The First Day of the New Year

My family's eclectic CNY First Day dinner.

Technically, it's already the second day of the Year of the Pig but since I've not slept yet, it still feels like the first day for me. =)

Traditionally, on the first day of Chinese New Year, my brother and sister and their families will come visit. Some years they'll time it so that it'll coincide with when my aunt and uncle and their families visit and we'll have a big party of people at my home. This year was one of those years and it was fun and rowdy as it should be during CNY.

Some years my mum will cook or prepare for steamboat but this year she wasn't well before CNY so didn't have too much time to prepare. So in the end, we had the most eclectic of CNY dinners we've ever had to date. Instead of the traditional steamboat, which is for some reason extremely popular in tropical Singapore, we had curry chicken, which we ordered from one of our Malay neighbours, Kentucky Fried Chicken's Treasure Feast, Japanese styled pizzas from Oiishi Pizza and 80 sticks of satay.

But we did have a traditional dinner on Saturday CNY's eve, as did all my relatives, so our not so tradition dinner on the first day didn't bother any of us. That's when all of us have to return for Reunion Dinner. When I was younger, we often had steamboat for Reunion Dinner but since my parents got older and we got lazier =D , we now usually have our dinner at a restaurant. This year we booked the 5:30pm slot at the Bottle Tree Restaurant at the Bottle Tree Park in Yishun.


The Bottle Tree Park - pix shot on a previous biking trip in the area.

While the location was quite pretty, I must say that the Bottle Tree management was probably too inexperience with dealing with so many people and the dinner didn't go as smoothly as we were used to. It took them more than an hour after we were seated to serve us our "yusheng" and I was somewhat disappointed that they didn't scatter the ingredients and pour the sweet dressing over the dish and say the usual CNY greetings, this being a proper restaurant and all. BTW, if you're interested in the origins of "yusheng" and how it came to be associated with CNY, click this link.


(First "lo hei" at Crown Palace Restaurant", the waitress pours the ingredients and the sauce over the vegetables and she'll say one phrase of good wishes in Mandarin with every ingredient she adds. )

I love raw fish but I don't usually like it sweet which is the way "lo hei" is served during CNY. But during the run up to CNY and during the 15 days of CNY, I make an exception and will participate in each "lo hei" session with gusto. The proper way to do it is to toss everything as high as you can and don't worry about making a mess and it is always accompanied with a lot of cheering and happy noise making.


(The second of my 3 "lo hei" 's so far. In this kind of "lo hei", you buy the vegetables & sauces in a pre-package like the one in the first picture. You then buy the raw fish separately and mix in all the items yourself. This was actually the noisiest of the "lo hei" sessions I had this year so far. The good thing about this kind of "lo hei is that you can control how much honey you pour in and you can control what kind of fish goes in.)

While "lo hei" used to be only eaten on the 7th day of CNY, it is now usually eaten any time from the eve onwards to the 15th day of CNY. And these days, it's not unusual to "lo hei" during the one week leading up to CNY's eve itself. This year, I've already "lo hei" twice before Reunion Dinner and will probably have another "lo hei" session at another office party that I'm suppose to attend on the 3rd day of CNY.


("Lo hei"at the Bottle Tree Restaurant. The dish came already all ready to be tossed. This is the third way this dish is often served.)

Anyway, after our "lo hei", it took them forever to serve us a second dish of vegetables and they only served us our shark's fin soup near the end of the dinner when the soup dish is traditionally the second dish that is served after the "yusheng" or the cold dish.

The food was actually quite tasty and aside from the "yusheng", the scallops and broccoli, the shark's fin soup, we also had crayfish, steamed fish and sea cucumber. But although the food wasn't too bad and the location quite lovely, I don't really recommend this for Reunion Dinner, unless they make changes next year like hire more waiters and cooks.

Still, we did have a good time. It is Reunion Dinner after all and although we're not superstitious, still I think we've been brought up with the idea that it is inauspicious and a really big no-no to be quarrelsome on CNY's eve and during the 15 days of CNY, so if this had been on any other day, we might have made our displeasure more vocal but this was the Reunion Dinner, so we had a good time. =)

We'll probably come back again as my 4-year-old niece wants to go fishing. One of the attractions of this restaurant is that there are two sections for fishing built right into the restaurant. One is a shallow rock pool where they place small tropical fish for kids to fish out with their nets. The other is a deeper pool for grown-ups to catch their fish with a rod and the restaurant will also cook it for you if you like. Unfortunately, the fishing pools were close on CNY eve and so we'll have to return again.


Fishing pools for the kids at the Bottle Tree Restaurant.


The Bottle Tree Park at night.

After dinner, we took a stroll around the park. The park was one of the reasons why my parents and my brother decided on this location. So we made full use of it by strolling around the area and snapping shots of each other when we weren't chatting.

The Year of the Pig is generally a good year and so far it's been great for us, a most auspicious beginning indeed. =)

Before I head off to bed, I'll leave you a shot of a Bottle Tree, the name of a species of tree that was imported from Australia to this park. It is also the reason why the tree and the restaurant are named Bottle Tree.



That's it from me. Good night. =)

Just Follow Law - Review

Let me start of this review by telling a joke someone told my mum who re-told it to me. She said that in Singapore, we worship three gods. We worship Kuan Yin (Goddess of Mercy), Kuan Kung (God of War) and Kuan Yew (aka Lee Kuan Yew, currently the Minister Mentor and often considered the father of modern Singapore).

If you're not Singaporean or if you don't know who Kuan Yin, Kuan Gong or Lee Kuan Yew are, you will most likely not find this joke terribly amusing. So what does this have to do with Singaporean director Jack Neo's latest film, Just Follow Law? Well, this kind of humour abounds in this film and it owes its success in part because this kind of humour gives this film a distinctly Singaporean feel and an instant rapport with Singaporeans in general.

As usual, I won't bother giving you a synopsis of the plot as they can be found at these websites Just Follow Law official website and movieXclusive and I don't particularly like writing synopsis.

The basic storyline is actually rather cliche and the Freaky Friday body switching plot device is old. But luckily for us, even though Neo does use the fish-out-of-water situation to create humour, his insistence on casting Fann Wong as the lead female really paid off. Fann is one of the top actresses in Singapore and has been known internationally since her role in Shanghai Knights. While Fann is no stranger to exaggerated comedy, she has never been in a raunchier role than this one and while she does get some mileage from the shock of seeing her being so crude after Lim Teng Zui (played by Gurmit Singh) ends up in her body, one should not take away from her how well she played this role. Fann is genuinely funny here. Kudos too to Gurmit and the rest of the support cast who are comprised of veteran TV comedians/actors like Moses Lim, Lina Ng, Brandon Wong and others who's names I don't know or escape me at the moment.

This time Neo chose to make a satire on the civil service and bureaucracy in Singapore and he gets a lot of it right. While bureaucracy is often as inflexible and full of red tape everywhere, Neo's decidedly Singaporean spin on things is what sets this apart. Here's one example of his inventiveness in incorporating Singaporean slang and a slant on things. The bureaucracy in Singapore is particularly fond of the "black & white". In Singlish, this means that everything you do must be backed up in writing and in this day and age, it means you have to have a copy of it in an email. I know this quite intimately actually. I don't work in the civil service but even in the corporate world, I've been advised time and again to make sure I have the "black & white" to "cover my backside". His use of the CG arrows to illustrate how the word "arrow" is used in Singlish is also quite funny.

Now I'm not a big Jack Neo fan and I feel that many of his films are deeply flawed and that Neo often lets too much of his Mediacorp Channel 8 television roots show through in his film making. But even though I'm often critical of several of his efforts, even his much lauded I Not Stupid, one thing I've never disagreed with is that Neo has an uncanny ability to reach out and connect with the masses in Singapore. And Neo has done it once again and surprising, at least for me, has actually quite perceptibly made several advancements in his film-making.

Like several of his previous films, Just Follow Law can be criticized for glossing over the issues and does suffer from a few common flaws that seem to plague Neo's films, still Neo seems to have learnt a little from his previous mistakes. Unlike his previous films, I think Neo has learnt to be a little more balanced. Previously, in films like I Not Stupid, I felt that Neo in his eagerness to not only express the pressures children can face in Singapore's education system and also to use it as an analogy of our paternalistic government completely forgot to give the teachers' side of the story.

Also, aside from his little poke about the James Gomez issue, Neo chose to steer clear of too many political jokes in this film. This was what I felt was one of the flaws in Homerun. While his jokes about the water issue between Singapore and Malaysia were quite amusing, he did take it a little too far, to a point I felt that it was beginning to detract from the story. Homerun also suffered from Neo's bad habit of over-using melodrama and although there are some moments of melodrama in Just Follow Law, kept them to a minimum and Fann and Gurmit took care to play them subtlety enough that they didn't overwhelm the whole movie.

Neo also has a tendency to do too much preaching in his films and it was his cop-out moralistic ending which killed The Best Bet for me. While Just Follow Law does do a certain amount of moralising, it is without Neo's usual heavy-handedness and he tempers it in such a way that it is sometimes amsuing and occasionally touching at moments. This I also put down to Fann's, Gurmit's, Brandon Wong's, Suhaimi Yusof's and the woman who play's Tanya Chew's mother's acting.

While this will in no way be a classic and this film is unlikely to win any film awards, still it is worth a watch in the theatre. And if one is looking for a light-hearted movie to begin the Year of the Pig with a laugh, then I wholeheartedly recommend Just Follow Law, especially if you're Singaporean. And if one isn't Singaporean, you might still find this film amusing as the jokes about the civil service and bureacracy in general probably rings true in other parts of the world.

Right, it's Chinese New Year's Eve and I'm off to get ready for the traditional Reunion Dinner. Have a Happy New Year guys and may the coming Year of the Pig give you many blessings. =)

Photo Journeys - Changi Boardwalk - update

Finally got some time to work on this entry. So here it is, my Changi Point Boardwalk trip. =)

So on Monday, a few of us freelancers took off early from work to go to the Changi Point Boardwalk. I was quite excited as I love walks and the location sounded cool. I also brought along my v10 to take some photos to share with you guys. The reason I elected to use the v10 instead of the Canon 300D is because my colleagues were there primarily to walk and so I needed to keep up and the v10 is just more suitable for quick shots.



The Changi Point Boardwalk stretches from the Changi Beach Club to Changi Village and is segmented into several sections. They are called Sunset Walk, Kelong Walk, Cliff Walk, Sailing Point Walk, Beach Walk and the Creek Walk. The boardwalk hugs the coast of the Serangoon Harbour and the Sungei Changi.



We started our walk from the Changi Beach Club and walked at a brisk pace to Changi Village before turning around and returning to our point of origin. The entire walk itself didn't take us very long.



Cliff Walk and Sailing Point Walk


Changi Sailing Club



Sailing Point Walk continued



Beach Walk


Changi Village - end of the walk

A colleague who recommended this place to us told us it would take us 2 hours but as we were walking quite rapidly, we completed the walk from Changi Beach Club to Changi Village in about 1/2 hour's time. After that we turned back and continued walking briskly.

On the way back...








The land mass opposite is Pulau Ubin.





That's probably Punggol or Sengkang New Town in the distance.

Since we entered the boardwalk from the Changi Beach Club entry and then turned right, we missed out on the section called Sunset Walk. My colleagues were there to get some exercise and now that that mission had been completed and it was after six, we decided to stroll to the Sunset Walk section to enjoy the evening breeze and the view.

Sunset Walk






The very end of Sunset Walk

The Changi Boardwalk has several other points of interest in the vicinity but we didn't visit any. If you're interested please check out the following links.

Urban Redevelopment Authority - to view a brochure on the Changi area
Wild Singapore - a dedicated page on the boardwalk

Right, that's it from me for now. Hope you enjoyed it. =)