Best of 2010
Best Restaurant: Wild Honey, Mandarin Gallery. Serving all day breakfast from around the world.
Brought some very important people in my life there on the very last day of 2010. Should have seen our faces when the waiter served our meals – the sight of the food before us simply took our breath away. There’s something about breakfast that attracts people. Perhaps it’s the smell of food after a long cold night. Or maybe it’s the sight of runny egg yolks and crispy bacon in the morning. In any case the idea of breakfast at 3pm simply makes my day. So here’s to my awesome ex-helpers and great friends (;
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| All Day Breakfast at Wild Honey. Clockwise from top: European, NY, Tunisian, English breakfasts. Check out our Banofee drinks! |
Best Cuisine: Thai “buffet” at Platinum Plaza foodcourt, Bangkok
This was a tough one. I had initially wanted to put Dinings in London for its amazing Japanese fusion creation – think the likes of Wagyu Carpaccio, Baked Alaskan King Crab, Fatty Tuna Sushi, Truffle Salmon Tartare. But eating alone and paying exorbitant prices for a nonetheless gastronomical experience, I thought taking a fraction of the cost and spending it on the best of Thai food in Platinum’s foodcourt was way better. Pad Thai, Green Curry Chicken, Braised Trotters, Duck Noodles, Oyster Omelette and much more at much less! And what’s more, you’ve got great friends to enjoy Bangkok’s street food with you! So here’s to a fantastic birthday celebration for Amelia in Bangkok with Karen, Carol and Josh!
Best Dish: Deep fried Crayfish with Cereal, Taman Seri Tebrau Market, JB
I adore this dish – my memory of quality family time has this dish written all over it. Dad and Mum used to bring us into JB every other month for shopping and food. The highlight of the trip was always dinner at 大马花园, where we never fail to order stingray, sambal kangkong and cereal prawns (or crayfish when we are feeling richer!) So when Yah Lan, Carol and Eujean offered to bring me there for my birthday celebration, I couldn’t ask for more. Crayfish rocks! But even more so the kind souls who accompanied me across the border to get it!
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| Cereal Crayfish, cereals-ly good! |
Best Shopping Center: Raffles City
This shopping center has outdone itself, again. The revamped basement boasts so many new stores and eating places, including the very pretty and delicious Canele. Not to forget its vast offering for the sweet tooth, including Royce, Awfully Chocolate and Gong Cha. This is my favorite meeting place for catch up with friends and Starbucks on level one remains one of the few places where I love to sit down to read a book and while a lazy afternoon away with a Green Tea or Toffee Nut Latte in hand.
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| Sweets at Canele, Raffles City |
Best Toy: Nespresso
I am a major coffee person. One of the best gifts I received from my members was Starbucks vouchers – they relieve the pain of spending $6 on a cup of Arabica. With the Nespresso machine I get to enjoy my cuppa in the comfort of my own home, for less than two bucks. I also wanted to bless my family with it, especially my dad, since he had always been so thrifty and been saving so much for the family. Time to get the house something nice, I thought. And definitely no regrets, especially since the inclusion of various recipes to make hot chocolate, mocha, macchiato latte and vanilla latte! Come by and have a cuppa too, my friends!
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| Boys and their toys. It never changes. Only the price does. |
Best Gadget: iPhone 4
No doubt the device of 2010 that changed the way I live. I listen to Phil Pringle everyday on the way to work on it. I practice my music exam songs on it. I bomb ugly green pigs as an Angry Bird on it. I jot the best random ideas and blog topics on it. I keep up with what’s going on in people’s lives on it. I talk much more to close friends on WhatsApp on it. Thank you Steve Jobs for the best fruit on Earth!
Best Present: Adidas watch
I love this watch from Pastor. Not just because it’s so bright it hurts my eyes, or that it’s an Adidas which I simply adore. But because it reminded me to be generous in giving to others, and giving birthday gifts that cost you something. It also reminded me of a leader and friend whom I respected a lot – Amos. He was the one who gave me my first Adidas watch when I was 19 years old – back at a time when everyone was much poorer and the most expensive gifts cost merely $20. Yet there he was, blessing me with an expensive gift that taught me the importance of giving your best to others.
Saving on yourself, giving unto others.
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| I like almost anything from Adidas. |
Best Party: YL Halloween Party
This must have been the most fun party I have been to in 2010. Fantastic gothic decorations, “bloody” food, eerie music and a ghostly night walk filled with shrills and thrills to cap off the night. Everyone was decked out in his/her best ghost and fantasy costumes, with scarily frightful make-up to go with it. It was such fun snapping photos with random fellow ghosts and everyone was in high “spirits”! But beyond that, it was the first major collaboration between the youth and the adults in planning such a large scale event, and I am impressed how well executed it was! We certainly know how to have fun!
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| Ghostly encounters |
Best Overseas Trip: Hong Kong in September
I loved this trip because I see a side of Hong Kong I have not seen before in my previous two trips last year. Staying in a rural part of HK, I woke up to a sunny beach each day and got to meet an amazing bunch of people, who became fast friends. Many nights out, parties, card games and dinners later, these people became locals that I look forward to meeting when I visit HK again. It is often the totally unexpected that makes the best experiences. So here’s to the crazy bunch of folks in HK!
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| Friends. Made in Hong Kong. |
Best Musical: Les Miserables, Shaftsbury Theatre, London
Love gets magnified in the best musical I have ever seen as Victor Hugo depicts the power of grace and forgiveness over the legality of the law. Some of the most familiar songs in history tug at your heart, with offerings such as I Dreamed a Dream, Castle on a Cloud, Bring Him Home, Do You Hear the People Sing? that made many a people famous, including Susan Boyle and Jamie Pugh. The law is important. But don’t forget to show grace in love.
Songs from the musical
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_xFNa7YKDw
Songs from the musical
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_xFNa7YKDw
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| Les Miserables, London |
Best Music: Cover Bands on YouTube
Cover bands made it to the top of my iPod playlist in 2010, with special mention to Boyce Avenue and Sam Tsui/Kurt Schneider. Cover bands often get discredited for the lack of original content, for they gather the best of songs and but merely perform. And this is the reason why most cover bands do not succeed. Boyce Avenue and Sam/Kurt have stood out for me because of their creativity in presenting the old in a new way. Boyce Avenue often bring a whole new feel to a popular song with Alejandro’s smooth and soulful voice while Kurt produces some of the most amazing medleys and videos for Sam’s impossible range of vocals.
Check out their music here:
Boyce Avenue
Sam/Kurt
Where is your creative edge today? Can we do old things in a new way?
Best Singer: 閻奕格(Yan Yi Ge), 星光大道
I was blown away when my cousin first showed me Yan Yi Ge’s video on YouTube, with her Cantonese rendition of 让一切随风 or better known by the chinese version as 爱你一万年, as performed by Wu Bai and China Blue. She went on to win the Taiwanese talent competition, wowing audiences worldwide with her singing prowess in English, Chinese and Cantonese. She’s the perfect singer – humble, pretty, versatile, fantastic dancer, affable, intelligent, and a singing powerhouse. Just check these videos out.
Born in China, and schooled in a Singaporean primary school, a Hong Kong secondary school and a US college, she seemingly lost her sense of identity as an alien in foreign land. But what impresses me even more is that she has never lost her sense of purpose and direction, choosing a very unexpected path of returning to the University of Chicago to continue reading Economics despite her win and a lucrative music contract waiting for her. She was not distracted, nor was tempted by the fame, money and glory but knew exactly what she wanted. I am very very impressed. No doubt the best singer in 2010.
It’s easy to stay on track when the opportunity costs are low. But temptation magnifies when glory and gold knocks. So friend, do you know where you are going?
Best Drama Serial: 下一站，幸福 (Autumn’s Concerto)
One of the best and most touching dramas I have watched. I never was a fan of Vanness Wu, largely because he used to be so haughty, pretending to be all high and mighty, riding on the residual waves of the F4 glory. And that was exactly how his character was in the show, at least for the first half of it. And the transformation takes place as one person made a difference in his life through her sheer patience and love for him. Because of the change she brought, the never-seen-before soft, gentle, chivalrous and generous side of him emerges. It is pretty much his real life story too, as he became a born-again Christian and began to have a radical change in his behavior and thinking, making him so much more approachable and responsible now. Ditto for his ex-buddy, Jerry Yen, who was recently born again, with some help from the now super fervent Sammi Cheng.
I love stories of second chances and bad-boy transformations. It could be your story too, don’t you think?
Best Movie: Inception
I specialize in dreams. I love the concept behind Inception. Sowing a thought into people’s mind to create an alternate reality, many a times through subtlety and the most natural of circumstances. A South African teacher friend once told me that this is what she tries to do with her students, as she inculcates values into her students through everyday activities, her speech and through leading by example. Inception, she calls her method of transforming lives and building dreams.
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| Can you make someone's dream real? For real. |
What life values do you exude? Are you making the dreams of others come through? What are you incepting in the mind of others today?
“If we are gonna perform Inception then we need imagination.” – Eames, in the movie.
“Sow a thought, and you reap an act; Sow an act, and you reap a habit; Sow a habit, and you reap a character; Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” – Charles Reade
Best Photo: Laughing Grandmother
I reckoned I took about at least 2,000 photos last year, probably more. Thankfully it wasn’t too hard to choose my favorite photo for 2010. After a tumultuous 2010 where I spent many nights in SGH with my grandmother, I chanced upon this photo in a newsletter that featured her while visiting her one day. When you are at her age, cars, houses, even money counts for little. All you want to do is to live each day with a dose of laughter and to spend more time with your family.
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| Make someone laugh today |
Neglect not your family – don’t regret only when it is too late.
Best Sporting Activity: Running around the Marina Bay Sands area
“I feel very, very confident that the keys to life for me are reading and running. The idea that there are millions and billions of people who have lived before us, and they had problems and they solved them and they wrote it in a book somewhere – there is no new problem that we can have that we have to figure out by ourselves.
When you get on the treadmill you deprive yourself of oxygen. What kind of person you are will come out very, very quickly. And that little person talks to you and says, ‘Man, do you feel our knee? We should stop.’ When you learn to get command over that person on that treadmill, you learn to get command over that person in your life.” – Will Smith
Running became more important this year, in part because I had to clear IPPT and in part because I was getting fat from all the eating. More importantly it was because I wanted to train my mind and discipline the thought processes, commanding the “little person” in my head. And combining exercise with a scenic run around the MBS Bay Area over lunchtime under the scorching sun was the perfect way to do it – efficient, healthy, and done in the beauty of a picturesque surrounding. My best achievement so far? 5km and 600 crunches at 11pm at night. Sure does instill some discipline in an otherwise rebellious and idle mind.
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| My motivation to run |
What does your mind say today? Is that “little man” getting too big for your own good? Zap him with a run today!
Best Book: Failing Forward, John C. Maxwell
Schools have taught us well on how to succeed in life. But they have done miserably in teaching us how to fail in life. The latter is a skill as important as the first, perhaps more so, for we often fail even before our first success. Dealing with failures and mistakes appropriately is key to maturity in life. Your response to failure can determine how far you can go in life, and how strong you grow to be. After a tremendously difficult start in 2010, this book bought by Pastor as a gift saved my life from falling apart. I forced myself to preach it over six weeks in cell group not just because I felt my members needed to hear it, but because a certain Gershon Liew needed to hear it more than anyone else. It changed my mindset and gave me a motivation to move on and become a better and wiser person.
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| Turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones |
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy
“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure. " - George Edward Woodberry
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill
Keep on keeping on.
Best Quote: “Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.” - Victoria Holt
To cap off the biggest lesson in 2010 that it’s ok to fail, remember that nothing’s ever wasted. Not even pain. Life is never perfect nor smooth sailing. God didn’t promise perpetual sunny weather, but He does bring sunshine after the rain, rainbow after the storm. Mistakes can make you miserable, or they can make you wiser. Choose the latter, friend.
By the end of this very long post, I realize one common thread throughout 2010's best - it was mainly revolved around people and relationship. These things were not created best in its standalone. It was made best because it included you. Relationships enhance the best of life. Thank you for being part of my life in 2010, looking forward to an even deeper friendship with you in 2011! Here's to you, my dear friend!
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