Best Eats According to Natalie

When I was walking home from the MRT with a bubble tea cup in hand, I started thinking about all the wonderful food in Singapore- and how I'll have to say goodbye to it all in about two months! That made me very sad, but this list will not. Here's my list of favourite places to eat (and what I get)!

Food:

Roti Prata: My school does decent roti prata, but there's a Muslim food stall in Newton that makes prata that's sort of like cake. Super thick, chewy, and the curry is awesome!
Chicken Rice: Boon Tong Key is awesome. I find that mall hawkers are good, but the stuff that's $3 or less and comes wrapped in paper beats it every time.
Laksa: The stall in ION is pretty good. I only eat this once in a while.
Chili Crab: Jumbo's is good. So is No Signboard Seafood. Also, Long Beach.
TWG: It has surprisingly good food, though pricy. The smoked salmon and lamb is notable.
Ban Mee: It's soup. It's heavenly. Also, it's super filling.
Chicken Congee: I get this at chicken rice places sometimes. I have no idea why people think salty rice porridge with chicken and oil floating on top is weird. It's wonderful.
"Veggie"-- I'm pretty certain this stuff is bok choy. Who cares when it has oyster sauce on it?
Chicken wings: BBQ'd and greasy, best eaten outside.
Kuay Teow: Thick noodles, lots of bean sprouts and mysterious green veggie, and chicken. Mr. Ho's at school is such a guilty pleasure.
Char siew noodles: Chinese prepared pork, these funky elastic-y noodles, and mystery sauce of tasty.



Snacks:
Old Chang Kee-- Curry-O (curry puff with chicken, egg and potato)
BreadTalk: The cheesy sausage bun is so bad for you, but so good. Also Black Pearl when they have it.
To be honest, I don't normally eat savoury snacks.


Sweets:
Macaroons: TWG has pretty good tea themed ones, but you can get tasty ones throughout the island if you don't mind paying like $2.50 each.
Kue things: Not sure what the real name for these are, but they are funny jelly things that are normally brightly coloured. Often found at fruit stands.
Mochi Sweets: Strawberry, peach, and green tea mochi with cream inside!
Pulot Hitam: Black rice soup with condensed milk and sometimes ice cream. Maybe an acquired taste. My aunt said it looked like drowned ants, but its really good.

Frozen Treats:
Bread Ice Cream: Find along Orchard Road for $1. Slice of ice cream in a piece of rainbow bread
Ice Kachang: Local thing with lots of colour and various Asian goodies. The aunties at Great World City sometimes give me extra condensed milk on mine
Frozen Yogurt: Great World City has like 3 frozen yogurt places. I like the self-serve one or Yoguru the best.
Gelatissimo: YUM. Expensive as heck, but wow.


Drinks:
Gong Cha-- Regular bubble tea, Lemon Calpis
ShareTea-- Strawberry Ice Tea. Unnatural colour, but yummy!
Each-a-Cup: Milk tea ice-blended, basically any ice blended (kinda like a slushy)
Toast Box: Teh and Kopi (tea and coffee with condensed milk)
Sjora: Passion fruit flavoured drink. I get it when I go to Yoshinoya sometimes.
TWG: Fancy teas in a pretty pot. I like "dancing tea" and "princess tea"
Lime Juice: Find anywhere. Different than American lime juice. Its cousin calamansi juice is also wonderful.

Things You Don't Care About Living Here

Since it's Thanksgiving back in the USA right now, I've been reading a lot of "I'm so thankful for this and that and blahblahblah" posts. They're nice and all, but they've reminded me of things we don't have here (and don't care about). 

1. Local Food. It's great in America that you can get local farm foods and whatnot, but that doesn't really exist here. I think you can get eggs and some green leafy vegetables grown here, and that's it. Everything is imported, and quite frankly, Singapore likes it that way. Why eat Malaysian stuff when you can get European cheese, Japanese or Thai rice, or New Zealand milk? I used to care about eating local in America, but it's just not possible now. 
2. Eating Organically. There's some organic food here for sure, but it's super expensive. The only things we eat organically are generally the stuff we can't find in general, like almond milk or something. There's organic peanut butter that's pretty good, but other than that... you just can't care about eating organic unless you want to pay an arm and a leg. Singapore isn't quite there yet in the organic movement- mostly because of the first point above, and also because Singaporeans just can't pay for it. 
3. Mosquito fogging. In America I know it's rather controversial because of pesticides and harm to children and whatever else they want to fuss about. Here it's normal, get over it. It's that or dengue, and dengue sucks way worse. 
4. Super divided rich-poor gap based on race. It's so deeply engrained into the culture here that you don't really think about it. The Tamil Indian men are construction workers, the Indonesian women are helpers, etc. White people are normally expats or tourists-- and always considered rich. 
5. Escalator safety. In America most people stand forwards and hold onto the railing, right? Well in Singapore couples face each other and talk/kiss. It's just a thing. 
6. "Other people". When I lived in America I remember a very strong mentality of worrying about what "other people" are doing. There was this constant threat of "other people" stealing this or that, or harming you in general. While this mentality does exist amongst some, it's not as prominent here. This one is hard to explain, but basically people don't walk around thinking others are out to get them. There aren't super-locks or weird "keep strangers away" machines here.

Well, that seems pretty accurate. Hope my readers in the USA had an awesome Thanksgiving and ate lots of turkey and pie. Before you ask, yes, you can find turkeys here, but your oven may not be big enough to hold your typical thousand-pound saline-pumped American bird. The American club and a few hotels do a pretty nice spread, but personally I'm a fan of chilli crab!

Great World City

I've been talking about GWC a lot lately, so I figured a post about it would be appropriate. 

Great World City is a shopping centre not terribly far away from where I live that I go to almost every day. My bus drops me off outside of it and I walk for a while... and that's all the detail you get about where I live (though in all honesty diligent readers of this blog could probably find roughly where I live within a few kilometre radius). Anyways, I've been there a TON lately getting snacks and dinner lately, so I figured I'd talk about the place. 

There are a lot of different shops at GWC from shoes to clothes, and the upstairs area has a movie theatre (that I don't go to very often, I head to Plaza Singapura for that) and general children's activities. While it doesn't have high end brands, it has pretty much everything else you would ever need. Banks, bubble tea, Breadtalk, Fond, a nice steak place called Pepper... you name it, it's probably there. One notable weird thing about it though is to get into it from the second entrance walking you have to go through a bar called the Pump Room, which I've never been able to figure out because that seems like a total mood killer. Also, why are there always people there drinking, every single day of the week? I go there enough to know this to be true. 

Thank goodness they redid the bathrooms in GWC. Each floor is vaguely country themed, hence the name of the mall, but the Egypt floor used to really creep me out. Like, go-to-another-floor type of creeped out. 

Anyways, they have a decent food court in the basement (and other yummy things) that I'm really tired of because I feel like I eat there at least once a week. Regarding eating, eating dinner alone is stupidly lonely and pathetic. It always seems like everyone else has someone to talk to or really cute kids to mind, while I sit there with my bags and food just shovelling it in my mouth so I can go home. Meep. They used to have an awesome noodle place, but it shut down. However they do have a Taiyaki shop (its days are probably limited, like the soya milk place next door and the prata place that already closed) which is kind of interesting. GWC also has a Jollibean (The peanut stuff from there is great, everything else is thoroughly underwhelming), Sharetea (they recognise me), and a pie place that doesn't sell anything but chicken pies. It's really weird. 

So, that's actually a decent insight into life here in Singapore. Random stuff that normally has its own building, like a bank or post office (though I don't think there's one in GWC) are in shopping centres. The doors blast you with Arctic wind when you walk in, which is really annoying when it's raining out. You see people of all walks of life there all the time, and there's often a really, really lost tourist. 

Well, I should do homework now. This was a good little distraction from the fact that the first show of Alice is tomorrow! AH!

Tasty Things I've Eaten Lately

A-nom-nom-nom-nom-nom~

I've been eating loads of tasty things lately, for whatever reason. Part of the reason is because I've been eating out a lot lately since people have been away, but that's alright.

• Japanese rice. I made this at home. While I've actually been eating this stuff for a while, I realised that washing it three or four times really makes a difference in texture and taste. It's very yummy~
• Sushi. Ichiban Boshi sushi is tasty, and I don't eat it very often. You get to pick out what you want and put it in a box. The cucumber roll is $0.60 per two, which is pretty darn nice. 
• Sticky rice. My history teacher just gave us some. Nothing to complain about. 
• Strawberry fruit bubble tea. Not healthy, but sweet and delicious. I love this stuff. 
• Japanese style fish. Not totally sure how they make it so good.
• Chicken rice at Far East Plaza. It's on the top floor and always has a queue. DELICIOUS
• Kway Teow at my school. I've mentioned it before, but so tasty~ I like the chicken-veggie type
• Carrots and Peanut butter. Just try it. 
• Watermelon. Had some at breakfast and it was really good. 
• In Thailand... Thai tea! I've never had anything quite like it. Super tasty and pretty coloured. 
• Taiyaki at Great World City. The new place in the food court actually puts red bean throughout the whole thing, not just a dot in the middle. 

Crap, now I'm hungry in social studies!