Food in South-East Asia

Com­ing from Aus­tralia, where food was expen­sive and not exactly haute-cuisine, South-East Asia was a foodie’s par­adise. First, food is cheap by world stan­dard and sim­ple meal usu­ally cost under $5. Sec­ond, Sin­ga­pore, Malaysia and Thai­land have a “street food” tra­di­tion and numer­ous hawk­ers offer local del­i­ca­cies on-the-go. Finally, the blend of flavours was sim­ply amaz­ing, from Thai curry to Penang’s Nasi Lemak.

Signs in South-East Asia

I love tak­ing pic­tures of signs because they tell so much about a coun­try. For instance, Canada’s bilin­gual “stop-arrêt” sign is unique, and so are the many weather-related warn­ings, “ice falling” being my favourite.

Dur­ing our trip to Sin­ga­pore, Malaysia and Thai­land, I col­lected var­i­ous signs.

The Woman in Black

The cou­ple walked into the restau­rant and sat right behind us. The first thing I noticed was that we had the same shoes, a pair of red rub­ber flip-flop, the kind every­body wear at the beach. Her feet were tan, like mine, and I could see a whiter patch of skin where the san­dals’ strap rested.

The Thai Adventure

My motto has always been “travel the world, take pic­tures, eat choco­late”, but I’m strongly con­sid­er­ing chang­ing it for “you haven’t lived till you’ve taken a bus that runs out of gas in the mid­dle of the freeway”.

Pulau Langawi

We had orig­i­nally planned to cross to Thai­land right after George­town, but we decided to linger a bit longer in Malaysia. Still look­ing for the per­fect pic­turesque island, we set­tled on Pulau Lan­gawi, which was said to have Malaysian’s best beach.

Georgetown

The empty streets were bustling with activ­ity at night: we were right in Lit­tle India and we could almost taste the smell of incense, burn­ing in front of most shops. We were also close to a Mosque, and the first night, we sud­denly woke up to the sound of the prayer call in the wee hours of the morning—it was pretty surreal.

Kuala Lumpur

Cross­ing the street is best done with both eyes closed and a prayer book in hand, as you try to dodge trucks, cars, irate taxi dri­vers and motor­bikes. The pedes­trian green light, a flash­ing ani­mated lit­tle stick fig­ure that runs, sums it all up: run like hell.

Going to Malaysia

An exit stamp later, and we were out. Enter­ing Malaysia was sim­i­larly easy: no ques­tions were asked and we were given a three-month per­mit on the spot. The only creepy fac­tor was the huge posters every­where that read “death by hang­ing for drug traffickers”.