last night: jiahao's b'day dinner - more than a week early, but with good reason. it was the usual six of us - the pre-birthday boy, zisheng, eekia, choonping, chun leck - whom many of us had not seen in forever - and, yeah, myself. started the evening off sonwhat poorly by meeting at 5:30 at the wrong restaurant. (yum cha in chinatown as opposed to teahouse in china square food court), which turned out to be sort of fortunate anyway because teahouse doesn't open till 6.

it's a tung lok place so the food was predictably good - and it was one of those a la carte all you can eat deals to boot. after the shark's fin came a drunken prawns wannabe dish, crab with ginger and spring onion, monkey-head mushrooms, peking duck, deep-fried prawn rolls with mango, tofu with scallops, a roasted meat combo, frogs legs in chili, stir-fried kai lan, siew mai, chili crab, prawns with salad cream and those little fruit bits, pepper beef, and many more i can't remember. for dessert: gui ling gao, mango xi mi lu, hua sheng hu and i think someone had a red bean thing though i'm not very sure.

and salmon sahimi (because no matter what kind of restaurant you are in singapore, as long as you have a buffet, that has to be on the menu).

and then we went home to suffer our individual, quiet attacks of gout.