Episode 311: Aerin's & Raffles Creamery

Met up with some of the MOE scholars from my batch for lunch at Aerin's. There was a 1-for-1 offer going on, so the meal was rather affordable, still a key concern for me these days. Dessert was ice-cream at Raffles Creamery, tucked away inside Raffles Hotel. It's got some novelty flavours like Singapore Sling sherbet, but price-wise, I'd definitely still go for Venezia. The service was a bit lacking as well. I spent a couple of hours in the National Library after that, just browsing. I did eventually pick up Tomas Tranströmer's The Great Enigma, among other things, including a book translated from German by Michael Hulse, Alexander Kluge's The Devil's Blind Spot. Have liked what I've read so far very much, so I might go so far as dropping him an e-mail about it. I've also developed a newfound respect for the amount of poetry that's actually stocked, considering it's highly unlikely that many library users go there to pick up poetry by John Ashbery or Paul Celan. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of collections published by Carcanet on the shelves, and wondered why I'd never noticed them before. Why do Borders and Kinokuniya not stock anything from Carcanet? It seems a bit of a travesty, now that I think about it. I mean, if the National Library managed to find it, surely booksellers can as well?