Anywhere Travel Guiding 2011 – Two

See the full Anywhere Travel Guiding Series 2011

TWO – 15th Jan 2011 (Sat) – 130pm-ish @Mandarin Gallery Shopping Arcade

R is a great friend I have the misfortune of meeting with so little. We try to meet up when we can, but schedules, work, etc etc you know how it goes…

We’ve known each other a pretty long time – since our JC days. I went up to visit her in Montpellier, France some years back while she was studying there, the first time I toured around by my lonesome. It was with her that I embarked on the great Andalucian cross country drive and the longest train ride of our lives up the east coast of Spain, and also this dear girl who prevented us from almost getting robbed in Barcelona by her CONSTANT VIGILANCE. (All stories I assure you that will eventually make their way up on this blog!)

So perhaps it was a little anticlimatic that we met up in boring ol’ Orchard for lunch after a good few months of not seeing each other. We headed to Wild Honey at Mandarin Gallery for lunch, but my goodness the queue was insane~ It was an entire sitting of people waiting outside the restaurant, so we decided to look around for another place.

We found ourselves one level up at Jones the Grocer – more famously known for its Dempsey Hill outlet; I like the Dempsey outlet for its chillax nature (and free parking!), but I like that this one is accessible by MRT and not packed to the rafters (well, we had excellent timing…), and its got great ambience, so that’s where we settled for lunch.

Intrigued by the Anywhere Travel Guide, I let her pick a card, that hopefully would work within the confines of Jones. After quite a bit of shuffling, we ended up with this card:

We had a bit of a discussion about this – how on earth do you know what you’re going to forget, until you’ve forgotten it, and how would you know then that you’ve forgotten it? A tad philosophical for a Saturday lunch date…

But it’s odd what you end up remembering from an encounter or a trip you take. Some things you think are momentous, that you will never ever forget, but it turns out that on hindsight, sometimes you take away the oddest memories instead. Like of Barcelona – don’t remember anything about where we stayed or the name off the top of my head, just that there was a rickety old lift and NEARLY getting conned (I will have to tell this story soon, heh) and that I never saw the people sharing our room because they were party animals and up at night while we devoured the Gaudi and kept normal hours.

Which is kinda why you keep journals or write things down, to immortalize the memories. I read something recently, that people don’t forget stuff – just that their brain loses that synapse connection, and only when something jolts it back into place do memories come ‘flooding back’. Sometimes things come back to you, and you remember exactly what you were feeling or thinking when you wrote that down. Other times, it’s like you’re reading someone elses memoirs and you wonder what in hell you were thinking then.

I (think I) will remember:

The fabulous Chocolate Milkshake. Yummy! I have to remember to get this again.

That for some reason, this place gets really crowded after the typical lunch hour. We’d just beat the queue in, which is a bit odd – I thought normal people had brunch on weekends? (I say normal, because I don’t usually get up before noon on most weekends…)

This awesome smell of baking chocolate that wafted in, making both of us swoon. R hailed a waiter demanding (in the nicest way possible) to know what that swoonsome scent was – Most probably the Pan Au Chocolat, freshly baked.

R swears by the coffee and that she’d probably remember that

I will (most probably) forget:

What we talked about – as old friends go, everything and nothing… but it doesn’t matter what we talked about, just that we had fun together, yah?

That I had the Eggs Benedict (though I will have a memory of it now, recorded down here). When I go back again, I will probably get into the same conundrum of getting the Eggs on Toast or the Eggs Benedict or the Traditional English Breakfast… What I decide on will probably depend on how rich/broke I’m feeling that day

That there is no Rocky Road fudge here! ARGH I keep forgetting this and being disappointed when I can’t find it in the store. Rarh. Their Rocky Road fudge is awesome stuff!

Well I definitely want to do this card again, somewhere foreign, and hopefully look back in future and see whether I do remember and forget what I thought I would.

See the full Anywhere Travel Guiding Series 2011