Monday, January 24, 2011

12:11 AM

I am home! I quite enjoyed my first trip to Kuching. My aunts and uncles were so much fun. I had a lot of food to eat during this trip, seriously. It somehow made me afraid of food for a bit. If you like food, Kuching is a nice place for you. There are a lot of hawker stalls and night markets, plus Chinese New Year is just around the corner, so there were a lot of things to look at and eat. I'm not very fond of hawker centres, but it was nice to go experience the lifestyle of the people in Kuching.

My favourite type of food is Western, but Chinese and Japanese come closely behind. All of the food I ate in Kuching was Chinese. On Thursday, we had roasted duck, some kind of pancake with oyster, broccoli with mushroom, and a really nice fruit juice. The fruit is called "mangolo" I think. I don't know what language is that and I don't know what fruit is that either! But it was good! On Friday, it's kolo mee (nice), Taiwanese food at The Spring (glorious pearl milk tea and 鹹蘇雞), roasted fish, steamed fish, char kuey, clams, crabs, stir-fried vege, Chinese tea, pork satays... On Saturday, I ate Korean instant noodles in the hotel room and then went out and had fishball dang hoon soup, pork satays, chow kuey tiaw, cheese wedges, sausages, char siew, fried turnip cake, clams, fried oysters, rojak... This morning, I had kolo wantan mee and on the way back to Brunei, we stopped at the new 24-hour McDonald's to eat the prosperity burger. The Twister fries were good this time!

The Spring



鹹蘇雞


By now you would have noticed the amount of food I have consumed over the course of just three days and would have understood what I meant by being a bit afraid of food. You would also have noticed the type of food people over there eat. It's all fried and oily food. Hawker-style food. No soup, hardly any mineral water, few vegetables, no fruits. It's okay to have this kind of food once in a while, but to have them for every meal is just not alright. Now that I'm back, it's back to eating simpler and plain food. Mineral water, cereals, oatmeal, bread, salads, brown rice. And cutting down on junk food. It's also time to work out again. I have stopped for a week because of all the travelling.

Another thing I didn't particularly like about Kuching is that smokers are everywhere. I don't care if you smoke, but please don't do it where people are eating their food. I think I would have died from passive smoking if I lived there.

But there's one thing I was really happy about, and that is our hotel. It's a little four-storey building. It's more like an apartment, but it's new. It's called the Dorset Boutique Hotel. The grand opening was early this month so we were lucky. Every room has WiFi and the aircond was super efficient. We were freezing in that room, but that really worked well with the thick blanket and comfy bed. I slept like a baby every night, without waking up in the middle of the night and having any dreams. I fell asleep almost right away everytime. I suppose I was tired too.


View from our window


Revision for IELTS. That's my new and sexy 2011 Moleskine planner.
I brought home a lot of junk food too. I saw the cheese & bacon flavour of Shapes (the biscuit) and immediately took two boxes. You can't find those in Brunei and that was our favourite flavour. I was so stoked!

All-in-all, it was a memorable trip. My uncles said more huge shopping malls will be completed in the next few years. I think that will give Kuching a more competitive edge as a tourist destination soon, eh?