Mid-Autumn Festival - Chinatown Philadelphia

I'm BACK!! Yea yea I know I’ve been MIA. Sickness sometimes doesn’t compromise and yea I was sick again. I honestly is sick of being sick. I wanted to show my recent performance in the Mid-Autumn Festival in Chinatown Philadelphia. ICC had to perform 2 dances for this event and we went with the Gelang Soko and Bapang Selisir from Madura and Bali. I was still sick at the time but what can I do? I signed up for this a while ago and I had to wing it. I came to Philly, danced and left. Haha. Enjoy the pics...

Stolovaya

The day after the ICC dance in Philly, we went back to Digo’s house to change and decided to eat out since it’s late in the day. We were gonna go to this Peking Duck place in Chinatown but after being there for the dance and looking at the massive crowd and traffic, we buried our intention for this. Instead we headed to Northeast Philly for some good ol’ Russian food. I have no idea what we ordered except the potato salad.. Everything we ordered was delicious!

Make-Up Freebies Haul

Since my cousin and her fi are in town for the weekend, we decided to check out the mall for the Macy's one day sale on Saturday. She basically was trying to get some deals on the cosmetics department since there is no sales tax in Delaware. Estee Lauder and Clinique were our first and second stops. Estee Lauder is currently having this 7-piece gift with $29.50 purchase. We silently add up her items and it adds up to more than $80 worth of cosmetics. So I suggested her to split her purchase and had me to "buy" the other half for her so that she can get 2-sets of gifts. Score! In Clinique, there was no official "free gifts" promotion but with her large purchase of skin care, the sales lady threw in couple of lip gloss samples in our bag. Berry Naise.

1. Clinique Blush Wear Cream Stick in 01 Glow Blush

2. Clinique Full Potential Lips Plump and Shine in Cherry Bomb and Play-Full Plump

3. Estee Lauder Sumptuous Bold Volume Lifting Mascara in Black

Out of all the gifts from Macys, I got the mascara from Estee and lip gross from Clinique. We then head in to Sephora and apparently it's the store's first anniversary and they had some door prizes to giveaway! I was there checking on some perfumes and this lady with a microphone announced that anyone who has a Clinique product in their purse can get a prize. Hahahaha.. I rushed to the lady and showed her my old Clinique lipstick that I got months ago that I kept in my purse. The lady was excited and she gave me blush cream stick for FREE! Then I'm like.. whoaa.. today I had spent zero dollars and yet received three makeup items. 

The day just can't get better than this.. I came home as a happy girl..

Halal Bihalal

Eid celebration is famous of its family gatherings. This day is what brings all family and friends together to say sorry and ask for forgiveness. As the typical Indonesian culture, gatherings always comes hand in hand with festive food, especially on Eid. Specialty dish as in Opor Ayam, Ketupat, Gulai etc are staple dishes on Eid and like every other year, gatherings are always hosted at my Uncle/Aunt's house which is almost like my second home. Here's a glimpse of the few dishes we enjoyed today.

Eid Mubarak

I'm so happy that I had survived Ramadan this year. With all its challenges and obstacles, I had managed to go all the way until the end. I took Friday off from work and spent my morning at Chase Center to pray with the other fellow Muslims. A great start of another long weekend :)

Happy Eid Mubarak everyone!

Labor Day Weekend

I hope you're all enjoying the long weekend. What did you guys do? Shopping? Major cleaning? Study?

My weekend is pretty low key; I stayed at home most of the time just watching TV, DVD, browsing the internet, and playing games on my iPod Touch. 

I'm so addicted to this game called NINJUMP. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, go download this game. Seriously I can play this game for the whole day. My current best score is 8310 HAHA! You can check this video to see what I'm talking about..

ANYWAYS, we went to this barbecue that my friends were hosting on Saturday. All of them are Russian speakers except (of course) myself! BUT, regardless I had a great time there. The food were amazing. They had this Russian barbecue style dish called Shaslik. We had everything from beef, lamb to chicken.. Delicious. They also had this salad that was so good - I'm not sure but I'm assuming that it's also Russian style salad.

Pictures are for girls only :D

Kathleen's Pose

Hardena Treat

As you know, I was in Philly last weekend. Apart from dining to different restaurants in the area, I was also invited for a home cook dinner at a friend's house - Mita. She offered me to have dinner at her bf's house in NJ (not too far from Philly) for some Soto Ayam. YUM. After dinner, I was telling her about my experience and commenting on the food in Indonesian Restaurant earlier in the day. She then mentioned this other Indonesian Restaurant not too far from the first called Hardena/Waroeng Surabaya. Yes, this is one of the hidden gem in South Philly.

This reminds me of my first time I went to this eatery place was back in December 2009. I planned to go to Philadelphia for some IKEA shopping and later met up with my cousin and her fiancee who drove down from New York. We were supposed to go to this really nice Vietnamese restaurant at Washington Ave but Reza (fiancee) was pushing us to go to this Hardena place for some hearty Indonesian food.

Images are from macandcheesereview

Carry on, we ended up ordering so many things from the steam table behind the glass counter. The lady was so nice she helped us pick all the dishes and explained what it was. Each meal comes with rice and 3 items for $6. We also ordered "es cendol" and "es campur". At the end of the feast we ended up paying less than $40 and decided to give the extra $10 for tip since we were so satisfied with the food.

Man I'm hungry now!

Brush it Up

When my face start breaking out for no reason, this is when I know I have to clean up my make-up brushes. Sephora have this deep cleansing shampoo for make-up brush for $6! Yes people.. $6 for the bottle.
I thought this shampoo does a decent job cleaning up my make-up brush. Directions? Piece of cake.

Collect your brushes in a bowl/plastic container.

Add lukewarm water to soak the brushes.

Add few pumps of the cleanser.

Rinse and leave it on top of paper towel to dry. 

Easy right?

Yikes!

Sorry guys... you won't see anything too exciting until September 10/11th. BUT to cheer this blog up, I'll post this picture that I took in front of the Philly Art Museum last weekend. I totally forgot about this picture BTW, we stayed there for 15 minutes because it was hot inside (yes inside) and waaaaaaaaay too many people. We may come back some other time.. def. when I'm not fasting.