A Day at Central Festival Phuket

My birthday this year coincided with our last day in Phuket. Since our flight was only at 10 pm that night), we decided to spend the day at the biggest mall in Phuket – Central Festival Phuket. Yes, I spent my 28th birthday hanging around a mall like an 18 year old. But hey at least it’s a world class mall!

One of the first things we came across as we started to explore the mall was these sushi doughnuts!

How could we resist. Of course we got them, and they were delicious.

And then we decided to have KFC for brunch! The KFC menu in Thailand is really interesting and the food didn’t taste like fast food (well except for the spicy drumlets).

This was my spicy roasted chicken rice:

We also tried the green curry chicken:

Everything was so yummy!

We decided to watch a movie at the SFX Cinema – a Thai movie at a Thai cinema, fancy that!

We got sofa seats at the price of a normal 3D ticket here in Singapore. Replica of our seat below, price excludes popcorn and drinks but still so reasonable!

We decided to watch this Thai movie called Summer Love. We’ve always loved Thai movies for its humour and because the poster looks promising, we had high expectations. But of course, we were disappointed. It was a plotless waste of time, but the sofa seats were really comfy. So I guess that balances everything out.

By the way, it was quite an experience watching a movie in Thailand. Somewhere in between trailers (and towards the start of the movie), everybody else in the theater suddenly stood up. We only knew that they stood up because our seats were right at the back. So we also stood not knowing what to expect. Shown on the screen was a video montage of the life of the Thai king. Very interesting experience, but I guess that how it is under a monarchy rule.

What’s a trip to the mall without a little bit of Starbucks? We had some cake and drinks in between window shopping and waiting for the movie to start (we got the tickets one and a half hour before the actual movie timing).

So I had some hot chocolate (not much else I can have at Starbucks since coffee is out of the question) and a strawberry shortcake (or was it cheesecake?) This cake was supposedly my birthday cake, lol.

Remember I mentioned that Steve Jobs died on the day we left for Phuket? Well this was what we saw at the Apple Store (can’t recall now if it’s an actual Apple Store or a reseller: tributes upon tributes upon tributes to the legend of a man.

Even little kids were writing tributes:

So I also took the chance to write one too.

So that’s our day at Central Festival Phuket. We couldn’t stay longer as our driver was coming to pick us up for the airport soon after the movie. I did enjoy my long birthday weekend in Phuket, I should travel out for my birthday every year! :)

One last photo before we were picked up. Check out the dark clouds looming again:

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A Peek into Food Photography

I’ve always loved food photography. I believe an appealing photo of a dish is not easily attained, but I do try anyway every time I dine out – with my humble point-and-shoot camera. Nothing professional of course, but I try to capture the very essence of the colour and presentation of the dishes.

Now bring FP into the picture (pun seriously not intended), with his dedication, photography skills, creativity and all his truckload of photography gadgets and you’ll get food photos so wonderfully captured, you’d become hungry just by looking at the photos.

As some of you might have known, FP got into a terrible traffic accident almost 2 months back (saving this story for another post) and he’s still in recovery right now. Because he’s in a much, much better state than he had been when it first happened, we’ve been doing photoshoots – just to spur our creativity and also, just for the fun of it.

We started with our normal photoshoots, but we somehow ventured into taking photos of food. When I say “we”, I meant: he takes the photo, while I assist in other ways to get the shot, hehe. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we both love food; exotic beautiful food. With both our quirky minds at work, it didn’t take much to create masterpieces such as these:

Click to see his write up for this photo

This was the first food-related photo he took. We’ve both been craving for hot chocolate for quite awhile, so I bought some hot chocolate and pastries for us to munch on (also to take photos of) and we ended up with this. That is a yummy cinnamon scone, and it’s even yummier when dipped in the hot chocolate. Gosh, you have no idea :)

Click to see his write up for this photo

This was a plate of delicious Pad Thai from Magic Wok. We also had Belacan Fried Rice and Mango Salad that day, but the Pad Thai became the star of the day. I was the one holding the fork up, just so you know haha :)

Click to see his write up for this photo

This is truly one of my favourites. Okay, so I’m biased because salmon sashimi is one of my favourite foods. Just look at this one. So fresh, you can see the “pores” of the meat. Yum, looking at it makes me want to have it all over again. Anything with sushi and sashimi (sushimi for short), you can always count on me to enjoy it. We so gotta go to Japan one day!

Click to see his write up for this photo

Another of my favourites because 1) I love macaroons and 2) I love that we used fairy lights for this shoot to achieve the Bokeh effect. This was actually a test shot that turned out nice and lively. I like how the Bokeh colours turned out so nice and makes it look like a real party scene. Macaroons were from De Paolo Gastronomia. This quaint little shop provides the best picnic all-Italian food!

This little food project we’re doing has opened my eyes to the world of actual food photography beyond my little pink point-and-shoot camera. It’s not that easy, with all the lighting stuff and post production but it is so rewarding when he has attained such nice photos.

I may be getting my very own DSLR soon. No idea how to use it, but I’ll learn from the best :)

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