The Venetian

In 3 weeks, I will be visiting Hong Kong and Macau for a brief winter holiday. At first I wasn't too excited about spending a night in Macau because I would have less one day of indulgent shopping in Hong Kong, until my family decided to upgrade to a night at The Venetian. Oh yeahh... I know I'm spoilt for the finer things in life! XD







And so, I did a little research on the accommodation, facilities and entertainment on The Venetian's website. It's certainly a privilege to be able to visit the world's largest casino which is also the sixth largest building in the world. There are no such things as standard rooms - there are only luxury suites with the Royale Suites starting at 70 square metres of floor space!



The Venetian can never qualify in namesake if it did not have an authentic Venetian themed interior. It boasts of over 300 shops built around 3 canals complete with gondola rowers, street performers and a vast painted ceiling that resembles a sky with enough lighting to match the time of day. I ran through the directory of shops at The Grand Canal Shoppes which are enough to rival that of a large world class shopping mall. Needless to say, I marked the ones which I intend to visit:

1. Coach
2. Adidas
3. Armani Exchange
4. ck Calvin Klen
5. CK Underwear
6. G2000
7. Hugo Boss Orange Label
8. Massimo Dutti
9. United Colours of Benetton
10. Zara





I hope to have sufficient time to explore The Venetian since I will mostly be touring around the ourdoors to visit some famous landmarks with Ruins of St. Paul being the foremost. I will be arriving and departing Macau via Hydrofoil so I will need to watch the weight of my luggage and not go overboard with the weight of my shopping bags (pun intended)!

In dreams I run away...

I have not been able to sleep properly for the past couple of nights. I'm either running away from something or getting in fights with people, or getting very emotional and breaking down in tears.

If there was a dream interpreter, the interpretation would be that deep down inside, I am running away from some problems in my life. Currently, I cannot see any reason for me to run away from anything. I don't think I am trying to escape from anything at the moment. I'm quite happy with my life. The only time when I constantly dreamt I was running away was last year when I was working in a Big 4 accounting company. Everything about the place was negative to me from the people, the work, the culture and the environment. And so I left to save my sanity!

However, leaving that place hasn't really made me forget about it. It still gives me the shudders whenever I think about it. Just two nights ago, I dreamt I was trying to escape from the Big 4 office stealthily during work hours - silently moving along the corridors in the dark, my body pressed tight against the wall and sneaking into lifts undetected. And I successfully escaped and ended up at the LEGO aisle of a large toy store!

MOOOooo...

Moo Cow Frozen Yoghurt is a relatively new dessert bar concept here in Malaysia which serves frozen yoghurt with flavours and toppings of your choice. After making 10 purchases and accumulating 10 stamps for each purchase, I finally qualified to redeem my free serving of frozen yoghurt. My favourite is the original flavour which tastes subtly sweet and sour, just like how decent yoghurt should be, except that this has the consistency of soft serve ice cream. It’s smoother and lighter than gelato and each spoonful melts in your mouth. Of all the toppings available, I prefer dried cranberries since it gives some kick to mandibles wanting some bite and is not too sweet and overpowering that it detracts from the original flavouring of the frozen yoghurt.

Sanma Kabayaki

There's always a first time for everything. Tonight was the first time I tried a 'sanma' fish at a local Japanese restaurant. The first time I was exposed to a sanma was at a Japanese restaurant in the city. Their pretty menu had a picture of the cooked whole sanma fish, shioyaki style, which looked pretty intimidating to me since the head, body and fins were still intact. The sanma fish is known as the 'Pacific saury' in English. It has a long, elongated and slender body and is a pelagic schooling fish. I have a keen interest on learning about the fish that I consume. So far the common local fish that I eat are coral cod, mangrove snapper, flounder, mackerel and leather jacket. If you hadn't already read my older post on fish, I am a bit of a nutter when it comes to fish but lately laziness has gotten the better of me and I have decided to take a long break from fish keeping again.

I decided to order the sanma this time because the dish pictured in the menu showed a sanma that was cut up, kabayaki style, as opposed to a whole gutted fish! I am always rather hesitant when trying new fish because I have no idea how the flesh would taste. There are several fish which I dislike eating, most of them freshwater species because they taste of mud and stagnant water, and pomfret because of their fishiness. I was pleasantly surprised at how similar the sanma tasted to a mackerel. It wasn't fishy at all and the flesh was nice and firm. The sanma is another oily fish (just like the mackerel) and it did have a distinctive smell similar to cod liver oil. Call me strange or what, but I do enjoy cod liver oil. In fact, I love popping the capsules in my mouth just to feel the oil spurt all over my mouth, and I then lick my mouth clean with my tongue!

Will I order sanma again? Definitely YES! And this time, I might go for the whole fish, shioyaki style!

Two bananas in a banana republic...

It's a long weekend and my friend invited me out to The Gardens for some retail therapy. You see, she had been travelling in Italy for almost two weeks but did not have the time (and Euros) to go browsing for Gucci and Prada in Rome. Off we went on a lovely sunny Sunday morning with very light traffic on the Federal Highway.

I bought a cool preppy looking slate-coloured half-zip four-button pullover from Banana Republic. It's got a high collar that is fastened with a zipper and 4 large buttons. It was also my very first purchase from Banana Republic since I was always under the impression that their clothing was very overpriced. But I was very surprised with what I found today and I can't wait to show it off next casual Friday at work although it's really for my trip to Hong Kong next month.

Halloween 2011

I look forward to Halloween tomorrow even though I am much too old for trick or treating. For those who have outgrown tick or treating, there's always the Halloween party where one can dress up in a fancy costume and still have fun. I do look forward to attending one (even though I have never been to one before) but tomorrow, I am looking forward to coming back from work and parking my fat ass in front of the TV to watch the Simpsons Halloween Marathon. It only comes once a year and I am thrilled with the randomness of the Simpsons although in my opinion, Family Guy is even more random!

There's really nothing too amusing on satellite TV this weekend to help me get into the Halloween mood but I did find some classic 80s horror movies such as Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street, so I spent the last two nights watching them. Tonight, the third instalment of Poltergeist will be airing in about half an hour so I shall be quick to end this post.

This year, my online Halloween persona will be Barrel from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas although I like to call him 'the skeleton boy'. He looks eerily cute with that pale round face with sunken eyes and an extra wide grin.

My neighbours are idiots

I am rather unfortunate to be living next door to inconsiderate neighbours. Early this morning at 6am, the neighbour two houses away let off some fire crackers. Do they not think that the rest of the neighbourhood is still asleep at that hour since today is a public holiday? Imagine being woken up by the sound of explosives going off with a BANG BANG BANG!!! I thought there was a war at my door step and shot straight up out of bed! Next, at just after 8am, I was awoken again but this time by the irritating knocking of a hammer on the walls. My next door neighbour on the right was making some repairs to the house. Isn't 8am still a bit too early for some hammering? And no, it's not just a couple of intermittent knocks but it lasted for about half an hour. And now at around 9.30pm, my next door neighbour on the left is burning pieces of paper in her backyard and stinking the air with the putrid smell of ash and smoke. Sometimes I think I live next door to selfish, uncivilised barbarians and I am at a loss when plotting my revenge. Should I blast the speakers to Lady Gaga songs at 2am just to get even with them? Or should I throw rotten eggs into their compounds? Ahh... vengeance is sweet! On a positive note, I think I might look forward to the day we shift to our semi-D in an expensive suburb where the property costs at least RM1 million and most neighbours drive a luxury vehicle.