Christmas Dinner

Last night my cowoker (also from San Diego) had a late Christmas dinner and invited me over. They had been on vacation in Railay Beach, Krabi, Thailand over Christmas as well.

A delicious turkey dinner

energy drinks

Thai energy drinks- two versions of Red Bull, White Shark, M 150 and one that has no English on it. They're so cheap. 10 bhat- ~$0.30USD. I havn't drank any yet.

Red Bull was originally from Thailand and when they changed the formula and started marketing to Australian and UK markets probabably started the whole energy drink market

Phuket Pictures-Christmas 2007

The lobby Christmas Tree



Street Food- A Prata or Pancake is dough fried in oil and butter to make it nice and crispy. For the filling you choose whatever you want- fruit, chocolate, sugar. I like bananas. Then it's topped with condensed milk and sugar.

Bangla Road, Patong, Phuket. A walk down a short section of Bangla Road in Patong on Christmas Eve. This road is always crowded and it's full of bars and bar girls trying to get you to drink or buy them drinks. Christmas Eve was no exception except that all the bar girls were dressed up in red and white for Christmas. Not exactly an ideal place to celebrate Christmas though.

Christmas Celebrations

Scarry Santa

Snowmen don't last very long on the beach though and you could almost watch as this one melted in front of your eyes.

Christmas Fireworks

Phuket- Dec 07

We've moved from Patong Beach in Phuket to Kata Beach which is much more nice, I think. It's almost at the Southern end of the island and it's not as crowded as Patong at all. Today we went on a day speed boat trip to the Phi Phi islands and a few other stops to swim and snorkel. For as crowded as Phuket can get it was really a lot of fun and with such sunny weather and beaches you can understand why so many people come here. I can't believe the week is almost finished- tomorrow we're flying back to Singapore already!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! I'm in Phuket, Thailand for Christmas and it seems much too tropical to get into the Christmas mood. I saw some ice carvings of snowmen set up with carrots for noses and they were melting super fast.
Yesterday I finished my PADI open water SCUBA certification with my friend I'm here with. We did a total of 4 boat dives during the day course and yesterday we saw a leopard shark and a couple small sting rays. There was also a manta ray (they're huge- like a 5 m wingspan underwater) in the water that some people spotted from the surface but we didn't see it underwater.
We have a few more days in Phuket and then returning to Singapore on Thrusday.
Happy Holidays!

Giant trees are up all over town. For Christmas.

One year and counting-

This past week marked one year living in Singapore and I’m still alive to tell about it. Actually life is pretty easy here. Work is generally fun but sometimes frustrating. There have been some recent developments in my group at work and we’ll start doing some business in Shanghai, China; I really want to go to China- if not to Shanghai for work then on my own for vacation.

In the last year I’ve also been fortunate to travel around a lot:
Siem Reap (Angkor Wat), Cambodia; Bangkok, Thailand two times, U.S. two times; Bintan, Indonesia; India (New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra-Taj Mahal); Batam, Indonesia three times; Koh Samui, Thailand; and Phuket, Thailand. And next week the office is shutting down between Christmas and New Years so I’m going back to Phuket, Thailand for 6 days- not because it’s that exciting of a place and it’s going to way too crowded but it’s easy to plan a trip there at the last minute and it should be nice and sunny. After that, I’m flying to either Bali or Java to spend a few days in central Java to visit Borobudor before making my way to Ubud, Bali to where I’ll meet some friends from San Diego- we’re renting a glass studio for two weeks there, relax, practice glass blowing and have fun.

Wow, life it so good, right! I can’t believe it, right! Well there are some things that I miss (not in any particular order):
-Bar-b-ques- they’re pretty rare here
-Beef that tastes good- almost all Australian beef here- I’ve never really appreciated USDA beef before this
-Good beer- there are some microbreweries here that make good beers but it seems the locals really like their beer sweet instead of hoppy so they’re forced to make the beers more malty than I like- even beers that should be more hoppy like Pale Ales and IPAs,
-Cheap beer/wine- wine is so expensive, even wine that is like $5 USD is more like $12-15USD here. Going out to a bar in some areas expect to pay close to $10USD for one pint of beer.
-Family close by- hmm.. none of my family followed me out here so I don’t get to see them that much.
-Living next to construction sites- well, it’s often loud.
That’s a pretty short list. Not so bad, I guess.

So now some of the good things:
-Easy to travel- 2 hours flight and you can be in a handful of SE Asian countries
-Public transportation- after living in San Diego who could have guessed public transportation could be so convenient. Buses and the subways can get you pretty much everywhere you need to go and it’s cheap. And if you’re in a real rush you can take a taxi that is still cheap compared to most other cities.
-Food- it’s so cheap… depending on where you want to eat. I’m not going to rave that it’s all so good because that seems to be something Singaporeans do here and it’s unjustified- sure there is a lot of food here but to use it to define your country (they call it a Makan Culture) by saying the food is so good/cheap and that they eat so much seems to be a ridiculous thing to do. I don’t think there is that much more food here than any other major city. Sure there are really expensive places you can eat at but there are also a lot of places to get really good local food from all over Asia and it’s generally good –sometimes great and most times cheap. Then there are the hawkers (or street food centers) where a meal costs maybe a few dollars USD.

These lists seem pretty short and sad. I think I should put some more thought into them to express myself better… maybe by next year I have some better lists.

Purple Pheonix Ladies' Ensemble

Last night I went to see the Purple Phoenix Ladies' Ensemble. Yeah, I wasn't exactly sure what it was either other than that it’s some kind of Chinese Orchestra show. The ensemble was made up of 13 Chinese girls and the show was a combination of dance, singing, and Chinese instrument playing which all made for such an entertaining show (minus the horrible local emcee and some local singer that sang two songs). They started and ended with traditional Chinese songs which I really liked, but in-between they had some interpretations of more modern songs which I didn't really care for at all. I found out I really like the stringed instruments called huqin. Huqin is actually a family of two-stringed instruments with many different versions all over SE Asia; the most common is called the erhu. I was told that it's a difficult instrument to learn- like a violin but with only two strings and you hold it vertically resting in your lap. I also learned that the phoenix is the Chinese symbol for women and the dragon is the symbol for men.

on the subway, II

I don't know why it's seems so strange when you run into someone you know on the subway when this is one of the most densly populated counties in the whole world. I read that over a million people ride it every day which is a lot when there's only about four and a half million people total on the island. Actually though, I don't think I've every really just bumped into someone I know on the subway but I have recognized people on it before. Strangers. Mostly really cute strangers. Just today I swore I thought I saw a friend of mine on the way back from work... but he lives in California so it couldn't have been. Though, he did enjoy Singapore last time he was here...

not a bad day

Yesterday’s events reminded me what an international city this is. For lunch I had wanton noodles with a friend from China then later I walked to Little India to have an Indian dinner with a friend from the UK and he had brought along a girl, Kabi, from Ghana, Africa he met here two weeks ago. After stuffing ourselves we decided to walk around the corner to an Australian pub for a beer. Little India was absolutely packed as it always in on a Sunday since its most of the workers’ only day off and Kabi was amazed because she said she had never seen so many Indians before. The Australian pub was packed because it happened that two Scottish bands were playing there as part of a St. Andrew’s Day celebration unbeknownst to us - these were real Braveheart looking Scottish guys dressed in kilts, playing bagpipes and pounding their drums as hard as they could (I would never have thought 5 drummers and one bagpipe player could be a band). Not a bad day.

A few side notes-
I had never met anyone from Ghana before. I really don’t know anything about it and when she said she had come to Singapore because she was getting away from some trouble back home I didn’t pry. She wanted to know if I had a girlfriend or a wife and couldn’t believe I didn’t. I figured she was looking to marry a westerner here and my UK friend said her sister was living in KL with her Australian husband. After she asked if I was married she also couldn’t believe I didn’t have any children either when she asked that. When I asked her how many children I should have by my age she said at least ten or twenty! She seemed serious, too. My UK friend later told me Ghana must be a very male dominated society -earlier in the night she was talking with her sister on the phone and she put him on the line. The sister was thanking him for being nice to Kabi and said she hoped he would allow Kabi to visit her in KL! As if she would need his permission to travel. Trying to keep from laughing in half shock he had replied “oh, yes, of course. Anytime.”

1st Singapore Thanksgiving

Well, it was my first Singapore Thanksgiving at least. We celebrated last Saturday since we didn't get the Thursday off work and it was a lot of fun. We had a lot of food: turkey, ham, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, cornbread, pumpkin pie, cranberries, cranberry salad, desserts, wine... pretty much everything required for sharing a big meal. I think everything turned out really well but the turkey didn't brown like it should have- this was the first time I had used that oven and there's something not right about it. I think it only broils instead of bakes... but it was done and it tasted good. My apartment was pretty full, too, and not having an actual dining table posed a bit a challenge to having a big thanksgiving dinner but we managed.

The biggest challenge without the central table was having the thanksgiving prayer so instead we did it after dinner but before we had dessert. This being the first thanksgiving for a lot of my friends I felt obligated to follow at least some tradition and have everyone say something they were thankful for over the past year- so to make it as painless as possible we all wrote something down on a scrap of paper and then everyone drew one to read and we had one big collaborated statement of thanks. I think it worked out well.


assistant chefs checking the bird

carving the turkey is a serious job

the food

lots of dessert

the group photo