teddY-risatioN™

Just like what I’ve expected, university life, once kicking in action, never ever wants to give you a break. Suddently that dreadful 24 hours just whizzes past you without you even battering an eyelid - time flies just way too quickly for you to hang on to the best moments of it. Desperately trying to strike a harmonious balance between upholding the lucid dream of a sweet, problem-free and rather laidback university life and pushing myself to accept the truth that the real world is the exact opposite instead, I simply ran out of time to blog. Wow, that’s definitely a mouthful *pffft!*

This post will be the amalgamation of everything I can think of… that’s why it’s called mixing the unlikely!

Happy belated birthday, Bregitt!

Happy belated birthday, Bregitt! - In the photo: Huilin and Bregitt.

Monday was Bregitt’s birthday the best present she’s got is her new LG phone! Lucky her! Anyway, the photo above was taken during our night walk around Singapore River. Thank you Bregitt for being such a great friend like how the way she treat others made me think there’s still a lot of love in the world! Awww!

School of Art, Design and Media

It’s that weird building that doesn’t fit into the surrounding architectural style of the university - modernistic, futuristic, environmentally-friendly (note the green roof!), brutalistic interior, glossy facade and minimalistic layout. It’s the School of Art, Design and Media (people call it ADM but sometimes we do refer it by the name SADAM). A few weeks ago my roomie, an ADM student, and I went to his school’s library to borrow some books on architecture and interior design - I read them for leisure in fact, I always dreamed to be an architect!

Oh and with such a great camera (I love my Sony Alpha!) and a new laptop with 3GB RAM, I never did hesitate trying out super-sized panoramas! What you see below is a horizontal panorama stitched from three photos using Autostitch - it’s the best panorama stitcher so far, and most importantly, it’s FREE! Don’t you just love the glass facade and the green eco-roof? To view the whole panorama, scroll horizontally to the right

The management discourages us from climbing the rolling green roof but who on earth could resist the feel of soft grass brushing against your bare foot? Or the feel of grass brushing your back as you gaze at the stars. Of course it’s a popular spot for love birds, but I’m not going to evaluate on that.

Due to the amount of content, the rest is tucked under the Read More tag! Here’s what you can look forward to after the jump:

• Chinatown Outing - We went to Chinatown for the buffet and visited a famous temple!
• Holland Village! - Chongx and I went to Holland Village on Sunday to meet up with his secondary school friend. Guess what we had for lunch? mmmhmm!

Chinatown Outing

About three weeks ago we organised an outing to Chinatown to savour the famous dimsum buffet at Yum Cha Restaurant! During off-peak hours they charge a uniform price for everything you can eat. What a bargain! We even went to great lengths to ensure that we’re making a credit transaction (instead of a debit one) - some of us took the liberty to starve ourselves in the morning. LOL!

Yum Cha Restaurant @ Chinatown - the place where we had our dimsum buffet!

Sadly I didn’t manage to take nice photos during the eating part because everyone was just too busy eating after the buffet, we headed off to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple for a visit. Click on the Before and After images to display the final image in the lightbox at a higher resolution.

Before and After - the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple: Taken from a corner of the street around the template, I’ve already used the circular polariser filter. But in order to add that dramatic poster-like super-saturated blue sky effect, photoshopping the sky is needed! I just selected the portion of the sky, choose a bright hue of blue, paint it over and changed blending mode to Color Burn.

Before and After - Royal at Chinatown: When Chongx saw me working on this photo he thought the photo was taken at Shanghai, China wow, I’m honoured! Tweaking this photo proved to be a little more challenging because the facade needs to be artificially lighted up to create the dramatic evening lighting effect. I just chose a dark brown and Color Dodged it over the walls. Handy!

Isn’t it interesting to see how Photoshop can improve the visual appeal of a photo so tremendously? All thanks to the new Quick Selection Tool in Adobe Photoshop CS3, selecting the blue sky no longer needs that frustrating tweaking of the magic wand options. All hail CS3!

Last, but not least: Holland Village!

Last Sunday went to do tutorials with Chongxian and he’s nice enough to invite me to meet his secondary school friend, Grace, who happens to be working in Singapore too! They settled for Holland Village as the meeting point, which I personally feel is the best decision ever - because I’ve never been there before (despite living in Singapore for the past 6 years, shame shame!) and Holland Village is famous for its katong laksa and coconut milk rice (known as nasi lemak locally).

Chongx and I went to Holland Village!

We went there searching in vain for a clean toilet at first. How comical! We walked up and down the street, passing by that big fat obvious Holland Village Shopping Centre which is right under our noses! And here are a few of the random photos I’ve taken over there

And then we settled for this Katong Laksa cafe which is opposite a row of electronic shops. Here’s a photo of the shop, just in case you want to look it up at Holland Village next time!

Our hearts got won over by the fragrant coconut milk rice!

I’m pleasantly surprised by the huge variety of side dishes you can pick for your rice! Wooots!

A wide selection of side dishes waiting for us.

I settled for seafood coconut milk rice. Mmmph, so far it’s one of the BEST nasi lemak I’ve tried in Singapore!

My seafood coconut milk rice! Yummylicious!

When we were about to leave, we were stranded in the shop by the heavy torrential rain so we ended up hogging the table up to THREE hours, talking and talking non-stop! We finally decided to make a move when the rain showed no sign of abating… and to only be drenched in more rain along the way! My sweet tooth suddenly decided to kick up a big fuss among the mess so we had to make a detour to the nearest Starbucks to get my sugar-addiction fixed… with the divine caramel flavoured ice-blended frappuccino!

If you’re still reading…

Thank you! Thanks for trying to be awake throughout the whole story telling thing. I shall break up my posts in the future. Well it all depends on whether I have time or not, but I’ll try!