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gone to meet the bookmaker
click to view in flickr The description of Tuas on streetdirectory.com begins "Tuas is Singapore's version of Chernobyl." Comparing Tuas to Chernobyl is way too flippant, but to most of us islanders who don't work in a shipyard or any of the heavy, manufacturing or chemical industries, Tuas will seem somewhat surreal. There is really no distinctive architecture - just these monotone blocks, some of them windowless or clad in metal. There are no high rise buildings. Even the trees are low and overwhelmed by the concrete and steel. The streets are wide. Or perhaps they feel especially wide because the traffic is sparse, save for that roaring truck. There aren't many people hanging or walking about as you drive by. But although the place seems deserted, there is the knowledge that inside those concrete and metal blocks, there is almost non-stop activity. Man operating machines operating the economy operating man. Why were we in Tuas? To visit a bookbinder for one of
Believe what they tell you on TV
...when it tells you Taiwan has some of the yummiest food in the world. All those Taiwanese variety shows on street food, theme cafes, and those well-designed restaurants - they are not lying. Our 30min dinner in 3 eateries (L to R): Wan Kuek or literally "bowl-cake" - rice flour paste with yam, tender pork chunk and salted egg yolk, to eat with the gravy, chilli sauce, garlic and vingear; You Yu Gen or Cuttlefish Starchy paste noodle; Ba Bao Bing or literally "eight treasures ice", shaved ice covered with groundnuts, red beans, kidney beans, gingko nuts etc that's been stewed with sugar. However, don't believe what you are led to believe about Taiwan from watching those scenes of fighting Parliamentarians in the news. The fights may actually happen, but what you should conclude from watching this, er, demonstrative commitment to political participation is not that everyone's a gangster in Taiwan. On the contrary, I think this is just one extreme en
Comments
i'm glad i changed my mind and lifted the taipei guards instead :)