Entries Tagged as 'Grace'

Jiuzhaigou trip – update

Today is the third day, and we spent the whole day in the main attraction of the trip, that is, Jiu Zhai Gou or Nine Villages Valley. The sceneries in JZG is fantastic, and all water based. However, we were also interested in mountain, trees and clouds.

Here are six teaser photos, there will be better ones later.
Nou Ri Lang waterfall, the first major stop we had:

Did you notice the rainbow in the photo above? Next was Mirror Lake, but not perfectly reflective as there was wind.

Here, we were at the Five Flower Lake:

The roads are quite dangerous, being narrow and close the the edge:

This is a view of the Long Lake, which is actually much longer than what can be seen here, much like a sea:

The last lake we visited was Five Coloured Pool, very nice:

We will update when we next have internet access. After JZG, we’ll be visiting Mount Emei and the big buddha at Leshan.

TYLin Trip to Jiuzhaigou

YowCH and Grace left home on Thursday to catch a flight at 2:00am to Chengdu for the TYLin company trip to Jiuzhaigou. The children did not join this trip, as it is mostly bus rides and walking, with sightseeing in between, none of those children friendly activities. Big thanks to Grace’s parents for looking after them.

Here we are, just landed in Chengdu on 29 Oct morning.

We then visited Luodai Ancient Town and the Dujiangyan irrigation system. The river and scale of the system is huge.

We had dinner with the TYLin Congqing office colleagues at a Sichuan hotpot restaurant, and enjoyed great numbing spicy hot soup steamboat and a nice strong liquor “Wu Liang Ye”.

The next day, 30 Oct, we went to the airport to fly to Jiuzhai Huanglong Airport at 10:20a, but due to heavy fog, the flight was delayed by over 4 hours. We reached Jiuzhai at 3:10pm, after waiting in the plane for 4 hours and a shot 40 minutes flight. The plane took us over the clouds and mountains, beautiful views.

After we landed, and having lost 4 hours, the first stop is a tea house where we were expected to buy some tea (typical tour shopping stopover). The scenery of the rural area was fantastic.

This is a short trip update. More updates later on, and a dedicated page to file the trip.

Lego Paradisa

Grace is currently most attracted to shopping for old and discontinued Lego sets online. Of great interest is the very girlish Paradisa range, which she had managed to get from UK two sets at good prices. The sets, 6402 and 6403 reached YowCH’s office (the default parcel delivery address for us) on 12 Aug, and Esther put them together on 14 Aug.



Children’s updates & happy birthday to Grace

Joseph pulled the stool to the parapet of the balcony and climbed on the stool to see cars on the road; and he did that all by himself. Smart guy, but rather dangerous…

Nowadays, for the last feed at night, he can down 10 ounces of milk (full bottle).

David is enjoying some Lego time while Esther does her homework, with some help from Besta (the Chinese-English digital dictionary).

These last three photos were taken using our new Tamron 17-50 f2.8 lens bought two weekends ago. The lens has very good colour contrast and is very sharp, but the S5pro camera under-exposes by about 0.7 to 1.0 stop on this lens.

And today is Grace’s birthday! “Happy Birthday”.

9th Anniversary

YowCH and Grace was married nine years ago on 16 Dec 2000. Today, we had an anniversary dinner at Prego, Raffles City with the children, mum, dad and Gene.

We had a free cake for being a member of the hotel chain.

Here’s a link back to our wedding site.

Netbook for Grace

After much thinking and planning, with strong recommendation from Chee Kean, we bought an Acer AspireOne netbook (white) for Grace’s use on 20 Dec 2009. Costs $599.00, runs on Win7 Starter and Android, with free Targus travel mouse from Challenger.


Collected car on 13 Aug 09

The repair was faster than expected. After sending in for repairs on Tuesday 11 Aug late morning, the taxi driver went to Ricardo to pay the $900 repair cost. We had also asked him for a nominal $100 taxi fares for Grace over the loss-of-use of the car, which he gladly accepted and paid.

Ricardo informed that the car would be ready by afternoon of Friday 14 Aug, but the car was ready by afternoon of 13 Aug. Replaced cover, repaired bumper and door, and straightened out the bumper hooks which were bent. After the bonding and spray paiting, we noted no signs of the damage. Hopefully the bonding and paint job would last.

Grace is down with food poisoning, she’s on MC yesterday and today.