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How to get to see naked women in Rome

This post isn’t really categorised under ‘running‘ but I don’t have a more appropriate category. Maybe I’ll change it to ‘health’ to make it more encompassing.

Anyway, with the start of October comes the start of public schools as well as sports centre. Which means that there would be lots of open houses going on. And I’ve been taking advantage of that to try the different activities in the sports centre in my zone.

Imagine going for an aerobics class, Taiji, Pilates and Yoga all for just 1 euro! There were also other classes, but these were the ones that I managed to go to. If you are living in Rome, and if it happen to be an open house going on, I urge you to just go take advantage of it and try it out 🙂

In any case, I’ve been dragging Cart with me to accompany me in looking at the different swimming pools in the area. But after looking at several, I’ve decided to just stick to the one near our house because :

  1. It’s walking distance. And when Winter comes, it will be a pain to find parking with car but too cold to ride on the scooter and I don’t want to risk having penyumonia all over again.
  2. The price is much more competitive here. Unlike other places that charges hundreds of euro, the one near our house, being a comune (sort of like a Govt subsidized centre) we pay a 30 euro registration which is valid for a year and 50 euro each month for a twice weekly lesson.

(I’m trying to find a list of other comune sports centers in Rome but the site is very confusing to me)

In any case, regardless of which sports center you go to, you’d need to get a medical certificate by a family doctor to be accepted.

So why Aquagym?

As you know, I’ve been jogging for a while, and God willing I’ll be doing my longest distance come March. It still feels a little unreal to me, so right now, I’m not comprehending much of the reality of it.

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And I’ve been doing my jogs as usual, getting used to my new shoes and I’ve hit 10km so far pain free. But a couple of weeks ago, my knee started to act up again. While normally it would get better in a few days, there were some things that happened to me that aggravated it more. Like riding on the scooter and suddenly seeing a small metal cylinder on the path. I had to stop immediately and doing so, landed on my left leg to prevent the scooter from toppling. My bad knee. Ouch!

Thank goodness I didn’t go too fast. And after that, it was such a drag going down the steps, I had to hobble around even doing certain yoga or stretching poses, much less bending up and down.

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So I’m taking Aquagym classes with the hope that it would aid my stamina as well as my muscle mass while at the same time, being low impact in the water, doesn’t aggravate my knee (I wish Cartcart would join me. I think aquagym could be good for his hernia)

Aquagym is basically aerobics in water and I did it the first time about a year ago. I remember it was actually relaxing and I enjoyed it heaps. So imagine my surprise last week when I found out that it was so intensive, I still felt extremely tired the next day. Like running on a 10% battery.

Compared to last year, the classes were more intensive probably because of the timings. In the mornings, there were more nice elderly ladies and thus the movements were more relaxing and slow. While the evening classes were full of younger people, so the instructor makes us do a more challenging workout.

I don’t mind it so much. A harder workout means the more calories you burn and the more toned the body. Even if it might be negated by the amount of food I eat as soon as I reach home. I always get so hungry after this workout.

In any case, I’ve been going for about two weeks now and my knee seems to feel much better so far so I might start on my jogs again in November. My only concern is, seeing how tired I feel, I’m not sure if I have enough energy to even start training simultaneously! My battery is going to go down from 10% to what? 3%? But  better not think too much about it and see how it goes …step by step …(ooh baby)

By the way, one big cultural shock about going to the pool here is seeing all the naked women in the changing room / shower, sometimes walking about, chatting with each other in their naked selves without batting an eye. Some were even admiring their naked bodies in the mirror.

I still am not that comfortable in going around with my bits hanging out and I prefer to change out of my wet swimsuit discreetly. But I’m getting used to seeing all the nakedness and not feel so embarrassed as I was the first time I was there.

I’m not sure if it is the same phenomenon as for the other pools in Rome as far as the ones that I’ve been to previously, there are some with open showers while some have doors on them.

But we’re lucky in a way, because in other European countries like Finland and Sweden, co-ed saunas and pools are common. Even if the intention is non-sexual, I really don’t want to see hairy naked men. And we all know that most Italian men are super hairy. It’s not pleasing to my eyes to see them naked.

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Easiest way to do tilt shift pictures

Not sure if you’ve heard of the app called snapseed before, but I just recently discovered it and I loved using it especially for making tilt shift pictures.

By the way, tilt shift is basically a term used when you make a picture look as if it was a miniature. An example would be, from it looking like this scene from Tarquinia.

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To this :

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To me, I think this feature makes a regular picture looks really cute and it makes me excited to snap more pretty sceneries.

Here are a few other pictures that I played around with. Starting  with Gianicolo 🙂

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This was near a winery inTuscany :

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This was taken at the Grande Moschea di Roma during Eid :

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And this was taken just last week at Laghetto dell’Eur 

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Isn’t it adorable? I used to do them using photoshop, but it can get quite time consuming. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to do using snapseed. By the way, it works for both android and iphones and it is free!

Below is a video I did with a quick demo on how to do tilt shift on snapseed.

I hope you give it a try and have fun as much as I did 🙂

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Our fridge is dead

Our current fridge is the type where regular fridge is at the top, while the freezer is at the bottom.

The freezer has always seem to accumulate more ice whenever the door gets opened, which sometimes jams up the freezer shelf. But we’d simply scrape it off. This routine has served us relatively well the past years.

Last Tuesday though, there was so much ice accumulation that the freezer door wouldn’t close. I couldn’t take it any longer. Rather than waiting for Cart, I decided to defrost the fridge and solve the issue once and for all.

So I turned off the fridge, put all the foodstuff in a freeze bag, put on a pair of gloves and got to work, scraping off as much ice as I could. My fingers started to get numb even with the gloves on. There was so much ice that it almost filled up a whole pail! I kid you not!

It took about a good 4 hours for the freezer to become completely clear from the ice. I admired my handiwork, wondered why we didn’t do this earlier and then restarted the fridge again.

It was only several hours later that we realised that the fridge didn’t seem to get as cold as before. It started to beep around every 4 hours (it only did that before that when the door was left opened for too long) and the freezer didn’t freeze as usual.

I was horrified. Did I break the fridge?! I was really not keen for us on spending money to get a new fridge and hoped that the problem could be fixed.

In the meanwhile,  we tried to salvage as much food as humanly possible. I cooked as much frozen food as possible: pizza, vegetables and whatnots. There were also stuff like pandan leaves that my family brought over for me and fresh curry leaves that we brought over from Singapore. Both of these are impossible to find in Rome and thus, very precious to me. I made foodstuff like Nasi Lemak and Pandan Agar-agar.

And for the past meals, Cart and I have been trying to eat as much of them as possible so as to not waste them. Nasi Lemak with sambal for lunch, and then dinner, and then lunch again. My goodness. I felt so stuffed, it was as if I was being prepared to be harvested for foie-gras. It was hard to breathe at one time.

In any case, the repairman came over the next day to take a look at the fridge (I am duly impressed that he arrived at 2.30pm, considering that our appointment time was from 2 – 6pm) and the thing I feared most came true. He said that the pipes were damaged and it was irreparable. We’d have to get a new fridge.

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Oh gosh. I felt horrible and guilty. If I wasn’t so impulsive, the freezer would probably still be working right now. I hated the thought of us having to fork out at least another 600 euro or so on a new fridge. We’re not poor, but we’re not so rich that we could just make a big expense like that without batting an eye.

But Cart was really sweet and comforted me, justifying that it could happen to anyone. He said that he himself damaged a fridge one time accidentally, and insisted that the fridge was already 8 years old and towards the end of it’s lifespan anyway.

(Why is Cart such a sweetie?!)

At this point of time, we’ve been looking at a few fridges to replace the broken one. So far, Cart seems interested in getting this Samsung one which is frost free and is class A++ which means that it uses less energy and thus cheaper to run in time. Too bad it doesn’t come bundled in with a free tablet :p

The bad news is, a lot of my precious frozen herbs didn’t make it and I had to throw them away. The biggest irony is that I could have used them sooner before the incident, but didn’t because using them means that there would be less of them and I preferred the idea of having them for as long as possible.

Now I have none left :/

In any case, I can now look back now and laugh at this situation. This experience has been interesting so far, and I never realised how dependent we have been with having a fridge. From this point till we get our new fridge, we’d have to change our habits in buying our groceries in smaller quantities more frequently.

By the way, you know how last Tuesday, being Eid al-Adha is a day of sacrifice?

Yeah, our fridge was totally sacrificed. Along with my herbs too.

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What I wore yesterday

You know how during the holidays, people tend to dress up nicely? Well, it was Eid-al-adhar yesterday,  and this was how I dressed up  :

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They each had a function. My baju kurong, which I like to wear during festive days like these. A windbreaker and a makeshift headgear tied to my neck to protect myself from the cold Autumn wind. My purple sling bag which is great for travelling on scooters. My purple canvas shoes, for easy slip on and off. Coloured socks (The first thing I grabbed from the drawer) and of course Sam the scooter! I have had enough of trying to search for parking in that area. It was such a breeze just parking Sam at a little corner by the road.

In any case, as hipster as I am, it still feels odd going out like that. I look horrible! Hahaha! I just had to thicken my skin. :p

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How to log off from Skype on Androids

Last week, I was helping my friend set up her new tablet – a Samsung Galaxy Tab2 10.1 and we encountered a very interesting problem. We’ve been trying to get on Skype. However, her husband has logged in Skype with his account and we’re stumped at how to log off from his account.

Searching for solutions online doesn’t seem to help much and I poured over this problem and finally found out how to do it. I’ll share it with you here.

1. First you open your profile. It’s the one with your icon on the top right.

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2. Next you press on the three dots at the bottom right.

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3. Now you open up your settings

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4. And remove the tick for ‘Sign in automatically’

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5. And finally go on back and sign out from that account

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6. And then sign in with your other account. If you like, you can set it to sign in automatically again.

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There! Quite easy. Can’t believe it took me such a long time to figure it out. Hope this is helpful to you 🙂

 

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Have you ever seen anything like this in Italy before?

When you are in a shop in Asia, it’s not unusual to see objects such as the Maneki Neko or a little Budai statue near the register – these are objects which are believed to bring fortune and luck.

Growing up in Singapore, I tend to see small coins glued to calculators, which I think is done in the hopes that the owner’s money will multiply.

I’ve always assumed that these are the sort of thing which is distinctively Asian, till I stepped into a pizzeria in Magliana. There was a little figurine with multiple Euro coins next to her, placed right next to the cash register.

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I didn’t know that Italians had this belief too. The fact that it had European coins could mean that it came from other parts of Euro. But it’s the first time that I’m seeing anything like this in a shop in Italy.

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3 gelaterie to try out in Rome

Before the weather gets too cold, try these 3 different gelaterie in Rome that I stumbled on and really liked.

1. Grom

My friend Magdaline and I were at Euroma2 recently and she spoke highly of the place. It’s been newly opened for several months, and already there seems to always be people queuing up for it.  Grom reminds me of the same concept as San Crispino where they cover the gelato with a metal lid and you don’t see what it looks like underneath.

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They also has seasonal flavours. Right now, for Autumn I see Cachi (Persimmon) Mela (Apple) Pera (Pear) and Limone (Lemon)

Mag had the Cachi flavour, and it was an intense, fresh taste of persimmons. The taste was true, like it was made of real persimmons – refreshingly sweet. While I had ‘Crema come una volta’ which is basically made of eggs and milk. I really loved how simple, yet intense the flavour profile was. It was so good!

2.

Located in the picturesque area of Monteverde, I’m not sure if this place is very accessible but I find the gelato  here rather refined tasting.

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Sometimes, there are unusual flavours here such as ananas con curry which reminds me of eating a Malay pineapple side dish (so it’s a little strange to me) but I especially love the lavanda e zenzero gelato here, and tend to get that each time I come here.

It’s a very ‘clean tasting’ ice cream. It’s not how a number of ice cream tends to put additional ingredients to make the flavour come together, you can taste the natural sweetness and taste like a primabella.

This is the type of gelato that you have to savour slowly to enjoy it.

3. Al Settimo Gelo

Cart and I stumbled upon this gelateria while we were roaming around Aurelia and decided to try their gelato out.

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The location is probably unusual to get to, but the place is interesting as there are no gluten in their ingredients. There are a lot of interesting flavours here like cardamom, ginger and cinnamon as well as saffron.

I find the gelato here lovely and very clean tasting gelato and delicate. I highly recommend the gelato persiano. It is amazing!

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What would you do if your bag got clawed?

Charles and Keith is a Singaporean brand that was known for their shoes.  I remember buying a pair of shoes donkey years ago while I was working in Marina Square, and being so happy with buying something with my new job.

This was way before my blogging days, but here is a very old post of another pair I got here. Man, I still love those rainbow wedges. Now that I look back, I wish I had gotten 10 pairs of them so I could just replace it when it got damaged.

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Anyway! My best friends Juli and Hema got me a bag from Charles and Keith while I was back in Singapore, which was very sweet and thoughtful of them.

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They remembered that green is my favourite colour. And there is a detachable side strap so I can sling it over my shoulder. A function which I love, and find very useful as I ride a scooter so it puts my mind at ease that it wont suddenly drop off while I’m on the road.

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Inside is roomy enough to pack in my daily essentials like my wallet, mobile phone, keys, camera and whatnots.

In short, I really love my gift. Thanks Juli! Thanks Hema! 🙂

I love my bag so much that I was super careful with it, and made sure that I didn’t handle it too roughly in fear that I could accidentally scratch it. After all, my besties, whom I don’t meet up as often now, gave it to me, so I want to treasure it.

The irony of this story is that I left the bag on the bed for a bit to pray, and Janet the evil cat entered the room and started clawing it!

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I broke my prayers when I heard the horrible sound, and when I saw the damage, I was hysterical!

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In my anger, I cooked Janet the evil cat into satay. On the flip side, I guess I have a sort of  souvenir, so in a way, I can remember more of Singapore, I guess.

In any case, does anyone have any idea how to fix my bag? I doubt a cobbler could do anything about it.

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