Based on my Nike+GPS running app, I have ran 155.34  km so far in 2012. I need to run more often!

Before arriving at the outlets, I sort of knew the discounts won’t be great and the stock won’t be new or comprehensive. I was looking to buy some clothes from Gap, but it was a major disappointment because not only are they off season (to be expected), they were leftovers from Singapore (not direct from US), odd sizes, and not heftily discounted. However, I did manage to get some good bargain from Fossil yesterday!

This was tagged RM280, but there was a 50% off on tag price yesterday, so I paid RM140 (SGD~56) each. Such good bargain that I bought 2 in different colours, one for me (green) and one for the sister (black). Guess how much it used to cost?

It used to cost USD128 (SGD~160).

I effectively saved more than SGD100 on each bag. This is great bargain, reminiscent of the outlets in the US.

I also paid RM45 (SGD~18) for this Key Per purse. It used to cost …

USD25 （SGD～32). Nearly half-price then.

Fossil is one of the brands worth looking out for at the outlets. But bear in mind it’s mostly WYSIWYG, not much stock in backroom, so not for fussy people!

Another brand to shop is perhaps Polo Ralph Lauren. The pony polo tees are about SGD120 there, compared to the SGD180 locally.

Don’t expect too much from the trip and you won’t come out feeling cheated. Just a tip.

For the 6th time.

This is the last year of my mid-twenties – and as with all last things we ought to honour the cliche of saying I want to make it count, as though NOT saying it will make it disappear.

A year closer to who I’m gonna be, but nowhere near who I (thought) wanna be. Perhaps I should rethink that; people shouldn’t decide on life direction so definitively too early in life. Especially when you’re as prone to fickle-mindedness as me.

But this year especially, I am grateful for all the dear friends around me doing things to surprise me and make me happy. Such as surprise book in the mail, surprise meal, surprise presents … it’s particularly heartwarming to know people put in effort. Reminds me that I still have a heart to be warmed.

So thank you to all of you who have cracked your brains trying to make this birthday memorable for me. :)

Zen Japanese Restaurant is a vegetarian restaurant I discovered too late. The food is great, the current location at Midlink Plaza is great, but they are moving (as Midlink Plaza will be undergoing refurbishment) to somewhere deserted near the Expo.

My vegetarian friend commented that it’s rare to have a vegetarian Japanese restaurant in Singapore, so this was something new. I like vegetarian food (not the mock meat crazy shit though) and so I wanted to try it. Six of us ordered a variety of main courses, including a dumpling hotpot, mock meat unagi rice, green tea soba, regular soba, cold soba, fried doumiao, and tempura. Now let the pictures do the talking.

It’s a pity this restaurant has to move. :(

The truffle shoestring fries are generously portioned (well, it’s expected given the price). I like shoestring fries because it’s just so sinful; the crust to potato ratio is just a tad lower that full-fat potato chips. Yummy. So my dining partners also had a season specialty, the chocolate truffle fries:

It was really just truffle fries with chocolate dip. A lot less fries, and not sure how the chocolate sauce makes it better.

Apart from fried potatoes we had various brunch main courses.

I had the crab tart. It’s a savoury tart with crab meat, and a salad atop. It is served with the most insane crab sauce ever. Imagine pulverizing roasted crab shells with crab roe – that’s the crabby taste of the sauce. Even my 5-year-old niece said it’s super crabby. I don’t quite like the sauce, but it helped …contextualize the tart if you get what I mean.

The tart is not as eggy as a quiche, and it’s soft on the inside with generous serving of crab meat. However the heavy taste of the sauce makes this tart a little too much to bear after a while.

I also shared a soup of the day – chicken and mushroom chowder with the little niece. It is served with a slice of toasted rustic bread. The chowder is a little creamy, but still very runny and almost light. However the taste was a little flat after a while; the initial tastiness quickly replaced by cloying distaste. I think I am very easily swayed by hunger-induced bias; it’s the hunger version of beer goggles I suppose.

Angela had the caramelised banana honey pancakes. If you like honey, this is for you. The pancakes are okay,  hardly the best around. Then again, I’m not the greatest fan of pancakes so I shall not comment much. Each to their own, and this pancake still did not manage to wow me.

Su had the brunch burger. Looks tasty enough, but the accompanying fries are seriously blah, especially in face of truffle fries. Man, I need to get my hands on some truffle oil.

At the end of the meal they also shared a dessert.

I think it’s a sticky cake with butterscotch sauce and some ice cream? I only liked the butterscotch sauce. I am also not a huge fan of desserts, so I shall not comment more.

PS Cafe at Palais Renaissance has a nice relaxed ambience, but do go early for weekend brunch because it got crowded during lunch time. The wait staff could be more attentive though.

I think the food are okay quality, nothing spectacular, especially considering how much I’d expect if I paid that kind of money for the things. All in all it’s a place to keep in mind when looking for brunch venues in Orchard that won’t cost a limb in price or from DVT* while waiting.

PS. Cafe – Palais Renaissance Branch
LEVEL 2. PALAIS S.C
390 ORCHARD ROAD
Tel. No.: 9834 8232  (call or SMS for reservations)

DVT = Deep Vein Thrombosis

(Nah, just kidding.)

The route was, again, my home turf in the Kallang Riverside area. We flagged off from Nicoll Highway MRT station thereabout, made a loop at Suntec City, up the Nicoll Highway into somewhere near the Stadium, come out and go to the Kallang Riverside, run to Beach Road and to the F1 pitstop and making a roundabout at the Flyer and ending at the start point again.

All thanks to the VIP who turned up 10 minutes late to flag us off, we endured 10 more minutes of scorching sun by the time the sun rose. It was an exceedingly warm day; most people were not on form due to the weather. To think NEA said it was going to rain in the morning.

The map, if you are interested. According to my GPS I ran 15.75km, I think that somehow includes elevation or something.

According to the organizer – my nett time is 2h 10 mins, my gun time is 2 h 12 min 39s. This placed me 584 out of 953 among women runners. In the top 60% thereabout (or bottom 40% depending how you see it). I aimed to finish the race in 2 hours, seems like I have lots of improvement to be made. Will I attempt 15km again? I’m not sure. I rationalize my bad form this time round with crazy weather and lack of training (severely undertrained in March), but I think a lot of it is matter of the mind too. But now that I’ve done 15km, 10km doesn’t seem at all that scary.

]]> http://lovelyloey.me/2xu-compression-run-2012/feed/ 0 http://lovelyloey.me/2xu-compression-run-2012/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/InkInc/~3/lBis4S4fjTE/ http://lovelyloey.me/on-pickiness/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:03:33 +0000 lovelyloey http://lovelyloey.me/?p=5133 I won’t deny I am a picky person, especially when I comes to food. Friends know my quirky (or, difficult) food rules, such as not eating animals without faces (e.g. clams and all kinds of bivalves), gourds and marrows, raw food, innards*. Only my family knows by heart (most of) the long list of things I will not eat, such as okra, asparagus, pineapple, kiwi, pumpkin…. the list gets pretty long. Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually being intentionally difficult, then I realized – why should I apologize for not want to shovel things I don’t want to eat into my mouth, or resort to pushing around on my plate?

I don’t know when this picky eating habit started – I figured since I was young. Because of the abundant food choices at home, I was able to pick and choose. If I don’t like something, no one will force me to eat it. I am always reminded (by my family) of the time I hid vegetables under my noodles because I didn’t like them. Perhaps that was the moment of revelation – I don’t have to eat what I don’t like. Of course, that came with some nagging and 20 years of mockery, but you get the idea.

Sometimes I wonder- for a picky eater, I’m pretty fat. Aren’t all picky eaters supposedly malnourished children who have to be force fed full-fat milk? Never happened to me. I compensate variety with volume. I just eat plenty of what I like, and none of what I don’t. Should I feel bad about it? I’m not sure. I don’t hate all vegetables. In fact I love vegetables such as carrots, celery, broccoli, kale, spinach… Let’s just say there doesn’t seem to be much more harm in overdosage of vegetables compared to an overdosage of cockles.

I Googled on why I am so picky about food, trying to find out if it’s some psychological trauma or childhood incident that made me this way. Then I found out I am not the only person in this world to hate egg yolk. Or icky things like raw fish and oysters. I sometimes think my taste preference as infantile, but I do think there are children who eats more variety than me. I used to feel inadequate somehow at my lack of sense of adventure when it come to food. Now I just say fuck off. Life is too short to fret about how people judge you by what you eat.

* With exception to cow’s stomach – the one with the numerous villi.

I caught the media preview of The Lorax on Monday, and boy it was fun and educational! The movie talks about Ted, a boy in love with with a girl, Audrey, and dying to impress. Ted lives in Thneedville, an artificial paradise where the air is bad and trees are fake. Audrey dreams of touching and having a real tree, a seemingly mythical plant that very few people remember. Ted’s grandmother advises him to go to the Once-ler, outside their utopia town. The Once-ler is a grouchy old man who blames himself for the disappearance of trees and their beautiful environment. He tells Ted his story, which involves The Lorax, the guardian of the forest, and plenty of cute cuddly bears. Together, they battle the nemesis and try to save the environment. Do they succeed? Watch it for yourself.

I brought the little 6-year-old niece to watch the film in 3D, and the effects are great at certain parts! My niece actually reached out and tried catch the fluttering petals. The moral of the story is great; it is about depletion of resources resulting in poor standard of living for people. It also critiques large corporation exploiting people. The cute animals helped too. This movie is funny and enjoyable, highly recommend it if you need to unwind after a long work week!

Took part in the 2012 NTUC Urun today at the Floating Platform. I signed up for the 10km Competitive Run category because I wasn’t sure I could do a 10km and climb 30 storeys in the other category. The last time I did a 10K it was a trail run, so this is my first road run! I haven’t done a mob road run since 2007. This time round I set a target for myself, to complete the 10K in 90 minutes.

The 10K competitive category was flagged off at 8.15am, pretty late. The sun was out, the air was warm, it was a pretty warm condition to run. Plus the fact that a large portion of the route along Nicoll Highway was unsheltered; I wonder if anyone had heatstroke. The thing about mob running is that you tend to be psyched up into a quicker pace than usual; people run fast, I followed. After my first km I was averaging 7 plus minute/km; I don’t usually run long distance at that speed. Perhaps it’s also the familiarity with the route – it is after all my turf (though I never got to run on the real road).

I was feeling not too bad in the first 6km of the race, then it started to go a downhill. I suddenly felt I was out of energy, if that is possible. Also the sun was searing us alive, and I was psychologically unprepared because the race route markers showed a different distance compared to my GPS (my GPS registered a longer distance). I haven’t really trained the full distance before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But nonetheless I finished the race well within my target time. The timer at the finish line showed about 81 minutes, or 1 hour 21 minutes, but I’ll have to wait for the official timechip timing to be sure.

And guess what? My GPS registered at least 10.8km. I stopped the GPS at 10.5km and started to walk because I felt so cheated. It was a good 300m or even 500m before I reached the finish line. But out of face-saving measure, I sprinted the last 50m or so to the finish line.

It was fun overall, and I think I learnt good lessons as to how my body will react at which points of the race and what to do.

And here is the race route (made possible with Nike+) if you are into that kind of things: