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.

Images of Singapore

Sin­ga­pore­ans seem to have two main activ­i­ties: shop­ping and din­ing. When you are done shop­ping, you grab a bite and when you are done eat­ing, you go for a walk with your credit card in hand for some exer­cise. The coun­try is one huge shop­ping mall and there is food just about anywhere.

Multicultural Singapore

I have this the­ory that every­one should be a minor­ity once in his life. The rich one among the poor, the poor among the rich, the short among the tall and the tall among the short ones etc. Just to expe­ri­ence what being on the other side of the mir­ror feels like.

Chinese New Year in S'pore

Happy Chi­nese New Year! 新年快乐！

As China and Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties around the world cel­e­brated the begin­ning of the Year of the Rab­bit on Feb­ru­ary 2^nd, we joined the party in Singapore.

A Foodie's Day in S'pore

I’m lucky to have a strong stom­ach and a taste for street food. I’m not a huge fan of “weird” meat (i.e. intestines and the like) but I can eat pretty much any­thing else. You can’t really apply West­ern health stan­dards to Asian street food but I’m per­fectly fine with that. Who wants to live in a taste­less san­i­tized world, anyway?

A Secret Affair

At 11 p.m., we sud­denly real­ized we’d bet­ter print the Kuala Lumpur hotel book­ing con­fir­ma­tion we had just made online. Obvi­ously, we don’t carry a printer with us (although I some­times wish we did) so we had to find an Inter­net café.

Singapore's Chinatown

And this is where my per­cep­tion of Sin­ga­pore sud­denly changed. Just a cou­ple of blocks from all the main West­ern finan­cial insti­tu­tions, we stepped into another world.

Bye Australia, Hello Singapore

Asia has such a unique atmos­phere that best way to adapt is to embrace the crowd, the smell and dive into the chaos with­out look­ing back.

We landed in Sin­ga­pore under pour­ing rain, after a whole day of trav­el­ing and two crazy last days in Sydney.