Breakfast at the Hawker Centre

Posted on August 24, 2012 by setiawanphoto

We reached the last day of our Southeast Asia trip. We wanted to make the best of the remaining time we had in Singapore before our flight back to Indonesia. However, when we checked our flight schedule, we found out that there was a change in schedule for our flight to Jakarta; it was moved up by a couple of hours. So that means we had two hours less than what initially thought to spend in Singapore.

What could we do in 2-3 hours before we had to head to the airport? Initially we were hoping to go to Singapore’s Chinatown area in the morning, and then go to Little India area for lunch before heading to the airport. We decided to modify the plan to forego the Little India part, and to focus only on Chinatown.

We left our hotel around 7:30 am. There was breakfast offered at the hotel’s restaurant, but we decided to head to get something better — breakfast at one of the many Singapore hawker centres. Since we’re heading to Chinatown, we decided to pick Maxwell Road Hawker Centre. This particular Hawker Centre is located right across the street from the Chinatown area, so that would minimize the travel time.

We took a taxi to the Chinatown area. When we arrived at the Maxwell Road Hawker Centre, the place was still pretty empty as the day had just started and many of the stalls were not open yet. It was also a Sunday morning, so that might have something to do as well. There were a couple of stalls already open, however. There was one that actually already had quite a long line of people waiting to order. We looked closer, and found that the place sold congee (rice porridge). It looked pretty good, but we didn’t want to spend too much time waiting in line. So instead we looked around, and found another stall that also sold congee, but with shorter line. There were some folks who went there, so we thought it might be good enough.

Kristi and I both ordered rice porridge, but with different meats. She ordered with fish, while I ordered with thousand-year old egg. We also ordered a dish simply called ‘homemade tofu’ after seeing other people ordering that. The rice porridge was good; nothing spectacular but quite tasty and a nice meal to have to start the day. The homemade tofu, however, was something else. Somehow it was crispy on the outside, and very soft in the inside. It was served with light soy sauce. The taste was just perfect; I thought it was among the best preparation of tofu I had ever tasted.

We also found a stall that sold soybean milk. That was a nice drink to have to complement the breakfast. We were filled and ready to continue on to explore the area.

The photo below was taken from our table at the hawker centre. This was the stall where we ordered our breakfast. You can see an elderly couple at the next table, also enjoying the rice porridge. They looked like locals who come here frequently to have breakfast. It reminded me to some places near my home in Indonesia where we would go early in the morning for breakfast.

Strolling Through Downtown Singapore

Posted on August 23, 2012 by setiawanphoto

After having our seafood dinner, we continued our night in Singapore with some sightseeing. When we got into a taxi cab, the driver asked us where we wanted to go. I told him that we wanted to go the Central Business District area, near where the Merlion Statue is located. He mentioned One Fullerton, and I said sure. I didn’t know where or what One Fullerton was, but I figured if it’s in the CBD area, it’s hopefully close enough that we could walk around and explore.

The taxi took us downtown, and when I saw The Fullerton Hotel on the right and the Merlion Statue on the left, I was glad that this time the taxi took us exactly where we wanted to go. The Merlion Statue that is the mascot of Singapore stood tall near the waterfront at the Merlion Park, facing the Marina Bay. It was a nice weekend night, and there were a good number of tourists at the Merlion Park taking photo of the illuminated statue. In the background there were the skyscrapers in the Central Business District area, and right behind the Merlion Statue there was The Fullerton Hotel, a five-star hotel that had earned recognition among the best hotels in Singapore and in Asia.

The name One Fullerton that the taxi driver mentioned referred to the two-story waterfront development right next to the Merlion Park. We walked there briefly to check out what’s there, and it looked like it was filled with restaurants, lounges, and clubs with a nice view of the Marina Bay. The patrons were mixed between locals and expats. That made sense given its location near the CBD and the touristy area of downtown Singapore. The view across the Marina Bay from there was very nice. In the eastern side you could see the Esplanade complex with its durian-shaped main building. The Esplanade is the main facility in Singapore for performance arts where you can attend concerts, theatre performances, operas, etc. It also had an outdoor pavilion, and that night we could hear the sound of music playing from there; it seemed that a concert was going on.

On the southeast part of the Marina Bay, we could see a newer landmark in Singapore, the Marina Bay Sands resort hotel. It’s shaped like a ship sitting on top of three towers. It was billed as the world’s most expensive standalone casino property at S$8 billion (including the prime real estate where it is located). I remembered watching a special reality show on the Food Network a couple of years back about the preparation and opening of a restaurant / night club called Ku De Ta, which was located at the top of the Marina Bay Sands. It had amazing view of Singapore, but it also looked like a very expensive place and you need to be ready to shell out some cash to go there — not what we had in mind for our short trip in Singapore.

After spending time in the Marina Bay area, we decided to follow the map that we took from our hotel to walk towards our hotel. It would be quite a hike, but we thought we would just walk roughly close to the MRT route, so if we got tired, we could either take the MRT or get a taxi to finish the trip back to the hotel. We ended up walking all the way back to our hotel in the Lavender area. Along the way, we passed the historic Raffles Hotel, the Bugis area with its shopping malls and the Arab Street area that looked like an interesting neighborhood of Arab immigrant stores to check out during the day (it was pretty dead at night). We made it back to our hotel after about an hour or so strolling, ready to hit the sack after a long day that started in Hanoi.

The photo below was taken from the One Fullerton area. This is the Marina Bay Sands resort hotel, with its ship-like platform at the top supported by the three towers.

Looking for Chili Crab

Posted on August 22, 2012 by setiawanphoto

After settling in our hotel room in Singapore, we were ready to explore the city during our short stay there. It was almost dinner time, and we were ready for our first meal in the city known for having great foods.

There are so many choices of places to go for great food in Singapore, and even for a particular dish you can ask the Singaporeans for their favorite place and you may get different suggestions. Before leaving for the trip, we decided to use the recommendation from the Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations Singapore episode to select the places to visit for this short visit to Singapore. The dinner was one that I had been looking forward to; we wanted to go to the place where Bourdain went with his Singaporean friend to have the Singaporean national dish, chili crab. They went to a restaurant called Tian Jin Hai Seafood. What made the segment of the show memorable was one special dish they had there, steamed shark’s head. The chef found a way to make an extraordinary dish from a typically discarded part of the fish. Andrew Zimmern in his Bizarre Foods Singapore episode also tried the same dish, and also said it was good.

So I looked online for information regarding Tian Jin Hai, and found that since the No Reservations visit, they had moved from a hawker center to a location in the northeast part of Singapore called Punggol that was pretty remote and not easily reachable by public transportation. We decided to give it a try anyway, and took a taxi to go there.

We reached the Punggol Marina Country Club address after quite a long drive from our hotel. It was a little shopping centre with some stores and several restaurants. The address was correct, but when we looked for Tian Jin Hai on the directory, it was nowhere to be found. We walked around to look for it, and couldn’t find the place. Finally we decided to ask some locals for the place. After getting puzzled look from some people, finally we found out that the restaurant had moved out elsewhere. Disappointed, we tried to figure out what to do as alternative then. We’re out in a remote location, and we didn’t really think of alternate place to go. So we decided to look for the restaurant options at the Punggol Marina, and found one seafood restaurant called Ponggol Seafood Restaurant that seemed to have pretty good crowd eating there.

The restaurant had the chili crab dish on the menu, so we ordered the dish. The chili crab came served with fried mantou buns, perfect to dip in the spicy chili sauce of the crab. We also ordered a steamed fish dish along with the crab. Unfortunately they did not have the steamed shark head dish on the menu.

Here was the chili crab dish that we had for dinner. I was a little disappointed we didn’t find the steamed shark’s head dish, but at least we did have pretty good taste of the Singaporean national dish.

Hotel with See-Through Bathrooms

Posted on August 21, 2012 by setiawanphoto

One thing to note when planning a trip to Singapore is that the cost for accommodation is generally higher than other major Asian cities. So you want to budget accordingly, and/or select a place to stay that would fit with your budget and plans during your visit. During our short visit to Singapore, we stayed at a hotel called Aqueen Hotel located in the Lavender area of Singapore, north of the downtown / Central Business District area. We found this hotel on TripAdvisor; it generally had good reviews and the price was reasonable (comparable to the amount I would spend in staying at hotels in the United States). The hotel location is about 10-minute walk from the nearest MRT station. We did not try that however since our stay was too short and we ended up taking taxis instead. The hotel is on a major road, so it’s pretty easy to get a taxi.

Our first impression of the hotel when we arrived was pretty good. It looked pretty new, modern, and clean. Our room was on the fourth floor, and while the room was a little smaller than the other ones we stayed at during this trip, it was clean, well decorated, and looked very modern. There was one quirky interior design choice, however, that may make guests uncomfortable staying there. The bathroom had see-through glass walls, with the bottom part frosted but still somewhat see-through. We only stayed one night and didn’t use the bathroom that much during the stay, so it wasn’t that bothersome. Each of us just looked away from the bathroom when the other person was going to use it.

Overall it was a good stay for the one night we spent there. The bed was comfortable, and I didn’t hear noise from the road even though our room was facing the main road. In the morning they served breakfast at the restaurant at the ground floor of the hotel, though we didn’t try it as we opted to go for breakfast at a Hawker Center instead.

The photo below was taken in our room. You can see the bathroom with the see-through glass walls in the background.

Taxi Ride from Changi

Posted on August 20, 2012 by setiawanphoto

Kristi and I arrived in Singapore after quite a long day traveling from Hanoi that started with spending several hours at the Hanoi Noi Bai Airport due to flight delay. Once we passed the immigration at Changi International Airport, we were ready to head to our hotel in Singapore. We decided to take a taxi ride instead of the MRT as we did not want to deal with walking around and looking for the hotel from the nearest MRT station.

During this trip, we had mixed experiences taking taxi ride in the countries we visited. In Bangkok, we took a taxi that was decorated with disco lights inside and the driver playing Lady Gaga music. In Hanoi, we had bad experience getting overcharged in a couple of rides and in another case getting yelled at for requesting a ride that the driver thought was too close to worth a ride. So I was hoping for a better experience this time in Singapore considering it’s generally an English-speaking country and things seemed to be more orderly and supposedly the taxi drivers were more honest.

We started the experience with waiting at the taxi line at the airport. It was quite a long line; there were probably about 50 people in front of us. I think we waited longer to get a taxi than getting through immigration that day. What made it even a worse experience was the hot and humid weather; we had to adjust back to that kind of weather after spending a week in the cool Northern Vietnam winter weather.

We finally got a taxi cab assigned to us. The driver was an older Chinese gentleman. The taxi car looked like somewhat older, but it was very clean and it was quite modern inside with the taxi meters inside. I told the driver the name and the address of the hotel. He nodded, and off we went.

The ride towards downtown Singapore was pretty smooth; not much traffic until we got close to the Central Business District. I took my camera out of my backpack and took some photos from the back seat. The driver recognized that it was my first visit to the city, so he pointed to some newer parts of the city like the Sands Marina Bay building in the distance.

We arrived at a hotel near downtown, but it didn’t look like the hotel that we were supposed to go to. When I showed the hotel name and the address again, the driver realized that he had taken us to the wrong location. He apologized and we continued our ride until we reached the correct location. When we arrived at the hotel, I was about to pay the driver what was shown on the taxi meter when the driver told us he apologized for taking us to the wrong location, and he refused to be paid full price because obviously the ride should have been shorter than it was. The price for the ride was not that expensive, so I told him it’s okay that he gave us a little sightseeing tour of downtown area Singapore, and I paid him the full amount.

I thought it’s interesting to think back that this could have been another bad experience riding a taxi. But given the honesty and attitude from the driver, I was okay paying extra amount for the unexpected longer ride, in comparison to felling ripped off when the taxi driver in Hanoi told us that he didn’t have change for our large bill and didn’t even attempt to look at his pocket to see if he had any.

The photo below was taken from the back seat of the taxi cab as we’re getting closer to the Central Business District area of Singapore.