Fun stuff to do in the US while waiting for my big bro to get hitched...

My bro is married today! Woo hoo! Congrats to him and his new wife, Keonghi da cool Korean chick! :D

Wedding pics aren't ready yet, so I'll keep ya all entertained with my list of fun stuff to do in the United States (or rather, in Knoxville, Tennessee) while waiting for my bro to get married:

1) Go 1120 feet under a mountain to see a waterfall!
The first couple of days of my trip to Knoxville, Tennessee were kept well busy as my bro and his wife took me, my mum and his wife's mum to go visit Ruby Falls at Chattanooga. Ruby Falls is a very cool waterfall located way underground in a mountain, and has a very interesting history behind it, which you can read about here. Basically we took an elevator 1120 feet deep down into a mountain, where we exited into an underground cave full of fantastic rock formations, and at some points were pretty narrow.

As my brother would attest to, it was quite scary. Fortunately, I am in no way claustrophobic, so I quite enjoyed myself. Some of the rocks resembled everyday objects, and were given names to match.

For some reason, I was rather hungry after the walk though the caves. :P Kidding!

At the end of the walk, we reached the best part of the whole place, which was the underground waterfall, Ruby Falls!

They had fancy colour-changing lights there to make it look even more awesome. And there was also a walkway around the pond where the water fell into, so I took a pic there almost directly under the waterfall, and this was what came out:

Not quite what I expected, but looked pretty cool nonetheless. After all that, we had to climb back out the mountain and my bro and I ended up like this.

2) Go see fishies!

Ok, so visiting an aquarium isn't a big deal, but I always like seeing anything wildlife-like and like taking good pictures of them even more, so allow me to indulge in showing off a few of my nice piccies of some of the residents of Tennessee Aquarium.



Aren't they all purty? The last pic isn't very clear, but I thought it was cool to show the mini jellyfish with the bright flashing coloured lights. It is, of course, much cooler to see them in real light, flashing away their multi-coloured lights like a...a.... bright multi-coloured flashing thingy!

3) Drive up a mountain (or two)!
My mum and I went to visit the Great Smoky Mountains yesterday with some of the other wedding guests who are my bro's wife's friends. I got the picture to prove it!

My camera does very littl justice to the mountains. Like seriously. They look much more awesome than this.

Close up shots, on the other hand, look MUCH better. It was so cold the night before that the leaves and branches totally froze over!


There are also lots of places with water running down the rocks, forming little waterfalls. I managed to catch a rainbow formation in this mini waterfall. Nice-ness!

Further up the mountains, we finally came to a point were snow had fallen, so we got to stop and have a snowball fight, and I got to practice my swing.
I also got to make a snowman! Ain't that even cooler?

Unfortunately the others I went with wanted to go off quick so I didn't have time to make the eye, nose and hat. And since it was only a 5 inch-high snowman, a hat would've been quite a feat to make.


4) Shop til you drop!
Well, actually, my mum was doing all the shopping for clothes and cosmetics and God knows what else. I was mostly walking around from shop to shop, looking for stuff at reasonable prices, but everytime I would calculate in my head the conversion rate from ringgit to US dollar and decide not to buy anything coz' I can get similar stuff in Malaysia for cheaper. So I end up like walking the whole mall in about half an hour and then coming back to my mum who's still stuck at the first boutique and asking "Are you done yet?". In case you're wondering, I am so not a shopaholic.

One fun thing about shopping for clothes in the US is that I have absolutely no problem finding clothes my size. Among Asians, I'm considered larger than the average Asian gal... but around here, almost every other American lady is the same size or larger than me. There are sections of clothes in departmental stores labelled 'Petites', and they all fit me nicely, which makes me very happy! :D And their clothes and shoes are mostly made of good quality stuff, not like in Malaysia, where most material is pretty crappy. If I were earning in USD, I would be quite happy shopping in US. Most of the clothes, shoes, and bags here looks really nice too, although I came across this monstrosity which made me wonder if I should laugh my head off or scream my head off.

Only in America, I believe.

Another fun thing is walking into shops with 'themes' and observing how the shop attendants. Like at a shop selling coats and suits for men, all the male shop attendants are wearing nice looking suits. At a shop selling only black and white coloured clothes, the attendants only wear black and white clothes. At a shop selling clothes for plus-sized ladies (all the clothes there were way too big for me, by the way. Makes me even more happy. ;P), all the shop attendants are... you guessed it... plus-sized! It was quite amusing... too bad I don't have the photos to show it. The shop attendants would've thought I was nuts to take their pics.

Of course, there is no lack of interesting knick knacks in American stores, and I just couldn't resist getting my hands on (*drumroll please*....) the Super Dooper Pocket Pooper!!!

It's a little toy reindeer that comes with little brown, round candy. The head can be flipped open and the candy poured in through the neck. Then the candy can be dispensed from the rear end of the reindeer, so it looks like POOP. Just the type of sick humour that yours truly can appreciate. :D And when you've eaten all the candy, you can replace it with other small round candy. But since it's hard to find small, round, brown candy, you could probably replace it with those white or green small round mints which are much easier to find. The you can say the reindeer is pooping snowballs, or even better, radioactive waste blobs... or maybe giving birth to green alien offspring! And the reindeer doubles up as a keychain too, so that makes it even neater. :)

By the way, I bought about ten of these pocket poopers to give away to people whom I really like or whom I think share the same sick humour as me and can appreciate a pocket pooper. But if you really want one and if you're fast enough to ask me, and I like you enough, I might give you one too. :P Might help if you offer to be my slave for the next couple of weeks or so...


5) Eat, eat, eat!
Aaaah, the infamous Malaysian indulgence... FOOD. Well, Americans seem to love food twice as much as Malaysians, coz' whenever we eat out, the food portions are practically double the portions of Malaysian food. Seriously. My mum and I went with my bro's wife and her mum to IHOP (that stands for International House Of Pancakes, for the uninformed), and we made the mistake of ordering individual meals for each of us. And we had to go through the delightfully yummy yet sinfully torturous task of having to wolf down all of this!

My mum had gigantico bacon and cheese burger with fries. She couldn't finish it.


That was my meal of sirloin tips, with two eggs, two hash browns and two of IHOP's famous buttermilk pancakes. Almost all went down the hatch, save for some hash browns, and I felt delightfully guilty after that. After that I decided anytime we ate out, it was best to order one meal for both of us to share. That rule has served us quite well.

Another dish worth mentioning is the spaghetti and meatballs from this Italian joint called Sbarro. I tried it the first day I landed in the US at the airport, but failed to take a photo. I totally fell in love with the meatballs. Especially the fact that they are BIG meatballs. One BIG meatball = about 3 or 4 Malaysian normal meatballs, and tastes really good. The spaghetti was pretty good too. So when I saw Sbarro's again at the mall, I got myself almost the same stuff, except I ordered ziti (or penne pasta) instead of spaghetti, to give it a try. And this time I got a photo of the ziti and BIG meatballs. Doesn't look like much, presentation-wise, and the ziti wasn't as good as the spaghetti, but the meatballs are still hmmm.....


I have a feeling I will slightly more prosperous than usual for CNY this year...

On a slightly related but not really related note, my bro and his wife ordered online some extra special Chinese tea for their wedding ceremony. What makes this tea extra special is that it's actually a bunch of long tea leaves woven with a flower, and the flower and leaves 'bloom' in hot water, as can be seen below!

Ain't that neat? I thought that was so neat, I want to get the same tea for my wedding too and make all my guests go "Ooooooh! Blooming tea!". Of course, I'd have other things to get for my wedding first... like a poor sod who's willing to marry me. Hur hur.

My bro and his wife had a wedding rehearsal followed by a nice dinner at a Korean restaurant the night before the wedding ceremony.



Yeah, I know that's not particularly interesting. I just needed an excuse to put this pic up.


Now you know where I get it from.



Wedding pics coming soon!!!