Notes From the Bridezilla

Okay, it's 9.51pm and I'm still stuck in the grad room, but I HAVE to tell everyone about this.

as usual i was surfing the brides.com website for some late-night R&R and i chanced upon this! carolina herrera's collection for spring 2010!

herrera's my favourite gown designer, but her pieces cost 10,000 sgd and upwards so i'm really just building sandcastles in the air here. but with this latest collection, she has just succeeded in outdoing herself, and almost every other top designer showing this season. wedding dresses are not usually the medium where designers can allow their imagination to roam free; most women would never risk looking too different on their big day so gowns are always designed according to the tried-and-tested silhouettes and made with safe fabrics. hence, the "see-them-once-seen-them-all" surfeit effect you get when you flip through bridal magazines these days.

with herrera this season however, she has managed to turn every gown into an art piece. each dress is named after a prominent painter, and all the pieces so beautifully personify the essence of the artist. check out the monet, with the layers of tulle that feature handpainted waterlilies. every gown says a lot about the woman who wears them, and it is amazing how herrera manages to craft such interesting storylines and details from a single dress.

Summer Beckons

Ken and I decided to leave our mundane lives behind for a very short one and half-day getaway to Nago, which is about 70 km north of where we stay.

the weather was good, the hotel was surprisingly comfortable and the beaches offered some much-needed respite from his work and my thesis-churning. all it took was 35 hours away from the humdrum and we were back to where/who we were six years ago.

we packed a barbeque set and two camping chairs, stocked up on the meat and drinks and returned to the same island we camped at in 2007. while we had company on our private beach the form of a father and three-sons team along the other end of the shore, it turned out to be a good thing because their lamp provided just enough illumination for us when our own bonfire died out.

after dinner we sat on the shore and competed to see who could spot the most number of shooting stars.

i saw one, and he claimed he saw two stars colliding.

the next day we played with fishes in the hotel's stretch of beach and relaxed with a sauna and dip in the hot bath. ken had his very first facial while i waited with a copy of the newspaper.

on our way home we managed to catch the sunset.

someday all short trips would be made this way.

The view from our hotel room:

The one with Ken looking like Sha Wujing in Journey to the West:


The lighthouse at Cape Zampa:
Sunset from Zampa: