Journey to the east

Kai had his first standard chess tournament last Tuesday to Saturday. Sito brought him to Tampines on Tuesday and left him to Google Maps his way home. We forgot that Circle Line was undergoing works on weekend mornings so on Saturday, he had to take a shuttle bus from HV MRT to BV MRT to find his way to Tampines. Luckily he still made it in time!

U13 for National Age Group Championships

So I had to wake early every morning to prepare breakfast for him. Tuesday was easy as he bought extra kebabs on his way home from tuition on Monday night - I just heated one up for him and he had the last one when he came home starving before dinner time.

His first day ended really early as he killed his second opponent really quickly. But he had a really long second match on the second day - I was so worried he would be starving! But he couldn't stop giving Sito his match details so ate very slowly....

He has two schoolmates in the tournament so they had lunch together at the foodcourt at Our Tampines Hub. Sometimes he sent pictures of his food to us. Then one day he updated his OS and his WhatsApp got deleted. Then I found out this boy didn't know about SMS *.*

Vietnamese hat from his friend - so cool!

On Saturday, the rest of us joined him in Tampines. So far.... We changed at MacPherson where Yang and Yu said the Downtown Line TV screen at the platform brought back memories of them going home from school to BP, awww... Even now, they still talked about visiting our old house. Hello, someone else is staying there now...

Kai finished his last game before we got there so he stayed with a friend to analyse his game. Overall, he did pretty well, winning three games, drawing five and losing one. He found us outside the tournament room and we stayed there a bit as his brothers wanted to play chess with robots.

Yang played and lost

Yu thought very hard but still lost

We wanted to go to Fish and Co for lunch but there was a queue and we couldn't be bothered. The boys found seats at Macs so Macs it was!

Next was the library. It was huge! But the kids section was strangely deserted... I don't think the school holidays have such an impact on the library at Clementi or Bishan. So maybe the kids were all attracted to the kiddy playground at another level of the library. Coz my kids were attracted by it too but they couldn't go in without socks :p

Since we were so far east, we took a bus to Pasir Ris to visit the Carbon Gallery. It was a 30-min bus ride and we also spent 30min at the gallery as it was quite small... 

Hope the boys learnt something there!

By the time we stepped out, it was raining. So we decided to have a drink at the canteen - the compound was once a school and the canteen now caters to visitors and the neighbourhood. The rain had slowed to a drizzle when we left but we walked through HDB blocks until we had to cross a canal. That was when the rain turned slightly heavier again.. 

But this time, we had three umbrellas instead of the one in my bag, yeah! Kai had one in his tournament bag and Yang had his tuition bag too. So we managed to get through the canal where two herons perched, then Pasir Ris Town Park before reaching White Sands. The weather was a pity as we found a fishing pond in the park - the kids would have liked to go fishing! 

We took a walk through the food hall at the mall. My four boys had yakitori and we bought a 1kg log cake from Prima Deli! Then we survived the long train ride home... But we almost didn't survive the walk from HV MRT to home...

The wind became crazy just after we crossed the road. Even my hair got wet!! So all five of us got home half wet. I guess it's better than four half wet and one fully wet if we had only one umbrella for poor Sito to ferry us across in turn!

It's been raining these days. So cold as I type... Hope the weather changes soon so we can go out more..