I got a little excited this morning when SQ sent an email saying I could now pay for fares by Krisflyer Miles in combination with credit card or paypal payment.
It is very different from redeeming award flights because for 30,000 miles or so you can fly free to say Taipei or Shanghai on an award ticket (but you have to wait till you amass 30K points). But buying a ticket with KF miles gets you this:
So say you’re short of $50 on your credit card to pay for your air ticket – you can use 4,900 KF points to top it up, meaning one KF mile is worth a whopping ONE CENT.
We were so lucky to have had a final NYC burger at Shake Shack’s JFK Terminal Four outlet, and having been back in Singapore for five days, we’re now suffering serious burger withdrawals. Or it could just be jet lag.
I’ve never craved burgers so much, and I know there’re burger joints all over the U.S. that’d lay claim to having the best patties, so we’ll just have to eat our way across 50 states (ok 49, ‘cos maybe not Hawaii ‘cos they probably put pineapple in theirs) another trip.
But for now, here are the other three outstanding entries:
If I had to pick a winner among all the burgers, it’d have to be The White Label. If you can’t taste it for yourself, then knowing what goes into it may help.
There isn’t much worse than having your preschooler be mistreated and injured at the hands of the people you trust to look after your child while you’re at work – whether it’s your foreign domestic helper, nanny, or pre-school staff.
I thought about whether it was right to post on FB the CCTV footage given by the preschool, and I think I would have done the same thing. I’d have been very angry and would have wanted to warn other parents of the same. I wouldn’t have waited for the police or the press to do that for me.
While there’ll be questions to be answered on how the centre screens its staff, including employees who don’t necessarily have contact with the kids, it’s a good reminder to parents to really get to know the people you delegate your child caring to.
The city is full of random surprises and we were treated to a whirlwind cheese tour in the West Village branch of Murray’s Cheese by cheese guru Michael Krempasky, complete with chocolate pairings and stories about his past life as a fire patrolman.
Michael Krempasky
Then a couple of days ago in SoHo, we heard someone shouting, “Hey, check it out, it’s Jesus on Jesus!”, and we turned the corner and saw someone posing in front of a billboard:
Random Jesus lookalike posing in front of an artist’s depiction of the real McCoy
We didn’t plan on doing this, but I’ve been told it’s quite characteristic of a trip to New York to entail many distractions, random and sudden new objectives, and a lot of it having to do with food.
On our first night in Manhattan, our local friends took us out to a burger speakeasy, simply called The Burger Joint, and simply hidden behind a velvet curtain in the lobby of the Parker Meridien hotel in mid-town Manhattan.
The following day, we made a plan to walk from 59th Street southward to Eataly, and stopped at Madison Square Park for Kai to get a little play time. There we saw our first Shake Shack, then we saw our first crazy Shake Shack queue and decided to come back some time after lunch hour. It still took over 20 minutes to get our burger, but thankfully, it was a 20 minutes worth waiting. It was also the first burger Kai has ever finished on his own.
Then the next day, we happened to be walking past Minetta Tavern at close to opening time and our local friends decided it was worth our giving the famed Black Label Burger a shot even though the tavern was kinda small, and a little noisy with post-work people hanging out having drinks. Custom-made from dry-aged ribeye, skirt steak and brisket, the patty is sublime, and at the moment, the Black Label stands as the best burger I have ever tasted.
(As we were leaving the tavern, Bono – yes, the Bono of the U2 – was just walking in, and nearly got hit in the head by Kai’s stroller, which was being passed to me overhead – so crowded was the tavern.)
There are other burgers to be had – we have lists, but the first three made for a really good trifecta.
