Return of the baking virtuoso

I've gone back to baking! After halting for about 10 months (due to discouraging results), I decided to bake again after colleagues suggested I do it again before I quit the place. These people must be some sort of masochists but since they asked for it, I, of course, obliged!

I decided to make an orange cake, after my mother found this real simple receipe in the Chinese newspapers. She tried it and it smelled good! So I wanted to have a go at it too, for another colleague's farewell lunch. The cake is made with the all-natural goodness of real orange juice and orange peel. Yummy!

I know it doesn't look very good, with that jagged little hole there (Someone said it looks like a donut), but it tasted OK, really! I kinda like the orangey tang, and my colleagues all said it was quite good. That's the thing with my cakes--they're edible, just that they don't look fantastic, especially since I don't like the idea of smothering them in whipped cream. I shall try lemon next. :)

Another conference that came and went

So the conference that has kept us busy for the past few months has finally ended. We had a similar one 2 years ago, and I blogged about how exciting and exhausting it was. This time round, it was, well... a bit lacklustre.

I was looking forward to it actually, because it is the last major event of the centre that I would be part of and I remember how all of us worked so hard together to make it work for the last one.

The centre was only 2 years old then and it was to be the biggest, most international conference held at the institute for more than 2,000 delegates. I remember on the Friday before the conference, a few of us were still toiling away in the campus at 11pm to make sure everything goes smoothly during the conference. I had emailed the dean to ask if we could take the cab home and claim for reimbursement. He replied immediately and gave us his number in case we needed him. Shortly after, he sent out an email as a rallying call to the whole centre to remind us how far we have come as a centre and how he knows everyone is working hard to make that conference a success.

At the end of it, many of us went for the conference dinner at Sentosa where we dined at the beach, open-air style and accompanied by singing and dancing. We sat back and enjoyed ourselves while watching the crazy dean really let loose with his friends on the beach.

The closing ceremony then was rousing, with a touch of triumph, the feeling that we really pulled it off. There were high-fives, hugs on the stage and the deans couldn't stop smiling. This time round, it felt so uneventful. The auditorium was strikingly empty, and the ceremony was short and quiet. At the night safari conference dinner, there was only a handful of us but we were made to feel like second-class guests, because the bossy hospitality committee head (who is not from the centre) ensured that the paying delegates had priority in everything, from seating to food to the tram ride. There was a bit of annoyance and irritation all around, but I was still glad to be there, enjoying the cool night ride on the tram with my colleagues, ooing and ahhing at the lions, tigers, giraffes and elephants. It felt like a school trip with a bunch of excitable primary school kids, which is quite funny because some of them were actually the admin "aunties" (I use that term affectionately) . :)

Maybe because the dean is gone now so things are very different, but the centre is still a good place, with good people. As the dean himself said when he left, the centre has made a difference in many people's lives, including his own.

I survived jet lag!

Woohoo! I survived what I would consider my most gruelling trip ever.

Let's start with the time spent on the flights and transits alone: 51 hours! It's changed my opinion of air travel forever. Going there was more punishing and in a way makes the coming back seem more bearable. It entailed 3 transits: Narita, Portland, and Minneapolis. By the time I was on the final leg, I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I used to be one of those people who think flying was part of the fun of going away. I used to get all excited about the idea of going to the airport, about making full use of the flight entertainment, and I actually ate up all the food they serve. Well, not anymore! They kept running out of chicken which means I had to eat beef stew. Urgh.

And you meet with all sorts of people on the plane. On the longest leg back (from Minneapolis to Narita), I sat with this nice lady from Minnesota who was accompanying her husband to Shanghai. She hoped I have a safe journey back home and that the conference was worth all this travelling (erm, nope). On another short (thank goodness) flight, I had to sit beside this PRC man who swore and spit in the barf bag and put it back in the seat pocket, twice! But most of the time I don't talk to the people simply because I was too tired. It's going to take at least a few months for me to get over this flight fatigue. And no more Northwest, if possible. One flight attendant actually chit-chatted with the passengers while chomping on chewing gum while there was another matronly one who looked like she would stare down any passenger who dares to misbehave on her flight. It was actually quite a funny sight when you juxtapose it with the Sin8apore Girl. :)

The weather there was, too, a new experience. The temperature was between -1 to 4 c (the wind chill was probably colder) and it snowed. :)

The wind was so strong that the snow was falling horizontally and hitting you straight in the face. The brutal wind also battered my umbrella as I was walking along the river and I had to buy a new one, whose spokes were also slightly bent by it. It was really an effort walking in that kind of weather, and I had to occasionally stop and seek refuge in nearby buildings. I couldn't capture the falling snow on camera, but did take a picture of an area covered in snow while on the plane.

The buildings below are the Wrigley Building (left) and Tribune Tower, which are the landmarks I use to navigate around the city. They are the home of the chewing gum company and the newspaper Chicago Tribune respectively, and the newspaper founder got his correspondents to collect stones and bricks from all over the world and embedded them in his building. Which is a cool idea, except that I don't think they always got the bricks through entirely legal means. Some were after all, from very important sites where they don't give out pieces for free, like Taj Mahal and Great Wall of China.

Because the weather wasn't great for photo-taking, and I didn't feel like whipping out the camera too often since I was walking the streets by myself most of the time, I don't have many photos, and most were of buildings.

The above is an interesting edifice though, called "The Bean" and must be the most photographed structure in Chicago. It's one of the numerous sculptures to dot the city. I also went to the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the must-visit museums there with a strong collection of works by famous people like Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh. I'm just a curious tourist and not art aficionado though, and so walked through the galleries fairly quickly, in about 1 1/2 hours. Some people just stood in front of the paintings in this deep, appreciative silence, but I was busy snapping away!

The food there is nothing to write home about. I had mostly sandwiches and wraps. The most delicious thing I ate there was actually a US$1.70 pipping hot teriyaki chicken bao which I devoured in seconds, so cold and tired I was. They seem to take their pizzas seriously though.

Chicago's specialty is deep-dish pizza, or stuffed pizza. Essentially, they make their crust deep and fill it with lots of cheese and other ingredients. I tried the mushroom and shrimp combi at Giordano, 1 of the recommended restaurants but I've never been a big pizza fan so I can't really rave about it. Their garlic bread was nice and toasty though.

All in all, I wish I was able to stay a few more days in Chicago and maybe the city would grow on me a bit more. The weather was just too severe when I was there and because of my hypervigilance and jet lag, I was a bit too tense and disoriented to thoroughly enjoy myself. Many a times I was walking around the city by myself and there were many people begging on the streets but they seem generally harmless. I was even tempted to give them the coins that I didn't know how to use. Still, I decided to veer on the side of caution and walked away quickly.

One of my favourite moments in the city was during the last morning, just before I went back to the hotel to check out. The wind had stopped and the sun managed to beat the gloom, finally. I walked among the brisk peak-hour crowd, just enjoying the cold weather while sipping on some delicious hot chocolate. Ah, this is the life!

Next stop: Chicago

What a frantic few weeks it's been. Just when I was finally pulling myself together to start on that paper for the Tasmania conference, they informed me that the grant was not approved, and instead, I would go Chicago.

What followed was a mad scramble to make bookings for the trip and to rush out all the work needed for Chicago (and apparently, I still need to write that paper for Tasmania, even if I'm not going!). No, wait--first, I had to convince myself to go. When it became clear I would possibly be staying there and taking the flight by myself, I hesitated. It's all very new to me: my first trip to the US, first overseas conference, and first working trip. I know, I know, I was just waxing lyrical about getting lost in a foreign place in the last entry, but pontification is pontification; gettting lost in transit is quite another thing!

My work neighbour "counselled" me and told me to step out of my comfort zone and just go! He said no matter what happens, it'll turn out OK. The persistent optimist. :) I agreed with him; it would be a good experience, or at the least, edifying. I've got to learn to be more independent, and this would be a start.

I spent an entire day in the office calling 1 agency after another, chasing after some very scarce air tickets and accommodation. My office mates, seeing how frantic I was, helped out by passing me agency numbers, websites etc.

Anyway, the frenzy hasn't ended--I have papers to write, work meetings to prepare and other details to settle. That means lots of overtime for the past week and the next. I'm starting to feel the onset of sickness already. And although I still feel some apprehension, I'm looking forward to exploring the city and its tapestry of art and architecture. I just hope the jet lag won't be too bad. :)

Get lost!

I had taken 2 days off after CNY in an attempt to at least clear some of the "backlog" of leave I've accumulated. (17.5 days! To clear by May!! Don't you wish you were in the same pickle as me? :D ) I was fretting to a colleague about how the leave days are still precious nonetheless and I've had nothing planned for the short break. In exasperation, I said that I'll just hop onto the 1st bus that comes and then just sit back and "get lost".

"But it's so hard to get lost in Sin8apore," I grumbled. My colleague looked at me for awhile, blinked and said carefully: "Err....I think you could get very lost."

Actually I've done this sort of thing before; when I was still in secondary school, in a fit of boredom I boarded a bus, tuned in to my transistor radio, people-watch and take in the scenery along its 1 hr+ route and just let it take me to its final stop. There was nothing exciting there, just another ulu, quiet neighbourhood. I had a short walk around the place, bought a packet drink, and boarded the bus again to go home.

So it wasn't a very successful attempt. But sometimes, I still have an urge to alight at a different stop from where I intended to go, be it on a SBS bus, or the public train in Perth. Actually, especially when I'm overseas, because all places are equally unfamiliar and promising, and I know that I may never come by that way again.

When you know nothing about the place, you won't have any expectations, and thus you are less likely to be disappointed. Maybe that's why those trips taken when I was a kid seemed more memorable, even if it was just a car trip to Desaru. We stayed at a cheap motel (I think we would have howled at that thought now) but it was novel then. I remember that when the lights went out, it was total darkness, unlike in Singapore where the orange glow of streetlights outside always seeps in through even the smallest gap. My sister and me were totally enthralled by the fact that we couldn't even see the hands we were frantically waving in each other's faces.

You know how as you become older, travelling becomes in a way demystified, because even before you step off the plane onto the foreign soil, you've researched the place to death, examined its most gorgeous scenery via photos, planned your itinerary down to the last minute, and mapped out all the places you want to go so that that you won't end up "nowhere".

Anyway, I did go nowhere for my short break; I got so bored that I cancelled part of my leave and went back to the office. I'm due for another extended weekend this week. Maybe I'll take up my colleague's suggestion to walk around Tion8 Bahru, with all the good food places. Anyone wanna join in? :)