The Farrer Side of Life

I love my family, my extended family with uncles, aunties, cousins, gong gong, po po, and their domestic helpers. When I was younger, I used to grudgingly tag along for Sunday lunches. I loved to eat the food my granddad cooked, but the house was always so noisy, with the TV at top volume, and everyone shouting to get themselves heard. When siblings get together, they try to out-talk each other, so imagine a small 4-room flat with the echoes of loud loud Hainanese!

Years passed and I have grown to understand the relationships and behaviour of everyone in the family. There are still things that irritate me (like pieces of rice on the floor that stick to my socks) but overall, it's the whole fun of enjoying the closeness of the family unit that I appreciate now.

Thank you God for blessing my family all this time.

I was recently in Hong Kong on a 4-day holiday, except it did not feel like a holiday at all. It came and went by so fast I feel like I need another break again. Kimmy and I resolved to have a relaxing time and planned a suitably leisurely itinerary for ourselves. Unfortunately for us, Hong Kong is filled with massive and never-ending streets of shopping and we couldn't help but walk our way through the 4 days. No thanks to my lousy pair of shoes, I was suffering from back pains on the first day and it inadvertently affected my enthusiasm for this city that is a sensory overload (nearly as much as Tokyo!) Everywhere, there were things to see, hear, feel, touch and taste, and even though we didn't rush our way through the city (the way one would do at Bangkok's Chatuchak on a weekend), I think we felt even more tired than when we started out. Even a friend of ours we met who's a Hong Kong native agreed that the city (downtown HK areas) seemed to be lined with shops and people, without breaks in between, and it was extremely overwhelming.

So, whilst I wanted to be inspired by pretty things, cool weather (of which there was none) and take lots of pictures, I have only fun memories and a whole load of good food to show for it.


The beautiful skyline of Hong Kong from the cable car going to Ngong Ping.


Really good and cheap dim sum, heavenly!


Ubiquitous trams, which although cheap, I have never had the chance to take a ride on it.


Streets lined with people on a weekday afternoon.


And here is me, looking refreshed on the last day of my vacation, although inside, I was pretty tired.

It's "cultural" month for me. A friend sent me an invite to her bear exhibition held at MINT Museum, another is staging a play, and yet another friend asked me to go for SSO's Beethoven concert next Friday. It's also a very busy month, the jobs have started coming in, and I've been working my ass off, nursing a cough and neglecting my regular workouts. Nevertheless, I'm trying my best to squeeze in time for some extra-curricular activities, here are some pictures I took at MINT.


Check out the estimated value of this very old Mickey Mouse toy.


I loved this, Batman charm bracelet, how cool is that!


This here is a remote controlled peacock and it's life-sized. I really cannot imagine who would have bought this toy to play.


I'm a fan of Astroboy but he seems rather grouchy here. Must be his "fighting" face.


Beatles toys.


Sean Connery James Bond figurine.



A rather disturbing old China toy of a soldier bashing the head of his enemy into the ground.


Last but not least, my friend's bear, who's travelled the world more than me, and has won numerous awards. He will now be loved and admired by many in MINT.

Three baby bunnies were born recently but one died, think he got trampled on by its mom. The other two are strong and well, chubby and cute, and have been adopted by a nice person who I got to know out of the blue. If you've always wanted to bunny and have been waiting fervently, don't fret, there will be more opportunities in future. On a side note, two bunnies who got adopted in the past have given birth too! I can't wait to see what colours they are, I think both the mommy rabbits are white but the daddy rabbits are brown.

Do you ever feel like, you wished you knew more people? I've been having those thoughts lately, and it's only because of my shyness I've never been able to talk to or know more people. I'm not the type to talk to strangers on the street, although I try to keep myself in a friendly frame of mind. I'm also not very sociable with neighbours but when I moved house I resolved to be more talkative when I can. Then, I realized my neighbours aren't very comfortable with random chit chat as well. Sure we'd all smile or greet each other, but some of the neighbours try to ignore me when I walk by and say good morning. I guess they're even more anti-social than me, or just socially inept!

At this juncture in my life I feel this need to get to know more people, but I don't like clubbing and I don't want to pay for networking, so it seems I'm left with social networking sites like facebook, which really is very useful. Of course we'd never really personally know the people we know on facebook, since everyone is hidden behind a monitor. I guess The only way I can achieve this is to
go out and do what I have to do, and talk. If you want to know more people too, or know me, feel free to drop me an email. A response within 24hr is guaranteed. :)

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I have been a customer of all three telcos we have here in Singapore - M1, Starhub, and I recently switched to Singtel.

Having experienced all three telcos' customer service, I must say Singtel really takes the lead for having the worst customer service around. Using them as a benchmark, M1 would be top-notch, answering calls to their service line promptly and politely. Starhub has also improved over the years although I must say they seem to favour Starhub users calling from a Starhub mobile line, as opposed to enquiries via email or regular land line. Unfortunately, as of last week, Singtel was the only telco selling the Apple iPhone, and having had waited for that phone for many months already, I decided to sign up with them to buy the phone. If I had been patient, I would be able to buy the phone with M1, or even Starhub in future.

Because of the limited stocks of the iPhone in the past few months, I had been emailing Singtel customer service to request information. It takes about 2 emails to get someone to reply, and then after that it's a fairly long wait for another reply, or you might not get one at all. I sent an email to a customer service officer and left her a message on her answering machine but have had no reply to this day. As for calling 1626, it's perpetually a 45min - 1 hour wait for anybody to get on the line. I know Singtel has the biggest customer base amongst the telcos, but I expect that they should have more officers in their customer service department to handle the high volume of calls, especially when they say they are "committed to providing nothing less than quality products and premium servicing".

I think Singtel should improve their customer service, now with the added customers they would be having with the EPL and ESPN channels they have scored.