A night at Le Bistrot

Roasted Goat's Cheese!

Poor man's Caviar (the one in the small bucket) - garlic puree, chicken liver mousse and somethings...


Dark Chocolate Tart!

These were just some of the offerings some friends and I feasted on at my friend Thaddeus' newly-relocated restaurant, Le Bistrot. If you're ever in the mood for good, unpretentious french food, drop by!

I had the Goat's cheese entree, and the Pig's Head Galette main course. They don't serve a Ter Tau like an illegal moneylender trying to get money back, but rather it's all cut up, breaded and served like a roasted terrine. It's quite flavourful and very tasty. It's a little fatty, but it's soothing. The stuffed rainbow trout was good too.

I got there early, and worked my way through the various construction sites surrounding the Stadium Waterfront area, and found and this bridge connecting the Waterfront dining area and the expensive condos on the other side of the river. Quite peaceful, and picturesque.

The company was good of course, I had a grand time telling them all about my roommate and Pepper's too.

One of my dining companions runs her own Cookie Bakery. If you need cookies, call Christine!

So much for the Easy Stuff

In case any of you have been wondering why there have been so few entries of late, it's because nothing of real interest has happened to me lately.

Except for work. Then Work, and also WoRk.

However, for my friends outside Singapore, here's a pic of my usual type of lunch at the nearby hawker center (outdoor food court):
Doesn't look like much, but it's mixed veggies, with a chicken thigh in curry and a fried egg (the yolk I dump). Quite yummy, and relatively affordable.

Also, I've posted a pic of my workspace in Cleveland, so I think it's only far that I post one of my workspace here in Singapore:
As you can see, it's not really a cube. on the other side, are two people, and we're sharing 360 degrees worth of space. It's nice open space, but walking through the office is a little difficult. On the plus side, I have a Cisco IP phone and an LCD monitor, and a docking station. You can also see the little kettle I use to heat up water for my french press, and the coffee mug and aforementioned Bodum cafetierre.

Hm. That's about as much as I can stretch it. Looks like I'll have to start scouring my noggin, looking for blog-worthy topics!

Hmm. I could tell you about the bag of potato chips that I bought from the supermarket that turned out to have been surrepticiously 'sampled' by a rude shopper.

I know. How about this:
For those of you who don't know Bahasa Malaysia - it's Lizard Man! and something like "A blockbuster film with a budget of Malaysian Ringgit 5.2 million (USD 1.5m?), and "a Super-hero comedy". Almost collapsed laughing when I saw that.

To the Unknown Coffee Joint

Wouldn't you know it? I was so enthralled by the good espresso that I totally forgot to take a pic of the front of the shop!!! Arrrghh!

In case you're wandering around Suwon looking for the place, go look for this statue's butt:
It's on the left - if you click the pic, you can see a white-ish sign with a hand-powered burr grinder on it. Go get some coffee, you won't regret it! Pity they didn't provide receipts...
I did, however, manage to take a pic of Pepper's Americano - which, unlike the majority of coffee joints, did not come from a brew flask! Shame on Gloria Jeans at the Incheon Airport!!
Crema's gone because Pepper needed it to cool down a bit. And the stirrer was already there..

Walking around in Suwon In Search Of Food yielded some interesting sights, like this Titanic Restaurant:
and a few occurrences of weirdo naming of pubs:
Seeing as how Pepper and I gorged on Cow and Pig the night before, we decided to go simple - at a Ramen place. Of course, I mean having a simple meal, not being nuts at a Ramen place. Although we were a little overwhelmed at the end of the day with this bit of visual overload
made slightly worse by the apparent disorganization
The wall surfaces you can't see in this photo were covered with a gazillion yellow, green, red, pink and purple post-its, with scribblings in Korean and various cartoons. The picture previous to this shows a customer's rendering of some sort of an egg, for a basket of eggs in a basket, that was on each table. Don't know if those eggs were raw, boiled, or preserved. The cartoon does not look reassuring.

Anyway, on to dinner pics:
Free flow Kimchi! (the brown pot with the red tongs (that looks like an unlit candle)). Pepper's dinner is in the metal lunch pot. Her dinner only filled half of it, so she was forced to pour out some onto the kidney bowls. The round pot is
Spicy soup ramen (lamyeun) with an egg in it. Plain, but tasty and comforting (especially when it's 2 degrees Celcius out at night).

Day 1 in Korea

..of course, I actually arrived in Korea at about 5pm the 'first' day, but this day is the first complete day in Korea. So, Day 1 it is.

Pepper and I waited patiently for the 'hotel' shuttle service (it's actually a shuttle taxi operated by the Stay 7 serviced apartments, but... same thing) to appear. We got gestured into a saloon car, and were whisked off in several directions at once. Or so it seemed, anyway.

Our driver and the Marketing Manager/Human Global Positioning System / Impolite pointer of directions brought us around what seemed to be most of the districts in Suwon. We were wildly overcoming centrifugal force while navigating the maze of impatient Korean drivers on their way to being stuck in rush hour. I must comment that drivers in Suwon have levels of impatience surpassing Singapore and New York. Barely 10 nanoseconds pass between the nascent gleam of a green traffic light and the I'm-pressed-for-time-and-you're-a-slow-idiot-driver car honk.

After a lot of gesturing, laughing and u-turning, our Korean Driver/unGPS team finally decide they know where to go and promptly deliver us to a Samsung manufacturing plant. Oops! Wrong building. Attempt number 2 is mildly more successful. They deposit us (after 70 mins of a hot and wild horizontal roller-coaster ride) at the gates of the manufacturing complex and wave us vaguely toward a cluster of boring-looking buildings.

Pepper and I trudge off, confused, but relieved to be let off the Korean Mystery Journey Express. Amidst the monochromatic brown landscape of a pre-spring Korea, this stood out:
No, the building behind isn't the company building. It's a Renault factory.

It was a long walk up to the office, sun-drenched but the slowly rising temperature cooled my overheating pate. Imagine having to climb up this to get to the office. It had to be right at the top...
No wonder most of the office people were slim! (later, we found out that it was because of the cafeteria food).

The day passed quickly as we slogged through our alloted Herculean tasks.
Picture of note. Here's an example of the rubbish bin in the meeting room that was our work area: We got the friendly and helpful Executive Assistant to book us a more knowledgable cabbie, and he got us back to Stay 7 in a wonderous 25 minutes. Hooray for a functioning non-human GPS navigation system!

Pepper and I felt a vague desire to try something ethnic, so we wandered around the area near our apartments for a likely establishment. We avoided overly-dingy looking shops, and the far-too-common Japanese restaurants and fake Western joints. We finally ended up at a Korean BBQ place with an untranslated menu, and no chairs. We were offered "Cow!" and "Pig!" and shown to a large, low table, where we able to use foot/sock odours to whet our appetites. One interesting side dish we had was Raw Crab, preserved in honey/chili sauce. It was cold, sweet and lovely, if not cloying. The Cow was delicious! No pics though - too smokey and oily. Go to any Korean BBQ place, and the food might look the same. Just the freshness of the Cow that varies.

After stumbling away from the restaurant and massaging all the kinks out of our sorry joints, Pepper and I decided to assuage our caffeine withdrawal at a place that advertised fresh coffee.
Man, the coffee was the best I'd tasted! Expertly pulled shots, with loving care lavished on each cup served!

More, next post!

Conjuror of Congees Kimchi

Poor Me.

Having barely recovered from North American Jet-Lag, I headed straight into a sinus infection, then...WHAM! (no, not George Michael and the other guy)..
Office Martinet decides that Pepper and I need to help out some Korean tech writer. So with barely two day's notice, here I am...
OOps! Wrong pic. That's Bucky (black) and Otterboy chowing down on fresh kibble.

Let's try that again. "..here I am".. Ah! Nice 'living room' in Stay 7 Suwon, in Suwon, Korea. Other than empty shelving and and a desk area strikingly similar in its spartan starkness, this is it.
I have a nice little kitchenette, with another desk. But at least this apartment has non-stick cookware. but no knives of any sort. For my alert readers, yes, the pictures are bigger. This is purely for my other readers who have complained that the earlier pics were too small, and they didn't realise that clicking on a pic gives you a niiiiice biiiiiiig pic.

My first night was uneventful, just a little weird - went to the Outback Steakhouse. Huge Language barrier. Fortunately, they had a young-Bruce-Lee like person who spoke a smattering of English, enough to take our order, and give Pepper a doggy bag for a huge plate of pasta she couldn't finish.

The next morning, before being carted off to work (that's a story for tomorrow), Pepper and I initiated our Coffee Quest (yes, the serviced apartment serves breakfast, but their coffee is like dirty water).
Finally found a coffee joint that opened at 7.30 am... but all open and lit, but no one around. We could have gone behind the counter and made our own coffees, but we were too civilised.

One fresh-faced Korean Maiden eventually strolled in, and set about S-l-o-w-l-y setting up shop. While we were standing in front of the counter, waiting for to apologize for showing up late, and to take our orders for coffee. No Such Luck.

After half an hour of watching her putter around behind the counter doing ritualistic coffee things (she was obviously a trained minion, but not a devotee), nothing happened. She continued ignoring us, and continued heating up mysterious containers of steaming liquid, and washing dishcloths in the basin. We left in disgust. No eye contact, nothing. So Thank You Tuck's Espresso, for wasting our time, and congratulations on losing our custom!

More on better joints, next post!

More updates coming

It'll be slower, since there are potentially less alarming or interesting things happening to me.. but you'll never know.

More to come, especially when I iron out my stupid Internet connection at home. Starhub sucks!