Plenty Of Food!

The man and I had many friends in town over the long weekend. It was just not possible to take them out together for meals. We had to split up to go out with them for some quality conversation instead of doing an awkward group chat. We had no time to cook and host anybody at home. Different dietary preferences and schedules meant that it would be a logistical nightmare to attempt a mass meal outing.

They all met at Lepa(r)k! anyway. :) Strangers before, cool acquaintances, and some were more than facebook-friends after Saturday. Some were here on a work trip and the rest were on a stop-over on a vacation out to other cities. An outdoor event on Saturday with the whole NDP festivities took a perfect spot in their schedules. "Rain or shine, we'll come." They declared. They love the humidity, and the heat. WIN.

This is a city where they could get affordable (comparatively) Japanese food, and decent street/hawker food. When I enquired about their to-date dietary preferences, in addition to their usual meat-free/meat-only/low carb/low cholesterol, etc, stuff, they also stated a preference for "local fare, doesn't matter if there's no AC. No Italian, no Vietnamese. Please, no western-celebrity restaurants. Enough of those." Okaaay. The local fare at Tiong Bahru Market and Maxwell Hawker Centre were hits with them. I left them to wander around the cafes in Tiong Bahru and Amoy Street on their own. Like me, they don't quite appreciate the local coffee and needed to look for a 'flat white' or 'cortado' sorta thing. Haha.

We made the rounds of the decent to superb Japanese restaurants as well. Well done on the chopsticks skills! Although we didn't bother using chopsticks at Shinji and Tatsuya when it came to the sushi. The friends fell in love with the local kopitiam's soft-boiled egg, and when they saw a restaurant's description of onsen tamago, they insisted on trying just to see the difference between a Japanese version, and our kopitiams'. Japanese eateries offering onsen tamago are so hard to track down. Yes, the usual restaurants will whip it up for me, but it's kinda fun to have it already on the menu and check out which ones do it best. (But yes, I can do it at home. It's just egg. I do egg quite well.)

I had fun preparing personalized welcome packs for the friends! Always good hanging out with those I haven't seen for a while, and with those whom I see annually. A stable sort of friendship exists, as in the sane type, without strings attached. They don't expect us to take them out while they visit, and we don't expect them to take us out when we visit. It so happens that we enjoy one another's company, and it really isn't difficult to make plans if there's nothing else major going on. In this instance, we said we were going to be flat out busy with Lepa(r)k! and couldn't really meet. So they came to Lepa(r)k! instead, not just for us, but they're genuinely interested in the Singapore arts and music scene as well! LOVE.