Sophilicity

Since, I decided to update my blog with a music player from SCM, I thought I would talk a bit about the music videos we've been creating in BTEC Creative Media Production at my college. Before I talk about that, I thought I'd say that anyone who has any song recommendations for me to add to my playlist that would be great! All the songs I've included in my playlist are more or less Asian songs, but I don't mind listening to other things too. I'm a big fan of ballads as you can see from my play list, however there are a few exceptions too. Do comment below if you have any suggestions!

To start off with, I thought I should introduce the music video which me, Alfie and Megan created. We decided on re-making Pink's Raise Your Glass. Honestly, we thought it would really hard, we even colour-coded all the different lyrics to match the different characters which were to be used for our music video. There was a lot of shots involved in the process, but it was really fun to make!

I've finally caught up with all my birthday posts, although I didn't manage to include them all last month... I can't believe it's already December, knowing that Christmas is approaching (despite actually celebrating Christmas) I can feel the festive spirit around with everyone's Christmas jumpers, socks and of course, the Christmas songs. 

The funniest thing about this celebration was the fact we decided to celebrate my cousin, Jenny's birthday the day before her actual birthday, so she wasn't actually 18 yet, so she couldn't legally drink or anything - although I agree, drinking isn't necessary when you turn 18... I didn't even drink myself.

It was so hard trying to get a group picture of everyone since no one ever seemed to be ready - I have such a bitchy face, please excuse me. Let's just say our selfie attempts with a selfie stick weren't too great... From shaky pictures to cutting out quite a few people's heads.. Opps. Flash makes us look very pale, that's all I've got to say, but the flash picture includes more of us for sure! Forever not being able to see Duy though... Who was supposedly on the left at the far end...



For Jenny's dinner venue choice, she selected Thai Square, the Covent Garden branch. It was pretty convenient for everyone to get to. I was a bit worried since Thai food means spicy food... However I was fortunate to be able to find something on the menu which are suited my preferences. But as I said previously, I'm one to check the menu online before I go to a restaurant to make my life a whole lot easier - Welcome to the forever indecisive Sophia...

Here you can have a look at the online food and drink menus:
Thai Square Covent Garden Food Menu
Thai Square Covent Garden Drinks Menu

Majority of us selected the Pad Thai, which was the one I selected. It wasn't at all spicy, my cousin, Tracey warned me that it may be very sweet but the taste was just right. I chose the Pad Thai with king prawns. However there are variations to this course, you can opt between king prawns and jumbo prawns. There is even a vegetarian option available which Jenny got. The Pad Thai, as quoted is a "popular Thai noodle dish of Chanburi rice noodles, stir fried  with prawns, crushed peanuts, bean curd, bean sprouts and egg". Meanwhile, the vegetarian Pad Thai, as quoted is "stir-fried Chanburi rice noodles with Pad Thai sauce, bean curds, bean sprouts, spring onions and crushed peanuts".

I think one of the conversations that came up during the dinner, was knowing which type of curry is spicier, red curry or green curry, and honestly I found out something new myself. Since Tracey works at a Thai restaurant herself, she was recommending us all dishes, and I found that the green curry is spicier than the red curry despite the fact you usually associate that red spice is spicier e.g. red chillies... Or what I thought anyways...

Anyways, moving on to the gift giving, Jenny went through different gifts that she received from a Mac lipstick that she had wanted, a jacket, a wine glass to represent her 18th birthday, birthday cakes, jewellery, lush and of course from me, a monkey toy - I think my present was the best not gonna lie... I joke aha.


Once again, we managed to end up getting two cakes aha. Jenny received a cake from me and Tracey but also from her and Kylie's mum. Each to their own, both creams were Asian creations, with cream but one was pink whilst one was blue with a cute animal decorated on top.




Then of course, we wanted to save one of the cakes, so it was deciding which cake to cut. We ended up cutting the bigger cake, which was the pink cake, we each received a piece, cut by Helen and Adam - teamwork was on pointe! After we each had grabbed a piece, we divided the rest of the cake into takeaway boxes to take home, we ended up with 9 boxes, despite there being only 7 people attending. We each took one box to take back to our families whilst the remaining two went to the staff of the restaurant who gave us a great service throughout the whole occasion.


And of course, who would end the celebration without taking a selfie with the birthday girl aha. I thought I would get a selfie with Jenny with the gift I gave her - she's still contemplating what to call her monkey I'm sure!


Thank you Jenny for hosting a great birthday celebration! Especially trying to keep our family still connected, it's a worthwhile experience. To my readers, thank you again for reading another one of my birthday posts, I hope to keep you updated with the latest events whilst I can, although it's going be a busy month as Christmas is drawing closer. 

I'm slowly catching up with all my birthday posts for this month, this is the third edition of the birthday posts as I am yet to attend my final one. For my cousin, Kylie's 21st birthday, we decided on having a family gathering to reunite with each other. With everyone's busy schedules, it's really difficult to find time for us to be able to meet so we decided to try and meet at least once a month.

 

The choice of venue for my birthday dinner was at Banana Tree in the Angel, Islington branch. I've heard much about Banana Tree before, and as I usually do, I did a bit of research on the menu which is offered at Banana Tree before I attended the event. You might be wondering, why would you bother looking at the menu beforehand when you will receive the menu on the day and you can pick then and there? Well... I'm a pretty indecisive person so I'd rather know beforehand what I'm getting so I have a lot of time to think rather than awkwardly staring a menu for ages to finally decide on something... It's much more time efficient. Sitting in a restaurant deciding on what you are going to eat within an appropriate time limit is too much pressure for me... Fortunately, they offer downloadable menus on the website for each branch, which made my life much easier!

 

 

I apologise if they aren't that clear, I was lazy and decided to just print screen the menus since they were downloaded as PDFs... Don't mind me...

 

On to the actual food, we all got quite a variety, and despite it only happening last month, even I am struggling to remember what we all got as our choices. I'll try my best to remember what we all got so you have a good idea of what everything looks like! I know for one I opted on eat the banana spiced noodles.

 

 

My cousin Jenny, despite acknowledging the fact we are Vietnamese, she even bought a Vietnamese dish herself. But she seemed to enjoy it, usually I would try to eat something that I don't usually eat at home which is usually Vietnamese or Chinese food, now and again eating fast food as you do... She chose the Bun Bo Meaty Salad Bowl, with the grilled chicken jawa option.

 



One of my close family friends, Darren chose the Phad Thai. I was considering the Phad Thai however I know how Thai food is with its spices and as I previously stated in my Eat Asia Night Market post, I'm not very good with eating spicy food, a little spice feels like fire to me.

 



So, today is the day in which many people will be shopping for Black Friday sales, but straying away from my recent birthday blog posts, I thought I would review a recent event which I attended last Friday. Some of you may remember that I was advertising the Eat Asia Night Market event with a giveaway as well! But fortunately, as a blogger I received a staff card giving me the privilege to attend the event, for free!

 

I was actually rather surprised at the turnout, I expected more attending the actual event, but the amount of people at the event was constantly increasing. I was fortunate to be skipping the queues. If I'm honest, my friend and I went to the wrong location... We went to the building across the road from the event... And once we realised that the queue was for the event, we were pretty astounded.

 

Now onto the main focus of this event! The main reason why I was so interested about this event was the fact it was dedicated to food, specifically from Asia (although there happened to be an appearance of Mexican food, although I have no concern for it even so). If you don't know me, I'm honestly a food fanatic, you'll always see me taking pictures of all the food I eat with the DSLR camera... Trust me it's an interesting sight, especially when all eyes are on you holding a giant camera just to take a picture of a single dish...

 

 

If I'm honest, I'm pretty proud of the pictures I managed to take that day, I think each of the people I asked to take pictures of their food just smiled or laughed at me. I guess I could say I'm a very typical Asian aha. The one that made me sad though, was the fact I missed the opportunity of having one of the vendors pose for a picture holding their hand up with a peace sign! Unfortunately I was too slow, but it made me laugh that all the vendors were very welcoming.

 

 

The other dishes available included the tempura don as well as the chicken-katsu don. I'm usually a big fan of chicken katsu but I thought I would try another Japanese dish whilst I had the chance! And I don't regret my choice. I was really lucky that the vendor only charged me £4 for the oyako-don rather than the displayed £5 - maybe it was my lucky day aha!

 



If I'm honest, as my 18th birthday was approaching, everyone was more excited about me turning 18 than I was... I was actually scared to turn 18. Why? Well, I knew everyone was attempting to get me drunk on my 18th - don't get me wrong, I don't hate drinking, I'm just not fond of it. Plus, due to my best friend's 21st birthday with him consecutively downing 21 straight shots of vodka, you would understand why I was so worried...

Fortunately, I didn't get drunk, and I barely had a sip of alcohol on my birthday which was pretty good for my sake. I spent the beginning of the day with my best friend, Ying. From shopping for snacks at H-Mart, New Malden to getting ready for the dinner together. My dinner overall was a smart-casual occasion. My dinner party had been organised at a Korean restaurant called Han, located in New Malden. The organisation of my birthday was left to my cousin, Tracey as we both decided to organise each other's birthdays.

I really liked the atmosphere provided at Han, as the layout of the restaurant and décor was very suited to the formal occasion which was accompanied by a bar as well as an option of karaoke services as well. I appreciated the variety of choices on the menu, which will be further discussed in the rest of my blog post, but for now you can have a look at the venue and menu here:

https://hankaraoke.wordpress.com/

I decided that I wanted to limit the amount of people to my 18th birthday party so I decided on only inviting close friends and family to my event. But the people at the event made the atmosphere great! It was difficult to have an opportunity to talk to everyone, but I'm glad everyone got on so well although it may have been awkward for some at first - This was due to some of them not knowing anyone but me attending the event... Opps.

I think my favourite dish on the menu would have the BBQ set. The payment of our dishes were organised by tables, so each table would pay for they bought within the table. For our table, we felt that although the BBQ set was great, we had to order more for the 5 of us to eat as there wasn't enough. The BBQ set was £19.50. We selected "C" as our favourite of the four. Set C includes galbisal (seasoned and marinated beef ribs), beef bulgogi (sliced and marinated beef), dak bulgogi (sliced and marinated chicken) and samyeopsal (sliced pork belly with spicy sauce). Bulgogi is a popular choice of meat included in Korean BBQ and one of my all time favourites.

However, we did opt upon some starter dishes as well. Between our table, we shared some of our starters although people from the other tables also took some of our food now and again. Rude. Just joking aha. My starter of choice was the "ojingeo tuigim" which is deep fried squid covered in breadcrumbs. Whilst my friend opted upon a vegetarian starter, dubu tuigim salad which is deep fried tofu on vegetable salad. Another friend of mine, chose the "yangnyum chicken" which is deep fried chicken with seasoned soya sauce.

Besides the food, the atmosphere was great, everyone was talking about discussing about interesting topics, and I can say my messages through the night were incredibly insightful. I can solidly say some of the messages sent that night were not even from me... But reading the conversations made my night, I'm really thankful for the 100+ Facebook wall posts for my birthday - I probably looked antisocial throughout the night aha.

To end the night, I was gifted with a Millie's Cookie, personalised as a substitute birthday cake - since I'm not a big fan of cakes, my cousin decided upon gifting me a cookie instead. Everyone's attempt to distract me as the birthday cookie was being brought to me from behind, honestly it was too obvious and everyone wasn't very subtle about it, but it was still great.



Anyways, I would like to thank everyone for making my 18th birthday amazing, although some people couldn't attend, and I couldn't invite everyone, I'm grateful for all the wishes.

That's it for now, but look forward to my upcoming birthday posts for this month - I have a lot of birthday posts to be catching up although I've only accomplished two so far...

PS: Photo credits to Ying and Tracey as I brought my DSLR camera but forgot the memory card... Well done me...

For my first entry of November, I'll be writing about my cousin's 19th birthday celebration in August - yes I realise it's already November, but I'm terrible with being up to date with my blog posts, give me credit, I have to balance college and other events aha.

But what was interesting for this event was the fact me and her best friend, May were working on this plan together to make her have a great 19th birthday - since she was in Mongolia at the time doing volunteering at a hospital. 

So what exactly did we plan for her birthday? Well we decided on holding two events for her birthday - however this blog post will be mainly focused on the birthday dinner. For our two events, we decided on a karaoke event at Firecracker, whilst the birthday dinner was at Dozo.

If you know me personally, you know how much I end up being responsible for events. Apparently I'm reliable - I wish! But planning although stressful, can be pretty fun sometimes.

Anyways... DOZO! It's all about the food life aha! Do I even remember what I had that day? Most probably not... I have a terrible memory... Referring to the menu provided by Dozo's website, I believe I had "Gyu Don" which says "Sliced of fillet beef with shitake mushroom, carrot, onion and seasoned egg on rice". It was a fulfilling meal, but the sushi everyone decided on eating looked amazing as well.

One of my friends who knew some of the workers well chose a variety of sushi dishes such as the volcano maki, the spider maki and the dragon maki. The volcano maki contains eel, leeks, bonito flakes, eel sauce, avocado and mayonaise, whilst the spider maki contains soft shell crab, avocado, sesame seeds, tobiko and tempura batter. On the other hand, the dragon maki contains jumbo prawn, asparagus, avocado, tobiko, ikura, eel sauce and mayonaise.

Apologies for the focus of these pictures, everyone seemed incredibly hungry and it was nearly impossible to take pictures without everyone grabbing a bite between pictures were captured. It really shows how hungry everyone was, or how good the food was. But I do warn you, Dozo is expensive. We decided on dining at the Dozo in Soho, where we reserved the back table. I really loved the decor of the place, it felt very traditional and portrayed the aspect of Japanese dining greatly.

... Just joking! He was pretty sober and majority of those glasses aren't even his aha! If I remember correctly, I think some of the glasses were only filled with water to be honest... I hope you enjoyed reading my latest post, be sure to check out Dozo sometime if you have time and money!