A Brand New Baby!

Leaving for Lulea, I knew that I would miss the births of many babies. Four to be precise. Three friends of mine were pregnant in church and so was my cousin Linda. Thankfully, Facebook kept me abreast with the baby news in my church and I got to see the lovely pictures of the little new friends I would be meeting in due time.

As for my brand new baby niece, I asked my cousin Linda to sms me when she goes into the labour ward and I got my mum and her mum to keep me updated with dailations, contractions and the actual birth.

So at 2:16am Swedish time, my cousin sms-es me and says she is in the hospital on a chemical drip and close to an hour later she was given an epidural. I then immediately called her mother (my aunty Jinni), my mother and my grandma because I was so excited. This morning at 9:40 Swedish time, just as I woke up, my mother called to say that the baby was crowning and my cousin was going to give birth anytime. And 9 minutes later I get an sms that she had given birth to a beautiful, helathy baby girl at 4:38pm Singapore time. I immediately Skyped my mother who was in the hospital waiting room and she told me she had already seen pictures of the baby taken by the baby's dad - my cousin-in-law Anjan.

I'm an aunty for the second time over! I'm so excited and cannot wait to meet my new niece. I was promised that I will get to see her on Skype, and that they will email me the first pictures of her taken by her father. A brand new princess to love and adore, and I live right next to them, I can visit her everyday! I wonder what they will name her....

p.s. the picture is of my cousin Linda and my grandma taken at my cousin's traditional Indian baby shower.

Onde Onde Biasa

I made onde onde again. This time the traditional way - rolled in coconut. Yellow ones were sweet potato and green ones were plain, cos I didn't buy pandan.

While my international friends liked it, it was the Singaporean verdict that mattered most- cos they know what it should taste like.

Vishnu said that it pops in the mouth and oozes out syrup. And the skin wasn't too thick. But the best indication that it was not a disaster, was the empty plate littered with powdery soft coconut glistening with sugar that was left behind for me to pick at =)

Pick A Date, Any Date

So my time in Lulea is drawing to a close.
It seems too fast, I have less than a month.
I have told the landlord I'll be leaving on the 16th of December.
I still have till early Jan in Europe, but Lulea has been home all this while and I feel like moving away means uprooting myself from 'this' normal.
But maybe I'm just being overly dramatic...Seriously, what roots right?
And I do miss everyone back home so much. I have a new niece to meet too!
It's always the people isn't it? I think knowing that out of all the new friends I've made, only 9 will be back with me in Singapore is the saddest bit.
See you soon, in our sunny island set in the sea, my loves.

The party upstairs

This post is really really late, but I just got my paws on the photos cos I didn't bring Gordon (my camera along). The theme was Chic-Shock, so I wore my knee-high stripy socks and colourful scarf as the 'shock' factor to what would otherwise be a 'Chic' ensemble. It was one wild birthday party, and I being one of the last sober ones ended up babysitting random drunk people, including a French buy who kept telling me his knee hurt and a girl from Hong Kong who was being carried around by random boys. I was also dragged out onto the balcony by a drunk guy so I could be pelted with snowballs, he was suprisingly strong for someone drunk...I couldn't break free from his grip around me so I gave up struggling and just waited :/

Incriminating evidence!

This will impress my Indian Mother-In-Law (if I had one)

I cooked up a storm today. Made 5 dishes for an Indian dinner I promised to cook for Uncle Jimmy and his family- friends from church. I invited Vishnu to come along because everyone from our group has left to go skiing in Ruka except us 2.

Here's the menu:
Jeera Pulav (Cumin rice)
Vegetable cutlets
Yogurt potatoes
Pepper Fish Curry
Chicken Tikka

I wanted to challenge myself this time.
So last night I worked from midnight to 6am this morning to prepare all the ingredients, just so that at 11am (when i begin cooking after a nap) all the activity I had to do was limited to the stove-top and oven.
My workstation, complete with a steady stream of good music from my iTunes library.

I learnt that when you don't have a grinder, a grater is excellent to make pastes. But grating chilli and onions isn't any fun at all. In desperate times right guys?
Everything was in order and neatly stowed away. Vegetable cutlet mix, pepper curry paste, yoghurt sauce for potatoes, chicken happily marinating in masala spiked yogurt, potatoes boiled and cubed and plenty of chopped corriander.

The furious cooking began at about noon and I ended at 4pm, just in the nick of time for uncle Jimmy to come and pick us and the food up. Here's how it all turned out!
The yogurt potatoes were really yums :) I made the gravy thicker because the fish gravy was the more liquid kind.
Spiced basmati rice steaming away on top of the stove.
The Jeera rice turned out nice and fluffy. It was my favourite dish of the lot. Simple and homely.
Vegetable cutlets, potatoes, peas, corn, spices and curry paste. These were a hit, should have made more.
The pepper fish curry with a sprinkling of almonds. The gravy wouldn't thicken up even after a lot of water had evaporated away, so I just threw in a lot of breadcrumbs and voila! Perfect consistency. Hahaha! Very spicy and shiok, but I prefer attah's version more.
Chicken Tikka! Can't tell you how it was cos I don't eat chicken, hahah. But it was the only mild thing there.

I thought I was only going to feed 5 people but it turned out that there were 8 people there and still there was enough food to go around and a little bit left over too. I think God multiplied the food after Uncle Jimmy prayed for it ;) And Africans love their spices, so the food went down well with them. Yay, another cooking experiment that did not end up in disaster.

Posters

I've never been one for posters, I have zilch in my room back in Singapore. I love hangings and things in a frame but not sticking posters directly on my walls. Anyway in my apartment are some fun posters that the 3 girls shared and bought. I have no share in them cos I didn't really see the need for them and didn't wanna pay for 'em. They were cool with me sitting out on this...I think...Hahahah! Anyway they are quite funny and I thought I'd share them with you guys. Very typical university life posters... click on the images and zoom in to read the small print!
Ok the next one is very um...graphic? I dunno, its the one that is taken down whenever anyone's family members come over for a visit :p There's a running joke about how when boyfriends [potential or existing] come over, it would be a good *ahem* guide, so it is completely understandable if you see someone dashing out of a bedroom to take a look before dashing back in and locking the door -_- [I don't suggest zooming into this one, in case you were wondering.]

Dude, where's my ceiling?

Well, I can't say how this happened on the world wide web, but you can ask me in a private chat or something ;p

Long story short, a broken pipe led to water being collected between the floor of the guy's apartment upstairs and the ceiling of my apartment. So on Sunday morning we saw water running down the walls and on Monday morning water was literally pouring out of the ceiling light near our kitchen. There were men from Linbacks (real estate company that owns the property) here moping up the mini flood and trying to assess the situation.

So this morning I woke up to the loud roaring sounds of various tools gnashing and tearing at our ceiling. I walk out and see the entire place covered in plastic sheets and white dust. I couldn't even fix myself a meal before class. But the guy ding the work was really nice and moved away some of the sheets and stopped wokring for a while so I could get some water and an apple :/

At about 3:30pm I got back from school and I couldn't help myself, I just had to document the situation.


I just had to stop and laugh. And poor Andrea just cleaned up the flat cos it was her turn to do it this week. Thank God she left for the ski trip or we would not hear the end of it. Hahaha!
I'm just worried that I will not be able to cook tomorrow because I'm making a full blown 6 course Indian dinner for 6 people...I will probably go upstairs and borrow the boys' kitchen :/