Shawn & Hui Ling: March 2008

This is the second year we're spending Valentine's Day as a married couple. A week before that, I've already started badgering my hubby. I told him I didn't want him to waste any money on overpriced flowers. So he asked me ,

"Ok , no presents?"

Being a girl, I'm not 100% practical so I went,

"Erm but you can get something small. I don't need expensive presents, just something to know that you care about me more as a wife than as a girlfriend."

On the day itself, he went to Cold Storage as was his usual practice to buy the ingredients for cooking a nice steak for us.

He came home with 2 innocent looking bags of groceries and I didn't suspect anything. The thing is both of us have freelance jobs so we see each other alot at home which means that it's very difficult for him to do anything in secret at home.

After dinner, hubby gave me 2 presents.

Flowers, which I secretly hoped for but would definitely not pay an exorbitant price for and a notebook, both prepared while I was giving tuition.

He came up with another advantage of living on ground floor-->The hubby can sneak flowers through the window into the master bedroom even though the wife is in the living room, where she has full view of her hubby the moment he walks into the house.

Here's my home-wrapped roses, lavender and some flowers that are white but turn purple when in full bloom.

He got everything from Cold Storage and cut off all the thorns on the rose stems so that I wouldn't cut myself =P

Precious moment notebook with crystals and our photo.

Thank you lao gong, for all your efforts at caring for me and for thinking of all kinds of ideas just to bring a smile on my face.

I love you lao gong, and I really thank God for you =)

When you're on a holiday, you're just in the mood to take pictures. Even if it's a cab ride in Singapore to the ferry terminal.

At the ferry terminal waiting for our ferry

Last year, we didn't go to the terminal particularly early and ended with 'bad' seats so we decided to go earlier this year and grab some good seats. For some reason, they changed the name of our ferry and many of the passengers seemed to know it except us and a few others. Our ferry was supposed to be at 1030am and at 1020am, me and hubby were wondering whether our ferry was late.

The gate had already opened but because we weren't aware of the change, we just kept sitting there, thinking that we were going to get good seats. At 1030am while I was on the way out from the ladies, I heard 'Eng Kee Wee' and I thought maybe I heard wrongly. Then I heard 'Tan Hui Ling' and I started running to hubby and we had to rush with our bags and all for the last call. Oh man. So much for getting good seats. We ended up in the open-air upper deck and we had to endure 2.5 hrs of the wind whipping in our faces and the glare of the sun and I didn't have my sunglasses with me. Haha quite funny. We had planned to watch a nice movie on our laptop but the sound of the wind was too great and we could only manage probably half an hour's sleep. Haha...

Our 'Alfresco' Seats

We finally reached the harbour

It was very nice to see familiar faces the moment we reached the harbour at Tanjung Pinang. The guide from the resort recognised us from our previous trip and readily agreed to bring us to buy firecrackers. Last year we bought our firecrackers from the resort which was more expensive and of fewer variety.

Firecrackers stall

The entrance of the farm resort we stayed at last year

Driving to our beach resort

Direct sea view from our room

We stayed on the 2nd level, 2nd unit from the right

It was low tide when we reached so we explored the beach and the resort.

Thousands of mini crabs during low tide

Don't they look like aliens. Me and hubby would just spot the troopers from far and run into them to watch how they scatter and run into their holes. Actually the 1st day was hubby running to them and me screaming as he dragged me along.

Lunch was...

Ikan bilis fried rice

Sambal kangkong

which tastes different from the ones we have in Singapore. I prefer our local version...

and tom yum kung...

which was also different from the authentic Thai style. I think it was Indonesian style, and I prefer the authentic Thai ones.

Homemade lemon tea

Moral of the story: When you're in another country, order their local food. It would usually taste nicer, like the Indonesian Ikan bilis fried rice.

Dinner was...

Indonesian fried kampung chicken which we liked

Fried cap chai, which was also good...

and calamari rings (pic unavail). We learnt our lesson from the lunch we ordered.

After dinner it was firecracker time!

NB: Some of the videos were taken horizontally and I can't rotate them the other way. Sorry!

Flying Firecracker
I forgot the name of this firecracker but it sort of flies up once it's ignited.

In my hurry to fling away the ignited cracker, I didn't 'aim' properly and the firecracker ended up flying into the water. You can even hear the "doop".

Colourful Chrysanthemum

This is all I have for this firecracker. It sort of spins like a mad cracker but I find that it looks more like an insect than a chrysanthemum. Then again they can't call it colourful insect right...

Dinosaur Eggs

This is one of my favourite but it's not those spectacular kind. I was so tempted to bring some back since it looks so much like chocolates but the man of the house said No.....

Triple Report Rocket

Twisty Kicks

Each cracker lets out 8 shots. The wind was so strong you can see the sparks being blown off.

Hubby says that firecrackers are dangerous as you don't know when one might be faulty and it may explode in 4s, like what happened to Achmed instead of a few seconds so it's better not to go too near the cracker when lighting it. So it's not good to use a lighter, which is short and very flammable. So what did we use? Joss stick.

Me: Where are we going to get joss sticks here?

LG: There's an altar over there.

Me: What? You want to use the idol's joss sticks?

LG: Why not?

And he procceeded to 'kop' the idol's joss stick.

Me: Hey don't you have to pray or something? Moreover we're living by the sea....(I was reminded of the water ghost shows I watched when I was young)

LG: We have God with us. The spirits are more afraid of us than we are of them.

Actually I agree with him. The spirits only have as much power as you believe in them. But it was spooky going so near to the altar and seeing your hubby put his hand right in to get the joss sticks.

Below is a video of a firecracker lighted up by other merrymakers. It was also sold at the stall we bought ours but the cracker looked so huge hubby said better not. Dangerous. But after seeing how others used it, we're gonna try it ourselves next year.

We were standing about 3 metres away from the other group so when the crackers shot up, it landed right above us which was very scary. It sounded so near to us and the sparks looked like they were falling on us. We ended up trying to escape from underneath all that sparks, scuttling backwards and looking out for rocks while taking a video all at the same time.

Knowing that there's nothing much to do at the resort except relax at the beach, we rented 5 movies (a package) from EzyVideo to bring along to the resort. We stayed up watching movies and woke up so late the next morning we missed the breakfast.

Brunch @ Tropicana Restaurant

We were too hungry and half-asleep to take pictures of our food...

Dinner was...

Mixed vege soup

Very tasty...

Cereal Prawns

so-so

and Gong gong

The sambal balachan was different from the ones we have in Singapore and yes, I prefer the Singapore kind.

Low tide. Notice how far off we are from shore.

This is the hot spot for firecrackers.

We get a good view from our room on the left. Even before we went for dinner while catching our evening movie, merrymakers were already starting to light their firecrackers.

The bridge connecting the Sun Moon Restaurant to the resort.

Back View of the Sun Moon Restaurant

We usually have our lunch and dinner there while breakfast is at the Tropicana Restaurant at the reception area.

The benches outside for Alfresco dining

Another part of the resort behind the Sun Moon Restaurant

This year the water wasn't as clear due to the post monsoon period...but it was still beautiful, at least to me...

Preparation to go snorkeling

Lao gong braided my hair for me so that it wouldn't get all tangled up when we go snorkeling. But in the end we didn't snorkel cos the post-monsoon waters were too murky to see clearly so we went to the white sands beach instead.

White Sands beach