Baden Restaurant & Pub @ Holland Village

Baden Restaurant & Pub

T.G.I.F. It's been almost half a year since the last meetup at Orchard Gateway with my Lund University exchange buddies.

Yiting suggested Baden Restaurant & Pub located at Holland Village as she heard good reviews from her boyfriend.

I would say that, since it's a German restaurant, the name Baden could be derived from the old German territory.

It brought us back to having cheap and delicious pork knuckles, sausages and beer in Berlin and Munich 3 years ago.

I managed to get a table of 4 by walking in, and it seemed to be the last isolated table available, it was 7pm. As reservation is not available, you might want to reach earlier to get a place before the restaurant is full.

Erdinger Weißbiers (500ml) @ $16
One-For-One during Happy Hours (ends at 9pm)

I was wondering if I haven't been eating out for too long, I find the food and drinks ridiculously expensive. Thankfully we managed to whop the one-for-one Erdinger draft beer before it was too late.

Pork knuckle was not bad, but they can definitely cook better sausages. The standard is still far from Germany.

I enjoyed the reminiscence, the food however... I would give a thumbs up if they were more affordable.

Pardon the quality of the photos, they are all taken by my iPhone 6 because I forgot to bring my camera.

Hühnerflügel @ $10
Deep fried chicken wings with thai chili sauce


Schweinshaxe @ $36
Baden's famous pork knuckle with crispy whole potato and sauerkraut


Würstplatte - fünf @ $35
Platter of 5 different types of sausages


Kalmarkugel @ $7
Cuttlefish balls with thai chili sauce



42 Lorong Mambong
Singapore 277698
Tel: 6463 8127

49 Seats @ Kreta Ayer Road

Every gathering with them is a reminiscence of our unforgettable student exchange days in Sweden.

We kind of 'promised' to have a bi-monthly meetup, which obviously failed simply because we are working adults now.

Like every other gathering, we talked about our fruitful trips in Europe and the funny moments we had in Lund University, the cool breeze that swept us over as Min Khai and I made our periodic return cycling trips from Sparta to Östra Torn, where Phoebe and Yiting stayed, for a dinner, for a movie screening, or just anything.

Seafood Marinara Pasta @ $13.90


Chicken Chop @ $13.90


Pan Fried Fish with Al Scampi Sauce @ $16.90


Tom Yum Seafood Pasta @ $14.90
This seems to be their signature dish, but too bad my taste bud isn't catered for Thai food

And, I wonder when will our next meetup be...

49 Seats
49 Kreta Ayer Road
Singapore 089007

Freehand Cycling

After 2 months of continuous cycling (especially for me who had classes everyday), I finally can cycle without hands!!

Sometimes whenever the road is spacious enough I'll always try to release my hands for a while then grab back the handlebars, eventually I thought I was actually gaining some feeling towards the correct posture and technique of freehand cycling.

And today I managed to do it when I was cycling alone to Yiting's house at Stralsundsvägen, Östra Torn for dinner. I thought my bicycle's gonna topple but it stayed straight for very long, as long as I wanted it to.
I was pretty surprised then, as I'm totally not an expert in cycling, although regularly I cycle to school.

However I have to get my bicycle to a certain speed to keep it gyroscopic, else it will topple or self-steered because of gravitational force, and of course I still can't steer without hand. Let's see if I can do it before my exchange ends. Hehe...

Not to show off, and I know a lot of people can do this, but I just wanna share my happiness for attaining one negligible skill in my life. やった！^^

I dropped my camera...

That evening I was cycling to Pizzeria Primo Ciao Ciao for dinner with Min Khai, Syjia, Yiting and Weiling. Instead of the bag I usually bring, I brought my black slinging bag and didn't zip the compartment where my camera was put into (like I usually do in NUS - never zipped my bag).

When I took my bag out from the my bike's basket, my camera just dropped with lens facing down (the bag was placed vertically in the basket).

And resulted in...

When I looked at the cracks, my heart cracked, but luckily it's the lens filter that's cracked, not the lens thankfully, and surprisingly images can still be taken normally with the cracked lens filter attached.

Then I checked around the camera body and found some scratches, which really made my night doomed, as I found the permanent imperfection as shown above. My GF3's gorgeous metallic red body.... sobz...

Thank God, for protecting my camera from malfunctioning and teaching me a lesson of not being careless anymore in such thing.

And then I remembered a quote from 貧窮貴公子（山田太郎ものがたり） that can be a consolation:
「世界上再完美的東西，都會有它毀壞的一天。」


PS: Get your camera a lens filter if you haven't had one.

Lund University: CNY Celebration

One saddening fact to be realized during exchange - barely a fortnight after arriving here for exchange it's the Chinese New Year Eve, on 22 Jan 2012 (Sun), which is going to be celebrated out of hometown.
Another not so saddening fact is, no holidays for Chinese New Year in Sweden, or in almost all European countries.

Also, as you can see, what a "White CNY".

And so, all the NUS exchange students in Lund are ethnically Chinese, 11 of 14 of the NUS exchange students plus 1 NTU exchange students, had a 'reunion' dinner at Gareth and Wei Ling's house in Stralsundsvägen, Östra Torn.

Preparation






Reunion Dinner

After the dinner, we moved to Yiting and Sy Jia's house for some forfeit and drinking games before the hour hand touching 12, to 守歲, maybe?

Skål!!! (Cheers!!!)

And at 12am in Lund, some SMU exchange students and Östra Torn residents dropped by to wish us a Happy Lunar New Year.

And so this is my first and hopefully last CNY celebrated overseas.

恭祝各界：
龍馬精神　生意興龍　龍飛鳳舞　龍騰虎躍

For more photos, please check out my photo album Lund University: CNY Celebration on Facebook.

SEP Arrival

Doha International Airport

Approximately 6 hours of flight from Changi Airport to Doha International Airport, 2 hours of transit and 7 hours of flight from Doha International Airport to Copenhagen Airport Terminal 2, I've reached the destination.

The place where I'm going to do my exchange, Lund University in Sweden, is so near to Denmark that the easiest way to reach there is to take train (Öresundståg) from Copenhagen, Denmark that travels across the sea between these two countries, or in other words, Lund is a very southern city of Sweden.

Kastrup Station

We just touched this foreign and unfamiliar place with unfamiliar languages and customs, and these definitely made us wondering where and how to get train tickets to Lund.

A lot of us just stood inside the airport and some of us went out of the airport to taste the temperature - cold, really cold, it's like when I was in China.

Well, back to the train tickets, Wei Ming has bought 14 of us train tickets from Kastrup Station, the station beneath the airport to Lund Central Station, which cost about SEK140 each. Yup, Scandinavia is expensive to live in.

Our very very first photo with all 14 of us the NUS exchange students in (at least for my camera)

There's toilet (or you may call it lavatory) in the train, good that you don't have to rush for toilet before hopping on the train.

The train route is Kastrup - Hyllie - Triangeln - Malmö Central Station (Malmö C) - Lund Central Station (Lund C) and it took roughly 30 minutes.

After alighting, we're supposed to find some mentors in blue Lund University T-shirt as they'll be picking us up and fetching us to the AF building for registration, and we did found them, or were noticed by them.

I forgot which track but the track where we alighted doesn't have elevator, too bad we had to carry our heavy luggages through the stairs.

The mentor that drove me is a Chinese girl, who speaks Swedish, apparently sort of like a local student in Lund University.

Registration and Housing
Registration was fast, sitting on chair forming a queue and being issued a welcome package with free SIM card and some letters containing our university WiFi login ID and password.

For housing, I queued for a while and got my room key, whoohoa.
I don't know why but it took freaking long after my turn and till the end, everyone was waiting for Aletheia.
The reason, she couldn't get an accommodation because her contract of staying in Sparta starts in February.
I really did feel sorry for her, but... nothing could be done, the person in charge for private housing was out for lunch, seemed like she had to think of some other ways.

She ended up decided to stay in Min Khai's room for the first month, as Min Khai, Aletheia and I are staying in Sparta while most of the rest stay in Östra Torn.

We then waited outside the AF Building for some mentors to drive us to where we're going to stay, which eventually took more than an hour.

During that hour, I ran up to the AF Building and registered for SUSA01 - Swedish: Introductory Course for Exchange Students 1, which I didn't plan to take because I'm not interested in Swedish and didn't intend to map this back to NUS, but these just lost to peer pressure.

My room (E307) at Sparta

My housing rental is the cheapest among all others, lucky me, and it's very very near to LTH (Faculty of Engineering). There's even a supermarket (ICA Tuna) downstairs, thank God!!!

However, bathroom and kitchen are shared (for Sparta International Corridor), I'm ok with that because that's what hall's like.

My room, I can say that it's bigger than any hostel room you can find in NUS, but one fluorescent light tube is spoilt, and you can only review on that but can't get it fixed by the caretaker, so have to fix by yourself.

There're also stuffs left by the previous tenant like mirror and table light, so I'll just utilize them.

Spent some time to unpack my luggage and set up all the plugs, extension and LAN cable. The bed's springy, the table's big, the wardrobe's spacious enough.

It's 3pm and I should be meeting Min Khai and Aletheia but I've been straying around at the entrance there and I couldn't find them, the sucky thing was, we couldn't contact each other as we didn't have each other's number, and we have to top up first to make calls. I was going to give up and walk to AF building to meet the rest by myself but Gareth told me that the Östra Torn people were at ICA Tuna shopping for stuffs. Well then I walked back to ICA Tuna since it's where I'm staying.

Dinner

Our first dinner in Sweden was pizza at Olympia Pizza & Café, just next to ICA Tuna (at that point of time I was just considering myself as the luckiest one to get to stay in such convenient hostel, haha...).

We ordered three huge pizzas and each of us paid SEK40, which is cheap. And as new arrivals, we'll automatically divide the price by 5 to get the rough conversion to SGD.

Pizzas are common and relatively affordable in Europe, we're definitely gonna be fed on pizzas for countless times in Europe.