eC's Chillout Lounge

Having Basic Kitchen Training (BKT) now at River Valley Road. Got to learn a lot of of food knowledge and methods of preparation. We'll be cooking out own lunch tomorrow, can't wait to taste fellow colleagues' cooking.

Bought some mooncakes for Eliss's family. I believe this is the first time that I've bought mooncakes for anybody.

Went to Sembawang Beach after dinner for a chat, and to escape from urban life. I remembered the last time I went there was with V, accompanying him for his night photography shoot.

Just spend the night sharing her all my concerns, with the gentle sea breeze on our face, and the waves hitting on the rocks... a wonderful setting I would say.

Found out some interesting facts about Sembawang Beach.



The Seletar Pier stood at the end of Seletar Road - the road which later (around 1938 it seems) became Sembawang Road. Seletar Road was a mere track in the early 1920s when military personnel came from Singapore town reviewing sites for the Naval Base, and so it was more usual to travel by boat around the coastline and disembark at Seletar Pier. When work started on the Naval Base in 1923/4 the working parties who commenced surveying and laying out the Naval Base brought all their materials and stores by boat, and then moved them around the area using a team of 20 bullock carts. Only at a later stage in the building of the Naval Base, as the work of building roads progressed inland from what is now the Sembawang Park Beach, did Seletar Road become the normal way to reach Singapore town.

Now the location of the Pier can still be ascertained by the remaining approach to it, beyond the circle of the Sembawang Road End. Benches are placed on it, where people can sit under the spreading Madras Thorn tree and the Malayan Banyan Tree. Steep steps lead down onto the Beach.



Beaulieu House, originally the seaside house of a David family, who were in the mining business, was probably built around 1910, in the same era of the building of other seaside houses around Singapore at places like Katong or Pasir Panjang. When the Naval Base was up and running, Beaulieu House was used as a residence for senior officers. In fact it was actually used from 1940 - 1942 as a residence by the most senior Naval Officer in Singapore and the Far East, Admiral Layton, Commander-in Chief, China Station.