London & Shopping for Princess' Birthday Present

I'm in London with Ming for the Project Alpha Season 2 shoot. The film crew and the rest are actually coming only on Thursday but Ming and I decided to come a little early to do some things here. It's been 3 years since I've been back to London and I kinda miss it. London to me is like.... the only place other than KL and Penang that feel like home to me. Everything seems so familiar and feels like I could just live here.

Today was our first day in London. Ming and I woke up at 3am this morning, suffering from jetlag. There's nothing like suffering from jetlag. The feeling of wanting to sleep but can't.... it's almost as annoying as scratching your finger nails on a blackboard. So we stayed up working off our computers, checking e-mails, making calls etc etc till almost 6AM before we tried to go back to sleep again.

I managed to sleep till like 8AM but Ming stayed awake. So after 8AM we finally decided to wake up and head for breakfast. For tradition's sake, we had a full english breakfast!

Man... being around Ming just makes you fat because the man likes to eat.

This was breakfast.

Then lunch was Indian Food that Ming really insisted on having and subsequently over-ordering.

And dinner was Four Seasons roast duck.

By dinner I had already given up eating. I ate just two slices of duck and some vegetable. That's it! I had never ever been to Four Seasons Bayswater only to have so little to eat before.

I spent a good part of the day shopping for Princess' birthday present. That's right. The 10th of February is Princess' birthday and it's not just any birthday, it's her 25th birthday. I took the longest time to decide what to get her.

One of the things I knew she wanted was a new purse so we ended up shopping in Westfield.

I had always tried to steer away from buying any designer goods and I think it's something we both agreed on to some extent. Sure there are increasingly lots of people our age or younger who walk around with LV handbags or all sorts of other designer stuff but I always felt that Princess and I can't afford to indulge in all that yet. There are so many other essential things in life that I need to save for like a family home (lots of my friends already have achieved that) or my kid's future education. I mean it's one thing to buy a camera that we could use to take pictures for our blog and another to spend 5 times more on a handbag or something.

Hence I've never really bought myself anything branded so far apart from a Boss suit (which I felt was necessary because you need a good business suit for work sometimes) and maybe my Paul Frank t-shirts (though it's not exactly nearly as expensive as Gucci or Armani).

Princess and I also always agreed though that we didn't want to start a consistent practice of buying expensive material stuff for each other and having us eventually be all about brands. Sometimes I think the best gifts are the simplest ones. A good book that you know someone likes, a photo album with pictures of memories in it and so on so forth.

But this was her 25th Birthday so I decided that if there was any time in the next 5 years for us to indulge in something, it was now. Plus Ming had been egging me on to get her something really nice because our relationship had grown so much from puppy bf/gf love to a more mature and stable relationship. So at Westfield, we walked into Miu Miu.

I know Princess likes Miu Miu as a brand. She's not much of an LV or a Prada person. Maybe because the name "Miu Miu" sounds cute and Princess likes cute things. Nevertheless I had a hard time trying to decide what kind of purse to get her. There were so many to pick from and they all looked almost the same to me!

So I asked them for the newest range and they showed me a set of purses with 4 different colours. I narrowed it down to two colours. Between a baby blue and what they called "Miu Miu Pink" which really looked like Purple to me (when are people going to understand that men can only see 16 colours just like the 16 colour VGA monitor from the old days: Blue, Black, Red, etc etc.... Lavender for example... isn't a colour! It's a flower dammit! A flower!!!).

I thought the Baby Blue was nicer and suited Princess' cute personality better but I was undecided. So I asked the sales assistant for an opinion about what suited my girlfriend best. I described her as "cute little Japanese-sy girl".

The sales assistant then said "Oh wait let me introduce one of my colleagues to you. She's also a cute little Japanese-sy girl". So he introduced us to a girl named Julia.

We later found out Julia was Singaporean. She asked what we do for a living and when we said "Nuffnang" she went "OOOhhhh Nuffnang! I know I know! Very famous company!!!".

I saw a big smile on Ming's face.

Julia suggested the baby blue and I was so close to getting it but it had to past one last test. I decided to verify it with one of Princess' friends. I called Tze up and asked her to pick a colour and she said something I'm ashamed I didn't know: "Princess hates blue".

I know she likes pink and yellow but I never imagined that she hated blue. Why? I love blue! Blue's my favourite colour! Nuffnang's logo is blue! So is ChurpChurp!!! But the purse wasn't for me (obviously), so fine I went for the "Miu Miu Pink" (purple) instead.

I told Princess on Skype a few hours later that I bought her the present and she's excited but I haven't showed it to her yet.

All I showed her was the bag.

She will see the contents of it on her birthday. The impatient girl went to Googling for Miu Miu purses to try speculating on what she was getting. Nobody but Ming (and Julia) knows which one it really is.

Be patient baby! Your Birthday's only a week away.