SOYA BEAN

豆花, or soya bean, has come a long way in Singapore. Other than the almond flavor types, there are durian flavor and pink ones too. Some of us, my colleagues and I to be exact, still prefer the traditional type though.

TOILET

I didn't know we have such a scenic toilet at the Beach Road Food Centre until now, that is.

MARINA BAY SANDS & NIGHTSCAPE

These are night photos I took of the Marina Bay Sands and the beautiful night scenery of the area and its surroundings.

NIGHT PHOTOS

I tried to use my iPhone to take night photos of the MBS but didn't know how to adjust the settings then. So the quality came out bad.

I switched to my camera instead and after snapping a few photos, there were already a few Indian workers standing behind me looking at my camera. I smiled back at them when I was done and did not let their presence unfazed me.

HOTPOT

I tried out this 麻辣 hotpot soup last week for dinner near my place and was pleasantly surprised by how good it tasted. Yes, I was hungry.

SOUP

I was so thirsty last Monday evening and had this bowl of fish bowl mee pok soup at People's Park hawker centre for dinner.

ACHIMENES

These photos show how backdated I am in posting recently.

Anyway, this is a container planter I planted up a few months ago using the plastic container purchased from NTUC Fairprice. This Achimenes has been flowering reliably for months on now. Don't ask me what species or cultivar this is because I don't really care anymore. As far as I am concerned, this uncommon gesneriad has been rewarding me with lots of beautiful flowers.

MARINA BARRAGE

The view of the Marina Bay Sands (MBS) and the SuperTrees from the Marina Barrage is splendid!

THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE & MURAL

Today's weather - sunny

I watched 2 chinese mythical productions recently. One is a well-known chinese folklore on the legendary Madam White Snake and the other is a complete unknown to me. But both stories revolve around the theme of love.

I had high expectations of the former, which is yet another interpretation of the love relationship between a thousand year old white snake demon and a man. The Buddhist monk is a staunch religious character who sets himself out on a quest to catch and imprison human harming demons. Typically, monks are supposedly good and demons bad, but the earlier movies usually tell the tale of how things are not always what they seemed. In these movies, the snake demon is often portrayed as being more magnanimous and has more empathy in her heart than the stubborn, inflexible and unreasonable religious leader. Therein lies the popularity of this good demons vs bad monk story.

However, this adaptation starring Jet Li, Eva Huang, Raymond Lam, Vivian Hsu, Charlene Choi etc, turned the tables around to show a benevolent monk, who questions the righteousness of his actions to vanquish demons, and a more self-centered demon, who was only out to save her man with nary a care for other beings. There was little or no on-screen chemistry between Raymond and Eva. Their love was so shallow and was not really built on strong foundations. On the other hand, the monk played by Jet Li has a stronger conscience and had doubts whether he was doing the right thing by separating the couple.  Overall, I was disappointed by this makeover because it did not show the depth of the love between a demon and a mortal being, but was more focused on going back to reinforce the notion that monks are good and demons are bad.

There were a lot of CGI effects and the scene I was really looking forward to was the flooding of the temple on the mountain. Anyway, I love the forever youthful looking Vivian Hsu but was again disappointed that her role in this movie as the Snow Demon was so transient. However, I cannot deny that she is still so pretty.

The second movie starring the real life married couple Deng Chao and Sun Li was surreal and contains lots of CGI effects of heaven. It tells the story of a scholar who was transfixed by a mural on a temple wall and was transported into the fantasy world of heavenly maidens or fairies, ruled by a queen spurned by love. In the heaven realm where no men is allowed to live, except only to marry the fairies and make them conceive before they are killed off, the scholar encountered a series of lovelorn maidens who fell in love with him and revolted against the tyrannous queen in the name of love.

There were few actors and actresses and I love the use of colours in this movie. The fairy maidens were dressed in various vibrant colours and there were actually quite a number of young pretty ones who resembled established movie actresses.

Comparing the two, I was more thrilled by the latter because at least the story was original.

CHANGE-UP

This is another movie about body swapping again. And it is not a horror movie but a relaxingly fun one. To cut the long story short, the pair of best pals, one a career ambitious father who neglected his wife and the other a good for nothing low grade actor, made a wish to lead the other's life in their drunken stupor after a guy's night out.


Unfortunately, when they woke up the next morning, they found their wish came true, possessed the other's body and freaked out. It is one of those comedic movies where the two then had to impersonate the other person as they went about their daily routines and experienced encounters not of their own. Naturally, they screwed up and had to try to put things right. In the process, they learnt to appreciate their own lives, families and friends before they finally reclaimed their own separate lives all over again.


Jason Bateman, acted in Horrible Bosses recently, was a child star but at 42 years old, he seems to have aged quite a lot when acting side by side with the 35 years old Ryan Reynolds, who was most recently seen in the Green Lantern.

PARAGON

Outside, the landscape is planted with lots of orange flower Crossandra, which I like very much. The vibrant Sunkist orange colour is one that I always love to add to my landscape projects. To me, the colour represents positive energy.

Inside, there were lots of male and female mannequins lining the aisles, adding some semblance of artificial life to the cold hard mall.