Chinese New Year 2010 & another visit to Miss Marples.

This year was yet another Chinese New Year celebrated overseas. I think ever since I came to Melbourne to study and stayed on to work, spending chinese new year back home in Malaysia is hard especially since where I'm working now, mid Jan to mid Feb are like the most fire-prone periods where the CFA gets really busy and so taking leave is almost impossible.

But lucky over the years, we've made quite a few good friends here who are also around during the this festive period and so we met up for our own reunion dinner at Ocean King restaurant in Glen Waverley on the first day of chinese new year which also happened to fall on the same day as Valentine's Day this year! 14 Feb 2010!

The view from our side... :D

Everyone digging into the yummy food... Crocodile meat, fish, prok ribs, egg plant etc...

The group of us that day and thoughful Daniel bought each of us a rose for Vday.

After that, some of us decided to head over to Crown and for the first time we actually bothered to go there, I was pretty fascinated and amazed at how CNY is much celebrated what with all the stalls of food lined up outside Crown along the Yarra River.

Check out the walkway outside Crown decorated with chinese lanterns and the crowd!

Didn't know they performed chinese opera there as well! Or cantonese opera to be more precise!

Super duper happy to find my favourite CNY treat Bak Kua there as well. Which is known as Pork / Beef jerky in english.

Animated dragon display inside Crown Promenade. Lucky to be able to catch the performance time.

Lion dance performance by the CYSM (Chinese Youth Society of Melbourne)

Dragon dance by CYSM (Chinese Youth Society of Melbourne)

Finale of the Lion and Dragon dance performance CYSM (Chinese Youth Society of Melbourne)

Darling and I also decided to take CNY day 2 off just for a break and we bundled Jasper and us trio went up to Dandenong's. Even on a week day, there was a line up outside for table. They don't take bookings and people have to line up and wait. Lucky us, we didn't have to wait too long that day.

Inside of Miss Marples, named after famous detective Miss Marples herself in the background.

The yummy scones with cream and jam - their house specialty. Can never have enough!

Cutie darling Jasper was quite happy with his walk that day!

Gold Coast trip and goodbye to Ralphy...

Okay, finally updates on the Gold Coast trip a couple of weeks ago! Oh man, :( I can't believe 2 weeks have passed already since the trip. It felt like just yesterday! As always, holidays are never long enough! Anyway get ready for visual overload! I took about close to 400 photos and videos - not bad already, considering I thought I'll take more... hehe... Well I just picked out some of my favourites and the rest are on facebook if you're interested:

Hooters Restaurant - where you get good food and sexy waitresses to entertain you!

One of the dishes ordered by Tubby: Hooter's special steak burger with curly fries.

Sexy waitresses putting on their hourly act - which is chair top dancing

A group shot with Joewiz and Len with the hot waitresses!

The stairs leading up to Hard Rock cafe restaurant and the shop was just opposite us! Of course I had to buy some stuff! :p

Wax Museum: Len me and Ghandi! Tubby said he was a lucky bugger. :p

Wax Musuem: Ah my favourite play-writer: William Shakespeare

BBQ at the apartment pool, us greedy girls digging into the food!

Ladies by the poolside...

Outside Harbour town shopping centre! Shopping there was so good lar! So many great bargains at cheap prices! Cannot compare to Melbourne lor, so expensive...

Anyway to continue the rest of the photos: Gold Coast: Food, Shopping and Sight-seeing

Next is the 2 theme parks which we managed to visit in the 3 days. Due to the showers and thunderstorms, we didn't have time for Dream World.

The 3 chabohs with their rain coast posing! :p

Clever Sea Lion show! Boy he can dance and do lots of interesting tricks! Good trainers!

Loved the Dolphin show! They are so intelligent and cute and it just makes you wanna care about the environment more after the show to protect them.

Check out the heavy and horrible thunderstorm on the 1st day we went Sea World la. It was so bad the park closed half day. But lucky we got return tickets to go back on the friday.

Outside Movie World! Woohoo! The morning was actually cloudy and rainy. But as we were driving past to go down Brisbane then we saw the sun coming out and decided to head there instead.

The 3 chabohs taking the Batman ride! Super fun lar! Could hear Len screaming like nobody's business. Of course we screamed too, but not as loud as her hehe!

The Looney Toons theatre and of course Looney Tunes performance! Love Bugs Bunny!

Looloo and me with Bugs Bunny!

Ah Scooby-Doo Coaster! Super fun as well! You are brought up and then turned around and you thought you're gonna drop vertically down or something and you actually go down a curve back first!

Central Square where the parade starts and also the other shows presented.

Superman Roller Coaster, 0-100 in like 3 seconds. I still can't believed we were too chicken to take the ride. :(

Me and Len with the evert beautiful "Marilyn Monroe"...

Hollywood Stunt Drivers! Awesome show and hot mitsubishi lancers! heehee!

Scooby-doo bee doo where are you? :D

Batman and his Bat Mobile. The car is so cool in real life hor!

Me with my Bugs Bunny Grammy Award! heehee...

Second day at Sea World, nice sunny weather! Looloo and me with Big Bird!

Seasame Street Land I can't remember the actual name, it's as your can see, for the kiddies!

Hehe, find me find me! Classic shot hor! I was actually posing for the camera man!

Anyway rest of the theme park photos: Gold Coast: Sea World and Movie World

Okay that's the "gist" of it. On another note, Ralphy was sold over the weekend. To cut a long story shot, we finally realised we couldn't love any other dog as much as we loved Jasper and it just wasn't gonna be fair. And so Ralphy is now with a lovely old lady living in the rural area. No more new dogs for us for a long while unless it's Jasper's son I guess...

Bit and pieces of the remaining whole of April...

Haven't been updating again this month, oh well, I guess it sorta gets to this when the time passes so fast and there's holidays and stuff and there was nothing really super exciting to rant about. In short, I bought myself the new Nintendo DSi. It was actually a trade-in of my old chipped pink Nintendo DS Lite. A pretty good deal actually, I only had to pay extra $150 more to get it and it came with a free 2GB SD Card. And of course for the moment the new gadget doesn't support the R4 Revolution, so it's back to buying games legitimately. :p

Especially love the new Photo-taking feature, you can distort faces, put new frames, draw graffitti on your photos and much more! It's much like what the neo print machines can do, except you can take as many photos as you want here and its free! :D Of course don't expect too much about the photo quality. I also like the idea of downloading games to play from the DSi store, they are not too costly at all

Then we went bowling with Daniel and Serene on Easter Sunday. CFA was given free passes to play 2 games on either of the weekends. And we opted for Sunday so that serene was off and can come with us too.

Daniel and Serene - Mr. and Miss Singapore. Heeheehee... :p

Bro, the poser during his move...

Tubby and moi...

Then just a couple of weeks ago, we also went to the Sandown Toy Collectors Fair. Boy people quere queueing up like way early in the morning lah! We were late but we cut queue seeing Stuart and his wife and kids. :p

Lining up to buy tickets and be the first to check out the goodies!

A snapshot of how one part of the interior looked like. They had stores outside too.

The boys digging for goodies and seeing what they can find for a good price. Man they have good bargaining skills!

Group shot of part of the ozformers melbourne group!

Well and the rest of the time is being busy with Tennis and going to the gym. The BRTA District comps on Saturdays have also started. Oh and we also watched Xmen Origins: Woverine. Boy is Taylor Kistch (Gambit) super hot lar! Anyway am super-duper looking forward to this weekend because we are going to watch Cirque Du Soleil - Dralion this Saturday!!! Will update with photos another time! Oh oh oh and Len and Joewiz are coming to Melbourne for a visit and we're all going to Gold Coast together! Oh man! May is such an exciting month! :D