Fish ball noodles and dessert

After an incredibly good sleep-in, mum and i headed out to Aberdeen for some infamous fish ball noodle soup at a place called "Xie Ji Yu Dan" 謝記魚蛋

Once there we ordered the fish ball & slice soup plus fried fish skin - these guys don't waste the fish. For those not in the know, fish ball and slice is made up of fish mince and since they need to use so much fish they definitely need to do something with all the fish skin. So they fry it and you can eat it just like that or throw it into the noodle soup for a bit of a crunch.

I've got to say the fish skin is much nicer that the stuff you get in the typical noodle soup in the busy parts of Hong Kong - those are just mass fried and delivered to the shops - this place does everything themselves.

So managed to stuff ourselves a fair bit, but we walked past a dessert place on the way to the 'main' meal so obviously we had to stop there for some dessert on the way out.

Mum had a "mai mai sa" which was made up of three types of rice, mine was a coconut, papaya (or is it paw paw) plus a fungus thingy that us asians like to eat - it was supposed to be cooked inside a steamer etc but they didn't. Instead they microwaved it, unfortunately they nuked it a little too much and the initial taste was like something you had over microwaved. Still it was enjoyable but would have been sooo much nicer if it hadn't been over-nuked.

Anyway afterwards we were sufficiently stuffed and wandered around the streets of Aberdeen checking out shops. Mum and I went a bit handbag crazy at one of the shops but we were still quite pleased with ourselves afterwards (it wasn't that expensive considering 2 of them were leather handbags - no way we could have got that price in Oz.)

Couldn't resist and had to sms Erica about it - will have to take her over there to check things out sometime.

After we had shopped ourselves out, we found there was a free shuttle bus taking us over to one of the housing estates over there - so we jumped on and headed over there to check the area out. It was nice, more suited towards family though here are some pictures of the area.

But first, here's one of mum showing off two of our purchases...

The one on the left is an 'environmentally' friendly bag, the one on the right is my new lunch bag!

Ok, back to the estate - this is what she was pointing to


So i'm also using today as a chance to test out my new camera an Olympus mu 840. It is really cool and has all these preset options including documents, taking photos of things behind glass (that would have handy in Europe & London) plus sunset options. The photos were pretty good as well

Another thing i had to test was the macro settings on the camera...

The verdict is... i'm quite pleased with the camera but the embarrassing thing was the reason i bought it was because i was sick and tired of the 'dots' appearing in my photos from my old camera but testing with the new camera i found out it was because of my ISO setting - doh! oh well my old camera has an excellent zoom so i'll still use it, too bad it sucks the batteries.