Cotton Candy Skies

I think the sky speaks for itself.
Simply, literally, Divine.

It's amazing that God would paint such beautiful scenes for us to enjoy. Standing before a sky of powder pink, lilac and baby blue makes me feel so insignificant and small. But I'm inspired, and my soul is awakened to sing, "My God how great Thou Art".I'm reminded that it is my Father's world and that He does speak to me everywhere. And today He chose to speak to me by dipping the clouds in my favourite hues and saying, "It's time you looked up, my child".

To Market, To Market, To Make Me A Cake!

Today I decided I must bake something or I WILL DIE. Seriously, it has been a month without having baked a single thing. So I checked with Bryan if I could steal some Coca Cola for a Coke cake and he was like, "Sure, I'll exchange Coke for cake". So it was settled. I set out for Willy's supermarket with my backpack and a loooong list of things to buy. Flour, eggs, cocoa powder, vanilla sugar...the works!
Then I get to the bus stop after spending 229SEK (SGD$46), with close to 7Kg in my backpack worth of goods only to realise that the bus was not coming for 58mins. That means I'll pass the 1.5 hour mark for how long the bus ticket I got for my ride to town validity period and will have to spend another 12SEK (SGD$2.4) for a 15 min bus ride. So I decided to walk. I began walking at 12:07pm, I got home at 1:43pm. I kid you not. It didn't seem to far because the weather was cool and I didn't realise that my hands were actually numb from the cold until I had to open my door.
By the time I got home I was more hungry than tired. So I looked at my fridge and decided that my mushrooms had to go as they've been in there too long and the amount of milk I had left was way too little to have cereal with. Looks like I'm having Creamy mushroom pasta for lunch then.

I threw in one cup of milk, half a cup of water, 2 sliced button mushrooms, a knob of butter, and salt and paprika to taste into a pan and put it on medium heat. Once it started to boil I turned the heat down and kept stirring to reduce it without burning the bottom. When it was all lovely and creamy, I poured it onto a plate, put on 2 slices of Gouda cheese and threw it into the oven to melt the cheese. This is certainly something I'm gonna be making in the near future. Shiokedelic to the max!

But that's not all I made, remember the Coke Cake? Here's where I got the recipe. It's the same one I used to make back in Singapore. You can't taste the coke at all, but usually one person out of the entire group will say they can taste it *shrug*. I just love it because it is MOIST and RICH and CHOCOLATY!
It was a bit strange making it in a not-so-well equipped kitchen and using 'dl' cups instead of 'ml' cups and weighing scales but with the help of some "aggaration" it turned out alright. And the best part is, I have no more cake left, every last bit was gone. Yay! I don't have to feel guilty about finishing left over cake in the fridge!

Mojlkuddensberget - probably the highest point in Lulea

I loved the Mojlkudden hill that I had the Christian fellowship BBQ on so much, that I decided to take my friends there two days ago. Only Katalin, Bryan and Song could make it, so we packed our dinners and made our way there expecting a beautiful sunset and a great view of the city. We got everything we came for.

Nasi Lemak!

I had some left over coconut milk from the time I made my grandma's spicy tomato soup, so I decided to try and make Nasi Lemak! There was no need to make any sambal since I stumbled across a shop selling sambal olek in Boden, so it was a meal waiting to happen really.

Into a saucepan, I put two small cups of rice with one cup of coconut milk and one and a half cups of water. Then I added half an onion that I had minced up, a slice of ginger and a pinch of salt. Put in on a hot stove till the water boils and then turn down the stove to the lowest setting and let it cook till slightly moist and fluffy. I attempted to make a nais lemak style egg, which I must say made me think fondly about Changi Village.

And of course I needed a side dish, so I just made a spicy kentang goreng which is really just frying boiled potato chunks with curry and chili powder and i stir fried some crabsticks with mushrooms and oyster sauce. I don't think it looks very good, but looks in this case were deceiving, because it was YUMMY!



My housemates Kenza and Lucie are excellent cooks, their dinners always look and smell so good. And they nice enough to let me have some but that just leaves me feeling bad for offering them my food because it's not half as good as theirs :s


Here's Kenza's Middle Eastern-ish tasting chicken risotti:








And here is Lucie's French gratain with
penne and salmon:

Making plans

I never imagined that I would ever say "I'm tired of planning", but that time has come folks. This entire week has been spent planning for a trip to Italy and Greece from Oct 3-12. And yes it sounds like a load of fun, but planning it has reduced my sleeping hours and studying hours drastically and because I feel like I'm spending too much money I get occasionaly pangs of guilt that don't go away until I est chocolate and let some guilt of a different kind take over instead. Then its not so bad.

Anyway it has taken so much effort to plan because we are on a budget and we want to see Milan, Cinque Terre a scenic collection of 5 towns south of Milan, Venice, Athens and Santorini the MUST SEE greek island.

It is a really hardcore trip, like Mel's and my whirlwind Scandinavia trip. There will be many nights on trains/planes/ferries and train stations. We'll prbably get to sleep on a bed like 4 times the whole trip.

And flights to and from Athens is the killer because everything else is really cheap 30-40 Euros, but getting to athens is costing us close to 200 Euros!! But its Greece, and getting there from Italy is cheaper than getting there form anywhere else so I might as well do it now.

My travel buddies for the whole trip will be Mel and Bryan but Dale and Song might skip Italy and join us in Greece. They better...planning this trip with all the connections and 4modes of transport involved blood, sweat and tears. Bryan was saying we should get credits for travel planning. Anyway Song told me he wa simpressed with my plan, and coming from someone who studies tourism or the like...I'm pleased.

So how much is my 10 day 5 city trip gonna set me back by? A grand total of SGD$1000. Cheap? Siao ah? Expensive? You tell me.

Weekending

Thursday

The weekend began early this week with a visit to Toys R Us on Thrusday. It really made me miss Shaun because he's the biggest Toys R Us fan I know personally and whenever we went to one, we would sword fight in the aisle and I would proceed to give my 'anti gender bias' speech about why girls have vacuum cleaners and pooping babies as toys and boys have jets and super soakers.
I digress, anyway, yes we had fun looking at giant plush unicorns, Monopoly Sweden and I even played dress up as a viking!
Saturday
Then on Saturday Melissa and Bryan had signed up for a boat trip around the Lulea Archipelago, so Dale, Song, Vishnu and I decided to take a trip to Boden as there was a indoor pool there with slides, a current pool, steam bath, jacuzzi...the works! Before going, we had to stop by a sports shop as I didn't have a swimsuit and the boys readily helped me pick one. It was sweet, strange and embarrassing all at the same time. We (I) managed to find a pink bikini top and pink shorts to match. So we skipped over to the bus station and waited for number 23 to roll on by and take us to our water park.
Though I have no pictures to prove it, we DID have fun and TONNES of it too! The slides were awesome though there were some minor cuts and bruises sustained by the boys. No biggie. We went down the slides many times, then all clung onto a float shaped like a loooong snake and went round and round the current pool before calling it a day. The steam bath and jacuzzi were a nice touch to round up the whole day.

Our search for dinner led us to a small grocery shop run by an Iranian man. We found sesame oil, sambal and tom yum paste as incredible prices! But one the expiry date for the tom yam paste is 2 weeks ago...so I'm gonna try and freeze it. After a nice pizza dinner we headed back to Lulea by bus, chatting the entire time. It was great :)

Sunday
Haparanda! That is where the nearest IKEA is. IKEA truly is the same everywhere, except for maybe the food...but there isn't much to say about it because it really is the same.
But this was an IKEA paid trip, so food and refreshments were provided. In fact the areas around IKEA are more worthy of mention.
First we decied to go to Finland, which we were told is just 5 mins away. Well it took us more than 5 mins but it is very very near. The whole time we didn't know if we had reached Finland as the border was just a stony path and the only way we realised we were in finland was seeing a door sign in Finnish. it was quite cool seeing everything in a different language an being a mall that excepted euros if you did not have kronor.
But we quickly got bored of the lack of things to do in that part of Finland so we turned back round and walked over to Sweden. We wanted to see the stores that were surrounding IKEA. My favourite was the candy shop called 'Candy World'. I was pretty awesome, especially the 'pick & mix'. Just rows and rows of a never ending supply of candy (Godis in Swedish).
And such ends my eventful weekend, it was great and I must say I loved whatever it was that we were doing. Of course, the company was awesom-est :)

Hangout Out, Down the Street, The Same Old Thing We did Last Week

We have a routine here that we rarely break. One of supermarket shopping and thrift store foraging. I guess that gives away the fact that there really is nothing much to do here.There are many supermarkets here, COOP, ICA and other small ones, but only one has won our hearts and wallets. Only one can make us weak at the knees and unable to ignore its deadly siren-esque calls..."Come buy cheese"..."Come, I know you want oyster sauce"...."Come, Ben n Jerry's is cheaper here and I know you have stopped counting calories".

Let me introduce to you Willy's, the supermarket chain that has probably earned enough from us Singaporeans to feed a small country for a month.
Every time we go there, which is like once to twice a week, I can spend SDG$50-$80. And the worst part is that I eat and cook so much that I actually finish what I buy. One of the guys here actually spent SDG$120 here at one go. I have no qualms with Willy's as I can get almost anything there and it's cheap, but they don't have tofu :(