Xing Fu Tang bubble tea

幸福堂 recently opened an outlet at Compasspoint. Finally I got a chance to try out their famous brown sugar milk tea.

It’s located in the basement of Compasspoint mall next to Guardian. They have a few interesting drink selection but I decide to go for their best seller first.

No much queue as it’s a Friday afternoon. Waited for about 10mins for the drink. They missed my number coz it skipped passed me and I have to tell them. Service wise, everyone was unsmiling and had a black face....so ironic since they are selling ‘happiness tea.’

The pearls were stirred in a big wok and then scooped into the cup. No plastic bags were given. They have paper bags but not v useful if u only got one drink. The other option was this paper carrier but dun think u can drink and carry it at the same time.

Taste verdict: one of the best brown sugar I tasted, much better than tiger. The milk was creamy yet light and the toasted top part gave a sight crunch to the drink. Pearls were v soft and chewy with the brown sugar taste in every bite. I like the fact that it dun taste v sweet as I thought. Yum yum...truely 幸福 (sinful) sia...

Butchart Garden Victoria Canada

Drove to Port Angeles and took Blackball ferry from Port Angeles over to Canada to visit Butchart Garden. We bought the ferry tickets together with the 2way transport and entry tickets into the garden from blackball website. 

We parked our car in the parking lot opposite the ferry, it’s $12 for the whole day and we pay by putting the money inside the tiny envelop provided with our car details and put it into the slot provided. 

After that, we need to pick up our tickets at the ticket office and from then we proceeded to board the ship. By the way, there was a slip of white paper to fill in with our names and date of birth for Canada custom purpose. Do note that for entering into Canada, ETA is required for air travel but not for ship or car. However, we did not know at the time and this gave us problems when we were flying from Seattle to Calgary later on.

On the left side was foot passengers waiting to board the ship. The right hand side was for cars waiting to board. Decided not to drive coz heard the immigration checks was quite long for vehicles.

View from inside the ship looking out before departing.

It was 1.5 hrs trip by sea to Canada and the view outside was shrouded in fog most of the time. Also, it’s freezing cold and the ship was rocking quite a lot....it easy to get seasick....

Finally reached Port Victoria Canada...the weather turned out to be nice and sunny.

We boarded the bus situated right outside the black ball ferry terminal which would bring us to Butchart Garden.

Entrance of Butchart Garden with pokemon Roselia.

Map of the garden. Turned out the park was not as big as I expected and the crowd was huge....mostly tourists.

It was a beautiful sunny day to take pic coz the flowers looked so vibrant under the glaring sun.

The most iconic sight of Butchart Garden was the sunken garden. Sadly I dun seem to get any reception in the sunken garden so no Pokémon photo session in this beautiful place.

Hubby with his jungle hat on. It was so hot.

Event the trash can looked nice with flowers growing on top.

Posing with Pokémon again...haha 

Notice many ppl touching the nose of this pig statue. Not sure what it means but we gave it a try too.

After that, we boarded the bus back to the pier area and walked around for a bit before our ship departed.

There were lotsa of souvenir shops along government street around Bart and Banker. 

Since we had a lot of time to burn before the ship depart, we decided to try our miniature world museum. 

Most of the miniature were quite old and some not working. So, I was quite disappointed with it as compared to my experience with mini world in Lyon France which was really nice.







Fun shot with Pokémon outside the Parliament House.

The journey by ship back was shrouded in mist during the middle of the journey and started to resemble the show “deadliest catch”, coz the ship was swaying so violently side to side that many ppl was seasick....

This conclude our trip to Butchart Garden which we have always wanted to visit. However, it was too crowded and hot that day maybe becoz it was a weekend. But overall, it was a beautiful garden.

Pokémon Community Day-Point Defiance Park

My first community day in the US and it’s ralts, one of my fave Pokémon. After a long trip, we finally arrived at Point Defiance Park at Tacoma, Seattle. It was a huge park with its own zoo and aquarium inside which we don’t have time to explore. However, we did managed to see quite a lot of flowers, especially the dahlia flowers which were in full bloom. They’re so pretty and looks like little symmetrical flower balls.

Check out my YouTube video on ralts community day:

Got myself 5 shiny ralts and many fun AR photos. 

Even managed to see a deer at the end of the day roaming by itself.

After community day ended, we went for dinner at Pho 38 nearby. 

Our first bowl of pho in the US. Yum yum....big bowl and cheap. Any pho in the US taste way better than NamNam in SG. 

After that, we drove to Sequim and check in at Olympic View Inn. The reception was closed by the time we reached around 10pm. So we had to call them up. Luckily they arrived shortly after 5mins to check us in. Scary....thot we will be without a room for the night...

Been the longest day of my life.......

US trip Aug 2019

It’s been more than 5 years since I went to the US and like last time, we went to Seattle to check out the lavender festival in Sequim.

The first day was spent mostly in the plane. It was the longest Saturday of my life, from boarding the plane at 9am and reaching SFO at 9am on the same day again due to the time difference. 

After reaching SFO, we still have to pass through immigration, take out our luggage and check in again for our second flight from SFO to Seattle.

Upon reaching Seattle, we went to pick up our rental car from Thrifty and drove to Point Defiance Park to play Pokémon community day. It happened to be ralts community day and we only have 1.5 hrs left by the time we reached the park.

Claw machine craze....

These are all the plushies I won from claw machines recently. It was really fun and addictive! Sighz...these claw machines can really sucks a lot of $$ if you are not careful. I tried to limit myself to $10 a week for playing claw machines. It’s so hard....

Fun day at Jewel Changi

Recently I heard about this new Pokémon game launched by Changi airport called Pokémon Explorer found inside the Jewel Changi Airport app.

After installing the app and signing in, you can see the Pokémon game inside.

There are some mini games where you need to find the respective Pokémon QR code located around Jewel Changi. After completing the game, u can unlock a photo frame to take picture.

There are 3 mini games to be played on level 1 of Jewel and 1 mini game on Level 2. No games to play for level 3-4 at the moment. 

The rest of the games are all on level 5. Except for charizard, all the other games on level 5 required ticketed entrance in order to play. Meaning u need to pay $$ to play...*sucks*... So in total, only 5 games for me to unlock and score points for ranking.

As you can see, my score is really bad...haha...

I quite like the cool photo frames unlocked from each games. Too bad I can’t use them outside Jewel. Also, the games can only be played inside Jewel. Another thing is, some of the games uses facial recognition and you need to take off your glasses in order to play, thus if you can’t see anything without glasses, (for hubby’s case) you can’t play at all. Too bad for hubby....he’s quite upset about it.

Happened to pass by the newly opened Apple Store in Jewel and they were giving out freebies for their opening! Yeah, got ourselves each a tee shirt that day. 

It comes inside this white box and when we opened it, it was a tee shirt. 

Nice tee shirt and made in US somemore. Best of all, it’s free! Haha...glad we went Jewel yesterday morning. All the tee shirts were gone before 12pm.

Tian Tian chicken rice at Maxwell market

I have never tried tian tian chicken rice before even though it’s so famous and I’m Singaporean. But after watching Mike Chen on Strictly Dumplings singing such praises for it, I need to try it out.

Ordered this medium chicken rice with roasted chicken breast meat at $5. No soup, so dark soya sauce or garlic sauce given. $5 for this small portion of chicken rice and it’s considered medium size, can’t imagine how the small looks like. 

Anyway, the rice was cooked perfectly and well flavored. It had a nice bite unlike some other chicken rice that is too soft and mushy. For the rice, it’s 10/10.

The roasted chicken breast meat was surprisingly tender and juicy. Usually roasted chicken are more dry than the white skinned hainanese chicken but their roasted chicken was one of the most tender and juicy ones I ever tried. 

Overall, it’s a good plate of chicken rice. But bit too expensive and not filling for me as I am still hungry after eating it..haha...but if you are tourist, will highly recommend u to come and try this plate of local delicacy.