Wow! We're in the papers

Our flat got featured in Shin Min (local Chinese rag that has the scandalous headlines and pixellated pictures). We're safely in the inside pages though -- the interior pages -- way at the back, past all the tabloidy Seven Deadly Sins stuff.

Fancy that, our home made the cut for coverage. OK, it's Shin Min, not Martha Stewart's Living, but by our standards, that's still a golly gee event.

What happened was that the reporter, who had featured some of the homes our interior designer/builder worked on before, asked him if he had done a resort home recently. So he e-mailed her pictures of flat, and the surfboard, picnic table and cloudy ceiling apparently qualified. Though I still maintain that ours is a Beach Shack look, not a Bali Resort look she was probably hoping for.

The reporter came round with a photographer last week. I meant to take pictures of the photographer taking pictures but during the shoot, quite completely forgot to do so. I didn't want to be in the shots, but thought HRH should, only she wasn't very co-operative. She wouldn't stay in the frame but kept coming towards me so the photographer gave up. The shoot didn't take as long as I feared -- it was newspaper click and shoot so there was no styling, no props that they brought along, no lighting. I only had to move some unpacked boxes out of sight. But you can see some of the unpacked plastic bags stowed at the bottom of the closet. I didn't know the photog opened the closet to take the pix.

We're the page lead with three little sidebars across the bottom -- the bit going down on the right side isn't us. The headline says something to the effect of: Home and Beach, with a deck that says: Blue sky, white clouds, surfboard.

Basically, the reporter just repeated what I told her -- that we were beach bums, that we had a beach wedding, so it wasn't surprising that our house took on a beach look in the process of renovation. HRH got honourable mention in the bit where she goes on about how the dog has the run of the house. Hmm, I guess ruling the house doesn't come across the same in Chinese.

The rep got some things wrong though. She said the designer came up with the "skylight". Hey, that should be properly credited to me! And she said L and I met in Hawaii. S says I should ask for a correction. Hawaii wasn't where L and I met, that was where we got married. We met in the newsroom. In Teeline class (or goofing off at the back of Teeline class), which I bet that reporter doesn't have to pass at 100 words a minute. She didn't have to go through all the annoying dumb questions I used to have to ask, like full name, age and occupation.

L was at work during the photo shoot and the interview, so the reporter never met him. She's probably under the impression that he's a tanned, bronzed Hawaiian surfer dude. Hahaha.