Tim Sum Afternoon Tea at Geylang, Brother's Birthday Celebrations, Attempted Ice-cream Outing at Illuma Mall at Bugis Area, Qian Hu Fish Farm Outing

Tim Sum Afternoon Tea at Geylang:

A group of VIP friends sudddenly called me during work and said "Sean! Let's go eat Dim Sum at Geyland" and they packed themselves into a larger sedan and picked me up at my workplace for a Tim Sum Afternoon Tea last Friday.


The venue of the Tim Sum Afternoon Tea. Rumour has it that it is one of the best places for Tim Sum and it's open 24 hours. Service was brisk but the air-conditioning did not seem very fresh since it was mixed with the preparations of the dim sum.

The usual thing was that drinks were served in those plastic containers that were meant for packed food and thus the servings for drinks were huge. The Changed Man was, however, hooked on the drinks and easily finished two "buckets" of drinks whilst I could barely finished mine. The rest was busy eating and trying to coax all at the table to go for a holiday trip to Taiwan (that was before the swine flu outbreak was considered serious).
We ordered a grand total of twelve types of Dim Sum and they tasted great and were very filling. I particularly enjoyed the fried carrot cake and the shrimp dumplings because they were well-made by the chefs.

Brother's Birthday Celebrations:

This week, my family and I celebrated my brother's birthday and as usual to the red eggs, there was a coffee cake and noodles to go along with some raspberry ripple ice-cream.
Attempted Ice-cream Outing at Illuma Mall at Bugis Area:

I went to the new Illuma Mall to have a look and to meet SC for another ice-cream outing this week and was surprised to see that the mall was quite empty. Maybe the economic recession was worse than I expected. It was still alright for me because I wanted a leisurely afternoon without having to squeeze with the crowds but there wasn't any crowd to begin with there at all. Strange...
See how empty Illuma was then? Except for the cinema theatres at the top floor, most of the shops are empty. They really need to do some more advertising or risk staying this way all the while till closure.
SC and I decided to try out Empire State restaurant because they seemed to have better, cushier seats than the other restaurants that we had browsed through. It was in the afternoon so there was not much of a crowd except for a couple of tables.
This was the menu page for desserts and both of us were unpleasantly greeted with disappointment when the waitress told us that out of ten possible dessert items on the menu, five of them were not available due to some supplier issues. We were in quite a uproar between ourselves because Empire State did not state so at its entrance and the menu was not marked out appropriately to reflect the unavailability of so many items.
Eventually, we decided to forgo dessert at Empire State and go for a Hawaiian pizza to see if the place was worth a second visit. Whilst waiting, I decided to take a shot of the interesting lamp above our seats - it seemed to be made of paper and handcrafted, which was unusual and slightly appeased my disappointment with the dessert fiasco.
The pizza was in a square block and it smelled and tasted much better than the other pizza places I had been to so far. The mozzarella cheese was generous and well-spreaded out and the ham and pineapple was fresh from the kitchen so both of us tucked in. After the early dinner, SC and I moved over to Bugis Junction to have a quick fix of ice-cream at another outlet before she went off to meet her client whilst I had to rush off to another appointment.

Qian Hu Fish Farm Outing:

It's Mother's Day tomorrow and my mother suddenly has the urge to go to the spa fish farm at Qian Hu so I had to drop everything I was doing and accompany her. I also wanted to go and see what the whole spa fish thingy was all about since I never had the chance to go and try it till today.
We took a cab all the way to Qian Hu at Chua Chu Kang near the Home Team Academy and after accompanying my parents to look at all the fishes at the various aquariums, we made our way to the spa fish area where each of us had to pay $10.00 for 1/2 hour of soaking our feet into two huge ponds of those spa fishes.
This was one minute after I had put my feet into the spa fish pond. It was really ticklish - I thought, until two minutes later, I realized it was only the beginning...
The spa fish seemed to like my left foot alot more - and within two minutes, my leg was like covered with them as they ate my dead skin away, nibbling, pulling, tugging away. The sensation was really weird and whenever I tried to look closer, the fish would scatter away so I just let them do their job in peace.
After 30 minutes of tickling, both my feet went numb from all the nibbling but the fishes did a good job, smooth skin was restored after years of walking and running and my legs actually felt better after twenty minutes because they were lighter and cleaner!
The entrance of the fish farm wasn't much but don't judge by it's appearance, walk right inside and see at least 100 different aquariums of all types of fishes. Will post the pictures of some of the fishes up in a separate blog post soon.
We took the special bus shuttle from Qian Hu Fish Farm to Chua Chu Kang MRT station and went past a large swarth of farms and nurseries. Such scenery is so rare in urbanized Singapore. Lunch was settled at Lot 1's Subway because my parents wanted to eat healthy today as it was Vesak's day so that concluded the outing.