Beautiful rainbows after a rainy day

Yesterday (and today actually) was a rainy day. While I was crossing the bridge during the evening, I saw a group of passer-by staring at the sky. Out of curiosity I stopped, and realised that they were looking at a beautiful rainbow. I guess with such natural beautiful scenes, anyone would have stopped for a moment of appreciation. In fact, right behind me were couples taking snap shots of the rainbow.

The sunlight was sufficient to create rainbow at multiple locations. After a bus ride towards the east part of Singapore, I saw another rainbow when I alighted from the bus! With the approaching evening and darkening sky, the second rainbow wasn't as vivid in colours compared to the first (pic below).

I was told that someone actually captured photos of two rainbows in one shot and sent the photo to the evening dailies! Yupz, this wiki entry explains the formation of the double rainbows.

Rainbows are indeed beautiful, and it is a wonderful feeling to look and appreciate one when available.

Lost Generation Youtube

A friend introduced the video 'Lost Generation' to me and I must say I'm quite impressed by this YouTube done by 'metroamv'. The 'Lost Generation' video was among the entries of the AARP U@50 video contest and placed second. More details about the different winning entries of the AARP U@50 contest could be found on their website.

This is not the only YouTube video where the meaning of the words are completely reversed when the sentence sequence is read 'backwards'. Another such video about the Argentina political scene could be found in the video below. According to the information provided, this video won the Silver Lion award in the Cannes Lions Contest 2006.

Impressive right?

Queue of Haato Free Gelato Day @ Suntec

Haato was giving away free gelato on Thursday 12 Feb, in celebration of their new outlet at Suntec (1st floor and right outside Carrefour). The end result was the forming of a super long queue.

Well, the gelato is not exactly 'free' since customers could give some money when taking the gelato. Seems like Haato will give proceeds from this event to Community Chest. Haato had recently opened an outlet in Marina, and now there is this Suntec branch. Not sure how substantial would the crowd be to sustain two outlets within such close proximity.

I think Suntec people generally like to queue. Earlier when the toto Group 1 prizes were huge (New Year draws, and an earlier August draw), long snaking queues of people would be formed around the area. Here is a photo of the toto queue that I captured sometime back. The location is the same within Suntec, i.e. the Haato outlet and the Singapore Pool outlet are quite near actually.

Oh well, I guess in this climate, anything that is free is good!

Big Fish Seafood Grill @ Upper East Coast Road

We had a great seafood time at Big Fish during the weekend. The restaurant is located at 85 Upper East Coast Road. Parking is not too bad if you are willing to walk abit, since those private housing at the back of the restaurants 'offered' parking space for free. It is a cafe type of concept, and the place could be a bit noisy when there are lots of customers. The kitchen is visible and you could the chef preparing your food. We heard the french fries sizzling.

With the variety of food, we chose warm mushroom salad for appertiser, and lobster bisque for soup. Mushroom salad was great, and lobster bisque is, well, just creamy tasty lobster bisque lolz. Big Fish also serve foccia bread complementary of the place. I guess I was too hungry and had forgotten to take photo of the these until we were almost done.

The seafood selection is good. There is a picture of a whole grilled rainbow trout that looked especially tempting. Since we wanted to try the varierty, we ordered a Grilled Seafood platter - scallops, grilled fish, mussels, crayfish, prawns and squid. Butter rice and french fries included. The fish was good, and same for the mussels and scallops. The buttery sauce resting in the shells and warming the mussels and scallop were sinful but nice to sip. The prawn was slightly dry but still alright. They added butter and herbs when they grilled the food I think.

Other than seafood, they serve pasta and other meats (lamb, duck...etc) as well. There is also some selection of desserts plus drinks. We were too full to eat anymore though. So for those wanting to try some nice seafood around Siglap area, you could pop by the place. Reservation is possible.

Post CNY Spring Cleaning

Most people do their spring cleaning before the Chinese New year, but I guess I was too busy then. So over the weekend I did my belated spring cleaning.

It is quite amazing that a large amount of time needed to clear out simple stuff. I spent nearly 3 hours clearing out just a stack of old magazines (some as old as 2004) to make way for my course notes. Part of the reason is that I would flip through the magazines to see if any article is worth keeping. So there is now a small collection of rather useful articles, though I'm not sure if I would use them in future.

Actually magazines are generally environmentally unfriendly. There are pages and pages of advertisements which we do not generally pay attention to, or at most spend a couple of seconds on. Compared to the actual articles with reading and pictures / photos involved, these adverts and page fillers are waste of paper.

After the hours of magazines clearance, more time was spent on clearing another pile of papers - letters and bills. I didn't know I was asked to do some official surveys, and even received a reminder to do so. Shouldn't surveys be voluntary participation in nature?

Then there was the library fine. Lolz. I didn't know that if the fines (about a dollar) are not paid by April, I would not be able to borrow any books from the library.

Oh well, lucky for me to discover it earlier. The belated spring cleaning was somewhat useful afterall.

Souperlicious @ Suntec Tower 4 (opp. Carrefour)

Wondering what to eat for lunch is a daily choice, and for those who have worked around the same area for years, it can be a headache. So during one of the days when a few colleagues were wondering what to eat, I suggested we try out the Souperlicious (opposite Carrefour) at Suntec Tower 4. It was a relatively new set-up that replaced the Ben & Jerry.

I ordered a set, i.e. Golden Pumkin soup with a chicken half sandwich and some pasta that comes with lemon tea. Others ordered Beef Goulash & a shroomy mushroom soup. The pumpkin soup is nice but nothing extraordinarily fantastic. Similarly comments for the sandwich actually.

The portion is filling, and service is good (with the waiter helping us arrange the food and table) but the price tag is slightly on the higer end. Regular bowl of soup is about $5+ to $6.50, and the customer could add $3.90 for the half sandwich and lemon / peach tea. Overall, with GST, the cost of lunch for me was about $10.15. The good news is that a customer loyalty card is given, with a 'chop' for each $5 spent. 12 of these chops, i.e. $60, entitles you to a free set meal!