absolutum dominium

van's coming over is a blessing in disguise; it's *really* brought us out of our comfort shells and into town again. :)

anyway it's late sat morning; van's gone down to visit the art galleries downtown, so here i am blogging for a while while my heavy breakfast of bacon, scrambled eggs, waffles with butter and maple syrup, yoghurt with raspberries, strawberries, smarties (?) and choc chips (?!), and oatmeal raisin cookie happily digests in my stomach. then me and eileen can meet her @ metrotown after lunch to do some heavy duty shopping.

yesterday was a blast. it didn't start too good coz classes, esp boring psych classes are never good, but the weather was fantastic! it was clear and it wasn't raining! tt's more than we can hope for in (rain) fall! anyway eileen and i were late for our pedicure appointment coz we took the bus in the wrong direction (!) and the bloody bitch at the counter refused to give us any leeway. i think the chinks in vancouver are also racially-biased. they only give good service if you're ang moh. if you're chinese too, you can forget about any kind of service at all.

so with the veins in my temple throbbing with mild anger, me and eileen left for robson st downtown, where we met the rest of the singaporeans (tt i know here in totem) weiquan, andy, charlin and anne, doing some shopping. hung around with the for a while at the future shop, and then diana and van came to join us from stanley park.

so we walked towards the small korean restaurant where i had had dinner with my parents a few weeks before (because it's cheap and damn good), but we got sidetracked by purdy's chocolate. and ice-cream! in a cone! with a free chocolate dip! and yeah, at the restaurant, we had really really good food. we ordered the hot pot with mixed ham, and boy oh boy was there a lot of food. and meat. and the hot pot seemed to have like 5 kinds of pork in there, ham slices, meaty sausages, rice cakes, kim chee, mushrooms, sweet onions, maggie mee - sorry, i mean ramen, tau gay (sprouts as they are known as here), and a really delicious spicy soup! tt was for the first time here - actually spicy enough!

and well. if tt wasn't enough, we ordered seafood kimchee pancakes on the side, which looked like a pizza of chai tau kway (carrot cake) to me, except with prawns and vegetables... yum yum. and then there were the usual korean side dishes of potato and kim chee and more sprouts.

we went from superbly hungry to stuffed and the last new slices of meat in the hot pot required an amazing amount of prodding just to finish. there was *that* much meat. ugh. but it was fantastic. it's the ultimate dish to eat in winter. it will keep you so warm and it's so homely and all. and best of all, with taxes and tips, we only had to fork out $10 per person. :)

after tt we decided to do some window-shopping down robson to walk off the heavy dinner as well as to kill the time between dinner and the time the plaza nightclub tt eileen, van and i would be going to would be opening. i want to buy winter boots and a pair of waterproof boots to combat the rain, so we were going into the shoe stores and having a ball of a time trying different boots on. fall is like boot season; you can find almost any kind of boot you are looking for! i have already set my mind on a pair of furry winter boots with fur on the outside. i don't care tt the fur might trap the stuff in the snow in winter; i'm just too much of a sucker for aesthetics!

we also passed the rocky mountain chocolate company. oh man tt place is a chocoholic's heaven! when we walked past the store with the array of chocolate-covered marshmellows with rainbow sprinkles and caramel apples covered with chopped almonds or cashews or marshmellows or smarties, we were instantly hooked. i bought this chocolate and caramel covered waffle stick coated with chopped almonds just because it looked too good to resist. and eileen bought a caramel apple covered with smarties. oh man!

anyway diana had to leave around 9pm coz she wasn't joining us for clubbing. so after she went to catch the bus, we went to mac's for a while, got our hands stamped at the plaza (it was just past 9pm and we were the earliest clubbers!), and then feeling bored, we decided to walk down granville for a bit and check out some of the other clubs on the street.

well, we settled at this bar/lounge place called granville room in the end, which reminds me a bit of an irish pub in terms of lighting and decor, and all the bottles of alcohol lining the shelves. they had so many kinds of beer from the tap, and it was a fantastic atmosphere with the ambient/lounge kinda music playing in the background.

3 of us settled at the bar and ordered the house cocktails. van had a chocolate martini, eileen had a citrus mule, which had 3 kinds of absolut vodka in it, and i had an upper poolside, which had gin, red bull, and some other alcohols in there. but i liked it a lot. tasted really good and barely alcoholic.

and then we saw tt they were selling absinth. absinth is this emerald green liquor tt turns cloudy when mixed in water. and basically, it's banned in most countries including singapore because it's extremely potent, and it made of wormwood, which contains tujone, a drug with a hallucinogenic effect. it cost $10 for just a little bit of absinth tt can be finished in only 3 to 4 sips. you take it with caramelised sugar, where the bartender melts a cube of sugar on a spoon until it browns and then pours the caramel into the drink.

i took 2 sips. i found it pretty strong. it burns in the chest and leaves a dry and according to eileen, sticky after-sensation not unlike flamin' lambos and waterfalls. after tt i turned pretty red. could feel my cheeks burning.

we went back to the plaza close to 11pm. by tt time it was actually crowded, or at least there was a queue on the outside. thank god for the stamp. managed to get in and dance a bit. the culture here's a bit different from singapore. for one, guys just come up and dance with you. there's none of tt creepy-cockroach thing tt van and i despise about s'pore guys. they don't sneak up behind you and just put their hands on your waist. you *know* tt they're there. and even if they can't dance (not tt we had tt much of a problem last night), they try. they don't just stand there like blocks of wood. oh, and they take a hint. they dance with you for as far as you want to, and then when you decide you've had enough (i.e. by doing the lesbian dance thing with van or eileen or both), they back off and bow out gracefully.

did dance with 7 people, but everyone just dances with everyone. it's like musical chairs, almost. tt i find a bit disconcerting. and we befriended this guy called shane. actually i have no idea what the story with him is at all. for tt you have to ask van or eileen. but he took photos of us and he has our emails. and he works in the canadian superstore in metrotown and we're hoping to avoid him when we go shopping there today.

i had another smirvoff ice at the bar, and later this black dude tt i was dancing with handed me a bottle of corona extra from his pocket (i know the guys here wear baggy jeans, but how the HELL do you keep a whole bottle of cold corona in your pocket?!), so i felt obliged to dance with him since i'd accepted the drink, until apparently someone at the bar told eileen tt this guy was a drug dealer and she panicked and tried to get me away from him. which was actually quite funny coz she was trying to tell me he was selling drugs and when she was yelling to me over the music, i couldn't hear a damn thing, and when she tried to sms me in chinese i didn't know what 'xiao xin' meant. sorry lah girl, my chinese really cannot make it!

we left around 1.40am. ooh! they were selling piping hot $0.99 pizza slices, which i would have got if i were hungry! van got a slice of hawaiian and it was so good! prob also coz we were cold, esp eileen who was wearing a skirt, and i swear the temp last night was def below 10 degrees.

the bus ride took too long tho. i had to drop 1 stop early and *run* to mac's at university village coz i needed the toilet and i simply couldn't tahan any longer. haha. had to run/walk from mac's to gage in the cold after tt to find them. and after tt it was a long walk back to totem for me and van, who stayed over with me last night coz diana was prob asleep when we came back to my room. it was definitely past 4am when we finally fell asleep.

anyway van and eileen took quite a few photos yesterday. i didn't bring my camera. so i'll upload those photos when i get them. :)