Easter with Hong Yi
It’s amazing how time flies. Easter is a very special period for me, not just only that Jesus was crucified and raised again, but it was when Hong Yi and I officially became a pair.
Two years ago on April the 6th, I remember flying down to Melbourne and I was supposed to meet up with her that night for dinner. Unfortunately my auntie (mum’s friend) ran into car problems which meant I was late getting picked up and I was staying with my auntie out in the suburbs. Hong Yi was staying at La Trobe street then.
It was only the next day that I got the chance to finally meeting her after not seeing her for almost 3 months and that very night we made it official. So yeah…two years later.
Our relationship is an interesting one. We started long distance and have been long distance ever since. I do get a lot of questions about how I manage to sustain a long distance relationship. Let me tell you this: distance makes the heart grow fonder. There are pros & cons but I guess we usually don’t take each other for granted when we meet up.
Anyways, not here to talk about the relationship. So here are some photos of what we did!
Fish Markets
Hong Yi has been been quite upset at me for not taking her to the fish markets despite her visiting Sydney several times already. If you don’t already know, she’s a fan of food. So is her mum, a food-blogger!
So after many verbal beatings from her, we finally made our trip to the fish markets!
Fish markets is famous for seafood, for obvious reasons. You can get really fresh fishes, oysters, lobsters and much more at affordable price. Hong Yi said her family would’ve loved the fish markets!
I would recommend getting there first thing in the morning as the stuff is the freshest then. Parking is not cheap over there so I wouldn’t recommend staying for more than 2 hours.
One of the must foods you must try over there is the fresh raw salmon, tuna, swordfish and oysters. The oysters are brought in fresh from the morning’s catch and you can see people cutting open the shell and washing it. When we squeezed lemon juice onto it, it even squirmed around a little! I think Hong Yi was grossed out by it so she let me eat most of the oysters hehe. We also had half a lobster with chips and salad.
If you’re having your meal outside, be very wary of the seagulls. I remember I was having my salmon and tuna outside last time and there were 2 big pieces of tuna. When I was looking away, a seagull dived down and snatched one of the tuna pieces which got me really angry at the bird as there were only 2 pieces and I love raw tuna!
My Recent Trip To Malaysia
Recently I was on holidays to Malaysia for a few weeks visiting my friends, family and my girlfriend’s family too. Thought I’d share some pictures from my trip but I probably won’t upload everything because there’s a lot of photos (see bottom for gallery)!
My girlfriend also recently got a Nikon D90 which her dad secretly told me that she was meant to contribute half for it but her mum, Terri snuck her out to go shopping before poor uncle Wedge had a say in it hehe. So ever since that, she’s been taking photos of everything non-stop!
I’ll start off with my trip to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah where my girlfriend originally came from.
This is the view from the apartment I was living in. It is pretty much opposite Tanjung Aru beach. Hong Yi’s parents kindly and generously offered their apartment for me to live all by myself. Very nice and spacious 2 storey-apartment with three large bedrooms and as I can remember, 4 toilets and 2 bathrooms (toilet joined). Pretty cool ay?
I was even provided toothpaste, towels, soap, snacks, juice & water, a pen and even hotel slippers by auntie Terri! Wow, she really did impress me hehe.
This is Hong Yi’s cool outdoor table where they sometimes have meals because according to uncle Wedge, the temperature is around 2-3 degrees cooler outside. Also this is auntie Terri’s outdoor kitchen where she rules with an iron fist. Haha, just kidding. But she’s seriously good at cooking and I hope one day Hong Yi will surpass her mum’s cooking skills! You can check out auntie Terri’s food blog at hungerhunger.
Mamak Night
You guessed it. Mamak night was a day full of cooking and eating at my place. Had a bunch of friends over and I want to make a special note the common behaviour I see in Malaysians. Punctuality.
Peter Teoh, the famous Malaysian himself, said he was going to come over to my place around 1pm since he was a co-organiser. But he only arrived at around 3.30pm.
Yes, I too am not a very punctual person. I sent the Facebook invite out to start at 11am but decided to tell people to come around 2pm instead since I wanted to sleep in a little and had to go do some shopping and errands during the day time.
The two things I was going to cook was curry chicken and roti canai. Curry chicken I thought wasn’t going to be too hard but I had to challenge myself by making roti canai from scratch! Yes, that’s right. From scratch.
More pictures from Melbourne
Totally forgot there were more pictures in my dead camera. Hong Yi was looking for pictures from our trip to the ACMI video game exhibition. The exhibition exhibits all the old school games such as Pac Man and Mario Brothers to the modern games such as Wii and X-Box.
Hong Yi and I were playing Mario Brothers as it was one of our favourite childhood games. Here’s a screenshot if you don’t remember what it is.
Boy do I have to say that both of us don’t have teamwork! She especially tries to kill and sabotage me by getting all the coins and kicking all the bumped monsters, while not helping me at all! We definitely don’t do well during team events, hehe.
My Trip to Melbourne in June
Ok I’ve been consistently bugged by my girlfriend to put up pictures from my trip to Melbourne in June. Unfortunately few days into my trip, my camera decided to commit suicide and die of mechanical failure. Thus tilll today I am still left camera-less.
Thinking of getting a DSLR once I get my tax return in. But can I justify spending $1000+ for it?
Anyways, here’s some pictures taken from my trip. Unfortunately it’s not much and most of it is still on Hong Yi’s camera.
Dinner with some other friends: Denise, Joel, Jonathan, Adrianne.
Hong Yi and I having dinner with some friends at some Thai restaurant I can’t remember.
My lunch at Yu-u with Nicole. Some famous and randomly hard to find Japanese restaurant. $16 for a lunch menu. Quite good!