This week I 've been going to town quite frequently.
First was to shop for Mark's birthday gift and Bernard's ORD gift. At Borders where I bought the pre-paid gift card for Mark, I also bought a copy of the Harry Potter & the Half Blood Prince, all because it was sold at $9.95! Goodness, there's still the price tag on the back stating it's original price, which was over $40! Great deal, man. We shall see if Half Blood Prince will replace Goblet as my favourite volume in the HP series.
After Borders I went to Kinokuniya (I foresee myself going there more often in the future) to get some comics and to check out the Ima Ai Ni Yukimasu novel, which insipred the movie (which I will watch someday) and the drama (which I will still watch again someday).
Found the novel, I did. Found out the price as well: over $30. Sigh. I will still buy it someday, with a certain amount of regret because of the price, of course.
As for manga, I got the comic version of Evangelion (not the side stories, but the adaptation of the Anime itself) which was in Japanese. With Furigana, haha. From a brief browse of the book, it's more graphics than text (which means, relief from fatigue from reading stuff like Deathnote).
Another manga piece I got was entitled "Welcome to NHK". Not the Nihon Housou Kyoukai (as in, Japanese Broadcast Association) but the Nihon Hizai Kyoukai (as in, the Japanese Association of Useless Bums). I first saw an advertisement of this comic series from one of the volumes of Keroro. Kwok Onn said it's good, so I thought I might give it a try.
Eva and NHK.
After my Kino trip I rushed to Cineleisure (it was quite late) to check out the possible choices of board games for Bernard. Comics Mart was still open, so I found out the price for a few board games we may get for him.
The next day Chiang Wee brought me to Serene Centre to get the board game. We pondered over a few choices, and finally settled on Seafarers of Catan, an expansion of Settlers of Catan which Bernard already had.
This Friday was Bernard's ORD, and so we sent off the last of the Old Guards on NSF Br.
Will miss the day of sharing return transport with him, on which we talked about... mostly stuff related to Japanese, haha. And oh yes, all the "ear-dropping" legends that he made while working here.
Chiang Wee who knew VBA as well could succeed him as the VBA guy of our branch. Thank God, otherwise... otherwise I might as well paste a dart board on my chest all the way until my ORD. Or not really, because I think Mdm has already given up on trying to persuade me to learn some programming rather than Foxpro (which I still have much to learn).
On the same Friday I went for dinner with some colleagues in town, and after that we followed Kelvin to the Esplanade Library, where you can borrow media items under a paid membership. Most of the stuff there couldn't interest me, though. The music related stuff I saw there are classical music, or generally Western music which I hadn't really touched before.
The next day Bernard organised an outing to Settlers' Cafe, Clarke Quay branch. This time there was quite a large group, and we began with games like Swap (a card game which I played with my cell group before) and Jungle Speed (a game of spotting patterns and snatching totems).
After that we switched to this card game called Citadels, in which we play different characters every turn and build different districts until a certain level of achievement is reached. The game would have been quite balanced if not forthe fact that there was one character which we regarded as most "useless", and the gameplay sort of made it easy to predict who will get that character for every turn. Nonetheless I found the game quite easy to pick up, and it didn't render me thinking on my feet like Munchkin did.
I did join them for Munchkin later on, though. I guess what appealed to me the most about this game was the element of humour.
Some of the photos I've taken on that day...
The very cute bird statue near the Clarke Quay area.
A quite impressive building, called the Central, I think.
One of the boats you can find on the Singapore River.
Just a random decorative pillar we saw at a traffic junction.
Tall buildings never failed to impress me.
