Revamp!

I started this blog two years ago as a means of catharsis for myself. I was going through depression and anxiety, and that period was also a difficult time as I was grappling with discovering who I was, where I was headed and balancing all of that with my emotional instability. Since then, two years have passed and I am now at peace with myself and the struggles that I went through. More importantly, I have opened myself up to friends and family. I can't say for sure that I've overcome the illness, there are definitely moments where I feel susceptible to falling prey to it again. Even so, I am more positive about what life has to offer and feel a lot less burdened than before.

One whole chunk of rambling aside, I have spent the past few months deciding on the direction I wanted to take with this space. I mean, as a teenager I spent my time on my blog complaining about friendship struggles, school, etc etc etc. You know the drill. As teenagers we pretty much stalked our friends / schoolmates blogs just for funsies. That's pretty much how gossip starts anyway.

Now however, I no longer want to do that. Besides sharing random stuff like I've been so far, I definitely want this space to be filled with positive vibes - one that people come to and feel at home and at peace with. Over the past few weeks I've been following so many people on instagram, and despite them not knowing who I am I have found so much strength in their kind words and their captions. I find myself visiting the same pages, blogs and sites when I'm feeling down.

So.. I've come up with a plan for this blog. Posts that you can expect during the week. I am a rather cliche individual, so I hope you don't mind the alliterations I've created for each theme :P

• Make-up Mondays - In which I share a product that I love, or items I wish to buy. They may or may not also include YouTube videos that I've been obsessed with :P
• Transformation Tuesdays - I'm constantly wanting to improve myself. Be it the bad habit of not always making my bed, to procrastinating with homework, I want to spend some time to share some habits I wish to change and hopefully share these experiences and journey with you!
• Throwback Thursdays - In which I share past photos or stories about myself. Not that it'd be of any benefit to you of course... but I wanted to do this to remind myself of how far I've come. It's also a good reminder of some of the best memories I have :)
• Weekend Wrap-up - Self explanatory here. This is where I wrap-up the events of the week. 

Needless to say, I'm really excited about this and I hope anyone who's reading this is too! Lots of exciting things coming up, and I'm just really excited to type away as I go along. 

Till then, I have to finish an assignment before my exciting weekend ahead. Let me know what you think about my "revamp"? :)

xx.

Food Adventure Friday

Two days ago, pw and I met up with Cliff after what felt like ages and we decided to go on a brunch adventure :) Also, I am well aware that the title of the post doesn't correspond to the actual day we visited the establishment. Still, humour me please :P 

A technique my friends and I have established when it comes to exploring brunch places around the city is through instagram. Whilst we used to find urbanspoon/zomato highly useful in the past, we also realised that the ratings given by users there don't necessarily highlight our personal experiences. Also, it's a lot more fun to explore food and places through instagram, very often I find that a lot of underrated places can be located through the app. 

We decided to visit Pillar of Salt, a brunch establishment located along Church Street in Richmond. To be fair, we've heard of this place before but never had the opportunity to visit as it's quite a journey from the city. We tend to choose places within the CBD because it saves time and we don't necessarily have to spend extra commuting there by public transport. Since we were on our one-week easter holiday we didn't mind spending time journeying out to the suburb :)

As always, I started out with my usual order of a mocha. A quick question: am I considered a coffee-lover if the only coffee I actually enjoy drinking is mocha? It's 80% chocolate isn't it haha.

The main reason pw and I wanted to go to Pillar of Salt was really because we saw some splendid photos on instagram of their buttermilk pancakes. Now if there's one thing you need to know about me, it's that I absolutely love pancakes. Even if I were craving something savoury, should it be my first visit to a particular establishment and I see pancakes/hotcakes/_cakes in the menu I am defo going to order it. Needless to say, once the dish was served I was not disappointed at all.

Look at that presentation!

Presentation wise, this dish was so instagram worthy. Pw and I both ordered the pancakes and we most probably spent around five minutes just marvelling at its beauty. I was actually really sad I had to destroy it because that would ruin everything. I actually love desserts (eating + baking) because the end product is always so pretty and it's a beautiful art form in itself.

Taste-test: it received our seal of approval. It was light and fluffy, and the flavours were very well captured by the sweetness of the jam and the strawberries. Oddly enough, it's not as sweet as it looks! Which is great, because you don't get sick of it too quickly. Pw doesn't usually ever finish her meals, but she finished up 90% of this dish, so I think you get the idea over how nice it was portioned. This dish cost AUD14 for three stacks of pancakes. I think its reasonable given the portion. It's also fairly cheaper than other brunch places we've been to.

Burger stack

Cliff on the other hand was ravenous that day so he decided to order something savoury instead. He ordered this burger stack which he wiped clean. I can't comment much on this dish because I never tried it, but he did say it was really nice and I think the clean plate at the end is testament to how much he enjoyed it.

Overall, Pillar of Salt was definitely worth travelling all the way to. You may proceed there via tram 78 but we took the train towards east richmond from flinder street station instead. It's only two stops from flinders st station, and about a five minute walk away from there.

xx.