The Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Education will be in Cambridge this week. He would like to meet with some Singaporean Students in the area to discuss education issues.
alright! dinner. free dinner! the initial email sent out was to this place in Harvard Square called Penang. it's a msian restaurant but serene and i agreed that the thai restaurant across the road is better (& cheaper =p). keng was asking if i wanted to go “discuss” education issues. hah! as tho loh.. you know me lah, prefer to let pple do the talking and i do the eating. but nonetheless, it was an interesting opportunity not to be missed. general lim chuan poh loh. ex-chief of defence force. in the end, we received another email stating that the venue had been changed & according to the website http://mammamaria.com, the prices of the food just seemed like it was ‘foolish’ to pass on such a nice yummy, free dinner.. so we signed up (like super last minute coz the ‘deadline’ to rsvp was 4pm and we did so at 11pm or so..) check out the menu! http://mammamaria.com/n_menu.html. it's amazing. i didnt understand most of it. haha. too cheem liaoz. so what did i do? i asked the waiter for recommendations. yay for recommendations! coz i ate really yummy delicious dishes - baked oyster & veal (aka baby cow). it was soooooo good! Gen. Lim (i duno how else to call him actually - Mr Lim sounds abit under-titled. heh. =p) had a bottle of white wine and a bottle of red at our table (the other table where keng sat - yes, *sadly* we sat apart. haha! - had only the white wine) - both tried and approved by him. the waiters probably knew he was of important status. they came to him for approval. =p heh, but when they came with the bill, he directed them to the other table - he wasnt the one who was going to foot the bill. contact singapore was. =p man, the entrees were like 30+ a dish and there were like 21 of us! we all ordered an appetizer and a desert at the end. lazy to count but our total bill would likely to be at least a thousand USD. talk about where tax-payers' money goes. *smiles*
so we were late. haha. opps. almost 8min late. 7 of us. we got lost. kind of. *grinz* kevin (sgporean freshman) drove - his dad bought him a new SUV, 25k USD. it wasnt very far from MIT but heh, we missed the exit from the highway so we took the next and 'u-turned'. ended up where we first entered, except on the wrong side of the road lah. then we did an illegal u-turn (which was scary, considering we were turning at the sign that said 'no left-turn') and managed to find our way to the area. bad. coz it was town and there was hardly any parking. we kinda 'ran' to the restaurant coz the phone call ruijie received said that they were all there liaoz (that includes Gen. Lim loh!) so we were quite paiseh. there were 2 seats left on Gen. Lim's table so friendly ruijie and me *kinda* volunteered to sit there loh.. ruijie had an easy time in that sense.. coz Gen. Lim had just spoken to ruimin, ruijie's brother, in person. (gosh, family of president scholars.. ruimin finished his Bachelor's & PhD in like 4 years or sth - came out in news loh!) i was the last person he spoke to on the table (of 10, including him) but it kinda sparked the 'education' part. haha. he was surprised i wasnt with MOE (yay for no bond!!) and asked me a lot of questions. haha. he even asked which sec school and jc i was from. =p which obviously was way out of pple's imagination. =) i'm so grateful to God's grace.. to be able to come here. in the midst of so many scholars (i am not one!) and getting to interact and live with them. and love too lah. heh. blessing upon blessings.
he's pretty well-traveled within US. esp with restaurants! i think the entourage (maybe on other trips, not sure) were going around to check out schools and other stuff for the development of digital media (this trip) to be used in education (& probably other sectors in sgp if successful). they were going to have a full day mtg on monday at MIT, travel to somewhere (cant remb) and then to Microsoft. haha. love was telling some of the others he just finished his summer internship there. it's really cool and rare chance to be having dinner with such 'high-level' pple.. minus the 2 president-scholars here - ruijie and didi's friend, weixian (who btw, complaint a lot about my 'instant' dinner the night before! - shirleen thinks we should bar him from cooked dinner.. =p) he seems to like fine dining a lot too. talked abit about molecular food (dont ask me what, but according to the conversations last night, it's about using chemical engineering to 'engineer' food at its peak. nice!) he could even tell us about his favourite cheese and what type we should try the next time we can (dun think that is gonna happen to me any time soon).
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