Durian Land & Red Light District

Ying Kit said that you can read your future from the tea leaves in your cup. There are no tea leaves in my cup. I guess that means I have no future!
I doubt Western cuisine would ever serve up fried fish skin and charge you money for it.
Some sort of fried thing with a cheesy, creamy concoction. It was very yum.
Very soft tofu. mmmm.
Some sort of fish ball with fried fish skin as a crust. I didn't try this one because by this dish I was stuffed already. I've been stuffed for 2 weeks.
This is half of the class eating dinner for Graham's birthday. The restaurant played children's songs that had a happy birthday song. We sang along and I particularly enjoyed the part where the children sing "Happy Birthday dear mmm mmm.....Happy Birthday to you!"
only ONE of the many mounds of durian.
This is a durian.
Us sitting down to eat said durian.


Today during debrief we talked a lot about the migration within Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Singapore. Henry and Graham spoke about how people don't really think of Guangzhou as an immigrant city because most of the immigrants that make up the area are from other regions of China, however that population makes up almost all of Canada's population in total. Singapore on the other hand consists of an obvious array of races, with various different languages being spoken. We also talked about the characteristics of the Vancouver F.O.B versus Singapore's P.R.C. We compared the manners of the various places and discussed how Singaporeans know how to line up and say excuse me when they need to walk past you. Haha. Overall, it is obvious that Singapore is a lot cleaner than the other Asian countries but I can't go as far to say that it is cleaner than Vancouver. I definitely think Vancouver is still at the top of the list in that regard.

If you guys don't know, durian is EVERYWHERE in Singapore. I spoke of the 2 buildings here that are built in the shape of durians earlier. On the buses there are even signs that say NO DURIAN. Haha. Someone already broke the law while I was on the bus though because there was definitely a sudden gust of durian wind at one point. Today was Graham's birthday and we all went to the red light district to eat dinner. After dinner we walked past a durian market with mounds of durian for sale. We bought 3 and sat down to eat the stinky fruit. I had it once before in a fried dessert at dim sum but never fresh. It was extremely creamy and rich. I don't think I could eat too much of it but I definitely think it would be awesome frozen. Everyone says it tastes like ice cream when it's frozen. After the durian feast the profs and Jenn our TA went back to campus while the rest of us decided to do a head count before we headed into the night to get a glimpse of the red light district (if you haven't been up to date on the blog, the red light district is an area where all the prostitutes frequent). Hui Ping informed us prior to take off that we were not to take photos, we were not to separate from the group, and we were not allowed to laugh. we saw a lot of them and Jack told us that sometimes the men treat them to dinner first so sometimes you don't really know when you see them. After a few streets I soon developed hooker-radar. We also saw hotels that charged by the minute, quite expensive I must say. The area we saw tonight is definitely the opposite of the commercial shopping area we were taken the first night. Yes, so that was what we did tonight: eat durian, and go look at prostitutes.