March

Somehow I had quite a few wedding invites and dinner and dance for these months, March to June... so I thought since I couldn't fit into most of my clothes, let's tailor a dress! Got this simple design idea from the seamstress *where everything is adjustable and expandable for my tummy too*, materials and beads from Arab Street! It's my multi-purpose semi formal dress!! To note though, that chiffon is one helluva fragile material... the dress is now alittle kaput cos it got stuck on some wooden splinter and there's this line across the tummy area... the pleats kinda help to cover it up but it's still visible. Oh well, the purpose was served nevertheless :) Must also give credit to my wonderful KittyKaps from Aerosoles which I wore to almost shoe death in the early parts of my pregnancy.

Having looked into our schedules and our wishes to visit some places in the near future, we realised that we could only do our trips within these few months. So we quickly booked our trip to visit David, our bestman in Shanghai and to Sydney! Soon it was March and we were very excited to visit Shanghai as it was the 1st time for Hans in China and my 1st time to Shanghai. On reaching the airport, T3, horror of horrors... we forgot all about our visas!!! Had to cancel our flights and think of alternatives... finally, decided on heading to HK to get our visa over the weekend and then fly from there to Shanghai. We thought it would be an easy affair since the visa office was opened over the weekends.
Making use of our trip to HK since the last time I was there was more than 10 years ago!!! And to think I used to visit the place like a couple of times a year for almost 10 years?!?!?! Besides sight seeing, had to makan the roasted goose, yummy veggies and of course EGG TARTS!! See my tummy in the pic, I really think it's 10% baby is 90% food! ;)
Well, it was supposed to be easy in HK ... BUT they needed an empty page in Han's passport and his was full, so it meant that we had to wait till Monday, go to the German embassy to get the covers of the passport chopped for validity and then line up again! The visa office opens at 9am and below is the line at 8.30am already... we waited for almost 2 hours and submitted our forms and $$. Had to come back at about 4pm on the same day and we could collect the visa. Crossed our fingers as we made our flight changes again.


Finally we got our visa and off to Shanghai we flew! Was really happy to see David and his family, his 2 gals Cassandra and Carina. They lived in Shanghai for a few years and the little ones speak with a Shanghainese accent!!

Of course we dun show sight seeing pics lah, just makan pics... since Hans and I can gorge down 10 xiao long paos at Din Tai Fung at a drop of a coin, we def. had to savour the best xlb in shanghai... apparently the ones at the Yu Yuan Gardens. The super huge ones where you use the straw to drink the soup are rather overrated. Generally we love the xlb in Shanghai for their thicker skins and hence more soup to taste! Besides the food, we had a really nice time catching up with our friends and also going to the beautiful lake in Hangzhou and watching a spectacular lake/laser/water show created by Zhang Yi Mou as below.
and finally it was time after 8 days to say goodbye to Shanghai... it was quite an adventure with the visa and definitely a new learning experience about the people and their habits in Shanghai ;)



So what was Sparrow's 2nd concert? Something alittle less loud ...


After the concert, it was off to BKK for that elçheapo shopping and fooding spree! A cool hotel that my good fren picked out...

scored lots of floaty tops at 5-10dollars each and those expandable soft and comfy 3/4s and pants ... besides that I didn't bother looking at the clothes from the other shops because even if it says FREE SIZE in Bkk, it dun mean scoot. The gals there are puny! And this fat momma has just gained like 13 kg since preg started... heh. I must say tho, Little Sparrow has been great to me so far, allowing me to do almost anything I wanted, long days walking along the shopping lanes... just that I tend to perspire alot. Am extremely thankful :)