Another year older.

They all told me that once you've passed the twenty-one mark, that there wouldn't be any brakes and it sure is true. It honestly frightens me that time is passing by so quickly. Wouldn't it be awesome if life could be controlled by a remote ?

Moving on, here's how I spent my birthday.

I woke up to a Louis Vuitton delivery surprise.

I pretty much spent the whole morning and afternoon playing world of warcraft. I'm pretty hooked onto mythic dungeons at the moment just trying to gear up. I'm trying very hard to get my i-level up so that I can get into hfc raids and guess what ? Blizzard gave me a warforged weapon. What a great birthday gift. Thank you Blizzard.

So today's birthday dinner was spent with the usual suspects. Last year, we celebrated it at Irodori and we thought we'd go somewhere new this year. We searched around a few weeks prior to my birthday and we came across this restaurant called Shin minori and they had a private room which was needed because of our noise level.

When we got there and told them that we had a booking for the private room, we were in for a shock. When we called to make a reservation a few weeks back, we were not told that there would be any additional charge. We were then asked by the manager very rudely, in this exact words "Eh you all know that private room got minimum charge of $450 hor ?" and we obviously didn't know because we were not told. The thing is, even if we were told, we would have still gone down but it's just ethics. It would have been nice to have been informed. We did consider not even having dinner there, but it's 2 days before Christmas and we didn't have a reservation for anywhere else. We just had to suck it up and have dinner there.

Well, every time we have a buffet dinner, we always say that the next time we have a buffet dinner, that Fufu is not allowed to order, but each time, he ends up ordering.

This is the result.

And of course, a group photo with the feast.

So I am going to be brutally honest with our verdict here.

We were pleased with the manager from the moment we stepped into the restaurant. When I told my father about what happened, he actually remembered the manager and described him as a person who did nothing but stand behind the counter, ordering the ground staff around. It honestly amuses me that someone this incompetent and also one with 0 pr skills can be a manager.

Secondly, the food was of very average standard. Nothing special.

If there was any positive thing I could say about the restaurant, is that the remaining waiters and waitresses were really hard working. They gave us top service.

It's definitely not a place that we would step into ever again.

Okay, enough ranting for now.

A birthday isn't a birthday without a cake right ? Well, I got the best cake that I've ever had in my life.

Well, here are a few photos that we took with the cake.

So the cake was pretty good ! It's from a home baker.

As I was saying, the cake was really great, but we had so much to eat for dinner that we couldn't finish and it's usually the case isn't it ? Well, have you ever been to a restaurant to celebrate a birthday and got told that they threw the box away ? This one did. That's exactly what we were told. I was truly appalled ! In the end, they gave us rice bowls to put the cake in. My goodness.

This year, instead of our usual after dinner mahjong session, we decided to visit Christmas by the bay instead.

Here are some of the photos that we took earlier.