Life's simple things.....

Monday, May 25, 2009

Edinburgh

hi hi :)
First time posting here.
Cause of Jo's awesome photos, i'll just put a few up. will have more coming along soon!

huilins in the fish and chips shop :)

lady returning home. all the streets of Edinburgh are like these! Quaint and old fashioned little houses tucked next to each other. :)

Menu for the day..

Fish and Chips man! dipping the apparently super fresh and awesome fish into the batter and deep frying it. It was pretty tasty. :)

Misty road..

It's a graveyard in front of an interesting building that doesn't quite look like a church. I'm not too sure what it is, just spied it from a high point of the city and took a picture. Regretfully, I didn't spy the man sitting between the trees (if you look you can see.) and I wish I did! Would have zoomed in more to take a shot of that.

Red telephone boxes of the UK!

Edinburgh Bus Stop :)

One of the buildings that we passed on our massive walk to Princes street that day

The Scots Monument. It's gloriously gothic and smack in the middle of Princes Street. I love seeing it every morning on my way to work. Right behind the monument is a park. :)

First dinner! Steak, beans, corn and orange juice :)

Memories of home on my nightstand... Picture of my dad and 4 siblings in the snow and a frog that my brother and mother gave to me before i left! :)

My pretty daffodils, jo's water bottle and our 5 pound phones! (my phone was destroyed in a freak accident of ultimate carelessness. )

That's it for now :) Take care all.

Li :)

5/25/2009 01:41:00 AM

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

Curry chicken and tulips=)

Yummy home made curry chicken in Edinburgh=) With some tulips which we bought from the supermarket. Li bought them when they were just buds, they came with a 3 (or was it 5?) day guarantee of blooming. And they did bloom=)

5/24/2009 10:30:00 PM

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Thursday, May 21, 2009

Second day...=)

More photos from our Edinburgh trip. This time, they're from the second day=) Decided to edit the photos in "batches" before uploading onto my blog. So this particular batch is of the second day. And no, I didn't take photos everyday of the trip. Otherwise, I'd be editing til I graduate=P Only took more photos during the weekends and on special occasions. Surgery in SGH is quite xiong, have been reaching there at 730am the past few mornings. Hence, havent had the time to edit many photos. But the teaching there is good=) The tutors there are also very nice, friendly and funny=) Not to mention, charming.

Anyway, here we are again, waking up to our new apartment in cold Edinbrrrr. It really is an experience waking up and feeling all nice and bundled up under warm blankets, and having to psyche yourself up to walk out into the "colder" house. The first few mornings were really cold though, I think it was because we didn't know how to set the thermostat. But we quickly overcame that by setting it at manual, and bypassed whatever "auto" or "programme" nonsense. =)

Indomee Mee Goreng! with kecap manis=) Sedap!

For today, we decided to do a recce and "test-run" of our individual journeys to our hospitals. First to Huilin's hospital, Royal Victoria Hospital, which we coined as CGH.=P

Yeap, that's CGH, a one one storey cottage!=) haha, just kidding. It's a historic guard house of some sort that leads to the hospital.

A nice big garden (...next to a massive cemetary).

And here's the hospital.

Yeap, Orchard Road.=)

Back onto the bus. This time to Royal Infirmary, which we decided was closest to TTSH. Strangely, I do not have any photos of our visit there. But we just popped by and came out again. Everything was closed also.

Back to princess street.

We decided to walk over to the Royal mile and maybe do our first sight-seeing at the Edinburgh Castle.

Walking up the hill towards the Royal Mile.

The view of Princes street from our journey up to Edin Castle.

Trees and flowers slowly blooming....

Marcus and his Scotch Whisky Experience.=)

Here we are at the Edinburgh Castle.

We reached there at around 530 and realised that the place closes at around 6 plus? So we decided to come back another day to go into the castle.

Experiencing THE scotch whisky experience.

Only Marcus and Huilin drank tho=P I only took a sip.

Bagpiper in kilt.

After which, we walked down the Royal mile. Historically, the Royal mile is this mile long stretch of buildings flanking a straight road leading directly up to the Edinburgh Castle. It was used for ceremonies and marches in the past for royalties--like corronations, welcoming ceremonies, home-coming marches....royalty related stuff. Now it's more of a tourist-y attraction with tons of shops, food, attractions and souvennirs.=)

The famous red telephone booths of the UK.=)

Potato in a jacket. Massive potato which was really tasty. Coupled with the cold weather, it was extremely happifying=)

Back home to our apartment.

And here is a photo of our apartment=)

And that was our second day=)

More photos coming up soon....

5/21/2009 07:35:00 PM

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Friday, May 15, 2009

Life in technicolor 2

~Coldplay

Love this song=)

Interesting how the SAF just had an overhaul, which they say is the "most comprehensive review ever undertaken of the armed force's career structure"=) Even more interesting how they are changing the retirement age to 50, which hopefully will ensure continuity of leadership, knowledge and change in the SAF. Even more interesting how they are putting in place a new military domain experts career scheme (MDES), which is a kind of a dual track promotion scheme (that i talked about a few months back), where soldiers are now promoted based on their expertise in their academic areas and have their salaries bench-marked to that of the private sector. Not only that but these people will retire at the age of 60.

=)

This is definitely a welcome change. As of now, the newspapers say that the specialties include, but are not limited to, intelligence, engineering and nursing. Interesting how the newspaper plays with words like "such as" and "include", but fall short of definitively listing out all the specialties. However, the ministry did explain that no further details are currently available and that they are still in the process of "identify(ing) the jobs, vocation and the people, and offer it to them.".

Very politically correct not to mention anything about certain specialties in light of recent events. But it seems this organisation-wide change is definitely in the right direction.=)

And they didn't leave out the warrant officers too.=)

5/15/2009 10:07:00 PM

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Our first day...

Now that we have returned back to Singapore, I can finally start editing and uploading the photos from our Edinburgh trip=) It was a wonderful experience and am really grateful for the opportunity. After sorting out the photos, I realise that I have 40++ GIGAbytes worth of photos to sort through and edit. Will be slowly editing and uploading them as time passes. I think Li will also be uploading her photos here=).

What we brought....

Li:

D300,
18-200mm/f3.5-5.6,
50mm/f1.8

Jo:

D300,
12-24mm/f4,
30mm/f1.4.

The main lens for me was the wide angle lens, while Li used the 18-200 most of the time, so the subjects and type of photos taken will be very different=)

Here are some photos of our first day in Edinburgh, after dumping our stuff in the apartment.=)

Walking the streets of Edinburgh, trying to find some lunch.

Cute dogs...the people in Edinburgh really really love dogs. Almost every other person has a dog.

Foooooood.....

hmmm.....

Home made Fish and Chips!!

I just love the poster behind Huilin.

Yummy!=)

The owner of the F&C shop was very nice...=) He kept making small talk and answered all our questions for directions and advice...this was his reply when we asked him for directions to the city centre, "It's a wee walk. Walk straight and turn left. You'll walk past a petrol station. Keep walking for 5 minutes and you'll reach there."

It took us abt 20-30 min to reach the city centre....haha.

A foggy/misty day in Edinburgh.

Take note of the bare trees...in the photos to come, you will soon realise how the trees really do spring to life in just a few weeks! It was really spring in full action=)