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Bryan phoned me to ask me if I wanted to go out to eat dinner. I said ‘No’ (haha. I actually said NO to food. ) because I was a bit sick of eating out and also because I’m trying to avoid unnecessary expenses. He tried to convince me to change my mind but I was still saying no and in the end, he had to tell me the truth: My cousin (who is also Bryan’s friend) was coming to Singapore for a few days on a business trip and told Bryan not to let anyone know. He wanted it to be some kind of surprise. =_= I had to say yes in the end. I haven’t seen my cousin since 2005. Bryan told me to contact Diana about the dinner plan. She is another old friend of mine and she is also currently living in Singapore.

When I first saw the name of this restaurant, I did a double take. Manhattan Fish Market. Fish market??? I was like ‘huh?What’s this?’ It turned out that it was really a restaurant. In fact, it reminds me a lot of Fish and Co.

Diana and I used to be very close during our high school days but we eventually lost touch with each other. I think that the last time I saw her was in 2004. Is it possible to revive an old friendship? I didn’t think that it could be possible in our case but it seems that I was wrong.

Diana took this photo of Bryan.

Manhattan Fish & chips.
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Like most people out there, I was reading fairy tales when I was young. Most of them ended with ‘…and they lived happily ever after…’ or something similar. My reading material changed a lot as I grew older but one thing remained the same: a happy ending. It’s the same when it comes to the movies and drama series that I watch. Most of them have happy endings. I love happy endings. Who doesn’t?

I would like to believe that ‘Happily ever after’ exists in real life but I know that it doesn’t.

My Indonesian classmate told me about the Food and Beverage fair (Suntec Singapore Level 4, Halls 403 & 404) and I wanted to see what it was like. He said that maybe they will sell ‘fried durian’ there and that’s why I was so eager to go. (Unfortunately there was no such thing at the food fair. I was a bit disappointed but I still had fun eating other food.)
I went with Lisa and Colas on Saturday.
What I think of the Food and Beverage fair : so and so only. There were a few stalls which looked like they didn’t belong there, for example, the manicure stall.

Some photos:
People walking around

People queuing up to buy food

What we ate:

Okonomiyaki, also called the Japanese pizza. This one wasn’t very good. I prefer Desmond’s homemade Okonomiyaki.

Some kind of takoyaki but with chicken instead of octopus

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Hendrik(from Indonesia) took us to eat Indonesian food at Surabaya Restaurant (Lucky Plaza) the other day. It was my first time going to an Indonesian restaurant and I was really looking forward to it.

Hendrik had this. It was good. It was the first item on the menu. Unfortunately I can’t remember the name of this dish.

Vani and Natasha ordered this. Again, I have no idea what it is. It’s difficult to remember the Indonesian names.

I had the fried chicken. I wanted to order something else but they didn’t have what I wanted.
I thought that the fried chicken was a bit dry but I loved the chilli! Yummy!

This rice was good.

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A photo to cheer me up (again ) :

Hendrik’s little teddy bear. :flowers:

Note: I’ll reply to the recent comments in a few hours. I’m tired.

Back in secondary school, some of my classmates (Mauritians of Indian descent) were applying mehndi (also written as mehendi/mehandi and known as henna) on their hands during lunch break and they applied some on me and on anyone else who wanted to try. It was kind of fashionable at that time. That was fun. I even bought an expensive book on mehndi designs back then but unfortunately, I wasn’t good at applying mehndi on myself.

Today,one of my friends who is from India brought henna paste (the cone type) and she applied it on my hand. While she was applying the paste on my hand, I was thinking of my secondary school days. I miss those days.

I didn’t have a particular design in mind and she chose one for me; flowers, leaves,butterflies,vines etc. Next time, I’ll see if she can help me do a more complicated design. She did a peacock on another girl’s hand and it looked great!

I took a few photos of my hand after she was done:

I remember that my Mauritian friends were saying that lime and some sugar are supposed to be applied on the design to make the color become darker or last longer. I’m not sure which one it is.

We didn’t have lime or sugar with us. About 1 hour later when the henna paste was completely dry, I scratched it off my hand but I didn’t wash my hand. I have to avoid contact with water if I want the color to darken.

The color is orange in this photo but now it has turned dark brown. I’ll try to take another photo tomorrow.
The mehndi design will fade away after about 2 weeks.

I was looking around for mehndi designs and came across this page. Nice huh? It’s a bit too much for me but this one is still okay.

I just found my Indian bangles. I bought many bangles in Mauritius and my sisters also sent me some when I was in Shanghai. I also have some bindis. I’ll wear some of them to class tomorrow. (the bangles, not the bindis! )
Here’s a photo of my blues bangles.

(this photo was previously posted in an entry back in 2006)

All good things come to an end.

That’s what the Mauritius Interactive(also known as MI) creator and main administrator Joey wrote on the main MI page. I’m not sure when he closed down the website but I heard about it last month. Apart from that sentence and his email address, there’s nothing at the Mauritius Interactive website now. :weeping: (Mauritius Interactive’s url changed a few times over the years but the most recent one that I know of is http://www.miweb.mu )

This means that it’s the end of Mauritius Interactive. It must have been really a very hard decision for the webmaster to take. After all, MI has existed for almost ten years. Users were able to sign up for membership as from year 2000 but at that time, there were few features available on the website. The main feature at that time was the forums. The personal pages or blogs were implemented around March-April 2001 and the webmaster started keeping track of the date of registration of the members as from Sept 2001. The commenting system was implemented in early December 2001. (information obtained from the creator of Mauritius Interactive himself. See: here.)

I think that I got interested in blogging because of MI. It was fun writing about whatever I had been up to, ranting about things which got me upset,posting photos and it was also nice to have people visit and leave their comments.


(Click on the photos to see a bigger version of the photos.)
They are some screen captures that I made out of the old saved pages. I was looking around in my old external hard disk and those those saved pages and even some old IRC chat logs dating back to 2002. Unfortunately, I haven’t found saved pages of the entries written before 2003. :faint: I’ll try to find more saved pages or screen captures and I’ll upload them there.)

Something I liked was the option to set the blogs to public or private view. I opted for private view because I liked to be able to see which registered member of MI had visited my page. (There was a Visitors page.) Some people opted for public view and non-members of MI could visit their pages. At that time and all the way up to 2005/early 2006, logging in on the Mauritius Interactive website was something that I did everyday. I enjoyed updating my blog and reading other members’ blogs. I made many new friends on the Mauritius Interactive website and even got to know them in real life. There was even a MI party organized a few years back at a night club. (I think it was at Arena.) It has been so long now. I’m not sure about the exact year. I think that it was in late 2003. That also was fun. Being a member of the Mauritius Interactive community was on the overall a good experience. However, some people created a few problems on purpose, ’stealing’ photos of some of the female members of MI ,writing mean things about them and posting the photos in a newly created blog there, hiding behind nicknames, leaving no clue about their real identities. Fortunately, the website administrators listened to the complaints, deleted those ‘fake’ accounts and even went so far as to implementing ‘Private pages’ on MI. I won’t go into the details about this but my main point is, the webmaster and the administrators of MI really did a lot of work on the website and they listened to the members’ suggestions and helped to solve the problems. However, despite all their hard work, a lot of people were really annoyed by the increasing number of persons who registered on MI with the main purpose of spying on others. Their own accounts were ‘empty’ and there was no information about themselves in their member pages. I hated that.

I stopped updating on MI one or two years after I left Mauritius to go to study in Shanghai. That’s mainly because I finally had a place to call my own, i.e, my personal website and blog. A friend gave me two domain names in early 2004 and even provided web space. I was overjoyed and concentrated more on updating my personal blog. However I was still going on Mauritius Interactive to see other people’s updated blogs. Then the Mauritius were hit by the sudden Facebook craze. Everyone I know got an account on facebook and less and less people were still updating on MI. Last year when I checked the Mauritius Interactive website, it seemed more or less dead. There were almost no updates. Now, Mauritius Interactive has officially reached its end this year. I can’t help feeling a bit sad. After all, there were a lot of memories there, the blogs, the comments and the emails. I wish that the administrator had given us some notice before closing down the website. I’m sure that like me, many of the members would have liked to save their own blog entries, comments and emails somehow. For me, my time at Mauritius Interactive was a record of a few years of my life. Now I feel like I’ve lost that record of those years.

I guess that now it’s finally time to say goodbye and let go of yet another part of my life.

(I have added information about Mauritius Interactive in my page Blogging before getting my own domain. I feel a bit silly saying this but I’ll really miss MI. )

I’ve joined a few online communities/forums during the past few years, for example the protag board, RBJ and dododsmb. However, they have all become inactive by now. I guess that’s why I’m not joining any other communities/forums now.

Desmond’s sister bought 2 hamsters a few months ago. The female hamster recently gave birth to 4 little hamsters. I was so excited to see them because I had never seen baby hamsters before. =) My old hamsters were always fighting and never had babies. (They are now in hamster heaven. The average lifespan for hamsters is 2 years but they died before that. )

Some photos that I took of her new hamsters :

I didn’t take a photo on the first day. I didn’t have my camera with me. The female hamster didn’t look pregnant at all and we were shocked upon seeing the babies. Desmond’s sister was the one who saw them first; a little bundle of pink, bald, wriggling little bodies. The first thing which came to my mind upon seeing the babies was … ‘Just a few days ago Desmond had put both adult hamsters in their respective balls to let them exercise. This means that the female hamster was already pregnant when she was running around in the ball and knocking into chairs and other things which were in her way. arghhh.’

The babies had no fur when they were born and their eyes were closed. I think that it took about 1-2 weeks for their eyes to open and their fur to grow. I didn’t count. I’ll post the other photos another time.

We didn’t touch the baby hamsters at all so as not to ‘contaminate’ them with human scents. The adult hamsters might eat their babies if they have a foreign smell on them. The hamster cage must not be cleaned during the first few weeks. In fact, the best thing to do is ‘nothing’. The hamsters shouldn’t be disturbed until they are big enough.

This photo was taken from outside the cage. (which explains about the white thing on the photo.)

A close-up. Look at that. awwwww :flowers:

Another similar photo…

…and a close-up! The female hamster was moving about sometimes when the babies were still suckling milk and it was alarming to see the babies being dragged all over the place.