berwick wall

excuse my patchy history but from what i understand, berwick is on the scottish border and has a long-standing heritage of keeping the scots out / english in, depending on who you ask. as such, it's got a wall around it, a garrison and magazine. it's between the river tweed and the north sea, and i couldn't help but think of the expression 'between the devil and the deep blue sea'. pseudo-nationalistic sentiment aside, make of that what you will. the great thing about the walls (apart from serving its original purpose centuries ago!) is that they made for some very good walking. we arrived in the afternoon and walked on the walls till sunset, then made our way to the pub. typical.

(apologies if almost all the photos are of the mister! when traveling in a twosome, there's really not much else to take.)

11b

almost two years ago, i bravely joined an orienteering race in edinburgh. we took a mini-bus up and as we were passing through berwick, a final yearer who'd done her rural GP placement there insisted that we drive back and forth across the bridge. she'd described an idyllic month, staying at a local b&b and swimming in the sea after clinic every day. at that point, i was more concerned with learning how to run while holding a compass (still haven't mastered it!) and sort of glazed over as we passed the town by. then came a weekend when the mister and i got itchy feet. we'd been to edinburgh while backpacking summer 2008 (gah, so old!) and wanted to venture north-ish. berwick came to mind and off we went!

oh, heart-warming story before i begin. so when we went to print out our berwick tickets, silly me hadn't realised there were eight (!!!) tickets involved. we picked up the one and went to have coffee, when to my horror it dawned on me that our solitary ticket read 1/8. my heart sank and we ran (ok i ran, the mister trailed and smirked) back to the station. there'd been some recent renovations and it was a mess, but basically the lady by the ticket machine checked and said all eight had been printed and she could not reissue them despite my insistance that i'd hung around but only one had popped out. about 2h had since passed and semi-resigned to having to buy a new set, i checked at the information counter and ohmyword, some kind soul had returned them. all of them! you hear some horrible things about big cities, but this act of kindness made my week. i felt warm and fuzzy all the way to berwick and back :)

and another shot from a little closer to the bridge. if you're astute, you might recognise it from the skyfall train advertisement! 

the mister is a man of impeccable taste and discernment. he's the amazing ability to sniff out the best deals, and find the coolest places to stay. i mean, just take look at any of the trips he's planned. the few times i've booked accommodation, it's always fallen short. in athens, i accidentally booked us (and his parents) into a dodgy hotel in the red light district (yeah, think hotel 81 equivalent in the greek geylang...). it didn't even have an en suite bathroom! i'd come to the gloomy hallway to find poor FIL patiently accompanying MIL on multiple trips to the far flung loo. more recently, i even got the town wrong and booked us 30km away (with no car) from the roman wall. lost all faith in my planning ability yet? i sure have! so you can imagine my sheer joy and relief when what i booked (that had sounded good on paper!) was actually good in real life too. value is something i, well, value, and much as i enjoy the occasional splurge, it's also so important to live within our (single-income!) means. i'd booked us a room above the local chippy and was silently prepared to come out smelling of yesterday's dinner. little did i know that the room was a lovely roomy attic room (they almost never are!), perfectly appointed, spotless, fragrantly scented and with plenty of skylights to make the most of the autumn sunshine. even the mister was impressed! yay to the perks of high street living without the hefty price tag :)

traditions

i really don't mean to get so nostalgic but a friend just posted photos of the new beaujolais and i was thrown back in time to 2009 when i was at her beaujolais party. so beaujolais is a french wine with a marketing strategy that's better than their wine. every year, there's le beaujolais nouveau and people host parties to celebrate its release. that year, i was in stockholm on exchange - a period i remember too fondly. 

on the day of C's party, the mister had returned to singers in the afternoon (to sit the bar exam no less!*) and J, my lovely french friend, had invited me to join her at french-swedish C's wine party. we couldn't even find a bottle of le beaujolais nouveau 2009, having left it so late in the day, and ended up going with the previous years. party guest fail. four years on, C and her sambo (swedish term for unmarried partner) are proud parents to two adorable little boys, J has moved to sydney and is in a civil partnership with A, her aussie love from our time on exchange, and the mister and i are london-based and have been married for over a year. marriage is so culturally relative and it's nice how each of us has found love and expresses commitment our own way.

oh! but this was supposed to be about traditions. i don't have many and think it's high time the mister and i started coming up with some for our little family of two. what makes traditions hard, to me, is the reproducibility. last year, we had a christmas tree and the mister roasted a christmas goose. almost twelve months on, we are still impaling unsuspecting tootsies with needles from said tree. and goose? once was enough. beaujolais nouveau parties are a tradition i wish i could get into, but not being french, nor able to truly appreciate the wine, it borders on fraudulent to randomly throw one too.

and that's the thing about traditions! how do you take something and make it your own? i'm all for organic traditions but save for glorious weekend lie-ins and HIMYM marathons, we need something with a little more edge. routine is also something we're not big fans of, and routine just seems to be the uncool cousin of tradition. i've friends who take one occasion and make it their thing. like how someone always always hosts a new year's eye party, someone else has a themed birthday celebration every year, yet another person (non-american, too!) can be counted on to host a huge thanksgiving 'do... which's great! maybe a big part of that is not moving, about having a group of friends who count on you to do certain things. as relatively recent transplants to london, we're still getting to know people, compounded by the little inconvenient detail that it takes me twenty years to warm to someone (the mister is lucky, it only took me five years to fall for him). 

or maybe it takes having children to form a tradition, because you want to gift them with the security that mama and papa do as they say. haha. kids. there's still so much we want to see and do before starting a family, so maybe starting a tradition can wait till then, too.

*it's not fair! he spent the two weeks study leave with me in stockholm and sardinia, didn't open his books once, and still manages to come in top 20 out of 300 candidates.

autumn colours (with text this time!)

having grown up on the equator, i'm accustomed to a perennial summer. dislocating to the UK has been a lesson in the changing seasons, and that strange ambiguity as they merge from one into the other. it's my third autumn here (i hate the word 'fall'. so american and much less pretty...) and the colours never fail to amaze me. there's also that funky autumn smell that i'm less fond of, sort of like feet but no one else seems to think so. it's so british to be hung up on the weather, and i'll be the first to request rain over sunshine anytime, but on this one good saturday, it was me who lured the mister out with the prospect of massive burgers. having had more than enough of the grey muckiness, crisp autumn air, blue skies and unadulterated sunshine was reason to take the scenic route. we passed this gorgeous little bandstand en route, the mister was deliberately antagonistic by taking a waist-down photo when i deliberately requested one of the autumn colours. and he didn't even have the courtesy to tell me my waterproofs (you never know!) were half-off :( 

uncooperative photographer woes aside, we did eventually make it to the burger joint. because we'd dawdled through the park, we missed breakfast hour. boo. so much for planning to have a waffle / pancake starter and then burger / hotdog main. just as well! because the burger was big, and the tower of onion rings even bigger.

street side lunch

we've a uniquely singaporean habit of visiting stalls that come with complimentary newspaper reviews. visit any 'famous' hawker in singers and you'll see a stall front plastered with foodie articles, occasionally with grinning celebs embracing the hawker in question. it was comforting to observe that this practice might not be solely singaporean in nature, as when we were in jaipur, our guide brought us to this one lady surrounded by aluminium drums. she, too, was newspaper-famous. one look at our aghast faces (sigh, bad tourists) and the guide read our minds. "it's ok," he reassured us, "i bring my tourists here all the time and they don't get delhi belly after!" the mister is usually up for anything, but the thought of running to the loo for the duration of our return flight did not appeal to him. nor me. i did feel bad though! wouldn't the lady be insulted? but the guide was hungry and we were more than happy to buy a few helpings of the deep fried dough fritters swimming in a peppery water mix.

the taj

now no trip to india would be complete without a visit to the taj. truth be told, i wasn't too keen to jostle with the throngs of tourists. i mean, it's just a block of white marble. meh. but am i glad i was wrong, and glad for the mister who nudges me out of my crowd-averse comfort zone and gets me to face life head-on. the mister is resourceful and research showed that the taj was most impressive at dusk i.e. to watch the marble glow different colours in the setting sun. there is a certain beauty to the symmetry and i can almost imagine the bereaved maharajah deliriously in love building this mausoleum for his deceased wife.

speaking of marriage, i hadn't realised just how conservative india/indians were. every where we went, people (passport control / shop keepers / guides / museum ticket collectors etc) would ask if we were married and their attitude would visibly change once they learnt we were. it was after this happened a few times that i thought, "maybe they don't approve of unmarried couples traveling together". like when we were getting our visas on arrival, the immigration officer was quite stern until he learnt we were married. then his whole countenance softened and was all, "oh! but you married! stay long time no problem!" uh so if we were just dating, we would have to leave sooner? i also found that the men would bond based on the shared understanding of being married. the string of guides we had really warmed to the mister and would tell him about their wives and families. also, at one of the museums, an artist sketched a portrait on my postcard and asked for my name, adding the mister's name to the drawing only after confirming that we were married. how bizarre!

amber fort

the highlight of our time in jaipur was visiting the amber fort. i'm no history buff but it's got to do with the maharajah and his multiple wives and concubines. honestly, i was more intrigued by the elephant ride, and good to know i'm no longer allergic to indian elephants (long boring story of childhood atopy). i mean, rush hour jaipur stylez is kinda cool when you've a row of elephants as far as the eye can see. through it all, i kept thinking of that scene from the jungle book when the elephants were marching with mowgli at the end.

our guide for the day was a former lawyer with a masters in history (!!!) and the mister and i were discussing how when a tour guide earns more than a lawyer, something is seriously messed up with the country. don't get me wrong - not knocking tour guides at all, but our guide was telling us how when he qualified 13 years ago, he was expected to work for a year with no pay, irregardless of his performance. i was thinking of the S$500/month i received while taking the bar exam course but to be fair, considering how that's less than the minimum wage of filipino domestic help, it was more stipend than salary. so our guide switched to tourism and hasn't looked back.

oberoi rajvillas

what pricked my conscience even more in india was the stark contrast between where we stayed and what was beyond the compound walls. when i was in stockholm on exchange, my swedish law professor was quite candid about how she only went on holiday to first world countries with high standards of living like switzerland and france. at that time, i found it quite narrow-minded. just because you don't see poverty, doesn't mean it's not there. but when we visited india, i saw things from her perspective. knowing that there were children starving just 200m from where we were surrounded by opulence was hard to stomach. made me wonder if it'd be worth donating the money we spent on accommodation to a local charity we could trust, and staying at a guest house for a mere fraction of the hotel rate. after all, it's all about efficient allocation of resources, and the opportunity cost of staying at a fancy place, isn't it. couldn't help but wonder just how far my £30 (average cost of a meal inside the hotel) would go if i gave the money away and had crackers for dinner instead. 

what also surprised me was how quickly i was desensitised to the poverty. on the second day, i found it easier to ignore beggars, and felt less guilty about being relatively better off. that said, it's incredibly hard to be an entitled brat when you learn the value of money. it's hard to justify a lavish lifestyle on the basis of, 'i work hard, i deserve a break' because compared to the locals, no, i don't work hard. the going rate for a porter at the rail station was 50p per suitcase. i mean, like, dude, my suitcase is almost 30kg. and this old man is going to carry it (and more bags!) over 500m from the taxi to the baggage rail for less than cost of a candy bar. unreal. and then i end up giving the porter something ridiculous like 300% the agreed rate, and my packed lunch, just because i'm way too soft.

but i digress, and this post is really about the oberoi rajvillas. i don't often mention hotels by name because 1) name dropping isn't cool 2) the mister paid for the room, why advertise for free but occasionally we stay some where that leaves us really impressed. the service was impeccable and the absolute best we've ever experienced. i'm also partial to tents (not) and the mister made it look like glamping. for the first time, i slept in a "tent" with zero trepidation. the food was amazeballs - i'd thought i'd good indian food before but nothing came close to what the in-house restaurants served up. cheese and garlic naans on tap? yes please! the rooms (well, our tent) was super comfortable and the grounds so luxe it was unreal. i mean, the lawn was hand-manicured and while it did feel a bit like job creation, there was an army of gardeners pruning bushes by hand. the personable GM was warm and welcoming, and every member of staff we met had initiative in spades. it was almost like they could read our mind and conjure up whatever we wanted before we even asked for it. the mister and i are quite particular about food sources and the waiter picked up on that and smoothly reassured us that the fish was local and line-caught. they also had the best recommendations and seem to have mastered the knack of sharing their culture and customs with us without being patronising. 

we did make a pitstop at the oberoi in agra and while good, the oberoi rajvillas set the bar so high that oberoi agra paled in comparison. if you're ever in jaipur and have the chance to stay at the oberoi rajvillas, do go. it's hands down one of the best hotels we've ever stayed in and somewhere i'm keen to re-visit. 

 

jaipur

we landed bright and early in new delhi and left straight for jaipur. the five hour drive whizzed by, although i suspect we were asleep for a large part. hey, after a red eye plagued by screaming babies, what else were we to do? catching up on zz did feel like a waste though, because the sights we passed en route were nothing short of fantastical. i fell in love with the striking red turbans the men wore, and the contrast with their white outfit? defo hitting the right sartorial notes.

there were also many "heart pain" moments. i'm probably not the first visitor to be shocked by the chasm between the have and have nots. it was disconcerting and disturbing, when the street children were banging on the car windows for food, we just had to harden our hearts and turn away. of course we'd stockpile buns from the breakfast buffet the next few days to misappropriate on the drive, but it was more to assuage my own conscience than anything else. how do you help every hungry child? i used to be against pri*mark after the mister educated me on appalling child labour practices, but child labour versus begging / languishing in squalor? toughie. what really got to me was how everyone has hopes, dreams and aspirations. but why do some people (like me!) get to pursue and realise that dream, while others, by sheer accident of birth, don't. karma isn't something i believe in personally, but i can see why it's one of the few ways to make sense of the inequality out there. many people in india accept their lot and are motivated to do good works by the promise of being reborn into a better life. i wish i had better developed ideas, and a more sound understanding of philosophy and suffering. thank goodness for the mister who helps me articulate the existential rumblings, and works through one ethical conundrum after another with me.

the himalayas

i harbour no intentions to ever climb to base camp, much less conquer everest. but soaking up the himalayas from the plane window? spectacular. even more so when bathed in that dewy golden light of dawn. didn't hurt that breakfast was being served (doesn't a hot meal make everything even better?) and despite the screaming baby (AUGH i have a personal vendetta against parents who irresponsibly let their offspring yell away... -death glare-) the views were pretty darn awesome. oh my, parents. maybe it's just me but they can be so entitled and self-absorbed. i'm at the age where my fb newsfeed is flooded with baby photos and updates, to the point where i'm so glad for fb's block function. 

i really don't care if your kid produced a poop. or rolled over. or pulled gas-induced funny face. by the same token, people probably don't care about what the mister and i get up to in london, so i really shouldn't judge being similarly guilty of splashing a (small) part of our lives on fb. 

obnoxious parent rant aside, we bent our "go west" rule for india (and for the maldives in january) because the world is so big and there's so much we want to see. again, maximising being in london and trying to keep our travels west-ward or europe-bound, but occasionally the opportunity to fly east is too good to resist. doesn't hurt that the mister is ever-organised and ever-resourceful, making every holiday happen because i just follow for the ride (and photos, he doesn't take many photos). occasionally he's on my case for putting some of it on social media (his friends know exactly what he's up to despite him keeping a low profile) and i'm slowly figuring out what's kosher, or not. london's an amazing city and we're so grateful to be living here. but we do have our off days, more me than him, and occasionally get itchy feet desperately in need of a change of scenery. so tadaaa! mr. planner supreme throws a metaphorical dart at our equally metaphorical world map and it's off to more exotic climes. 

freeeedommmM!

p/s brief travelogue to follow in the next few days :)

p/p/s it's not our first foray to the subcontinent! if you'd like to see, we've visited in 2010 and i even did a piece on goa that the lovely lavishley was so kind as to publish.

some thoughts

was on the ITU today and to risk sounding cliche, it was an eye-opener. i suppose that's the point and the very reason we are put on wards, but i hadn't expected for it to have as big an impact on me as it did. we saw a patient with 70% burns, with mutilating but life-saving surgery. he was, literally, up to his eye balls in skin grafts. and we were told when they were changing his dressing yesterday, his lip fell off. as a medical student, you learn to steel your stomach. and in a way, i find it's mind over matter. i've no recollection of this but according to my mother, i was a steady little five year old eagerly helping out when my darling brother sliced his hand open on glass. i spent many saturdays volunteering at a hospice when i was a teen, assisting the nurses and emotionally detaching from patients on palliative care. and then i copped out and went to law, regressing into the most squeamish person on earth. but now i'm back to medicine, i like to think there's not much that fazes me. scapel, incisions, drains, needles, blood, poop - bring it! observed a tracheotomy (incision in the neck to insert a tube for ventilation into the windpipe) too but seeing the burns patient this afternoon was like a scene out of 'the mummy'. every inch was covered in bandages and when the consultant showed us part of his blistered skin, i felt so very sad. the rest of ITU wasn't exactly rainbows and unicorns either. there's a certain gallow humour on the ward, and apparently how long-term patients deal with the passing of another regular. i also saw first hand how "heart sink" administration can be, with patients wanting to die at home unwittingly held at hospital because of discharge bureaucracy.

before applying to university, i was fortunate to shadow an intensivist who warned me that what we see in hospitals is not representative of life outside. if you're an oncologist who only sees people with cancer, then you'd start to think that everyone is getting cancer. so while i recognise that most people aren't in hospital, i'm very conscious not to take health for granted. every day i leave the wards overwhelmed with gratitude that my husband and family are healthy. speaking of husband, my GP tutor told me yesterday that our life experiences shape our attitudes to patients and being married, i feel it more keenly every time someone is their spouse's carer. i can't help but wonder what it would be like if that were us and whether i could cope if i were ever in their position. it really gives weight to the traditional wedding vows, and just this afternoon one patient shared his near-death experience. he described drifting away, then hearing his wife say, "don't you dare leave me alone, you selfish (insert salty language)" and the next thing he knew, he'd woken up in ITU. we all had a good chuckle, but i couldn't help but surmise that people some times hang around for their spouse, and rightly so! 

the consultant we were shadowing taught me more about professionalism in one afternoon than years of lectures. what i respect was how he treated fellow consultants and the domestics alike. as we walked through the wards, he would be bantering with the theatre orderly, joking with a domestic about rounds at the local and taking the mickey out of the other consultants. social stratification is something i'm trying to blind myself to and i'm always so encouraged when people at the very top of their professional game treat those at the perceived 'bottom' with the respect they deserve. when i was a pupil, my pupil master was a high profile senior counsel. and one thing i'd observed and really liked about him was how on the way to court, he'd ride shotgun and talk football with the firm's driver. now we'd be on the way to massive trial and i'm sure he'd 1001 things on his mind. cross examination questions, strategy, client management, bench management etc but for those fifteen minutes, he'd banter with the driver.

it's a journey, isn't it. and along the way i'm glad to have positive role models, people who influence my world view and walk the talk.

accidentally social

my best friend, C,  occasionally tells me off for misrepresentation. she alleges all i do is "fun things" while i try desperately to convince her otherwise. so in the interests of fairness, let's put it out there that my absolute favourite past time is sleep. and when i'm not sleeping, i'm usually watching trashy teevee. my idea of a perfect weekend? not setting the alarm, waking whenever, moving to the living room, eating lasagne and ice cream (not at the same time!) and washing it all down with fruit beer or semi-decent bubbles. after a week of non-stop social interaction and mental over stimulation, i need to decompress. and i'm unapologetic about it. "me time"?! pfffft. oh honey, it's my time and i'll do whatever i want with it ;) the best part about all this? the mister is with me 100%, unless he's got a bee in his bonnet about visiting a market/ restaurant / park / other cool new place so hip it hurts. with no family here nor its associated commitments, we get to be as selfish as we want. much as i adore my folks (hi porpor, please don't disinherit me!) it's nice to have almost no responsibilities and absolute freedom to do exactly as we please. 

however, the best laid plans to do nothing on the weekends occasionally get scuppered by fantastic people passing through london. in fact, we've just had one of our busiest weekends yet where in about 30 hours, we met up with 12 people. we started at one of our favourite markets with a friend doing his phD and a couple from singers who've just relocated to london. before the mister even had time to drink his coffee, we linked up with my cousin's in-laws-to-be for lunch. they're the sweetest couple ever and the sort of 'grown ups' that the mister and i want to be. they spoilt us rotten with amazing wines, the kind we'd never splurge on ourselves, and the best of modern british cooking. their london-based son had asked for bak kwa and they gifted us the same. now this bak kwa was life-changing. the mister usually isn't a fan but one whiff of this apple wood smoked baby and my formerly personal stash was fast dwindling. 

after a huge lunch, we moseyed over to soho for coffee with friends who were in london on their honeymoon. one drawback about being based so far away is we've had to miss many weddings. but then they honeymoon in london and we've a chance to celebrate with them on a more personal scale - even better! from coffee with transitioned to pre-dinner drinks then a massive eight course autumnal japanese supperclub with my brother and our favourite orthodontist-to-be (hellooo three year masters and recent london transplant!) in fact, the last time the four of us were together was at our iceland wedding, which reminds me of the same supperclub we went for on our first anniversary. oh, another friend from singapore happened to be at the very same supperclub (what were the chances?!) and we got to catch up as well. as obedient supperclub guests, we took our host's 'carriages by 11' instructions very seriously and rolled back to my brother's for more drinks and part of a movie before i, well, fell asleep on on the sofa and had to be brought home. when sunday rolled round, we arranged to go to church with 2+2+1 friends (a first! it's usually just us!) and had lunch as a big happy family after. 

when we finally got home and regressed into default couch potato mode, i asked the mister how we'd ended up doing so much in such a short time. he claims i'm secretly social and thrive on social contact while i'm adamant we're more accidentally social than any thing else. don't get me wrong - nothing about the weekend was obligatory and every one we'd the privilege of catching up with we did indeed want to meet. and maybe that's part of growing up - learning how to set boundaries, how to say no, how to be protective of 'us' time, how to prioritise sleep... but it's a lesson for another weekend because i'd an amazing time seeing family-to-be and friends dear to us. we don't see the people we love as often as we'd like to, and finding out in person that they're happy, healthy and in a good place is a great thing.

(hot pot on a cold night can't be beat!)

old habits die hard, and a new routine.

clinicals have been amazing. which was a huge relief because on the off chance i realised i didn't like them, then, um, well i'd be in deep trouble, to say the very least! it's slowly sinking in that "omg this is what i get to do for the rest of my life!" and i'm beyond thrilled that it's unlikely i'll ever have a "desk job" again. offices? bah! give me hospital corridors and their sweetly sick disinfectant smell any day. but back to old habits... was at a GP surgery for my primary care placement last week and got a little too involved in their as-yet-incomplete partnership agreement than i should've. guess it's hard to deny that the legal element of running a business still intrigues me, and as a fellow grad medic (she did english as a first degree!), the GP was kind to indulge my little legal gander. but it's in the small things, like picking up discrepancies during case presentations and wishing for more detail than actually provided, that remind me how i haven't completely let go of law. fingers crossed i never do, even though all i seem to be doing now is firing off angry letters to all manner of consumer agencies, and informally advising friends of friends on housing disputes. and the mister, bless him, is constantly tickling what's left of my law brain by telling me about work. we talk about transferable skills all the time, and it appears the only transferable skill so far is more transferable skepticism ('never trust your client' becomes 'never trust your patient') which is probably terribly unfair to the little old dears who volunteer to be case studies. so there, a little medicolegal musing that better lives up to the blog title than, say, a recap of our weekend.

and regarding the new routine - there's something truly restorative about having good girlfriends round for dinner. grateful to have an amazing co-host in C, and we happen to like the same people (haha) which is always a plus. simple home-cooking, made from scratch with everything organic and free-range. i try not to be an organic snob but feel strongly about eating as well as my pocket allows. and also eating less but better. there's little rationalisation but i rather have non-animal protein (lentils, soy etc) than eat mistreated livestock. i usually do a soup, salad, main and dessert. it's a great excuse to spend the evening experimenting with dishes the mister and i can't finish on our own. when we were on honeymoon in the galapagos, we met a yummy mummy who'd been married for twenty years. she and her husb have a little dinner group comprising four couples that has more or less stayed the same since they were fresh graduates. they'd meet monthly with the host cooking the main and delegating the other items on the menu to the guests. sounded like a great tradition and i wish the mister and i knew three couples we could do that with. however, pathetic as it sounds, our dining table seats a grand total of four people. so maybe we'll start that when our house grows up ;) for now, completely happy having one to two guests over at a time, catching and keeping up with dear friends.

exploring the north east

we've a trippin' uk album going on fb that i've been trying to add to every now and again. much as we like europe, there's something to be said for getting familiar with what's on our (metaphorical) doorstep. being based in london is great and we're grateful to be in that sweet spot where only i'm in school. figure if we were both students, we wouldn't have the means to travel as much as we do. and if we were both working, well, we'd have a harder time coordinating leave. so this works! as much as we prioritise time together, collecting passport stamps and sleep (in that order!) there are no passport stamps to be had driving in the UK. earlier this year, we spent some time in the lakes, followed by a quick visit to wales. in summer, i went to brighton with my siblings, and dover with the mister. more recently, spent the weekend in windsor with meal-time forays into bray. we're headed to scotland next month but thought to first visit the northumberland countryside last weekend. stayed at a quaint b&b where, incidentally, alexander graham bell made the first phone call from in 1877, and ambled through the woods and along the river. love how it's so easy to just head out and walk, with wonderfully accessible public footpaths that all seem to lead to the pub. or that might just be the mister adjusting our route accordingly.

tiny tea scare

i've a confession to make. i hardly drink plain water but have somehow picked up the bad habit of drinking copious amounts of tea (almost never coffee!). recently, i  read an article about how most tea leaves aren't properly washed. the resulting levels of pesticides and carcinogens (ugh!) are therefore much higher than the safe limits. with plastic teabags leeching disgusting chemicals into the hot water, and paper teabags bleached with more scary chemicals yet, even teabags aren't spared! how reliable the article was is beyond me, but surely there must be a grain of truth. the take home message being: drink organic, loose leaf tea from a stainless steel / glass tea strainer. 

now i'm not about to go all militant and stop downing my beloved twining's lemon&ginger tea all together but i'm also wary of all the bad stuff in my otherwise innocent looking cuppa. i'm caffeine-tolerant (good or bad, you tell me!) and the only thing that keeps me going is abject fear and desperation i.e. i can forget pulling a crazy caffeine-driven all-nighter (yay me when i'm shadowing on calls next month :/) but i can also enjoy strong coffee as a nightcap without the mister fearing for his sanity. along the same vein (sorry, i've venepuncture and cannulation on my mind) as the previous post, growing up strikes me as the inclination "to have less but better" - be it food and drink, shopping or even friends (haha). in some ways, spending our "wine budget" on the same number of half bottles may seem extravagant, but if i'm going to stop at two glasses, they better be good glasses! 

lengthy pre-amble aside, after this new-found appreciation for organic tea, you can imagine how happy i was to stumble on this lovely little tea shop. its floor to ceiling windows let plenty of natural light in while preserving the original structure and period charm. they also have the yummiest loose leaf lemongrass tea that brings me right back to ecuador when i was drinking tea straight from the on-site herb garden.

and there's my mister with his nose buried in fashion. it's semi-scary how well-versed he's become, with this crazy ability to tell fabric components from a mere touch.

indian summer

it's been deliciously warm of late and i'm starting to think that london's at her best in october. the throngs of summer tourists (ugh) have thinned out, it's not swelteringly hot, because, goodness me, most of london and its non-existent air-conditiong is incapable of dealing with heat. in fact, the weather has been so amiable of late that we spent most of sunday soaking up some sun. something i'd never do in singers but somehow relish in london. green park wasn't too crowded and the mister has the foresight to keep our trusty picnic mat in the car. so after a truly satisfying lunch at matsuri, we ambled over to find ourselves a little patch of grass. and what's some pseudo-summer sunshine without the obligatory soft serve ice cream with chocolate flake :) we must've spent the whole afternoon in joyous food coma at the park, trying our darndest not to let the territorial pigeons poop on us (as you do!). all in all, a very good sort of sunday.

growing up

was meant to be coming into one's own, dealing with crazy appetites and banishing bad habits like gluttony. in some ways, i feel very grown up with my spouse and my house. and in other ways (especially when soft cheese and alcohol is involved) i feel like an overindulged child with absolutely no self-restraint. denial of self and discipline seems to be fairly reasonable standards to work towards, but i'm still falling very far short. doesn't help that the mister is ever-resourceful, sniffs out the best deals (sometimes two at a time) and is keen to try anything and everything come restaurant week. he's miraculously managed to book us double lunch (!) and double dinner (!!) most weekends and there comes a point when i've to put my foot down and slowly explain why stuffing ourselves silly isn't the best of ideas. and i'm the one with no self-restraint! 

having whittled down "the original plan" to something a little more manageable, we were excited to finally try champagne+fromage near the lyceum. what the mister had sold me as a "light dinner of cheese and champers" was no longer so light when you factored in just how much cheese and champers there was. oh, and he forgot to add that there was dessert! i think it was a valiantly enjoyable effort to demolish* one cheese plate (finished before above photo was taken), one charcuterie plate, two baked camemberts and an egg and foie gras cocotte. we washed it all down with six full flutes of grower's champagne and a bottle of vintage champagne for good measure. and then there was a massive dessert course. we'd the chocolate fondant oozing with more cheese (i know right!) and a brick of raspberry tiramisu. you'd think the champagne would've acted as a lipase and digested most of the cheese for us, but no such luck. we left making empty promises not to eat for the week after (didn't happen) and a little more rounder than when we walked in.

*in the interest of full disclosure, we packed the bread (all the cheese plates came with mountains of amazing french bread**) and some of the ham to go. and the mister, bless him, shared it with a beggar on the bridge. if we 1) weren't already married 2) i wasn't a male chauvanist, i'd have dropped on one knee and proposed right there and then. oh the mister, he makes my heart swell :)

**one thing london lacks is good water to make good bread. all the decent bread we've had so far has been made in france and carted over in the morning. who knew?!

london by night

much as i whinge about london living, i've gotta admit at times it's pretty darn sweet. passing houses of parliament at night never ceases to make the mister and i slow down, almost unable to believe that we really live here. having grown up in london, it was a childhood dream of the mister to return as an adult. and me, well, i'm equally surprised how we ended up in ol'blighty. medsch?! did not see that one coming... what is really nice is how when i first met the mister in 2007, one of the first things he told me was how he wanted to live in london. and just over four years on, he (well, God) made it happen. it hit us quite suddenly one day how we've morphed into un-recognisable urbanites. something about being in a queue in the rain at 845am on a saturday morning, to enter a gym that only opens at 9, sobered us up. to be fair, it was the first time we've shown such enthusiasm to be yelled at by the slightly scary russian lady (spin class, for the uninitiated!) and in line with my clinicals-inspired spurt of healthy living. also, we were hours away from our weekend foray for a binge in bray. BUT STILL! our former selves would never be up that early on a saturday in singers, much less be in a queue for anything other than bak chor mee.

we've yet to return for a saturday spin class, but london is slowly but surely growing on us. it's restaurant week and the mister had booked us two dinners on saturday but somehow we managed to find time to walk through somerset house. what struck me was how the above photos received such a response over social media. a dear italian friend i met in stockholm while on exchange in 2009 happens to be doing an LLM in london and was quick to recognise the building, as did a friend who's moved back to singers for work. i suppose there's just something about london's subtle charm that compels you to identify and react to her attention-holding beauty.

waste not, want not

as you might've guessed by now, the mister is a man of many talents. and when it comes to cooking, we're complete opposites. i'll pore over a recipe, try to be as precise as humanly possible (nothing comes between me and my digital scales originally meant for gold but alas i've none to measure!) and get a little more worked up than necessary when things don't go exactly according to plan. control freak? maybe a little. which begs the question why i even cook to decompress. 

in fact, we're having my girlfriends round on two consecutive mondays (these busy busy junior doctors, can never pin them down to the same day!) and i've already draw up a plan of action. it's supposed to be simple home-cooked, and it is, but i enjoy the planning and subconscious stewing aspect. the mister, however, is a more just wing it kind of cook. in fact, this is the man who sprouted the most beautiful wedding vows on the spur of the moment while i had spent most of the night before memorising mine. no surprises there... the jury's still out as to who's the better cook. i mean, hey, give our friends some credit. picking sides would be the surest way to invitation revocation! 

i often concede defeat, most times far from graciously, and then the mister goes and cooks something so divine he makes me eat my words. i'm constantly amazed by how he's able to turn the simplest ingredients into something so wholesome and hearty. there's roast chicken, and there's roast chicken - a roast so good you lick the bones clean before using the carcass for stock. and the mister has a midas touch that i'm openly envious of, and he turns almost everything into culinary gold.

koya bar

the mister knows the way to my very asian heart is with hot soupy noodles. usually, it's bone*daddies ramen that does the trick after a long week. we decided to try koya bar after i thought it best to give our arteries a break. then again, this is the man who decided we'd have a korean fried chicken (jubo) feast right after cardiology week so health preservation isn't really a priority (BUT IT SHOULD BE!) on friday nights. i'm no food blogger (not hatin', just trying to play to my strengths) and taking photos of every single course is not for me. however we do relent and snap the odd photo to send to our folks to 1) remind them we're alive 2) not exactly wasting away. 

the sake came in convenient little one-cup size if you're lacking alcohol dehydrogenase (the mister is, i'm not) but after cardiology week came GI week and the joke was that drinkers have squeaky clean hearts but shriveled livers. don't quote me on this - i'm still figuring it out and you're better going to your actual doctor friends for proper health advice. so alcohol is also something i'm trying to cut back on. the first sip is always the best, anyway, so i'm slowly learning to stop at one.

that's the thing about clinicals. wonderful as they are, i'm starting to see how most things caused by lifestyle choices. and sure, we all know about some fit fiddle with no vice at all who dropped dead before 30. but it's a numbers game, isn't it. and i'm going to do whatever i can to improve my odds. take exercise! i KNOW it's good for you and have all the head knowledge to rattle off its multitude of benefits. but seeing decrepit old people who led sedentary lives and comparing them to their exercising counterparts? drastic difference. encouraged that it's never too late to start and trying to make baby steps. small things, like not cooking with salt, and exercising when i can, which fingers crossed will add up in the long run. like tesco says, every little helps!

three months

till this exact villa.

much as i enjoy surprises, i'm crazy about delicious anticipation and nursing little secrets. call it smug self-satisfaction if you will (haha, that's what i call it all right!) but there's a steep learning curve till my christmas exams and much as i like to think i'm self-motivated, knowing this baby* is waiting on the other side doesn't hurt. also, for the first time in three years, i don't have an exam waiting for me after christmas break. so this christmas break is going to be a real break (the mister insists it makes no difference because either way i holiday first, panic later...) and it's going to be a real treat. 

speaking of learning curves, i don't think i've ever been on one this steep and i feel infinitely better informed at the end of each week. it's affirmation of purpose (?) and i'm constantly overwhelmed with gratitude. sounds so trite but being with patients and being hit with realisation after realisation in the course of one day (OH! that's what blahblah looks like. OH! that's how blahblah presents. OH! that's how you do blahblah.) is kinda eye-opening and mind-blowing all at the same time -happy dance-

*ya ya i go on and on and get so defensive but omg if we'd a real baby at this stage, i could well kiss holiday treats goodbye. and 10h uninterrupted snoozes. my cute parents keep hinting that if we'd a kid, my allergies would disappear (?!) and when MIL starts praying for my womb, i figure it's wise to stay on in london for now. PLUS WHY ARE MARRIED WOMEN ON BABY-WATCH? i've been accused of being 3months preggers but 'not telling anyone yet'. sorry, that's just my lunch.

so i was being a little nostalgic

and re-visited this post.

it feels like life before medicine was a different life all together.

i've never been more fulfilled and it's crazy just how amazeballs clinicals have been. i spend most days overwhelmed with gratitude that 1) national experts take time out their schedules to teach us the basics 2) people with golden hearts come in on their own time to let us poke and prod them. just this morning we met a gent with acromegaly. he had taken leave to tell us about his condition and the long road to diagnosis, in hope that when faced with similar presentation in the future, we'd come to the diagnosis earlier and spare future-patient years of not knowing what's up. how public-spirited is that?!  

also, maybe i'm a little slow on the uptake but now i feel compelled to skim over the sylllabus in advance so come 9am start i'm all prepped and ready to see the conditions we're learning about live. the theory is slowly coming together and it excites me to see pathology in person (sorry patient!). but what makes it even better is when i go home and catch the mister youtube-ing things i've whatsapped him about in the day. we did gastro-intestinal last week and while i was decompressing, the mister was watching videos on ileostomy care and ascites drainage. i mean, how sweet and supportive is he! then we curl up on the sofa and guess the diagnosis while watch embarrassing bodies. so nerdy, and i'm moved beyond words by how the mister shows an interest in what i do. when we were both lawyers, we hardly talked about the files we were on. in a way it was nice how we could discuss them in shorthand and half-sentences, before soon moving on to more interesting things.

some one asked me recently why i got married "so young" and while i'm no child bride, it was hard to answer without sounding smug / vomit-inducing. but the honest answer is i've been so very fortunate to find the mister early. having spent five years trying to find something wrong with him, and failing, i realised i better marry him before someone else snapped him up. i'm no commodities trader, but i felt he was under-valued, and i was definitely over-performing by conning him into going out with me :) the immense benefit of being young and married is we've the luxury of time to enjoy this amazing season "just us" while pursuing our independent dreams. through it all, i've someone who has my back, who sees only the very best in me, and inspires me every day to be a better version of myself. he gives me plenty of space and ironically i feel more 'free' as a not-so-old married woman than i ever did when i was single many moons ago. 

in fact, the mister was instrumental in my applying to medical school and if i hadn't met him, i don't think i'd have had the courage to turn my back on a perfectly good legal career. but he signed me up for the medsch entrance exams despite my protestations (same time as the bar exam, hooboy!) and wouldn't let me settle for convenience. being a silly girl, i know that if i'd been single or with someone less encouraging at that point, there was no way i'd have about-turned into medicine at that stage. i wanted to eventually get married and have kids, and pursuing a graduate degree would have made it infinitely harder to do all that. plus the little problem of meeting a nice (preferably yellow) christian boy while at it... so it's all academic now, but every day i'm grateful for the mister, and this opportunity to being doing exactly what i want to do :)

exciting times ahead!