Top 5 cities to go for its food during long weekends in 2016 (Singapore travellers)

Have you heard the good news? Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower has announced 2016’s public holidays.

The news outlets reported that there will be six long weekends in 2016. But if your workplaces gives you off-in-lieu for Saturday public holidays (not all companies do), you actually have eight long weekends (nine if you take leave on 8 August, Monday).

I really love weekend travels. Even though this means that my trip is short, I don’t want to use my work leave. I’m a hoarder even when it comes to annual leave.

If you are planning to go for more weekend travels in 2016, I recommend these locations to go for their yummy yummy food.

Ipoh, Malaysia

I would visit Ipoh again and again for its food. It might not be as famous as Penang for its local food but that little town serves really good chicken.

Ipoh Beansprout chicken — Beansprout chicken feast in Ipoh.

How to reach Ipoh from Singapore:

Long-distance bus (7 to 8 hours)
Several bus companies run Singapore – Ipoh routes.

Train (6 + 2 hours + waiting time)
You can take the night train from Singapore/Johor Bahru to Kuala Lumpur. From KL, there is high-speed train to Ipoh, but the price isn’t budget friendly.

Airplane (1 hour 35 minutes)
Firefly and Tigerair has flights between Singapore and Ipoh. Remember to research on the timing.

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Pronounced as “Jogjakarta”, the town on the Java Island is home to gorgeous historical sites such as Borobudur and Prambanan. But the food is fantastic too.

I was deceived by nasi gudeg the first time I ate it. I thought the dish had a surprisingly generous serving of beef boiled so soft that I don’t have to chew it like a cow. Later found out that the “beef” is actually young jackfruit. I was disappointed but it’s still a very tasty dish.

I also had the best mie while in Yogyakarta. It was in a noodle shop inside the main shopping mall. The noodles were springy and seasoned lightly with soy sauce.

How to reach Yogyakarta from Singapore:

Airplane (2 hours 15 minutes)
AirAsia flies to Yogyakarta at a rather good timing. But the flight back leaves in the morning which is annoying.

If you find the flight timing for Yogyakarta terrible, your second best choice is Jakarta since it is the capital. There you can drink all the avocado juice you like.

Bangkok, Thailand

I went to Bangkok for my birthday in April, spending a three-day weekend there. I ate normal stuff like pad thai, I didn’t eat enough food. I still haven’t tried Mango Sticky Rice.

How to reach Bangkok from Singapore:

Airplane (2 hours 25 minutes)
Loads of budget airlines fly from Singapore to Bangkok. Pick those with good departure and return timings so you can maximize your trip.

Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

When I was in university staying in the dorm, my Vietnamese neighbors would cook with fish sauce. The potent smell wasn’t to my taste so I avoided Vietnamese food.

Then I went to Vietnam and I discovered that fish sauce is kind of like durian–stinky when you smell it but delicious when you taste it. I also discovered many other deliciousness that doesn’t involve fish sauce.

Vietnamese Pho

Declious banh mi in Saigon — Declious banh mi (Vietnamese baguette) in Saigon

How to reach Ho Chi Minh from Singapore:

Airplane: (2 hours 5 minutes)
Loads of budget airlines fly from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh. As usual, pick those with good departure and return timings so you can maximize your trip.

Shanghai, China

I would travel to Shanghai for just a weekend so I can eat the food. In fact, I’m doing it at the end of May.

My tongue still longs for the taste of shengjianbao: dumplings fried on one side ’til crispy. Take a bit and the soup flows out so you have to slurp it up fast. After two slurps, you can eat the meat along with the crunchy part.

The most delicious tiny buns/dumplings: shengjianbao

Can you look at these delicate 小笼包 (xiao long bao) and not feel like licking your screen?

The home-cooked style restaurants in Shanghai are fantastic too. The soups come in porcelain basins and the servings are gigantic. I loved Grandma’s Place (a chain restaurant) when I was in Shanghai.

A feast at Grandma's Place. — A feast at Grandma’s Place.

How to reach Shanghai from Singapore:

Airplane (5 hours 25 minutes direct)
Choosing a plane with a good timing is critical. I am taking Malaysian Airlines so I will reach Shanghai early at 7:30am on my first day and leave at 2pm-ish on my last day.

Another good alternative is Taiwan if you don’t want to fly that far to Shanghai.

Check out all the Weekend Travels posts:

YQtravelling with mom

Mother’s Day is this weekend. Pamela from Pam Goes Traveling has a Mother’s Day feature and my guest post is in it: Mothers’ Day Special – Travel with Mum featuring YQ.

Besides reminiscing my travels with my mother, I also share tips on how to survive a trip with your mother (as in the plural “you”). You should also check out the previous guest blogger on Pamela’s website, Agnes, who has really good tips on how to travel with your mother.

Read the full Mother’s Day feature on Pam Goes Traveling.

Side-trip to Kamakura, Japan

(I had this blog post in my draft since July 2, 2013. I’ve decided to just post this up despite the lack of text. A picture speaks a thousand words, I guess.)

Act I: Reaching town

The trip to Kamakura in 2012 was totally impromptu. I was planning to head to Yokohama with my N’EX and Suica package but changed my mind when I saw that the ticket covers Kamakura.

Despite being a city person, I love old towns more than cities. The trip to Kamakura from the airport was quite long. I fell asleep on the train.

The sky was cloudy when I reached. It took me a while to find an empty locker to store my luggage.

Act II Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū

Stone lantern burning thing, Gift from sugar store to the shrine

Art exhibition at Kanagawa Modern art museum

Solemn ceremony but we all gawked impolitely

Little boy tripped on steps at Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū

Act III Before, during, after the rain

It was pouring when I left the shrine. I stood at the corner of a street to wait for the rain to stop a little. It didn’t stop that much.

YQtravelling is back in business… Whatever business is

Hey folks,

Remember last year when I hadn’t been travelling much? Not really? Well, my bad since I didn’t write that much about it.

I’m happy to announce that I will be travelling more frequently in the coming months. Hurray!

Here my travel schedule as my attempt at art:

Among the places I will be going to, Surabaya is a city I’ve not been to yet. Jakarta and Bangkok are two cities where I’ve only visited for two days. I will be adding another two days to each of them.

As in the past, I’ll be doing a lot of weekend travelling. There are two long weekends that I will be travelling (May and August). I didn’t know Good Friday’s date or else my Jakarta trip would have been longer.

A year of not travelling (much)

As a travel blogger, it’s quite silly that I haven’t been travelling. But as a person, I feel it’s liberating that I didn’t need to escape to a foreign land every other month.

While not travelling, I have been keeping myself occupied with

video games (specifically Skyrim)–but I’ve neglected this these few months
figuring out fountain pens
improv
attending weddings
lazing around
sewing (ok, it was just for a week for the Jane Austen Circle Singapore’s Dinner Dance)
convincing myself to go dating (not quite successful with this)

Where are you travelling next?

Why we need a travel role model

This Friday, I’m flying to Ho Chi Minh city and travelling to My Tho for my friend Nguyen’s wedding.

Nguyen is a very important person in my journey to being an independent travelling woman. I can’t find a right term to describe her impact in my travelling life but the closest I can get is “travel role model”.

Nguyen and I met while I was on exchange at Xiamen University in China. She was in graduate school while I was an exchange student who was supposed to take journalism and advertising classes.

I was the first batch of exchange students at Xiamen University. There was another guy who was in Engineering so we had different classes. The staff at Xiamen University didn’t know how to handle exchange students so they dumped me at the Overseas Education College.

It was a complete mess. Instead of being assigned to real lectures, they expected me to take random classes for the students who were there to learn about the Chinese language and culture. Eventually, I sorted out half of the problem and had to solve the rest of the problem by taking extra modules back in Singapore.

But thank to the mess, I met Nguyen. I took a totally random class on singing and met her there. She was extroverted and joked with the teacher a lot. I’m quite the opposite.

At the end of the class, I invited myself to her dinner. She graciously accepted my self-invite.

Learning how to travel

I was such an amateur traveller that I bought TWO gigantic bags!

Nguyen took me under her wing. She brought me around the school, introduced me to the concept of taking naps during the university’s official nap time and showed what Vietnamese coffee looks like.

She told me stories of her travel from the South to the North of Vietnam and other tales. I was amazed that she and her friend could travel on their own across a country! (Mind you, I was 21 years old and knew nothing about travelling without my family.)

During a short vacation week, Nguyen suggested that we visit the historical town of Jingdezhen. I was more than happy to go because I love history.

I also found out that a nearby town has a preserved old Chinese law court. I was enamored with a fictional lawyer in a Hong Kong drama so we made a detour to the shabby court.

After travelling with Nguyen, I was sure that I would be able to travel on my own.

Some weeks later, I set off to Shanghai on my own for my first semi-solo trip. I stayed in a hostel for a night and booked a local tour group that went to the cities around Shanghai. I also bunked at a friend’s place for a few more nights.

At the end of my exchange, Nguyen and I took the night bus to Shenzhen. We took a ferry across to Macau where I took a direct flight back home.

Without her, I would have chickened out and take a flight straight from China back. I had a wonderful time in Macau and it remains one of the cities which I want to travel to again.

Keeping in touch

I’m usually terrible at keeping in touch with people. But somehow Nguyen and I managed to keep in contact for all these years.

In 2009, I had the chance to visit Vietnam because of her gracious hosting. (I found some of the blog posts from that trip.)

During the years, she updated me on her birthday trip to Boracay, her month-long backpacking trip to Europe and other trips. I updated her on my smaller trips and told her about my round-the-world trip. She was very supportive.

We met up again in Kuala Lumpur when she was on a stopover to Thailand. It was there where I met her husband-to-be Michael. The two of them have a meet-cute story that sounds like something from a romance novel about travellers in Venice. <3

Why we need a travel role model

If I hadn’t met Nguyen, I would probably take a longer time to become comfortable with travelling alone. I think it’s important to have someone in your life to show you what’s possible.

Having a travel role model makes it easier to cross that bridge from being scared of travelling alone to being a kickass solo traveller.

For every person who wants to venture into solo travelling, I hope there is someone in your life to guide you.

And here’s a big congratulations to Nguyen and Michael who are getting married on 1 March. I’ll see you both on Friday.

Who’s your travel role model?

PS I’m bringing the cheongsam I made in Hoi An for a wedding. Talk about prophecies.

How to use improv to survive Chinese New Year reunion

Hi folks, I’m flying home for the Chinese New Year holidays today! So I thought I would leave you with a Chinese New Year-related post.

You might know from my Facebook post that I’ve been taking improv classes with The Improv Company (Facebook). I want to share my improv love with tips on how you can use improv to survive Chinese New Year. (I don’t mean hiding in your room watching improv all day on Youtube.)

Some of you might know about improv from Whose Line is it Anyway . While improv is very fun and entertaining, did you know that you could apply improv skills in real life? This branch of improv is called applied improv and is useful for the workplace and life in general.

Being a beginning improviser, I haven’t really let the improv lessons seep into my every pore. But I had the chance to ask Kim and Hazel who run The Improv Company about how to use applied improv for Chinese New Year.

They gave really sound advice. Unfortunately, I didn’t jot down notes so everything that you’re going to read has a dash of my (probably unsound) advice. (This disclaimer is brought to you by the insecurities from my “You misquote me!” journalism days.)

Let’s go!

Rules of Improv that apply to life

Lesson 1: Be aware and listen

I’m guilty for not practicing this in real life. During reunion dinners, I would be in defensive mode, thinking of answers even before my relatives start asking questions.

To apply the applied improv lesson, I should be more attentive while listening. And when relatives ask questions, I should figure out what is the underlying meaning of their questions.

For example. “When will you find a job/ a boyfriend/ be married/ have a baby?” (I’m trying to encompass all possible questions.)

Instead of being cynical and thinking that it’s a busybody question, I need to see that they’re asking because they are concern of me. (They might also be judging me but let’s look on the positive side.)

And in the case of relatives who just wants to give a good lecture, I will give them my 100% listening skills.

Lesson 2: Say, “Yes, and…”

One very important rule of improv is to say, “Yes, and…” to something offered by another player. Tina Fey explains this better in her memoir Bossypants:

The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you just say, “Yeah…” we’re kind of at a standstill.
But if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “What did you expect? We’re in hell.” … Now we’re getting somewhere.

Well sometimes you can’t give “Yes, and…” answers to questions posed to you but you should embrace the question and add on something relevant instead of trying to avoid answering it

For example, a question posed to me a year ago:

– When will you find a job?
– Yeah, I’m looking really hard and I’ve got a few that I’ve applied to. I really hope I get them. :)

Lesson 3: Make your partner look good

red flowers improv make your partner look good

In improv, “Make your partner look good” means working with your partner instead of trying to hog the limelight with your own jokes.

In the case of real life, it would be being positive instead of reacting negatively to a question posed to you. (Remember, they’re just concerned about you.)

Also put on your best “This story is really interesting” face when your relatives are talking about the same “Back in the old days…” stories for the fifth time. This time, try and find out what they’re trying to say and compliment them on it.

For example, if an uncle talks about the hardship he went through during childhood (for the fifth time), maybe he just wants to be acknowledged for pulling through despite all odds. Celebrate that.

Lesson 4: Embrace failure

One big part about improv is the willingness to fail and to learn from it. So push your inhibitions away and apply Lessons 1 to 3.

If your relatives aren’t receptive to your awesome applied improv skills. It’s OK. You have another year to try it on them. In the meantime, just stuff yourself with food. That always works.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Curious about improv? Check out The Improv Company (website; Facebook) for classes. Besides theatre improv, they run applied improv classes and corporate workshops.

Happy 3rd birthday, YQtravelling.com

It was YQtravelling.com’s third birthday on January 8. It slipped my mind so I’m making it up with this post.

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My current obsession: Fountain pens

Hi folks, if you’ve been following me on my social media channels, you’ll know that I went to Cameron Highland last weekend for a wedding.

As much as I like to write about the road trip, I kept getting writer’s block so I give you another post instead.

I’ll be talking about my current obsession (apart from playing Skyrim and improv which I’ll get to these one of these days)–fountain pens. I have these little spurts of obsessions from time to time. I can’t really remember my other obsessions (um, travel?) so I’d better jot this down.

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How to cut pineapple and what they don’t tell you

I was thinking of buying a pineapple while out shopping today. I’ve never cut a pineapple before so I had to search for articles on how to cut pineapples.

The instructions seem simple enough so I bought one. After the shopping and cutting up of the fruit, I deduced that cutting pineapple is not as easy as people make it to be. Here’s why:

Instructions: Pick a pineapple that is yellow with green leaves.

What they don’t tell you: The yellow pineapples are hidden under the green ones so you have to battle through their prickly leaves to get the one you desire.

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Review: Starbucks Christmas Cookie Latte

Starbucks Christmas Cookie Latte signboard

Christmas is coming! Starbucks Singapore released a new drink this season–the Christmas Cookie Latte.

According to Starbucks, the drink is:

An old fashioned tradition made new with fragrant steamed milk, rich espresso and buttery shortbread cookie sauce and cookie crumbles. The Starbucks Christmas Cookie Latte taste just like grandma made them. New and available together with your returning Christmas favorites.

Unfortunately, I never had a grandma who made Christmas Cookies for me so I couldn’t figure out what it tastes like. But the name has two of my favorite words “cookie” and “latte” so I thought I had to try it out.

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