Ehm. I don’t have a proper blog post for you, but in the meanwhile … Let’s play “Caption this!” in the comment box with this sexeh cat spotted at Largo di Torre Argentina!
Winners will get … oh I don’t know, an Italian postcard or something 
How to sell and make anchovies sexy!
I spotted this in the supermarket yesterday and it was just too funny not to share as I’ve never seen anyone being so excited about anchovies (of all things) before.
Could you just imagine the conversation?
Man : Hey babe, check out what I have for you!
*whips out … an anchovy sandwich!*
Woman all dramatic like : Oooh! Yes! Fernando! You know what I like! Give it to me!
*poses all seductively almost eroticly*
Man : Hmm! Now after you eat this, go on and breathe on my face again. It’s sexeh!
And the funny part about this, the tagline reads, “When you start, you’ll never stop“. Never stop what? Convulsion for anchovies?
Sidenote : If you think this was strange, you should check this out too.
How I spent my new year’s eve
Hi everyone! Hope that your first day of 2012 has been going great.
Normally I’d spend New Year’s eve sleeping in bed and then waking up to a new year. Yes, I’m very dull. But of course this time round , for the first time since we’re not in Singapore, we did things a little differently this year.
In the morning, we were in Circo Massimo to support my friend Claire who was doing the inaugural Nike We run Rome 10km run that day.
I’ve always wanted to run a 10k event but I was really worried that I couldn’t cope in the coldness of winter. The first time I tried to run back in January, I literally couldn’t breathe after 5 minutes which really frightened me. But I think I’ve acclimatised myself and on the day itself, while was still cold in the beginning, it turned out to actually be a lovely sunny day.
There were so many people crowing around the start point and the feeling was extremely festive. I was extremely jealous and wishing that I participated too! Claire on the other hand, was nervous for her first 10k run. Said that she didn’t sleep much the night before and before this, had to pee 8 times. Hahaha!
But I knew she’ll do fine. She’s been training for a while, so it’s going to be a piece of cake for her 
Anyway, while she’s running, Cart and I decided to go walk around the area. We remembered seeing a pastry shop while on our way to the farmer’s market (which was closed on that day) and thought of trying out some cakes.
The place is called Cristalli di Zucchero by the way, and oh gosh, all the cakes there looked so orgasmic. The pastries were divided into macaroons, cakes and mignons and I had a hard time trying to choose which one to try.
In the end, Cart chose Mont-Blanc for himself which is a type of cream cake that has chestnut purèe on top.
While I had Rosa Del Libano which is a sponge cake with almonds, raspberry, white chocolate and rose tea mousse. Cart’s not too fond of this because it reminds him of Bandung. But I love it!
Oh so good! A little expensive at 3.50 euro each, but it’s worth to try at least once.
Since we had a bit more time to kill after that, I suggested that we go to La Bocca della Verità. Which is basically a white circular marble with a hole where you could put your hand in and it was supposed to be a lie detector. You’d get your hand chopped off if you’re guilty.
But gosh, it was super crowded with lines and lines of tourists and we gave up. So we went exploring the Santa Marina in Cosmedin church instead. The church looks so antique … I could totally imagine Thief the dark project in here.
Something interesting we found there :
Believe it or not, on the white sign there, says “Relics of Saint Valentine” Woah, really? I bet this church will be filled with flowers on the 14th of February.
We then headed back slowly to the finish area and were in time to see Claire running past the finishing line. Bloody hell she’s fast! She ran in an hour, 13 minutes! Faster than my timing! Haha!
She looked tired but exhilarated and pumped up. See, all that feeling of nervousness was for nothing! And I’m sure it will not be her last long distance run! 
After we said our goodbyes, Cart and I headed to the supermarket to get some groceries as well as some food to prepare for the dinner later that night. We’ll be spending the evening with some friends.
Most importantly we grabbed loads of these :
In Italy there is a tradition of eating lenticchie (lentils) which is supposed to bring you fortune (on account of how it’s round and looks like coins) when you eat it during right during the new year’s day.
After the lentils are cooked, we then headed to Francesco’s house who was hosting tonight. And because it seemed like a special occasion to look hot, so I did just that
I’m absolutely hot right? *coughs* I’m shameless, I know
By the time we arrived, there were loads of food all ready on the table.
This is a lovely quiche like spinach and ricotta bundle.
And roasted prawns! So yummy! This was over in just a few minutes.
Squid ink pasta with mussels. This was nice, but by this time I was feeling very full.
And I could hardly take a bite out of the parmigiana melanzana which was just wonderful. Le sigh!
At about 11.30pm we walked to Gianicolo, to watch the fireworks.
To me, it really felt like the second world war was going on here. It was night time and there were so many people all walking briskly and rushing and the sounds of the crackling of fireworks which reminds of me gun shots and the smoke in the air.
It was a little bit alarming for me. But at the same time, there were loads of people, children and adults alike playing with fireworks and sparklers and those were lovely to see.
If I imagined it well enough, it even felt a little like Chinese New year during the early 80’s when fireworks were still not banned in Singapore yet. It was still a little dangerous nevertheless, because if you’re not careful you could step into a firework thrown by a someone. In fact, the next day, there were reports of an increase in accidents by fireworks this year.
Anyhow, it was getting close to midnight and by this time, the amount of fireworks increased and people started to get more energetic. I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I’ve no idea if the countdown was accurate, because there will be someone popping their bottle of wine and then a few minutes later, someone else will be counting down. Hahaha!
Nevertheless, when we thought it was right, Cart and I kissed 
We then headed back to Francesco’s house and we were feeling very lucky that we didn’t take the car because it was such a cacophony and confusion going on there with all the vehicles trying to escape the bottleneck. It’s kind of like a traffic jam times 10! So you could imagine all the horns blaring!
It was much faster to walk.
Anyway, when we reached his place, we ate our lentils! (among other desserts and sweet foods)
Here’s to love, peace, happiness and richness! Now that I’ve eaten my lentils. Gimme money
To end, here’s a video of our time in Gianicolo :
Why you should wear red underwear today
Here’s a fun fact for you! Apart from rituals such as eating lentils, wearing red underwear on new year’s eve is supposed to bring the wearer good luck.
(I see now how the term getting lucky for having sex started )
That’s why if you’re anywhere in Rome towards the end of the year, you’d see practically all lingerie shops selling red underwear.
And not only women’s underwear, men are not spared from it too!
In fact when Claire and I were going around on our weekly adventures, I saw men’s thong in the shape of a red elephant being sold at a bancarella. It was dangling around and so in your face! Double meaning much?!
I was so amused
Bye everyone! See you in the new year!
Lucy Minerals Neutral Brow Powder
There are days when I am not in the mood to put on a lot of mekap on my face. But no matter what, I tend to always put a bit of bb cream and fill up my eyebrows which are sadly, quite sparse.
I’ve been using various things like eye-liner pencils and eye-shadows, which does work. But because of it’s intensity, sometimes gives me a sort of Groucho Marx look if I’m not careful.
I’ve been using Lucy Minerals foundations for a while and I’m really happy about the quality. Not too long ago, they were having a free shipping promotion and I took advantage of that and decided to top up my foundation stock.
When it arrived, one of my gifts was the Neutral brow powder.
It comes in a 7 gram jar which would have cost me $7 USD (not including shipping) which in my opinion seems quite pricey on its own. Which is why I think it would be more economical to get things from Lucy Minerals as a kit.
It comes with its own plastic sifter and a clear sticker on top of it. I haven’t peeled it off so far because I’d rather pop the sifter out and dip my brow brush in the jar.
Like so.
Tap off the access because if there’s too much on the brush, it tends to lead to a fallout on your cheeks or under eyes which can get annoying. With the brush, softly press the colour on parts of the eyebrow that you want filled in.
Don’t let the colour fool you though. At first glance, I wondered how could this brown powder fit the colour of my eyebrow? It doesn’t seem to match!
But incredibly it does and manages to look natural too. With the same shade, I think that it will work for wonderfully for brunettes to black haired ravens like me!
Like the foundation, the brow powder is quite long lasting and stays put all day for regular wear. Just don’t go swimming with it and expect miracles, of course.
I quite love it. No more half eyebrows.
Sidenote : I think the colder weather is doing my skin a lot of good. No pimples! It’s killing my nails though, they get so fragile and break so easily!
My first xmas in Rome
Seeing all the fairy lights and decorations being hanged around buildings reminds me a lot of Hari Raya.
For the first time I’m celebrating Christmas in Rome when normally around this time, we’d be back in Singapore. It feels a little strange for me to celebrate it as a non Catholic/Christian and at the back of my mind, it’s not the same thing as Hari Raya but nevertheless, I don’t see anything wrong with sharing happiness together.
Anyway, we spent Christmas eve at Cart’s sister, Paola’s house. Entering the house, the tree was the most eye catching item in the room with the presents at the bottom. The dining table was already set with cutleries and appetizers.
By the way, the tradition here in Italy is to eat fish which is a “non rich food” instead of meat on this day so you’ll see loads of families cooking fish related items. And since I love eating seafood, I had a lot of fun, because there were so many wonderful things for me to eat!
We started off with L’insalata russa which is basically a potato salad.
And then little mozzarella balls. Not the type that is yellow and solid and comes in rectangle shapes by the way.
And then mixed Seafood salad.
And then I had smoked salmon slices with tuna salad at the side. The green vegetable that you see in the picture is called valeriana and it’s interesting to me as it tastes a little bit like mint.
And then there are baked crochette of potatoes and olives. Cart and I prefer them fried though *coughs* Perangai budak gemok *coughs*
And then these are ravioli stuffed with crab and served with creamy crab sauce. Oh gosh, these was such a dream. It was so delicious! I normally don’t like creamy based pasta, but these were so light and yummy!
So good that I ate them all up. I need to ask Paola how she made it!
And here is Cart manually grating parmigiano on his pasta. If you’re wondering what we were watching on the telley, it was a show which was rather inappropriate for christmas
And this my linguini with a sort of arabbiata sauce with tuna.
My niece and nephew are very picky eaters though. They won’t touch anything if they think that it contains things that they don’t like. And to my horror, I saw that my nephew is eating pasta. Plain. Not even with a hint of oil nor cheese.
Anyway, after that we had a sort of quiche with the puff pastry and zucchini and cheese inside. This thing is awesome! But we still had more to go!
These are roasted fish called pesce persico but by this time, I was feeling so stuffed. Even though I was really greedy and I wanted to eat them, I could only pick at them and not finish. Sheepishly asked to have them put in a container so I could eat them later.
And then these are mussels cooked in tomato sauce which was supposed to be used for pasta. But Paola seeing how stuffed we all were, just served them as it is. I could only manage to eat one!
And these are artichokes. But at this point of time, I was already too stuffed to take another bite. Le sigh! How sad! I wanted to try everything!
I felt so full that I had to waddle to the sofa for a bit and soon after I felt sleepy and decided to take a snooze on Cart’s belly while watching the kids getting ready, stacking their presents to unwrap them. Eating is tiring work!
And when I woke up from my power nap, I found these ready for me. More food! Pandoro with lemon and strawberry ice cream!
I was so stuffed! This is probably what it feels like for a goose being fed for foie gras. And I didn’t even get to try everything!
Nevertheless, it was approaching midnight and we started unwrapping our presents.
Here is Cart opening his present.
Here is Paola inspecting the present that we got for her. It’s a hi-George teddy bear! With inbuilt speakers on it’s little feet.
Here are my in laws inspecting the olive oil bottle stand that we got for them.
Nephew has an Angry bird action set! Now you don’t even need to switch on the computer or phone. I couldn’t believe that it exists! And I blame it on Cart for introducing this horrible game.
Here’s the niece playing a Play doh Smashed Potato game. I couldn’t play this one though. The poor potatoes keep getting smashed and cut and diced …
And after playing for a little while with them and opening our presents, soonafter it was time to go home. It was a lovely gathering. And while I do miss my family and friends in Singapore, it’s nice to be with my other family too.
But it wasn’t over yet, because the next day, there was a xmas lunch! More food! I could hardly even eat breakfast. I was that full. And instead we waited for lunch and had Pasta with funghi.
I added some chili flakes because I like hot food. I’m still Malay after all.
And then baked potatoes with rosemary and roasted lamb. Not only for xmas, but they eat lamb during easter too. I suppose it’s a tradition to eat lamb here on accordance that there are a lot of lambs in Italy and also of it’s religious significance.
MIL asked me if we Malays eat lambs but in all honesty, beef and chicken are more popular meats to eat even though there are loads of ducks and goats around. Not sure what happened to make those meats less popular.
And to end it, a slice of pandoro, a popular xmas and new year sweetcake.
So good! But oh boy, I’m so stuffed! How does one even lose weight this way?!
Bird attack!
If you were here during the colder months in Rome towards sunset, you’d see something resembling a cloud of dust in the sky.
These are a group of birds called Starlings and as a flock, they can be interesting to see … FROM FAR AWAY. In close range, they are a menace bombing innocent victims who were just happened to be in the area.
I was walking in Eur when I happened to see this poor scooter. I bet that the owner didn’t even leave it out for a day. Imagine coming back from work to be greeted with this!
And then the same thing happened to Cart’s car …
What a casualty! It looked so horrible! Our jaws just dropped to an O when we saw the state of the car and Cart was adamant that he left the car out for just the afternoon. Not even an entire day.
Bleargh. But even worse is when you get hit directly by bird shit. Oh gosh, the colour and the texture is so sticky and gross and if it gets on your outfit, wiping it with a wet tissue is not enough.
Lately, there’s a group of people resembling like white Easter bunnies (without the ears) going around with a loudspeaker to scare the birds away.
Not sure if it really works though.
Anyway, check out the video that I took of these birds in action :
The thing that went in my mind at that time was Alfred Hitchcock, “The birds“. We’re so under attack.
Sidenote : Since when was getting bombed by bird shit is a lucky thing to be?
Happy anniversary!
It seems like it was just a couple of months ago when we got married, and before you know it, it was our 3rd year wedding anniversary already. Wow, time just flows by quickly.
We’re both very unromantic people that we didn’t plan anything for the day. In fact, even when we’ve finally decided to go out for dinner, we were clueless at which restaurant to go to. But in the end, we went to this little charming place called Checco Dallo Scapicollo.
See if you can spot Woody Allen and Francesco Totti
It’s an unreal looking place, we were driving around Laurentina which is a busy urban area, and then suddenly we found ourselves in a country looking place. It was so pretty and felt so tranquil with the sound of the water flow from the fountains and the shade of the trees. It was gorgeous. I was a little sorry that we weren’t here during daylight. It would have been something to behold.
Inside the restaurant, it looked like a country house with the fireplace and the wooden ceiling and bricks. To be honest, I was really scared to go inside, everything looked so … expensive from the furnishings to the waiters in their little waistcoats.
But Cart was adamant that we have a lovely evening in a lovely food and pointed out that it wasn’t every day that we had our anniversary. So we went ahead.
While the place was gorgeous, service was a little slow though. Even though there were practically only 4 other tables, it took a while for them to take our order and then have it cooked, and then serve our food.
The food was lovely though. Cart had ravioli stuffed with ricotta and spinach and served with zucchini and mushroom sauce with parmigiano shavings on top.
While I had a sort of seafood Saltimbocca. It doesn’t look very pretty, but it was delicious. On top is grilled octopus slices shaped into a sheet and underneath that layer is some prawns and underneath that is a piece of fish, dressed with lemon sauce. I thought the portions was small, but nevertheless, I felt quite full after eating this!
We also had carciofi alla romana, but as much as I like artichokes, I think they went overboard on the flavourings and I found this much too salty for my liking.
We then had a cheese platter. It was accompanied with 4 different type of condiments : kiwi conserve, fig jam, onion jam and honey. By this time, I was feeling quite full, but I wanted to try one anyway. So I sliced a cheese into four and tried all the condiments with each. They all tasted really good.
I wonder who was the first person to try eating cheese with jam together. It’s amazingly good together.
And we ended our dinner with a nice dessert called “assasino” which is basically molten lava cake topped with tiramisu cream on top. When you cut it open, chocolate flows out. It’s so sinful! And it’s so rich, henceforth the name “assasin” as it’ll kill you! But it’s oh so yummy!
It was a lovely way to end the evening and we both enjoyed our evening together.
But looking at the bill later, I looked at Cartcart, smiled and said, “Happy anniversary! Thank you for the wonderful dinner … but let’s not come back here too soon ”
Before I end this post, just wanted to share with you a picture that amused me so much.
Wow, I’ve never seen one of these things before!
Nail art!
I don’t exactly know when my interest for nail art started, but some months back, I saw a set of nail art tools being sold in a shop for about 3 euro. Impulsively, I got one for myself even though I’m actually quite bad at art.
Nevertheless, I had fun trying out different designs. Many of them were inspired from youtube and also looking through google images.
This one was from trying out the angry birds tutorial from Cutepolish.
I still need to do a lot of practice for a better looking bird, but this was a lot of fun!
And this is a design I tried to do for my friend Claire.
Cupcakes! It’s her obsession! I tried this tutorial out. Claire’s nails are quite small though, so she has 10 really teeny-tiny cupcakes!
This was done on a bored day. First I painted it blue. Then I got bored and I tried to paint clouds. And then I got bored and put sprinkles on the tips.
In the end, it looks kind of like a sort of ice cream doesn’t it? This design was inspired by this tutorial, although she does it way better than I do!
This one is one of my favourite. Leopard nails!
And while it may look complicated, it was surprisingly easy!
And then I felt the need to wear red so it’s strawberry nails! It looks so messy though, I was so impatient that I didn’t let the polish dry and smudged the tips.
I didn’t see a tutorial online for this exact nail, but it’s super easy! Being patient is the difficult part!
And now I’m currently wearing this. Such cheerful colours!
Watermelon!
All these bright colours makes me feel happy.
Living overseas, gets easier in time
It’s close to 3 years now that I’ve been living here in Rome. For me, I think that’s the amount of time to really get used to living here. The first few months was probably the hardest, being all homesick, missing friends and family. It’s not so much about the language barriers, but the sense of loneliness that kills you.
I can completely relate to Carrie when she was in Paris and happened to walk past a bar with 4 friends laughing and having a moment together.
Even now, sometimes I miss spending time with my besties Jules and Hema. We went to school together, and since then, we’ve done a lot of activities together, and so there are loads of memories. It could have been the simplest type of meet, but it’s the company makes it joyful.
It might take a shorter time for others to integrate, but for me, I needed time to assimilate and really feel like, “This is my home. This is my life,” instead of it feeling like a long stay-away. Which is probably what the mentality of a number of people that I’ve met here, have. They know that they are not going to stay here long term and eventually go back to where they came from. But it’s different for someone who’s married to an Italian.
It’s hard to abandon the metaphorical tree that I’ve sowed and start on a new one. And it took quite some time, but I finally have close friends whom I can confide and hang out with. It doesn’t feel so lonely anymore.
And I feel so amazed that it was just about a week or two ago when I’ve felt like I’m stuck in a rut, missing my financial independence. But now I’m getting more work opportunities. What I’m doing right now, is not my dream job, but at least I feel wanted and that my skills are not stagnating.
I feel like I’ve a more social life now, about twice a week I hang out with the people at the centro sociale, where there are quite a number of interesting activities held there. It’s a fun, stress-less, non judgemental place just to bond with others with a mutual activity.
I’ve been taking better care of myself, exercising more and watching what I’ve been eating (more or less) and I’m increasingly happier with I look at the figure in the mirror. I’ve went past my pre-wedding weight now and just a couple of kilograms more to my ideal BMI!
All these small things makes me feel motivated and I feel blessed. Things are looking up. It seems as if my new tree is growing healthily. And if there are anyone who’s just migrated in a new country like how I did, just hang on in there. It will get better.