architecture

I love the look of this building in Nanning, Guangxi, taken during the 7th China-ASEAN Expo held in October this year:

This convention hall is situated such right next to the expressways, such that cars will go one semicircle around this building, taking in its full magnificence, when they mount the expressway.

While Nanning a third-tier city, it possesses some buildings with fairly stunning architecture. I also passed by this public square cum park that was surrounded by tall buildings and was fairly impressed.

deviant..

spam senders should differentiate between their male and female recipients. why bother sending me emails on penis enlargement? i have no need for that whatsoever. boob enhancement would more successfully catch my attention and interest, rather than a mere roll of the eye.

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The Office and its Partners have a certain way of doing things. Those who deviate from the norm are not appreciated. Yet, different people have different ways of doing things; if you deviate from their norm then you might perhaps be the subject of disapproval.

It’s sometimes confusing, and getting to be a little annoying.

It doesn’t help that mistakes aren’t always overlooked or tolerated; the other week it felt like there’re some who expect newcomers to enter knowing exactly what they should do and how things should be done. Don’t they remember how it was when they first joined?

Anyway, like one of my bosses said, it doesn’t matter how perfect your track record might be – all it takes is that one mistake at the wrong time in front of the wrong people to derail your career. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if your record might be a little spotty if the right thing happened at an opportune time.

While i’m not facing either predicament, i totally agree with his opinion. However, The Office appears to provide ample opportunities for the former situation to occur, which is not good – remember also that the prevailing sentiment seems to be that unless there’s a natural disaster (or similar sort of totally uncontrollable event) resulting in something going wrong, there’s never really any excuse for shifting the blame beyond yourself.

Meh.

Mescluns

i was brought to Mescluns - this salad bar in Citylink Mall next to TCC - today and I really like it!

I’m not one to rave about salads, but those on offer at Mescluns are good stuff. You get to choose what goes into your salad from more than 35 different items, adding $3.50 for a soup and fresh juice if desired. It comes up to a fairly substantial meal – even I who usually demands rice for lunch was full from lunch and remained so till dinner.

What I liked were not only the sizable portions but the variety of ingredients on offer. I ordered Essentials, the cheapest salad on offer at $6.50. This entitled me to:

• 1 choice of greens – baby spinach, romaine, iceberg, mesclun, etc
• 4 basic ingredients – boiled egg, tomato, cucumber, carrot, cherry tomato, mushroom, sweet corn, beetroot, couscous, olive, pasta, tofu, parmesan and many others
• a choice of complementary items – fried onion, spring onion, crouton, seaweed, etc
• salad dressing – i was amazed by the variety as there were at least 9 different ones, including caesar, pesto mayonaise, french djion mayonaise, blue cheese and something, sundried tomato vinaigrette, raspberry vinigrette.

there were also other ingredients such as turkey bacon, roast chicken, etc, which are available if you order the more expensive salads. The salad is also well tossed and comes in a sizable bowl, something which made me quite happy.

Those who don’t want to mix their own salad can also order from one of Mescluns’ salad creations (like the good old Caesar, Feta and Olive, etc) or go for their sandwiches and wraps.

Really worth checking out; I fancy heading there again sometime soon!

For pictures from their Circular Road outlet (the original), see here, here and here.

the forlorn

my phone camera is meant to be 5 megapixels, but somehow the photo quality is quite bad! why liddat? 

Ethnic minorities costumes

There’s a museum in Guangxi that features the costumes of various ethnic minority groups in the region. Guangxi itself has 1/3 of its population being from the Zhuang minority group, and it seems to do a fair bit in trying to showcase this group’s culture.

a display at the museum featuring an elaborate headdress:

the patterns on the material of their costumes are really intricate:

you hear so much about 绣球 from chinese shows, but it’s taken me nearly 25 years before i’ve actually seen a real example:

the museum also featured some really impressive traditional crafts.

lions and a dragon made out of reeds i think:

    

this is a type of bridge (built across rivers) that’s unique to this part of china. i’m not sure, but it might be a form of construction unique to the Zhuang group of pple:

and finally, some ladies decked out in ethnic costumes at the event i was at – the costumes are so pretty!

super cute capybara

i fell in love with capybaras while in japan and happen to own a stuffed toy version of a baby capybara.

this video features a really cute baby and its mama, and the little child actress in the feature is rather adorable too.

good stuff :)

awesome animal
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the weekend is here

hallelujah.

this week has been slightly tough mainly cos i’ve been battling tiredness at work, but thankfully things eased up yesterday and today.

i’ve realised that work comes in peaks and troughs; we might suddenly get requests pouring in or an amalgamation of deadlines, whereas at other periods there might be nothing much going on. i think the difficulty with regard to deadlines is that while they are fixed, my work depends on the inputs from others, so there’s often a crunch nearing the deadline when i’m rushing work because the people in the upstream process were tardy, affecting i who am downstream.

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a discussion today also revealed that the idea of “work-life balance” is a Gen-Y phenomenon; a friend recounted how an older colleague in her thirties felt really grateful to land her first job more than a decade ago. Gen-Ys are supposed to be more demanding, seeking meaning and balance in their jobs.

i think though, that employers are getting more demanding too. these days you need a degree AND good results, good cca record, internship preferred, community service scores brownie points, overseas experience often helps, many jobs require a certain degree of bilingual skills (take mine for example!), one needs to be well groomed, people-skills are valued, one has to write and speak well, there’s little room for newcomers to learn and make mistakes, etc….

i don’t think our supposed ‘increased demands’ are entirely unwarranted. for the record (and as i’ve mentioned before), Singaporeans already work longer hours than their ‘western’ counterparts, and i think i have the right to a LIFE beyond the office. as it is i don’t have enough time between reaching home from work and heading to work the next day to sleep (i need at least 6hrs, ideally 7 – 8hrs) AND do basic things i want to do (watch an hour-long show, read the papers, chat a bit with friends online) – and i’m really not all that busy yet.

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i should find nicer/happier things to blog about. hard to do so when it’s nearly all work that i’m doing though! should put up some pretty pictures of Guilin tomorrow, perhaps.