Season Greetings- Merry Christmas & best wishes to a Happy New Year 2015!

As we mature further, time seems to fly faster..

In what seemingly feels like a blink of the eyes, 2014 is drawing to a close, and another year is coming with a lot of hopes and expectations. May your wishes and dreams be fulfilled in the coming year. Merry Christmas 2014 and a Happy New Year 2015!

Cheers to health, wealth and happiness!

Inspired by a 60 years old cyclist

I was on a ferry back to Singapore earlier this week and I was very lucky to get to know a very determined stranger on the ferry. Mr Jan van Susteren is a 60 year-old gentleman who is on a journey from New Zealand to the Netherlands, mainly on his bicycle.

The encounter with Jan immediately reminded me of the bicycle that I bought a couple of months back when I thought I was going to pick up cycling as a hobby. As the picture below clearly shows,

even on the day I collected my bicycle, I did not ride it home..

I even bought some lighting accessories from the internet thinking that I will be cycling often at night..

But guess what? In the past six months, I only managed to really cycle about two times..Can you imagine how I must have felt when I met a 60 year-old man going around about half of the world on his bicycle alone?

Anyway, after this chanced encounter with Jan, I am greatly inspired by how far a human can go on pedal power. While I am not planning to see the world on my bicycle yet, I will take Jan's advice to start off on a more regular basis..and I will follow Jan's Blog and Facebook updates as a form of support for him on his cycling journey. I hope you can do the same as well.

The other guy in the above picture is a Singaporean by the name Bob. I had requested for him to email me a few other photos we took with Jan. If I receive them, I will update the photos here.

Cheers!

My first attempts at wrapping Nem cuốn (Vietnamese Fresh Springroll)

I have eaten Vietnamese fresh spring rolls on a couple of occasions before, but earlier today, I had my first hand experience at wrapping it myself before consumption!

I started off with a piece of rice paper. It looks and feels like a piece of plastic initially, but after wetting the whole piece in water, it becomes soft and sticky.

Next, this is the time where you will choose and put whatever you want to eat from a selections of ingredients onto the wet rice paper. This was what I added...

Next, just roll the whole thing up very carefully..see below for my first roll..very healthy looking!

After rolling it up, dip it in a fish sauce mixture and it is ready to eat..After the first roll, I was hoping to make further improvements to my wrapping skill, so I kept rolling..

And rolling..

..and rolling...

..I wanted to make it look more delicious and at the same time, improve my wrapping skills..

This was the last roll I ate for tonight..do you think it's better than the first one I rolled?

No matter what, I really enjoyed my dinner this evening! Special thanks to all the people who made this possible! Thank you my friends!:  Cảm ơn bạn bè của tôi

Goose meat meal (可口鹅肉)

The last time I had a goose meal was when I was in my home town in Swatow, China.
It has been a long while and I must admit that you cannot really find goose meat in Singapore nowadays.
The braised goose meat at this shop near Bangkok, Thailand is delicious, however, the liver was a bit too overcooked & dry for my preference.
They way they cooked the vegetable gives me a sense of authentic traditional flavour and the bittergourd soup was great as well!
The location is just before 26 Suk Sawat.

Mid Autumn 2014

It's been a busy day today. I was fully utilized attending meeting in the morning and helping out at a community event in Hougang SMC this afternoon & evening.

I did not have much time to think much earlier, but I did manage to take a shot of this image..Reminds me of the time when I was this young and my favourite activity to celebrate Mid Autumn Festival.

When I saw this scene, I could not help but wondered.."Am I even too old to play with candles like these kids?" Will I still be doing the same thing this Mid-Autumn? Am I the only one thinking of this?

I carried on carrying out my role as the photographer for the event, taking photos of the many kids running around having a great time..and at the same time, missing my own kids.

I was really very glad they were still awake when I reached home..

Kudos to all the people working very hard to serve the community, you are awesome... Remember to spend time with your family & friends too! ;)

Happy Chinese New Year 新年快乐！

When I was much younger & in school, I always had this habit of rushing my homework/ tutorials at the last minute..

Today, 2 more hours to welcome the Year of the Horse..here I am about to embark to prepare the Ang Bao(red packets)..

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all my family, friends, clients, partners/ associates a very happy, healthy, wealthy & wonderful Year of the Horse!

祝大家马年行好运，身体健康， 万事如意！

Huat Ahhh...!!

Forgotten words in my draft folder

I was trying to clear away the many forgotten draft emails from my gmail folder and found the following words dated back to 2008. I could not remember the source of it, but I would still like to share it here..

my way, my dreams, my rainbow ..our life is like a river, we will never touch the same water twice cause the flow that has passed will never pass us again... 

anyone can catch your eye but it takes someone special to catch your heart... letting go of someone you love is as good as remembering someone you have not met... it only take one moment to lose someone so treasure the person beside you cause you will never know when they will be gone... there are moments in life when you miss someone  so much that you just want to pick them from your dreams and hug them for real!

when the door of happiness closes, another opens; but often times we look so long at the closed door that we don't see the one, which has been opened for us. 




go for someone who makes you smile, because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright. find the one that makes your heart smile. dream what you want to dream; go where you want to go; be what you want to be, because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do. may you have enough happiness to make you sweet, enough trials to make you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human and enough hope to make you happy. the happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way.

 the brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past; you can't go forward in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches.

 when you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. live your life so at the end, you're the one who is smiling and everyone around you is crying. 

the most beautiful things in life are those that come by chance, and you turned that chance into an opportunity and eventually a step closer to your dreams. life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breaths away. 

good friends are hard to find, harder to leave, and impossible to forget. don't let the past hold you back, you're missing the good stuff. life's short. if you don't look around once in a while you might miss it. 

a best friend is like a four leaf clover, hard to find and lucky to have. some people make the world special by just being in it. when it hurts to look back, and you're scared to look ahead, you can look beside you and your best friend will be there...

I remember this place after 14 years..

The 1st time I was here, it was an evening about 14 years ago.

I arranged for a prospective 3-room HDB buyer to view one of the unit here at this block one evening(Blk 308 Clementi).

At that time, a 3-room HDB was priced at around $150-$180k and my commission should have been about $1k plus..

From this location, approximately 3 months and 50 units of viewing across Singapore later..my prospective buyer finally got a 'landed inter-terrace' 3-room HDB near Jalan Bahagia at double his original budget..and my commission was therefore doubled to $3k plus.

If you were to ask me was the deal worth it after 50 viewings..i have totally no regrets..

I learned a lot from this deal and i treasured it very much such that despite visiting this place for the 2nd time after 14 years, I can remember this place..this was where my real estate career started and took off.

This was my humble beginning as a real estate salesperson.