Brunei Darussalam - 12 July 2011

Morning comes early in Brunei.

Brunei newspaper

morning view from hotel window

quiet morning @6.26am

We started off our second day in Brunei with breakfast at the hotel. Had to go to our customer site early because the training starts at 8am. Hence, we had our breakfast at around 640am! So off we trudged to Seasons Restaurant at Level 2 of the hotel.

interior

table setting

nice decor

breakfast buffet spread

potatoes, anyone?

my breakfast

yummy beehoon and quiche

very thick porridge/gruel

ingredients mixed in

last plate

After a good breakfast, we headed to our working place. Our customer site has a slope (we don't get that many slopes in Singapore schools.... I think..) which I felt was quite steep.

imagine carrying > 7kg of stuffs up this slope

Our day zoomed past pretty fast while we were at our customer site. Soon, evening came and we were back at our hotel. The night's itenerary was to Empire Hotel and Country Club for dinner. Our Brunei host said that this is one of the favourite staycation place for Bruneians. He said that one would need 3 days and 2 nights to explore this resort alone. Wow.

So with much anticipation, we headed there. Empire Hotel was indeed a very big place and grand. There was this huge huge chandelier right after its entrance. We had to walk quite abit to get to the restaurant. Had to take escalator down as well.

chandelier at the hotel entrance/lobby

spacious

One of the remarkable features of the Empire Hotel is its pillars. It stands a few storeys high. Very grand indeed.

buffet place

I heard that the restaurant is quite popular and reservation is a must. It has a good spread of breads, salads and cheese, a section for cold seafood (oysters, prawns, crabs, and limited sushi and sashimi), a section for local delicacies and a section for desserts.

seafood

The oysters were fresh but skinny. For some reasons, the oysters had residual shell/stone in it, so needed to watch out for those. The prawns were nice and firm, but the crab was so-so.

desserts, I couldn't eat much hence the pratically empty plate..

For desserts, it has a bread and butter pudding look-alike with a different name. It actually looked like tofu and tasted like tofu but nicer. From the picture above, it was the white slab of wobbly stuff at the top right hand corner. Trust me, it tasted better than it looked!

cakes

Another highlight of the hotel, is its washroom. Visited the ladies, and it is even more spacious than my HDB room *sobs*.

ladies

tall pillars

exterior of the hotel

moonlit night

 After dinner, we went off to buy keropok (uncooked) because my colleague said someone told her that the keropok in Brunei is nice (as Brunei is near the sea, so seafood must be good that kind of logic). Hahaa, it was quite hilarious to go to a departmental store just to get keropok during its closing time. We reached the store at 930pm and they close at 930pm!

Then, our gracious Brunei host drove us to the palace and stopped at a nearby park to take pictures of the palace from afar. Well, I ran out of batteries and my camera can't take nice night shots, so that was why I have no pictures of any palace. But its gold dome shines ever so brightly in the darkness of the night.

With that, Day 2 ended, and we were dead tired.