Twenty-Eight, A Surprisin' Date

The Chief admits that it was a stressful job pulling off a surprise birthday party for us. And the Chief did do a great job making it a surprise!

See, what we were expecting was that our birthday dinner with the bloggers were supposedly planned to be somewhere the end of the month (or probably after Chinese New Year), and the Chief told us to keep last Saturday free. Sunday we had dinner with the family (more later), and knowing the Chief to be ever the romantic with ideas of romantic candlelight dinners, we decided to leave Saturday's plans entirely in the Chief's hands.

And so the Chief, on Saturday, feeds us with plans of dressing up in each other's favourite colours (so that we wore blue while the Chief wore green), eating at Westin (eating only, the Chief balked at our suggestion of staying overnight there). Then the Chief points out that, since we both were slightly sick at the time, we shouldn't be eating chicken. Now, we don't really follow the many pantangs so we weren't sure how legit this is after all, but since the Chief believes so, we weren't gonna say anything against it.

Chief isn't a beef or lamb person too. Which means that asides from seafood and porridge (both met with rather unenthusiastic response by the Chief), pork for dinner was the choice of dinner. And the only pork place we introduced the Chief to was Checkers (first introduced by otousan, yes here's credits to you), when we both dropped by there one night to sample their ice-cream (creamy vanilla with fruits and rum!) before heading for dinner (yes, desserts before dinner).

You see, how neatly the Chief manipulated us into suggesting the place ourself?!

And even during the drive there...
"Should we call and see if we can book a table? Even if we're 15 minutes away only, you've seen how fast the place fills up."
"No need la. If no place we go elsewhere to eat. There was another restaurant there right?"
"Yeah. The Hot Chocolat Cafe. Never tried there tho'."

So we thought that it was somehow an easy dinner thingy. Mind you, it's not that we had low expectations. There were already plans for a birthday trip up to Camlands again soon and the Chief took it to pay up first - and so told the Chief that we were fine with eating simple, there was no need to splurge.

So anyways, we reached Checkers, parked, walked up to the place and we saw the proprietor outside. Asked him if he had a table for two free, and he told us that the restaurant was fully booked.

Then we stopped and thought, "Aw shucks, ok, let's go have a look at Hot Chocolat."

That was when the Chief urged us onwards to go closer to the restaurant, telling us to take a look. That, was fishy. And when we reached the door we saw Leggie.

Haha, we aren't very good at looks of surprise ourself.

Everyone had to Go green, green, green, green, green, green, green !!

Even the cake was green, topped with fruits and specifically made to contain more kiwi fruits and even the cream had green colouring!

Must say that we're very delighted that our sweetie Chief did wonderfully in planning the entire thing (although during the dinner the Chief did pour out the stress involved in organizing a surprise dinner event, especially because big numbers of people were involved and that Checkers wanted an exact number of seats to reserve)!

The night was spent eating pork, singing ABBA songs, chatting with our neigbouring table of diners, doing a yamseng in harmony, and having loads of fun being ourselves.

Shoutouts (from one end of the table to the other)!
Our darling, who took the effort to print out and made a card replica of the iTunes Gift Card bought from eBay!
Bunny, for the QQ CD Box. No, we haven't tried fitting the Wee Wog in it!
Paul, Leggie and Froggie for the Umbra photo holder! More reason for us to print photos!
Alex and Jin for the Spongebob Lego Keychain and Giant Playing Cards! Come CNY we gamble with that ok?
Alice, for the Lego Name Programme Keychain and the Pastel Art Set! We only have to decide on a name now...
Little Prince, who got us Puppet Pinocchio! Something else to collect in the future maybe!
Apollo, Williamnyk, Derek and SK for the Japansch Zaky! We had fun reading the message on the bottle! Wonder how long we can let it age...
Adrien, Junior, Nivlac and Sinner decided to follow up from last year's Ultimate Bar Book and get us a Cocktail Shaker!
Nase and QR, supporters of alcohol and coincidentally, also got us the same Cocktail Shaker! Now we can make two different cocktails at the same time, once we stock up on different types of alcohol.
Lifebook, for getting us an Esprit bag! Now we have a bigger bag for when the Crumpler isn't big enough!
And thanks for the calls and texts from those who didn't make it!

Once again, everyone, welcome to the first birthday celebration of 2009 (well among BFFs that is)!