Graffiti on carriages in Singapore underground

You might not know the name Michael P. Fay. He was the American kid who got caned in Singapore and shot to fame as the US government tried literally to save his ass. The US government managed to reduce his pain by 1/3, he took 4 instead of 6 cane strokes and got a Wikipedia entry for that.

Foreigners never learn from this incident and all the "Caning" T-shirts sold in souvenir shops. The Singaporean government is trying to extradite a Brit for vandalizing an underground train with another Swiss who was already caught. Vandalism in Singapore can carry a fine of nearly £1,000 or three years in jail and three to eight strokes of a cane.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/10261955.stm



The graffiti was so professionally done that initially the underground staff took no notice and thought it was officially sanctioned!!

Tian Tian Hainanese Chicken Rice 天天海南雞飯

It feels like mum and dad are never home these days and they disappeared again for a few days this weekend after having done so last weekend. Lucky that we never developed separation anxiety syndrome (we only suffer from not-enough-treat syndrome). Last week they kept talking about Portuguese food in Macau and dim sum at the old Lisboa; now they talk about the funeral that they went to and Hainanese chicken rice.

The urge for food hunting goes in the family, it's little wonder that we feel hungry all day long. They went to the Maxwell Hawker Center after they landed in Changi Airport. It was almost 3 in the afternoon and there was still this queue of 15-16 people outside the small shop front of Tian Tian. Grandpa was there securing a table while dad queue behind a Japanese couple with their baby in a pram. It was a multinational queue with local people as well as Japanese youngsters and Hong Kong girls. All Asians though, strange given that mum and dad only learnt about the place from Antony Bourdain's TV Series "No Reservations". Enough preamble. Cut right to the chicken and the rice. Chicken was very soft and smooth and the rice was very fragrant. The chilli sauce was hot!! Unlike most other shops, it didn't have crushed ginger. If queues of people don't put you off, then this shop probably offers you the best chicken rice that money can buy and best of all you don't pay a lot for the privilege to try. For a whole chicken, you pay SGD 22 and you pay no extra for having half a chicken, ie SGD 11. And the rice which in Bourdain's word "so fragrant that you can just eat on its own" cost just SGD 50 cents.

Again no pictures taken, but plenty of other bloggers have theirs on flickrs and here is a good recent example. The picture quality is better than what you will see in the shop now, as the real ones have severely faded colours. You can see Bourdain's endorsement on the right-hand top corner. Right next to it, there was a Japanese article comparing chicken rice in Singapore "チキンライス 食べ比べ", this perhaps explains why there are so many Japanese in the queue. In fact there's a blog entry about the shop just 5 days ago in Japanese.

Yucks!! All these fish taking a nibble!!!

During the stopover in Singapore, mum and dad tried out another new fad, fish spa. They were going to kill some time and get a foot massage in the familiar spot near Tanglin Mall, but got suckered into paying more for the pleasure of having their feet tickled by hundreds of these Doctor Fish. First such spa opened in 2006 in Hakone, Japan and has found its way in many Asian countries including Macau (but not Hong Kong, perhaps the association with HK Foot is just too much to bear for some). Don't know how beneficial these fish spas are to the body, but if the place looks hygienic it's probably worth trying.

Instead of keeping Kois in our pond, we can setup our own fish spa at home. Such services are already available in the internet.