I really must talk about the burgers in England.

THEY’RE SO GOOD.

No, I don’t mean Big Macs, although those are good, too. I’m talking thick, juicy beef patties that completely overwhelm your taste buds as the succulent meat languishes on your tongue, making your buds think they’ve died and gone to heaven.

Can you see the juice almost dripping off the lettuce? The beef burger at LeBateau Bar & Bistro in Poole is amazing even plain. It’s £9.50 for the basic burger, plus £1 for each extra ingredient, like cheese or bacon.

A little pricey, I suppose, but totally worth it if you like beef burgers.

I’ve eaten many beef burgers here and they’re all good but LeBateau’s my favourite.

There are two other places where I enjoy the beef burgers (The Slug and Lettuce and The Print Room.) Unfortunately, I haven’t got photos of them because of random mishaps. They would have been nice photos, too, because those burgers were massive, with loads of stuff in them besides the beef.

OMG beef burgers.

I’m really happy to have found a fast food / junk food soulmate in Piers. He loves fast food as much as I do. We would walk past an empty McDonald’s french fry container on the road and we would simultaneously go, “Oooh McDonald’s!”

We try to limit our Mac intake to not more than once a week, but we keep driving each other crazy by just randomly saying, “McDonald’s!” and watching the other’s ecstatic, then tortured, expression.

Because we had already hit our McDonald’s quota one week, Pizza Hut was a very natural alternative. Anything with pepperoni = best, so we ordered two medium pizzas with loads of pepperoni. We managed to finish all of that plus a bowl of DIY salad.

I never liked Pizza Hut in the past because I hated the thick crusts, but after discovering pepperoni, I decided that Pizza Hut is the place to go to for pizza because nobody does pepperoni pizzas like Pizza Hut. Really!

Haha, Piers made his sulky face at me again. I was trying to take a photo of the pepperoni juice running down his fingers.

Anyway, he’s been complaining about me putting his photos on my blog, saying that it’s my blog so there should be photos of me instead of him. Haiyah. I just prefer taking photos of food and other people. It’s such a hassle taking my own.

But I suppose he’s a bit right. So here’s one..

Okay, done. Now that we’re all happy, let’s go back to talking about food.

We had dinner one night with the Wing Chun guys at an Indian restaurant called Taj Mahal. (I’ll bet there’s an Indian restaurant with that name in every city.)

The food wasn’t really good so I won’t recommend it. But the ambience is nice, although that meant the place was too dark for photos, especially of food, so I’ll try and distract you with people photos.

Very nice people, all of them. Hardly any chat about Wing Chun at my side of the table. We talked about life and travels and parties and stuff. So, I was thinking, if you just knew these people at a party or at work or whatever, you’d never guess they were all deadly martial artists who could incapacitate you within seconds if you tried to mug them in the streets.

I feel so very safe hanging out with them.

Okay that wasn’t really about food. Sorry.

Next!

I finally found good fish and chips here. Not that I’ve been trying, really. I discovered Chez Fred when googling Bournemouth attractions some time back. It had won a “Best Fish and Chip Shop in Great Britain” award once, so I thought it was worth a try.

It was, indeed, good. I’ve had it twice so far. There are always long queues at the restaurant, in both the takeaway and eat-in sections.

I don’t really know how to describe the difference between good and bad fish and chips because I’m not so much into fish. I like going to Fish & Co and Manhattan Fish Market but mostly because of butter cream mussels and garlic rice.

So I can only say that Chez Fred is really good because it’s always so crowded and because after eating it twice, I find myself wanting to eat it again.

I usually choose the cod (cheapest one) because the meat is so good, just the right balance between meaty and flaky. And the batter is tasty and doesn’t make you sick from being too oily. And the homemade tartar sauce is yummy.

Only downside is the chips are not that tasty, and soggy by the time we bring the food home. Maybe eat in next time. I imagine everything would taste better hot!

Okay, last item for this installment.

Irish food!

I tweeted about being in an Irish pub called O’niell’s where people were dressed in funny costumes (maybe celebrating St Patrick’s Day early). I had to take photos of them illicitly because Piers said I’d better not walk up to them and request for photos cos they all looked drunk and rowdy.

We had originally planned to only have drinks there, then go for dinner at an Italian restaurant across the street. But then we looked at the interesting menu and started having second thoughts. And they had a promotion of £8 for two meals so that sold us totally.

I wanted to try the Steak and Guinness Pie because it sounded Irish and I think it’s fun eating cultural food. It was okay. No taste of Guninness whatsoever. Not fantastic but nice enough. A steal for £4.

It was too dark in there so I used my mini torchlight on the food.

That’s why the photos look like they have torchlights shone on them.

Piers had a burger and we shared honey mustard sausages. They were all not bad at all.

It was quite enjoyable having dinner in a noisy Irish pub. I want to try dinner at a noisy English pub, next.

Well, so many things I want to try, or eat again. So sad we have limited stomach capacity and bank balances!

Anyway, Piers, if you’re reading this, McDonald’s!

=P

I’m going to Paris this Thursday and I’m scared.

What if I get kidnapped?

The movie “Taken”, starring Liam Neeson, was on TV on Sunday and Piers said I should watch it cos it’s a good movie.

It is a good movie, about this retired CIA agent whose teenage daughter goes to Paris and gets kidnapped by a prostitution syndicate, so he turns the world upside down to singlehandedly rescue her.

I hope I don’t get kidnapped.

Piers will be going with me to Paris so maybe he will protect me. Except his Wing Chun training isn’t up to the stage where he learns how to take men with guns out.

What if Piers kidnaps me!

Oh, I suppose he won’t. I’ve got photos of him all over my blog so it’ll be a bit dangerous for him to do that.

Haha. His unshaven mugger face.

Look, if I disappear and don’t update my blog for days, one of you will come and rescue me, right? Preferably a Jack Bauer type.

We’re staying at this apartment we found off Airbnb. It’s a website where you can find affordable short-term apartments, houses or rooms to rent. You can also list your own property to rent out to tourists.

It’s really cool cos it’s a lot cheaper and nicer than budget hotels!

We found an apartment in the 18th arrondissement near the Gare du Nord train station, which should make it quite convenient for us to get to the touristy places.

The apartment accommodates three people and costs US$61 (S$78) a night. That’s like practically nothing if you split it among three people.

I was looking at budget hotels before I found this (thanks to my friend JD) and found that S$78 can only get you the crappiest 1-star hotel room, likely with bed bugs and walls so thin you can hear your neighbour sniffle.

You do have to pay a small service fee to Airbnb but it’s still worth it. We’re paying a total of US$272 (S$384) for four nights.

(By the way, if you’re interested in using the website, sign up through this link to get US$25 free to spend.)

We’ll be taking the train from London. Takes about 2.5 hours. Will be so exciting cos I’ve never travelled on a train cross-country before.

Train tickets are £69 (S$141) per person (two-way). Coach tickets from Bournemouth to London are £16.50 (S$33.80).

Paris on budget!

Have to save every penny in anticipation of the LV shopping!

Nah, not really. I’ve never liked LV and Gucci cos the designs don’t appeal to me.

I’d probably go crazy in souvenir shops, lol. Maybe Piers will employ Wing Chun moves to block me from entering the shops. Cos if I spend all my money and go literally broke from souvenir shopping, he’d have to feed me and I think eating in Paris won’t be cheap.

Unless we just eat baguettes and Big Macs.

I asked Piers some time back to list me some French stereotypes and the first thing he said was, “They’re always carrying French bread in the streets.”

He swore it was true and wasn’t a joke and then we watched Taken and there were people carrying baguettes in the Paris scenes.

LOL. Damn the movie for proving him right.

He then went on to name a few more unflattering stereotypes which I won’t recount here because I don’t want him to get kidnapped in Paris.

So, next, I said, “What about English stereotypes?”

His reply: “Oh, English people are known to be amazing, wonderful, great…”

He didn’t manage to finish because a cushion suddenly found itself in his mouth.

Anyway.

Please remember to come and rescue me if I get kidnapped!

When I visited Stonehenge, there were stupid yellow tripods placed all around the structure.

Imagine if I had spent $2,000 flying to England just to see it (and on top of that paying £7.50 to gain access to it) only to find stupid tripods spoiling the scenery. I should have been so pissed off, shouldn’t I?

But I wasn’t pissed off since I didn’t come to England to see Stonehenge, particularly. Well, I’m such a pushover, anyway. I just accept things as they come.

I suppose no one would be crazy enough to fly all the way out here specifically to see this ring of stones, except maybe academics researching the subject, but then all academics are crazy; just read the stuff they write. Embarrassingly, I actually considered making academia a career once. What was I thinking?!!

Still, Stonehenge holds a special appeal for me. Druid rings tend to appear in MMORPGs a lot and I often play druid-type characters. In EverQuest 2, I use druid rings to teleport myself between zones, so they’re always a wonderful, welcome sight.

And I always like to stand inside them in my games, imagining wonderful mysterious rituals being held, then wondering what it would be like to see a real-life druid ring with my own eyes.

Druid ring in Everquest 2.

So my heart pumped with excitement when, from a distance as we were driving up towards it, I first laid my eyes on Stonehenge.

I felt a bit silly to be so excited, especially after we paid £7.50 each to enter a field just to look at a bunch of mouldy old stones we weren’t allowed to touch.

There were many tourists milling about even though it was a gloomy, chilly day (I wonder if any of them had flown to England specifically to see Stonehenge) so that kind of spoilt the specialness.

Gawking tourists standing around a structure taking photos of it causes it to lose its romance and mystery.

Many people were also holding audio gadgets to their ears, listening to some old dude rattling off the history and interesting facts surrounding Stonehenge. After listening to it for a minute, Piers and I decided not to bother because we could easily read it all in Wikipedia.

So we took turns taking photos of each other.

As stupid as I always feel posing for photos in front of historic monuments, I can’t help feeling like it’s a huge crime if I don’t.

Piers hates when I point my camera at him, so he’s always making faces at me when I do it. To stop me from taking photos of him, he’s always snatching my camera away to try and take photos of me.

You may not believe it but I kind of hate that also cos I think I look horrid 90% of the time.

So it’s quite funny when we keep annoying each other like that.

But what’s even funnier is that each time we’re doing that, taking turns to annoy each other by making the other pose for a touristy photo, someone would invariably come forward and offer to help take a photo for us!

It’s so funny!

Of course, we can’t reject people’s kind offers, so we both end up being pwned together.

I suppose it’s a good thing when people are nice so I should be grateful. So much better than encountering rubbish annoying people! Speaking of which, I haven’t met a single rubbish annoying person in England, yay! But then I don’t go out a whole lot so that could be why.

I didn’t manage to get any awesome photos of Stonehenge. The day was too gloomy and cloudy and there were all those stupid tripods, sometimes even men wearing reflective suits standing around inside doing dunno what! How dumb.

We didn’t stay there long. We just walked around it once and called it quits, after which I spent a longer time in the gift shop than at the stones themselves.

Near Stonehenge is Salisbury City and that’s where we went next. The attraction there is the Salisbury Cathedral, “one of the finest medieval cathedrals in Britain”.

It has the tallest cathedral spire in Britain, anyway, so I suppose that’s quite something.

But part of it was covered in scaffolding when we went there. How stupid!

And what’s even more stupid was the fact that we could only zip in and out quickly because we had parked at this place that only allows you to park for 30 minutes, after which you have to clear out.

Unfortunately, that parking lot was like 10 minutes’ walk to the cathedral. So we spent 10 minutes walking there, one minute looking inside the cathedral and nine minutes in the gift shop. Then 10 minutes walking back. LOL.

Hence I only have one hastily-taken photo of inside. (Wasn’t sure if we were allowed to take photos in the first place)

But I do have a couple of photos of the cloister. Not too many cos I was too impatient to visit the gift shop.

Piers thinks I spend too much time (and money) in tourist attraction gift shops so he’s always trying to steer me away from them.

I can’t imagine why! It’s very important to not leave a place of attraction without a souvenir, right?

Men just don’t get it, right?

Thanks to my shopping efforts, I have a mini Stonehenge snow globe (among other things) to take home with me.

I can say I took a piece of Stonehenge home. Can’t I?

How fulfilling life is when your room is covered in souvenirs from all over the world, making it hard for you to walk around without tripping over or having something fall on your head.

I guess.

Sponsored Post

I once fell out with a friend because of a dispute over electricity bills.

I was sharing a flat with her while we were studying in Australia. Well, she rented the flat, then sub-let it to me, providing me a room, meals and home necessities for a fixed monthly rate.

We lived together uneventfully for a few months, then winter came and she suddenly said she needed to increase my rent.

I think it was because she saw me using my fan heater a lot, to chase the cold away.

I can understand the increased cost of heating a room, but at that time I got really angry. It was a substantial increase, plus I was already beginning to feel annoyed about her thriftiness around the house. The meals she provided were so small I was starving half the time and had to buy my own food and groceries.

So it was the last straw for me when she tried to increase my rent when it wasn’t part of our agreement. I told her I was going to move out. She said, fine, but I still had to pay the rent for the remaining few months of our agreement.

We finally came to a grudging compromise. I paid her for an extra month and moved out immediately. We were never friends again after that.

All that bad blood just because of increased electricity usage!

Maybe if I had been as thrifty as her and had just worn more clothes instead of using the heater so much, she might not have asked for more money, and we would have continued to be friends.

Well, I think, we tend not to be overly conscious about using excess electricity when we’re not the ones paying for it. My dad was paying for all my expenses in Australia, so I didn’t feel the pinch. I don’t know about that ex-friend of mine. Maybe she had to pay for her own stuff or maybe she was just kinder to her parents’ bank account than I was.

Nowadays, I’m more careful about using too much electricity, although I’ve never had to pay for it. I do realise that someone has to pay for it, so I should be nice and help them save money.

Like, I try not to keep the air conditioner running all day. I turn off the lights when I don’t need it. I know I can do more, like not keep my PC running 24/7. But that’s something I have to work on getting used to cos I like having my PC on and ready at the drop of a hat.

Just learnt something useful: Leaving your PC on overnight (around eight hours) costs an extra $15 a month for electricity. That’s not overly much but it’s $180 in a year! Think what I could do with the money!

Okay, it’s my dad’s money. Maybe he can buy a new… um… microwave oven or something? Well, I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine what my parents would want to buy cos they seem to have everything they need already.

Oh, and did you know that you can save about $665 a year by using a fan instead of an air-conditioner?

SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE DOLLARS.

Well, okay, I really can’t stop using my a/c in hot, humid Singapore. But that’s just a nice thought, isn’t it?

So, why am I talking about electricity?

Because electricity tariffs are up by 3.3% this year. Stupid oil prices keep going up and up and up! So annoying.

But it’s quite exciting to learn that we can save literally hundreds of dollars every year just by adjusting our lifestyle a bit here and there.

Like, turning off the switch at power sockets when done using appliances.

Like, upgrading to energy-efficient appliances.

Like, not putting hot food in the fridge.

So many things we can do.

Would be so nice to have a few hundred dollars in savings each year, right? Maybe go on a cheap holiday as a reward!

Alright, maybe you already know all these facts. Maybe you’re an expert.

Maybe you can win a $250 Best Denki voucher each week by proving it!

Here!

It’ll take only a few minutes and it’s very easy to play. Just help Mr Tan save on electricity costs by turning off his appliances or buying energy-efficient ones for him!

It would help if you looked at some energy saving tips here first.

Loads of helpful nuggets can be found there. They’re fun and interesting to read!

Well, okay, I’ll leave you to it. Shall stop blogging now so I can turn off my computer and go to bed. Must save energy!

Even though my clothes still fit, I’m quite sure I’m putting on weight after more than a month in England.

I keep telling myself to eat less, maybe skip a few meals here and there, but eating out is too fun.

Eating in is also fun. Groceries are amazing here. There is an unbelievable variety of delicious pre-cooked snacks and meals you can find at the supermarket.

And Piers keeps restocking the breads, muffins, crumpets and bagels in his kitchen as if there’s an army staying in his apartment. He says I can diet after I go back to Singapore.

And there’s Bovril and marmalade and cream and strawberry champagne jam. And eggs and bacon and ham.

It’s virtually impossible to skip any meals with so much food tempting me at home.

Bacon and egg bagel.

English sausages and asparagus baked with garlic and butter.

Oh, and there’s an Asian supermarket nearby where I can get supplies of my favourite instant noodles!

Well, I’m not in the habit of taking photos of my food at home, so most of my food photos are from restaurants, so that’s what I’m sharing today!

Italian food

I’ve eaten at quite a few Italian restaurants so far. The pastas have been disappointing because maybe the English palate is more bland than I’m used to. Even though they all look really delicious, I’ve had to re-flavour them with crazy amounts of salt and pepper before I found them edible.

Linguine vongole.

Basil and olive oil and something, can’t remember.

Mexican bolognese.

Apricot stuffed chicken with creamy linguine and olives.

The pizzas and starters are a bit better, although I haven’t found anything that I must go back to have again. I still do enjoy dining at Italian restaurants though, even with the disappointing pastas, because they’re mostly very warm and cosy, either in a romantic or family way.

Well, sometimes too cosy. They tend to pack tables very closely to maximise space so, if you wanted to, you could eavesdrop on conversations.

Sauteed garlic mushrooms.

Garlic bread.

Some pizza.

Garlic king prawns.

Pepperoni pizza.

Nando’s

Nando’s in England is as good as Nando’s in Singapore. Well, the liver is a bit more cooked here (I prefer our mashy ones) but the sauce is just as awesome if not better. The chicken is about the same. I love it!

Chicken liver with Portuguese bread.

Nando’s peri peri chicken.

Fusion Japanese

I haven’t been to a proper Japanese restaurant. Went to this fusion chain called Wagamama. Let’s just say… if you’re Asian, you probably won’t like it. Quite nice to go there for drinks and light bites (which are decent), but the main courses are a bit sad. They look sad and they taste funny.

Rice with some kind of stir fry chicken drowned in weird tasting sauce.

Chilli ramen.

Salt and pepper squid.

Baked (I think) dumplings.

Steak and wine

I really enjoy having steak and wine in England, although it’s usually quite expensive. We went to this nice French restaurant called The Guildhall Tavern. Looks cosy and and classy at the same time. And the bill for two people was £71 (S$146) before tips.

It was really nice but my steak was a bit overcooked.

Yummy scallops.

French onion soup.

Ribeye steak.

Rack of lamb.

Vegetables.

Clotted cream ice cream.

There’s a restaurant very near Piers’ apartment called Alcatraz Brasserie, a few minutes’ walk away, which has a steak promotion every Thursday. £28 (S$57) for two steaks and a bottle or wine. That’s really cheap. From what I’ve seen so far, it would cost almost twice that at any other steak restaurant.

But then we ordered starters and dessert and the bill ended up more than £40, lol. It was good, though. The wine was a bit dodgy, tasted cheap to me, but then I don’t know much about wines. The steak was quite decent for the price.

What I really liked was the ambience. Part of the restaurant has glass walls so you can see outside while you dine. Okay, so the view isn’t too exciting, just roads and buildings, but it’s very beautiful when it’s dark and the place lit by candlelight.

Oh, and the chicken liver! Mmm.

Chicken liver.

Steak with fries.

Wow, that’s all the space I have for today. I will be in England for another month, so I guess there will be a Part 3 coming up!