the duck, not N, unfortunately!) was reason enough to venture to london. somehow the duck is fatter than in singers, with a thick layer of subcutaneous adipose tissue.
my lovely room :)
turns out i did go to nobu alone as planned. initially aimed to arrive at 1300h but got distracted by the shops and ended up rolling in fashionably late at 1430. tried to be as austere as one could be at nobu and went for the bento box. was tempted to have the degustation but 1. i was alone 2. i just couldn't bring myself to spend so much money on one meal 3. i was in a hurry to get to do or die. feel like an absolute ingrate for saying this but i didn't like nobu. japanese food should be subtle and delicately flavoured but for some strange reason the sauteed vegetables came doused in sweet chili sauce (?!) and the seared ahi tuna marred by pepper. so, i concluded that any starred japanese establishment must be FAKE because them frenchies don't know their jap. which's why kahala's so precious - gotta respect the man for telling the michelin*peeps just where to put their star ;) kitcho (albeit pre-scandal), too. if anything, nobu merely made me yearn for tetsuya and shiro more. oh and inagiku, well, sorta. aside: babies, you know my prejudice against the latter!
grabbed a quick tea with K and we happened to pass the same japanese restaurant we ate at in winter '07. funny how i see more of him outside singers than in. for some strange reason, we've unintentionally coincided in bangkok on new year's eve '07, brown (providence, rhode island) winter '07 then again in london, later that winter, milan on new year's eve '08 and now london in autumn '09.
and the other K also condescended to meet me in london on the pretext of eating with me because one absolutely cannot go to a chinese restaurant alone. but his eating prowess, or lack thereof, was an epic disappointment because i'd order for 6 and he'd surrender after, maybe, 3 mouthfuls, and i'd end up having to eat everything myself to the point of explosion. i felt like such a glut.
of course, there were the lovely changmoh cousins (big J, little J and D) and i very fortuitously caught them when they were all in london so that was great. cousin solidarity and exciting times ahead :)
had the most spectacular lunch with aunty J in min jiang if you're ever in london, it's a must try. there're two min jiangs in singers too but, um, i liked the one in london more :) the chefs were all handpicked (well, duh) and you can tell where a chef's from by tasting the food. even in porto, when the angmoh waiter threw me off, one bite and you could tell the chef was bona fide chinese. they even had a duck-tasting session before opening to pick the most authentic peking duck, although the ducks served are ethnically irish. on a side note, the first thing i did when presented with my first xiao long bao in 10 weeks was to squirt and dribble it all over my front. way to go... leave singers for awhile and i forget how to neatly devour those jems. then again, not like i ever knew how to.
chic chic
the tate modern with J - finally made it, after two failed attempts in winter '07 and then summer '08.
big J's bachelor pad - i always love visiting
hotel from the park :)
and my last meal in london had to be fish&chips from a pub. it's tradition :)
don't know when i'll be back next but i am pretty optimistic that something good's going to happen and it won't be too long ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment