A few weeks ago, a reader generously sent me some Argan Oil.

I wasn’t sure what it was and had never heard of it till then. So I Googled it and it turned out to be some kind of a miracle oil from Morocco. In fact, some websites called it liquid gold.

If you’ve never heard of it (like I haven’t earlier), let this be the first place you hear of this amazing oil.

In a short few weeks, it has made my cuticles non-existent and has softened the lines around my eyes. I don’t have pictures to show because there’s no way I’m going to put the before ugly pictures of my dry skin and wrinkled eyes for the world to see. I’m not masochistic, I only put nice pictures of myself online so that I don’t puke when I read my blog years from now.

This miracle oil has also made the calluses on my feet smoother after I slapped the oil on before wearing socks to sleep. And that is a miracle by itself in an environment as dry as South Africa. The folks who gave me the oil said it’s a wonderful oil for a relaxing massage but the hubby refused to do that test with for me. Hmpf! He slapped it on his dry eczema plagued skin instead and a few days later came back to me and said it actually worked.

Best part is it doesn’t have a strong smell and doesn’t make you stink.

Stop asking me what I use to look young. I’m sharing all my secrets! =)

So yeah, I’m not promoting for this company and they didn’t pay me to say all this, but I really do like this product.

It’s SGD69.55 for a 50ml bottle. And a little goes a long way. You can buy it at My Life Store or Click LIKE on their Facebook page and leave me a comment here to say why you would like some Argan Oil. I have two bottles of this 100% pure Argan Oil to give away by Monday 5 March, 11.59pm UTC +8hours.

Please note that I am mailing these two bottles of Argan Oil to Singapore addresses only.
 

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[Announcement of winners on 6 March 2012]

Thanks for taking part in the Argan Oil giveaway. Here are the winners. They were both selected with the Random Number Generator.

#16 Carolyn (en******3@hotmail.com)
If I have the bottle, I will gladly pass to my teenage daughter to use to heal her acne on her face..

#58 Wendy (we*******h@hotmail.com)
I’m getting married end of this year and i wish i could get rid of the wrinkles around my eyes and my dry hands & feet..

Congratulations, Carolyn and Wendy! You both win a 50ml bottle of 100% Pure Argan Oil worth SGD69.55. I will be contacting you shortly to send it to you. I hope enjoy it!
 

People who told us or who still say that Johannesburg is a boring city must have not stepped out of their houses very much while they lived here. Every day we find something that amazes us how vibrant and interesting this city is.

To quote a new friend we made over this weekend – I love it here. I fall in love with the city more and more each day.

This week, we found our way to Collectors Treasury. I had read that it is the largest bookstore in the Southern Hemisphere and has like 2 million books. Someone also told me that they stocked books as old as a hundred years old.

Collectors Treasury is located in a not so posh area of the city. It’s close to Arts on Main and Market on Main, two of my favourite places in Johannesburg.

Enter the building and we were greeted by a long narrow staircase that have books stacked at the sides along each step. We knew instantly we were at the right place.

Once we entered the store, the only words that came out of our mouths were Wow. Wow! and WOW!

There were thousands and thousands of books in every corner. It was freaking overwhelming. I didn’t even know where to start looking at.

There were books in all categories that you can think of. Fiction. Non-fiction. History. Art. Travel. Languages. Hobbies. Architecture. Literature. And so so so much more. I even spotted Polar Exploration. If you are an aspiring Tin Tin, you would love this section.

The place was filled with old books. VERY old books. I loved touching those old bounded books. Look at this. The South and East African Year Book for 1931!

Look at the old pages and the kind of advertisements back then.

If you love reading about history, this is truly the perfect place to start looking for it.

All the books are marked on the first page. If you’re lucky, you’ll see the date of publication. And then there’s the price.

No one would bother you. You can just grab a corner or a chair and sit there all day and browse. It’s wonderful. Nice and quiet.

Until I spotted the local resident spider. I must have been hogging his space.

Wandering into the little nooks and corners of the store, I stumbled into a precious chamber. It’s where all the really OLD books are. Leather bounded and smelling of oak and paper and musk, this place felt sacred.

And then I spotted these. An entire collection of Shakespeare’s work. I was so excited, I was trembling. It took me a while to get a steady shot of them.

It didn’t say in the books but I’m guessing these could be 80 to 100 years old. They were R2500 (~SGD410) each.

It’s not just old books that you can find in Collectors Treasury. There were tons of knick knacks. We saw hundreds and hundreds of vinyl records. I recognised albums like Eagles and Simon & Garfunkel. This is a wonderful place to stock some records if you still have one of those old machines that play them.

There were tons of ornaments, fine china, jewellery, art, paintings.. very vintage.. some with loads of history.

I found a section where they had a set of vintage golf clubs. Hmmm.. maybe a birthday present for the hubby? Haha!

And a collection of old cameras. Woohoo!

I had a blast checking them out. I didn’t have an interest in photography when I was younger so playing around with manual lenses and cameras was pretty cool. They didn’t really work, of course.

On our way out, I spotted a copy of the now defunct local fashion/porn magazine, SCOPE. It was printed in the year I was born in.

So flipping through it, I discovered a few things about the year I was born in.

Raquel Welch and Brigette Bardot were the hottest young things.

They were encouraging women to cook Chicken A La King.

Nivea Cream was already huge back then.

And big hair and khaki shorts were the fashion raves. Hahaha!

This is a place to immerse in history. I loved the surprises we had at every corner of the store. We could have stayed here for hours if we didn’t have a lunch party to go to. Definitely a great place to visit in Joburg.

Collectors Treasury is located at 244 Commissioner Street, Johannesburg. It opens Mon-Fri 9am to 5pm and Sat 10am to 1pm. Closed on Sundays.

We spent last evening with a couple of friends who live in the bush. And our fabulous conversations on bush experiences (that means safari sightings) left me longing to go back into the wilderness. I miss the elephants!

I was also reminded of our encounter with a South African ground squirrel two weekends ago. We had a blast watching him devour a piece of bread.

Look at this picture and imagine the little one chewing and nibbling. Now play that picture in your head a hundred times faster. That’s how he was eating.

The ground squirrel is a rodent endemic to South Africa. Its body is cinnamon-coloured with a lateral white stripe on either side of the body. And it has a long bushy tail. So cute!

I wanted a sheep for a pet when we were in New Zealand. And then not long ago, I thought a hippo pet would be fun too. Now, I want a squirrel!

In the meantime, our favourite safari lodge, Kitara has been hit by a terrible flood over the past few days and it’s been lost to the water. We are so so sad and I hope everyone at Kitara will stay strong and hope the lodge will be rebuilt very soon!
 

It’s official. I never thought this day would come.

I’ve become a Mac snob.

I attended a photo editing workshop in Johannesburg recently and there were all these PCs around. I peeped at the screens and in my head heart, a voice said, These are crap. Why don’t these people get Macs?

Okay.. some history first.. I was a devoted PC user. I’m not one of those gals who only uses her laptop to check email and do online shopping. My PC was my life and I knew my laptop inside out.. right down to operating it in DOS platform, manually removing trojans and cleaning up and repairing registries.

After being a PC user for exactly 30 years, I decided to give Apple a try. I can’t really explain why. Perhaps I got caught in a weak moment where I felt I needed change. Perhaps my cousin was too convincing when he visited us and could not stop raving about how great his Macbook Pro was. He even offered to hold my hand through the transition and send me his entire collection of software applications.

So one day, I switched.

And life was hell for at least 2 weeks.

I couldn’t understand the Mac. I didn’t get him. I couldn’t figure out how he operated. The workflow confused me. I couldn’t get used to my window buttons on the left side of the screen instead of the right. I couldn’t get used to using my thumb to press a “Command” button instead of my pinky finger on the “Control” button. I missed the REAL delete button.

But now.. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my Macbook Pro. And I can honestly say I will never turn back to PC again.

Here are the reasons why -

First reason on the top of the list – It’s cool. FREAKING cool. Trust me. It’s so cool that if you are a frequent traveller, you’ll feel it immediately when you are clearing security and have to remove your laptop from your bag. It’s so much more shiok to pull out a slim solid looking Macbook Pro, instead of that plasticky HP or Dell you used to have. Even if it was a pink limited edition design.

2nd reason – Still cool. And this time, YOUR KIDS will think it’s cool that Mommy or Daddy is a Mac person. Trust me on this. Go in the Mac direction and your relationship with your kids will improve immediately by a million percent. I guarantee it. They’ll think you are cool and they’ll talk Mac with you. If you can talk Mac, you’re immediately in their world. Because that’s what the next generation is going to be about – iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs, Macs, MACs.

3rd reason – Still STILL cool. Seriously. It’s way cooler to tell people, I’m a Mac, than I’m a PC. =p

Okay.. now for the serious reasons – Speed. It takes me 1.5 mins to boot into my Macbook Pro from scratch. When it’s asleep or hibernating, it takes 2 seconds to wake it up. It takes average 30 seconds to install a software, and 1 second to uninstall it. Do we even need to compare PC timings with the Macbook Pro?

My monitor screen. I won’t talk technical specs. But if you have a blog with lots of photos like I do, the first thing you’ll notice when you walk into an Apple showroom and surf into your blog is – EVERYTHING looks better. The colours look more vibrant and alive. The lines look sharper.

The 4 finger swipe. The 3 finger swipe. The 2 finger swipe. Hell, basically the best trackpad ever in the world. I’m not kidding. It’s the smoothest trackpad I’ve ever felt and is fully customisable to pretty much do anything you want. Use one finger to move the cursor. Two fingers allows you to scroll up and down, left and right. Three fingers swipes you to the top of the page or to the bottom of your page. Four finger swipe.. the most precious feature of them all.. shows you in a flash every application and document you have opened at the moment. You’ll never miss the mouse.

Those are my kiddy Apple stickers. I like, okay!

Everyone knows you can run a Windows platform simultaneously next to a Mac platform in the same machine. I won’t go into the details, because I never installed Windows. In 2 weeks, I decided that I didn’t miss Windows at all. The only Windows stuff I run on my Macbook Pro is Microsoft Office for Mac. And that’s only so that I can open all my past documents that were created with Microsoft Office.

International support. This is lovely. Regardless of whether I am in Singapore, New Zealand or South Africa, when my Macbook Pro so much as chokes, I can send it in to any Apple centre to be serviced and repaired. And best of all, you are served by cute guys at what they call the Genius Bar. How cool is that?

No more Norton or McAfee. How often have our PCs been slowed down because of firewalls and virus protection softwares? You will never have that problem with a Mac because we don’t need anti-virus softwares for Mac. Well, at least not that I know of. And not YET.

Don’t forget one of the most attractive features of the Macbook Pro – The Power Cable. Tell me which PC laptop gives you a cable where the cord winds around the brick part of the adapter for neat storage. And the most brilliant part is the MagSafe power connector. The cable cord connects to the Mac by a magnetic contact. You can trip over your Mac cable a million times and as hard as you like, it will just slide right off the Mac and the Mac wouldn’t budge at all. No risk of the Mac landing on the floor!

I’ll be lying if I said the Macbook Pro is the perfect machine. Because it isn’t. There is no perfect machine. It has its flaws and some workflow are dumb and need getting used to. It also hangs occasionally, like every machine does.

But I love it because it’s a brilliant machine and it’s COOL. Seriously, if I’m going to have a gadget in my life that will take up like up to 30% of my time and one where I will bring with me wherever I go, it wouldn’t hurt if he looked good. Don’t kid yourself and say only specs matter.

So.. save up for that Macbook Pro. It’s worth it. And your kids will love you for it. =)
 

When I was a kid, I loved hearing the sounds of a ringing hand bell. Coz that meant the ice cream van was here.

In Singapore, we have “Uncles” riding bicycles or driving vans going around the island with a giant ice cream fridge attached to the vehicle. They sell the tastiest ice cream.. well, to me, they were very tasty when I was a kid. And I love those flavours of ice cream till today.

Now they don’t run around Singapore but have licenses to operate in selected spots in Singapore.

I love a cup of mixed flavoured ice cream on a hot day in the park.

I like these cups of chocolate, corn and strawberry flavoured light ice cream. While the hubby likes block ice cream on soft bread (the one that the Uncle was holding out to me). There are usually durian, chocolate, chocolate chip and raspberry swirl flavours.

Better eat more now while they are still around. I have a feeling these delights won’t be around anymore in a few more years.

[Afternote - a friend alerted me that the strawberry coloured ice cream in my cup is actually a local flavour called atap seed. Funny, I've always thought it was strawberry just because it was pink!]
 

Last month, my iPod Nano was stolen from my suitcase when I took a domestic flight.

I was terribly upset. I had loved my first generation iPod Nano (see post here). I’ve had it since 2005 and it had huge sentimental value for me. I had listened to it to go to sleep every night!

The only comfort from the whole experience was that our boy subsequently “built” my new music system with me.

He got me smart looking Beats by Dr. Dre earphones and helped me pick out a brand new iPod Nano.

I love love love my new music set up!
 

I am a firm believer that cactus plants in the home can ward off evil spirits (避邪).

It doesn’t hurt that the ones I’ve found in South Africa are quite pretty too. =)
 

I saw this in a spice shop last week.

Hmm.. I wonder why the chilli powder is named “Mother-In-Law”.

Is it so spicy that you can kill your MIL with it? Or is it so spicy that it’ll kill you like your MIL does?

Hahaa.. turns out that it was really a terrible crazy spicy chilli powder. We bought some just for fun.

But we haven’t decided what to do with it yet. Hmmmmmmm…

*grin*
 

There’s a lovely statue of Louis Botha on a horse at Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa. Louis Botha was the first prime minister of South Africa.

What luck to catch some sun rays in the right angles!

And some silver linings too. =)
 

Spotted.

An amazing ceiling lamp in a hotel. Made with scrap pieces of plastic, hooked together at the corners.

The effect was amazing. It was instant art!