Life Sucks

Beside the birds in the zoo and bird parks, we saw many wild birds on top of the countless sea gulls and ducks. Here are some of those that I managed to take a picture of. A magpie. They are supposed to be pretty common but I only saw them in a few places.  Another of the more commonly sighted bird which unfortunately like in Singapore has outlive its welcome  And this is the famous Robin! This was spotted in London all over the place outside the London Tower but I believe it is native to the whole of UK. I think it is a thrush. Somebody correct me if I am wrong. And my one and only photograph of a butterfly - spotted right on top of Cow's Head Summit . This is a Red Admiral butterfly.

One great thing about cooler temperature country is the variety of colorful flowers. In Scotland, there are beautiful wild flowers everywhere. And then there are the planted flowers in gardens and homes. We couldn't get enough of the flowers and visited 2 Botanic Garden - 1 in Glasgow and 1 in Edinburgh. Here are just a few of the interesting looking flowers. For more of them, go to my Facebook album or Picasa Web Album . Enjoy the nice flowers but don't ask me what are their names cause I sure don't know.

Our last main stop before we move over to London was to the Edinburgh Zoo. It seems we must make a pit stop at a zoo in every major place that we visit. There are quite of marine park and zoo in Scotland but Edinburgh is one of the bigger and better zoo in UK so we felt obliged to drop in. Edinburgh Zoo is one of the few zoo in the world to have the Panda bear. But it is more famous for its Penguin Parade where the Penguin goes on a real march through the zoo, Unfortunately we were there at the wrong time so did not get to witness this spectacular sight. But we did managed to catch the feeding of several of the animals like the Oriental Short Clawed Otter gobbling down the mouse. And the Asiatic lion running away with a piece of meat. We also saw up close the Amur Leopard The very rare Scottish wild cat And surprise surprise surprise the Koala bear. This is the first time I seen one outside of Australia. And another import from another country, the St...

Edinburgh has got to be the most boring place so far in our visit to Scotland. Other than Arthur's Seat , there wasn't really much to see. The famed Royal Mile is just a stretch of old restored buildings that caters mainly to tourist selling food and tourist trinkets much like our restored Chinatown back in Singapore. Back view of the Royal Miles as seen from Princes Street We skipped Edinburgh Castle and instead went to Holyrood Palace which is the quarters for the Queen of England when she visits. One thing about European country is that there is always some sort of demonstration and protests going on. Like this one on Climate Change which we saw from our diner window. And there are buskers a plenty. Practically one every 10 feet doing all sort of performance. But at the end of the day, I was glad to be out of Edinburgh and on to London.

Like everybody else in Singapore or rather those on the good side and not the dark side, I feel very pissed off that the law as it currently stands is allowing scumbags like those shop owners in Sim Lim, People Park, Lucky Plaza and even Peninsula Plaza to get away with scams and high handed tactics. While I don't really like the idea of vigilante justice, I think this is one time that I am glad some people has took it upon themselves to help Singapore get rid of these scum while our politicians and government twiddle their times and do nothing but make empty threats.  The only thing I don't quite like is these people exposing the identity of the relatives of the Jover Chew guy. Was it really necessary to get at him through his family? Surely it would have been easy enough to just go after him. Collateral damage is not always a good thing or a necessary evil. Sometime I think if our city is not so guai and law abiding, we could have got a few gangster, go into the shop...

Let's just say Scotland is not exactly known for its goods other than fish and chips, haggies and black pudding. Good Chinese food is hard to get and most outlets serves a mixture of Italian and basic Western cuisines like steak and fish and chips. But yet somehow, we managed to uncover some gems and surprisingly all were seafood! The first place is this little shack at Oban. We chanced upon it while on our way to Isle of Mull . There was a long queue and reviews on Trip Advisor were pasted on the wall. So it has to be good right? This little shack sells local freshly caught shellfish. Its speciality appears to be oysters and mussels caused everybody seems to be eating those. But both of us don't eat oysters so we contend ourselves with this cold dish of seafood: There were prawns, squid, crab, mussels and more mussels. And it was real good and cost only  £20.  On the Isle of Mull, there wasn't much option but what we found was probably the best deal eve...

At the just concluded Hello Kitty Run, there was a big hue and cry over some perceived "faults" created by the event's organiser. But is it really the fault of the organiser? My take on this event here but in general we Singaporean can be pretty ugly and downright unreasonable.Let me relate some personal encounters with these people. Now as most people who have attended AGM knows, there is a big group of shareholders who are super horrible in their behaviour at the buffet table. Take this AGM that I went to recently. The company had put 4 servers to each table to serve the food. I understand this was necessary because in previous years the shareholders "tabao" the food even before everybody else had eaten. So the server were distributing the food and even the utensils. But did that deter the shareholders? No. One man stood in front of the dessert section and just used his hand to keep picking up the kueh and eating it there and then. And despite the server...