A visit to waterfront city at Docklands and Crown Casino's christmas splendour

Mum, Ying and I went out to Docklands last friday to see The Southern Star observation wheel which is more easily nicknamed Melbourne eye just like the london eye. It's located at the Docklands and also houses new retail stores there which they call the Waterfront city.

It was disappointing though because mum and I actually wanted to take a ride on it. Tickets were about AUD$29 per person I think, but it wasn't opened yet. It was funny because they recently had an opening ceremony, so you would have thought that means it's open? :o Even then, most of the shops there weren't opened as well, so only a handful of shops to walk around. The "soon to be" opened stores had posters and funny things stuck on the shop front to indicate what kind of goods they sell.

A view of the Southern Star observation wheel from the Tram stop. Trams 48 and 86 from flinders street and bourke street respectively bring you there.

A white christmas tree outside the row of shops which kinda reminded me of Bugis for some reason, Ying also said the same thing. The weather was scorching hot that day lah, not at all a "snowy" christmasy feeling.

As mentioned the unopened shops had a display of images with a combination of things pasted on them to tell you what kind of shop it would be. For example this would probably be a hair dresser or a shop selling hair products. We also saw one that had lots of bowls and cups pasted on the wooden boards.

A snap shot on the second level. Note the shops at the back, most of them on this level are also not opened yet. The white building on the top right are apartments. Imagine staying at one there! You wake up every morning, walk out to the balcony and what a view you get! :D And also all the shopping temptations nearby!

We met darling at Crown Casino when he finished work. After dinner as we were walking towards the hotel lobby to watch the Crown Christmas display, we passed by this seafood restaurant with such an ENORMOUS crab that we just had to take a photo.

In front of some of the christmas decorations with mum. See the glittering Crown logo on my right. heehee. :D That's like a super gigantic "glass" ball or bobble decorations that you hang on Xmas trees.

The choir which performed so many wonderful christmas tunes.

I probably took more video captures as compared to photos because it was better to capture the animated moving performance. It was Crown's annual christmas show where the tree "talks" and then puppets pop out from the tree and the carousal turns with dancing puppets and stuff. And then Santa Clause pops out from a carriage on the carousal.

Gosh it's just so much easier to show it on the video, which I hope (I will not be lazy and upload to youtube) so I can post it up here. Meantime enjoy the photos first... :)

Tigger (Denise's visit), Chapel street bazaar and "Build-a-bear" workshop in chadstone.

Dear tigger Denise came to visit a couple of weeks ago. She was here with her sis and her parents for a holiday. We managed to do a bit of catch up and had lunch at Oriental Spoon, a Korean restaurant opposite Melbourne central. It's funny how you can not see or chat to a good friend for awhile and yet when you meet, there is no sense of unfamiliarity at all. ;) Wished we had more time together, but ah well, every amount of time to chat is valuable enough.

And she brought me the newest Jay Chou - Capricon and FM S.H.E albums! Super happy! They are so expensive to import from Hong Kong or ebay. Especially love Jay's new song - "稻香:Dao Xiang" which is about how people should be contented and with what they have and treasure their love ones and also "时光机：Shi Guang Ji" - Time machine; him playing the cute Doraemon guitar in the Music video. :) S.H.E this also had a few meaningful songs like "宇宙小姐：Yu Zhou Xiao Jie". It's saying girls should love themselves for who they are, something about inner beauty. And I love "安静了：An Jing Le"- a typical love song about a guy not being able to commit.

On Melbourne Cup day (4th Nov), we met up with wang-wang for lunch and then he brought us to this "hidden" bazaar along chapel street. Never knew they had a bazaar there, it was a walkway between the shops that you turn in and boom, there's this place with all these old vintage stuff for sale. Some stuff were old and some were new, but we mostly just browse through as some of the items were pretty costly.

Grabbed myself a love novel for $10 and the Guitar musical box for $12. Liking that the musical box is probably one of a kind now judging from the age of the box. The box had a "Made in Hong Kong" label on it which meant it was imported. It plays Elvis Presley's "Love me tender" and is still working perfectly fine, the guitar sort of turns around a small stand as the music plays. A real "romantic" ornament for the room. :p Heehee...

Over the weekend on our usual trips to Chadstone, we finally passed the "Build-a-bear" workshop. I remember playing the game on my nintendo DS ages ago and always tried to picture how the real shop would look like. Basically, you pick the "skin" of the teddy bear or animal you like (they have dinosaurs, a zebra, polar bear, rabbits and more!) then you bring them to the staff and they fill them up with the stuffing. Then you can buy clothing, shoes, hats and accessories for your newly created stuff toy. It's so cute lar...

There were these bunch of kids, (I think they were on a group trip or something) and they each held a stuff toy while they sat along together for a group photo. I just had to take a shot of them too, it was such a cute sight. I have a few teddy bears and have recently bought two more; one christmas 2008 white bear and the brown colour Target bear. So of course I was tempted to "build-a-bear" for myself too! :p But darling said he'll get me one another time. So heehee, I'm counting on him for it...

It's about time to upgrade the blog and template!

Howdie people, seeing all the new templates and cool functions that others have on their blogs, I guess it's about time I upgrade mine too! So off with the too-cutesy pink and blue banner which I didn't really like in the first place and on with one of the free blog templates. Haven't really got time to design a new template myself, it's all about using DIVs nowadays.

Anyway I shan't get too technical. Stay tune for more updates in the next week or so. Alternatively please "Follow my blog" and you'll be notified of my updates (I think!) :P. Works for blogger / gmail subscribers I know. :)

Mum's 60th Birthday Celebration - And yeah she doesn't look her age! :p

We celebrated my mum's birthday just a couple of weeks ago at Fortnums restaurant in the Dandenong Ranges. We initially wanted to bring her to Miss Marple's tea room, the usual place with delicious scones and dessert, but they don't take bookings. And not wanting to risk having having a long time on that nice sunny day, I guess second best was good enough. :p (P.S: Ang Mos like to drive up there to have tea on sunny days and that day was just beautiful...)

Anyway Fortnums served food similar to Miss Marples, apparently their scones were not too bad as well. But we were so filled with the main courses and surprised birthday cake for mum that we didn't bother trying out the desserts. Boy it was hard to find parking and it took quite awhile for the food to come too. But at least everyone was comfortable in the air-conditioned area.

Some shots of the place, the people who made mum's day and also the yummy food. Let's see what was on the menu; Seafood platter with fish, scallops, prawns, squid and wedges, Salmon salad, and others not pictured include Steam barramundi with vegetables, Veal Pot pie and Quiche... Let's say the food was good, but it kinda made you sick if you ate too much of it because of the grease I suppose.

Thanks to Ammie and weichao for buying the cake for my mum, I managed to sneak it pass her and got the waitress to keep it for us during the meal. Then afterwards, we even took the dessert menu and pretended that we want to order when the waitress brought the cake out to surprise her. After lunch, we took a walk at the pretty little garden at the back of the restaurants with a wonderful array of flowers in bloom and of course there was more cam-whoring as we walked down the road along the quaint little shops.

Bigger group shot - Thanks to those who camed along to join in Mum's 60th celebration. :) A person turns 60 yrs only once in a life time so I wanted to make it a memorable birthday for her. If she was back in Malaysia, her line-dancing friends would probably bring her out for a huge party. :p They were pestering her for photos after the celebration and I think I should get them resized for her soon...

Anyway work's usual, getting a bit into the busy period now at CFA now that summer is approaching. Been busy lately doing the new website layout and getting it ready to be launched in end november. Till the next time then...

Personal Development Course - CFA Fiskville Training College 1-2 Oct

Time flies when you're oblivious to it. I remember it was months ago when I applied for the Personal Development course after the first catch-up with my supervisor. It felt so long ago and then whoosh, the day came and went just like that. Although the outcome of the course wasn't exactly what I expected, still it was good to be away from work, get some fresh air and meet staff from other regions.

Fiskville is about 90-100km away from Melbourne and on the western side of Victoria. Because we were driving from the south eastern side, the journey took extra long. And it didn't help that my other colleague who was driving "didn't allow" me to snooze while he drove. I think he wanted me to keep talking to keep him awake as well. :D Apart from being a venue for courses, The training college actually houses recruits who are training to be firefighters as well. So there are buildings and objects where they can set fire to and then try to put the fire out. A pity we didn't see any action in the 2 days there.

We stayed in chalet-liked houses. There were about 7-8 rooms in each house and us ladies were all piled into one. The buildings were old like from the early 1900s and were newly renovated. I especially love the huge HD TV they had in the living room! Imagine playing Wii on that! :p The rooms were just exactly like hotel rooms though I didn't really sleep well probably cause of unfamiliar surroundings.

On the first day, it was pretty much a "get to know each other" time and also to find out what each individual wanted to achieve from the course. The trainer was very charismatic and her talks were very enriching and fulfilling. We each had a wooden board where we had to write down the excuses that we come up with to not go ahead and do what we want - self talk. And that was sort of like the "baggage" we had to carry with us for the 2 days.

Food was also like a never-ending abundance of supply. We were fed 5 meals a day! Breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. It was food and more food. So some of us decided that we needed to take walks to burn off the calories! And we did, instead of driving or using the golf buggie like the staff there did, we walked the 1km back to the classrooms.

Day 2 was much more relaxing because everyone knew each other better. And the massages we gave each other every couple of hours helped too. We would get into a row and massage the person in front(and then turn around) and you're supposed to wiggle and dance while you do that. :\ We continued with finding out our communication styles; whether we are visuals, kinestatics, auditorial or digital. Most of us have a combination of each and the others were happy to understand why it was so hard to communicate with their superiors.

And we were also allowed to "burn" and throw away our baggage from the day before. But not after we came up with a presentation for the trainer and did a little group dance for her. :p The second half of the day was spent partly in the lecture theater where at one point we all had to stand on the stage and sing an encouragement song together.

Lastly we had to write down the goals that we would like to achieve and set a date where we think we are going to achieve that goal and make sure we work our way towards it. We lied down on the carpet and then I think the trainer was using hypnotism to try and get us to relax. I probably fell fast asleep after like 5 minutes of the tape. :p We ended at 4pm-ish, exchanged our contacts with the people we were more familiar with, gave our hugs, said goodbye and prepared for the long journey home.

* Stay tuned for the next update on my mum's birthday bash in the Dandenong Ranges. :)