Day 4: Cardiff and Caerphilly Castle

Feb 28th, Sunday.

This morning the kids woke early at 7am-ish. We bathed them, and they had soda bread with turkey ham breakfast. After that, Kevin drove us out to Caerphilly Castle which is about half an hour journey from where we stayed in St Mellons Cardiff.

The weather was a little wet when we arrived, but Mr Sunshine came out shortly after. The castle is huge, not very furnished except for the dining hallf (I think). The kids enjoyed running around.

At 1pm, we had lunch at Happy Gathering in Cardiff, which is a Hong Kong Chinese restaurant, also belonging to one of Ivy's friends. We celebrated (in a way) Chap Goh Mei there with a special dish Ivy pre-ordered, called the "Poon Choy", translated literally to mean "basin vege".

The dish comes in a 1foot wide metal dish over a fire, and consist of all the good stuff like fatt choy, duck, steam chicken (which is the smoothest one can get), three-layer pork that melts in your mouth, oysters, scallops, radish, mushrooms and prawn. I hope I didn't leave any ingredient out. It was very filling and very delicious.

There were 5 adults and 2 kids, and we couldn't finish even the dish. We ordered two bowls of white rice and the kids had fried rice with chicken bits and their favourite BBQ pork chee cheong fun.

After lunch, we came home to put the kids to sleep. We are determined to normalise their sleeping hours and to end their jetlag. At 4pm, both kids slept after much protest from William. Phew!

With the kids asleep, Ivy and us had some time to chat and rest. I put up some pictures on the blog and then Ivy and me took a short 15minutes walk out to the lake near her house. It's actually a very lovely lake during summertime, according to Ivy where people would camp there and have BBQs and there would be ducks and dogs swimming in the lake. But when we were there, obviously it's still very cold, the lake was desserted and just not the right timing.

At night, Ivy cooked us a very very yummy home cooked pan mee. I tell ya, there is no pan mee as nice and great as Ivy's. I'm saying this deep from my heart, and my hubby agrees with me.

Unfortunately I cannot tapau her pan mee back for my in laws to eat as they are pan mee fans, but Ivy has kindly let me in on the ingredients and secret of her pan mee. I don't know if I can replicate her recipe with such great taste, but I will try. She even made a separate condiments for Vic ie minched pork with garlic instead of the mushrooms and prawn.

The kids loved her pan mee and William had three helpings, whilst Victoria had two. Hubby had two big bowls whilst I could only managed one.

After dinner, we rested and the kids slept early at 10pm. The next day we plan to go to Bath.

Oh, and by the way, today is our 6th wedding anniversary. I can't ask for a better way to celebrate our love than spending this special day with the special man in my life, and our two beautiful kids and good friends, in the country that we first met and fell in love. I love you, hon and looking to many many more anniversaries with you.

So now comes the big question. Should we have baby no.3? Haha... I don't know.