birthday surprise in advance 1: 

Refused to tell L where exactly we were going for lunch and so brought him to Lei Gardens at Chijmes. Quite a lovely, quiet place in the afternoon and the restaurant was beautiful. They have a sitting room with sofas and coffee tables with long windows, and the restaurant itself was partitioned into about 6 small rooms each with either one big table or a number of small tables, like ours. Our two-person round table was very adorable. Haha

The chopsticks were heavy at the end and gold-plated! Noticed because they kept falling off my plate. 

Poring over the menu looking for the famed crabmeat congee but to no avail (annoying chinese new year menus) 

Waitress’ recommendation: Custard buns with salted egg yolk (5.8)
Extremely unusual, L said they look like mantous and actually taste pretty good but the filling was a mixture of custard and salted yolk. 

l

Braised Ee-Fu noodles with mushrooms and abalone sauce. (22)
IMO, couldn’t taste the abalone in it at all but awesome as a staple dish. 

These are interesting little fried flour dumplings with a layer of yam AND a core of braised chicken meat in a great tasting sauce. Given the culinary expertise required to make these i think the 5.80 price tag was well worth it. 

XLBs were decent, but skin was a little thick and soup kind of bland but we were pretty full by then so I couldn’t tell. 

My first time trying Cheong Fun with shrimp dumplings!! I quite liked them although L said he’s had better ones. The lovely feeling of tasting shrimp in the layers of dough mmmm

Siew maissssss nuff said. 

Happy birthday boy with his birthday present! :D

Headed to Holland V (Yoshimaru) to meet up with squad mates after lunch and managed to make it into their restaurant polaroids hehe was great meeting all of them after so long!! 

birthday surprise 2: lured into a movie theatre 

Using the pretext of wanting to shop at Cineleisure, pulled L into the mall and up to the 4th level and then all the way up till the 6th. When quizzed which movie we were watching I randomly pointed at movie posters displayed (of freaky awful genres we usually don’t watch) to give him a slight shock. 

Anyway we caught The Viral Factor, which was already closing in cinemas. Good thriller, loved the part that was filmed in Jordan. The shooting scenes in the ship’s containers were well-planned out. These filmmakers did some serious research to incorporate the whole biological part about combining viral RNA, and then matching it to the antidote. But it sort of prolonged the show and felt a little tiring after 1.5hrs. 

Now L is probably back in camp, hope you had a great day, pull through the audit alright!! :> ♥♥