NZ Summer Holiday - Day 3

A new day awaits us as we woke up fresh and chirpy... Had a good night's sleep and our day started at 10 am...

amanda was our little helper in charge of the gps throughout the entire trip... :)  as usual, daddy went round uni-hunting.... boring... *yawns*

bought his tees and sweatshirts as usual...

drove to st lukes (auckland's largest mall) recommended by the bus driver when we boarded the bus at auckland's fish market last night... hehehe.... had lunch there and did lots of shopping... advantage of self-drive is you can just dump your loots in the car boot... hehe!

since the sky was still bright, we decided to drive to long bay beach and park...

daddy balancing himself while trying to capture shots of the seagulls soaring in the sky...

the car became our mobile wardrobe as we had a change of outfit.. lol!

our shadows and the awesome beach of long bay....  :)

the feeling there was great.. totally relaxing....

these 2 boys caught our attention and we couldn't help but sneak a few shots of them... :P

extreme lower right... beware : ducks crossing!

decided to squeeze in devonport as well since it was still bright at 7pm.... woohoo.... i love long days...

look at the father & daughter doing the same pose... can you spot a guy swimming in the sea?

what a lovely poodle...

devonport yacht club

devonport is a lovely town... would be nice if we could sit down, relax and have a drink at one of the taverns... but a pity we were running short of time...

dropped by countdown to get some grocery... silly us, parked at britomart and it cost us NZ8 for just 1 hour 4 mins of parking... gosh! countdown provides free parking for their shoppers and it's right at the doorstep...

decided to cook dinner... prepared mushroom pasta with fresh prawns, bought 3 types of salads (cannot remember which but they were absolutely delicious), fried eggs and also ready-packed bbq drumsticks... it was a sumptuous meal... had actually wanted to take a picture of everything nicely set up but by the time we started cooking, it was almost 10pm and we were all famished... so started devouring whatever could be eaten while waiting for pasta to be cooked.... hahaa..... amanda helped me in preparing the meal... :)

amanda also tried oreo dipped in milk before she slept... she said she's been seeing this in the advertisement and wondered how it tasted like, so decided to try...

NZ Summer Holiday Day 1 and 2

21 December 2011....  The long awaited NZ trip is finally here.... This trip has been postponed for the longest time and the air ticket was due to expire in a month's time.  Can you imagine, we bought the Auckland ticket 1 year ago??!!.... Not only that, we almost changed the ticket to fly to London.... Anyway, to cut a long story short, we paid S$7,200 in total for 3 of us on the SQ flight to Auckland (amendments and flight upgrading etc)... This is ridiculously crazy, but we didn't have any choice, since we had to return earlier for Amanda's orientation in her new school...

as usual, we parked our car in terminal 3 throughout the entire trip...

amanda had some food before the flight since she usually sleeps through the entire flight without any meals... however, this time, it was a great success for amanda... not only did she not vomit at all, in fact she even managed to stay awake for a sector to catch the inflight movies and snack on potato chips and chocolates....

our rented car... since we have spent so much unnecessary fees on our flight, we decided to cut on our car... hence we took from a local nz company instead of our usual hertz car rental... it was a good experience but just that the car was a little old, compared to what we usually got from hertz i.e. the latest model... haha...

checked into the apartment... and after freshening up, we walked around the city... amanda was so funny, she logged on to facebook the moment we reached the apartment whilst i was seeing to the check-in... haha....

we finally found the apartment we stayed when amanda was 3 years old... daddy was elated as he had very good experience and memories during his stay... lol!!

took the free shuttle to auckland fish market...

we enjoyed ourselves so much here.... played awhile before we had our dinner....

seafood was ultra fresh!

just couldn't resist my cuppa coffee...  we discovered L&P and love it to bits!

our seafood dinner....

never had such a relaxing meal in a long time.... good food, good ambience with live band, perfect evening cool weather of 15 deg cel and most importantly, with my family.... awesome to the max! <3

more pics before we took the bus back to auckland city... decided to drop by this bbq duck cafe to get out takeaway supper... daddy's favourite!

bottom left : our supper... by the way, the char siew rawks... and the beef hor fun was awesome too...  extreme right : refreshment with compliments from the apartment...

Time for bed... Day was extremely well spent... Looking forward to another fun day the next morning...  :))



December, a time for fun!

December, being the month of school holiday and celebrations, tend to be filled with more fun and happenings.... will blog about my NZ holidays in the next post...

3 & 4 dec... dinner at chongqing mala steamboat at tanglin....

dim sum again... and baby's recovering well... :)

followed by snacks at fruits paradise and tea time at joo chiat...

5 dec... visit to the school's dentist for the last time... had her molar extracted... her first time getting a jab on her gums.. brave girl.. look at the bloody tooth and the way they bundle up her tooth...

8 dec... the 2 letters of offer from both MGS and SCGS... and we chose the latter.... arthur christmas was quite nice, considering that christmas is just round the corner... :)

yummilicious japanese lunch at arashi... each of us had our own pot... i had beef in hokkaido milk broth, daddy had seafood in herbal broth, while amanda's child meal consisted of porridge in jap broth...

11 &12 dec... hi-tea buffet at swissotel merchant court... love the christmas decor....

brought tinkerbelle out for some fresh air...

look! daddy caught a fish... and no, we were not fishing, but he just happened to see the fish swim to the surface of the water... lol... well, we put the fish back into the water after taking a photo... :)

our last meal in Singapore before we head off to New Zealand for our Summer holiday... yippie!

SIM Family away on a summer holiday....

29 dec... invited amanda's friends over as they've been wanting to play with tinker since before the school hols... at the same time, amanda wanted to break the news of her leaving the school to them... unfortunately, amanda fell ill the moment she returned from nz... had fever and vomitted... hence she looked quite pale and didn't have much energy to play with the girls... but the girls were really sweet and understanding... all of them kept trying to "cheer" her up... hehe...

dinner at mellben... yummy!

lunch at tangshifu... shiok!