First Friday

Finished with my first full week of work!  This was my first Friday in the office since last week we had a long weekend.

I was running a little late getting ready, so I didn't have a chance to eat breakfast before I got on the hotel shuttle.  The shuttle drops me off at a corner near some small restaurants, and there is one on the corner that always seems to have a line.  I've been meaning to try it, and running late was the perfect excuse.

The only problem is the menu is pretty local and not very familiar to me.  As I got closer towards the front of the line, I got nervous that I wouldn't have any idea what to order!  So I took a gamble.. when I got to the front of the line, I just said "I'll have the same thing as her," and pointed to the girl who had been in line in front of me and just walked away.

I paid the woman S$3, and walked away with a drink (with a handle - love it!) and a little baggie.

When I got to the office, I had breakfast.  Inside the baggie were two small steamed buns.  This is a pretty common type of Chinese food, so that was comforting to me, but each bun, called a bau or bao, can basically have anything inside of it.  

The first bun I tried was filled with red bean paste.  Red bean paste is fairly common in Chinese food, particularly desserts, but obviously, it isn't something that you see a lot of in the US.  I actually do not love red bean paste, so I was kind of disappointed at the first part of my breakfast.  I ate two bites and then put it back in the baggie. 

Bun number two was filled with char siew, which is basically Chinese barbecue pork.  Yummy!  This is actually one of my favorite kind of bao, so I was happy :)

You'll notice in the first picture of my breakfast that the drink I got is clearly not coffee.  It is actually a warm soy milk.  Haha - I know that sounds awful.  Funny story - when I was little, my mom used to make me drink a giant bowl of soy milk every Saturday morning.  This was back before soy milk was commercialized in the US, and the soy milk that you bought in the Chinese grocery store obviously was not flavored with vanilla or anything like that.  So I hated it, of course.  And I didn't drink soy milk for a lot of years because I had it in my head that I hated soy milk from those Saturday mornings of my youth.  Within the last year or two, I've started to be okay with using soy milk in my coffee and smoothies, but I still couldn't bring myself to use it in a bowl of cereal, much less drink a glass of it.

But, one of the things I am really trying to do here is to really have an open mind, to be open to trying everything, and to do my best to really experience Singaporean life.  So if warm soy milk is what they are drinking, I am willing to try it.  (Side note - the girl that was two places in front of me in line literally ordered 10 of these warm soy milk drinks to go.  I guess she is at the bottom of the office totem pole, but obviously people love this warm soy milk.)

Shockingly, I actually quite enjoyed my warm soy milk!  (What an odd sentence.)  I drank probably about 80% of it, and although I don't know that I would order it again (I'm not much of a milk drinker in general), I was glad I tried it!

Woohoo for Friday mornings.

In the Singapore office, they don't really observe the "5 o'clock Friday" rule, so some co-workers and I headed out of the office around 6pm on Friday.  We were among the first to leave that day, but I felt like I was at work so late!

We stopped and had some snacks and drinks..

Then moved along and had dinner before stopping at the rooftop of the Fullerton Bay hotel to take in some great views of the city at night.. a wonderful way to end the work week!