Having not been to China for nearly three years, I have almost forgotten how phenomenal and interesting the country is. Last weekend, I was in Guangzhou and was reminded exactly that. Although it isn’t the most picturesque of all places, the capital of Guangdong province boasted itself as a key national transportation hub and trading port. In shopaholic terms, this means that it is the wholesale market of the world!
I can see why though. Buildings and buildings of wholesale markets selling everything from clothes to jewellery to toy cockroaches… However, since I’m not exactly big on shopping, I tried to spot what other things Guangzhou was made of. Here are some highlights of my four-day visit.
First up, as always, the food. I love Cantonese food. Dim sum is the obvious choice but there is so much more to Cantonese food than just that. We had this awesome fishball stuffed with crab roe just across the street from our apartment. It was delicious.
Photo and bite enlarged to show texture.
Although, to be frank, the plane food that I had on my Singapore Airlines flight was not too bad either.
So here is the deal: I did not go to Bali just to eat, as this post and this post seem to have suggested.
Instead, I was there to attend a wedding, a very beautiful one if I may add.
It may not have started perfectly. It rained heavily and the venue for the vows had to be moved from a beautiful spot by the beach to a sheltered open hut. (And I arrived extremely late that I missed the saying of the vows, but the bride and groom do not have to know this. For a valid reason though since my hairdresser was an hour late!). But as the afternoon and the night progressed, it just got better.
After the ceremony, there were cocktails and canapes, which were amazing. I did not even know what cocktails I had and did not bother asking, but they were really good and the appetizers tasty. Not much good picture from the first part and this was the best one that I got.
After that came my favourite part: the wedding reception. It was set in a beautiful tent with a row of 6 tables (I think), each table decorated with beautiful flower arrangement. The whole setup together with the fairy lights surrounding it created a very dreamy atmosphere.
Leave me alone with nothing planned and I will do this: eat.
On my last day travelling solo in Bali, I could not recall doing anything else apart from ensuring that my tummy was not in want. One of the highlights in my not-so-adventurous pursuit of traditional dishes was babi guling or Balinese roast pork.
Bali is probably the only place in Indonesia whereby you can taste a lot of varieties of pork, served in non Chinese style. Being a country with the largest Muslim population in the world, most of the restaurants serve halal food since it does not make much business sense to ignore the meal preference of close to 90% of the population.
Bali is different though. The majority of the population in the island is Hindu, which means that they eat pork but abstain from beef, which is perfect for me since I do not eat beef. This is why you can find blatant selling of pork and pigs being hung which will leave the people in other parts of Indonesia gasp in horror.
Although this scene of lamb cutlet did scare the hell out of me a little too.
So anyway, back to babi guling. You can find this everywhere in Bali, but two of the more famous branches are Babi Guling Ibu Oka in Ubud and Warung Pak Malen at Kuta/Seminyak area.
Since Bali rained on me on my first day here travelling solo, I had nothing to do apart from enjoying my hotel suite. It was a classic example of a beautiful accident – I was just looking for the best deals for hotels in Agoda and not even realising that I had booked a hotel suite for myself.
So I wasn’t complaining that I had to be stuck in my room for the whole afternoon. But when night came and it was time for dinner, I grew a little restless. Since the rain had stopped, I decided to venture out for some food. I was contemplating whether to be adventurous and tried something new, but thought better of it and decided to be safe and sinful. I went for Naughty Nuri’s Warung, an amazing BBQ pork ribs restaurant that I visited during my last trip to Bali in September, and this time I was going to have a whole rack for myself!
It’s been a year now since I went to Nepal on my first ‘voluntourism’ trip. I have promised to write about it since ages ago, and since it’s been procrastinated so much, I think this place very much deserves the attention – hence becoming the header of the month for April.
Not that I’m exactly abiding by my own time in posting this header of the month as well. First week of April has come and gone and here I am, ten days late, in publishing this post.)
Anyway, presenting to you the Header of April.
Boudhanath, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Kathmandu as a city is probably the epitome of how the capital city of a poor country is like. After all, Nepal is the second poorest country in Asia in 2013, just doing slightly better than Afghanistan with GDP per capita of USD 1,300. The city, if you can call it one, is really dirty, and you can find beggars and hungry kids strewn all over the street. The people are so poor that often times you will see the kids smelling glue at the roadside just to suppress their appetite. One even snatched a sandwich from my hand as I was eating while walking past them. Things that we take for granted… Thinking back, it was quite insensitive of me eating my food in front of starving children.
No visit to Jogjakarta is ever complete without paying homage to the world-renowned Borobudur Temple. Situated in Magelang, about two-hour car ride away from Jogjakarta city, Borobudur Temple is worth the journey – it is after all the biggest Buddhist temple in the world and at one point in time was one of the seven wonders of the world.
We made a grave mistake of visiting the temple not only in the weekend but also on the eve of an Indonesian public holiday. Which was definitely not the wisest thing to do since Borobudur is one of the cheap destinations for pretty much everyone living in Java. Also, because we are not the earliest risers in the world, we only got there at around 11 AM. Considering some dedicated photographers would have already been ready with their tripod set up at about 5 AM, we definitely deserved the huge line forming at the ticket counter, not to mention the baking hot sun.
The ticket counter for locals.
At least among the things we did wrong, we got a couple of things right. Like the fact that one of my friends is non Indonesian and could get her ticket at the Borobudur International Visitors Centre. Check out the queue for that.
Nothing.
She did have to pay for the price for that, being a foreigner and all. Her entry ticket was USD 20 while ours was less than USD 3. Reminded me of my time in Taj Mahal when I had to pay a much higher ticket price as a foreign tourist (750 Rupee or USD 12) while my Indian friend paid close to nothing (20 Rupee or USD 30 cents). The best part of this arrangement was that we had the spillover effect from her being a foreign tourist and a very kind guy in the counter helped us to get the local tickets through the backdoor and did not even want to receive any tip! Truly hospitality at its best.
Jogjakarta is like a sneaky little person with a lot of tricks up its sleeve. At first glance, it could barely call itself a city. With an international airport that just about works and a city so small that it spans around 32 square km, I really did not expect much out of it save the legendary Borobudur Temple.
The terminal building, which was just 50 steps away from our plane.Cue chaos.
A closer look, however, will reveal that there is so much more to the place than a mere small town behind its time. The city may not be massive, but the province stretched far and therein lies a historic place with rich culture and lively art scene.
As is customary in most of my posts, I will start my praises of any place from its food.
Some others go hysterical, or even come up with interesting theories surrounding a crisis.
For me, as long as the unexpected situations do not manifest themselves in the form of cockroaches, flying prawns (there really are such insects, I swear), lightning or someone tickling me from the back, I generally remain calm and composed.
Until the next day, when the reality of the situations start sinking in – I spent pretty much the whole day thinking of the events that happened over last weekend and playing every scene in my head. I think this is what psychologists would have analysed as a case of delayed shock (or in layman’s terms: v e r y s l o w ).
Before you jump into conclusions, nothing disastrously bad happened to me nor someone I know personally. But one thing was for sure: it was a very bizarre weekend.
I wrote in my previous post that I was going to have a weekend trip to KL for Future Music Festival Asia 2014. It was meant to be straightforward – reach KL early in the afternoon, get changed, head to the festival and take a bus ride back to Singapore the next day.
But of course nothing in travelling is ever that straightforward.
We reached KL two hours later than expected due to the traffic, and the moment I had access to WiFi from our hostel, I was greeted by a text from a friend informing me that the festival had been cancelled.
Cancelled. The festival we took a 5-hour bus journey for. The festival where Pharrell Williams was supposed to play! Poof. No more.
In our disbelief, we searched the net for more news and found a few articles confirming our news and when the official website finally released some sort of confirmation, we knew that it was time for Plan B. Except that we did not have a plan B, so we had to come up with something on the spot.
Apparently this A4 piece of paper is the only sign that could be found at the venue. Photo courtesy to ST Communities.
So I think it is of utmost importance that I write a guide of what you can do, should you find yourself stranded in Kuala Lumpur for 23 hours because the festival you came all the way for was cancelled at the last minute:
Some girls go shopping. Some others indulge in yummy food. But for me, the way to let off some steam is by travelling.
So you can tell that I have had a really long week when my upcoming travel count has increased from 1 to 4 in just one week. The first one is as early as this weekend, going slightly north to Kuala Lumpur. Never mind that I only know 3 out of the countless artists performing – Future Music Festival Asia, here I come!
It is funny that ever since I started this blog in December, I haven’t actually been travelling. The only place I have visited since Christmas day was my hometown, Jakarta. Under normal circumstances, I would not count such as travelling. However, my latest trip back home was far from normal. Five friends of three different nationalities came along with me to spend a long weekend in Jakarta, which certainly had to count for something. Hence, this is my first real post-travel blog post ever since this blog was set up, and I am pleased that I am writing about my own hometown.
I remember fretting for a few weeks leading up to the trip, trying to plan a perfect getaway for my friends. Living in Jakarta for 17 years as a rather antisocial person meant that I was practically clueless about cool hangout places and interesting things to do. So it was really down to a bit of online research, asking some more experienced friends for tips and outsourcing the tour guide service to two of my friends that I managed to pull the weekend through, very successfully if I may say so.
As a reminder for myself, I have listed down the below of what I deem to be the winning recipe for my fantastic weekend in Jakarta.
Food, glorious food. Always fill the trip with good food. From artery-clogging sweet martabak, to a goat’s eye in milky soup to crispy curly fish – when every single meal is to be remembered, even if all else fails, the food will always be fond memories. After all, the closest way to a person’s heart is through the stomach.
Crispy, curly fish.An eye for an eye.Ingredients: flour, sugar, butter (loads of them), chocolate, cheese, condensed milk, more butter.
missruslee 