I miss Giant Eagle

Squeezing in one last post before the month of May ends to make up for the lack of recent activity! It's been two weeks since we've gotten back from our trip to the states and... man. A lot of locals here who go abroad will tell you that they always miss the local cuisine (nasi lemak, mee goreng, chicken rice etc.). I'm a traitor - I miss American food.

Really though, look at the selection we have imported here and tell me you don't miss it too just looking at what America has to offer. Or Ohio's Giant Eagle supermarket anyway.

The love of my life.

I love my snacks, so I'm going to highlight just three kinds of snack food that stood out to me the most by the sheer difference of variety available between the two countries:

Poptarts

Exhibit 1.1: Poptart selection in Ohio USA Giant Eagle

Exhibit 1.2: Poptart selection in Singapore. wat

That's right. One miserable little shelf of poptarts, in only five flavors. That's the most we have here in Singapore. Sure, maybe varying sizes of the different supermarket chains here may carry more variants of the products, but you're never going to get an entire bay of poptarts like the one above in Giant Eagle. I had to stop myself from photographing each and every box cover for the amount of flavors they carried. It was amazing.

Cereals

Some of the cereals in Ohio. I WANT THESE SO BAD.

Singapore's selection. Yay, plain boring cereal!

 ...okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration; we do carry more than just corn flakes. I do wish we had more exciting flavors like those four featured up there though. I would kill to be able to get Reese's Puffs any day I wanted. And for only 3USD! Cereals here are about 4 - 7USD per box (and man are the boxes tiny), and those are just for kid brands. The adult cereals can go for almost 6 - 12USD per box! I'm not paying that much for fibre.

 Chewing / Bubble gum

Ohio. Again, a complete bay dedicated to an entire sub-category of kind-of-food!

If you find these in Singapore, someone's going to jail for it.

Totally serious. Chewing gum is actually banned in Singapore and you may even get fined for just having it on your person. (Michi chewed so much gum nonstop from the instant she landed in Ohio until we got off the plane in Singapore, it was kind of scary.)

I'll let you read up on why it was actually banned and let you be the judge of whether that move was really necessary. Remember to appreciate your local supermarkets!

edit: 12/06/11 - Found the photo we took of our shopping cart! Good times...

Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Keeping History Alive!

During our time in Ohio, Pris and I had pretty full days of visiting family and friends and dealing with the business end of things, which didn't leave as much time as we'd hoped for visiting actual sites. Luckily, we did manage to squeeze in an afternoon at the Natural History Museum, no doubt my favorite in Cleveland, though there's definitely no shortage of other museums in the area. If you have more time than us, you might want to add a few more hours and check out the Art Museum and Botanical Gardens right within a few minutes walk of the Natural History Museum.

The highlights of the museum are always the same for me, so a good 2/3 of our pictures were taken in the dinosaur and animal exhibits, but there are also rooms dedicated to geology, space, gemstones and the like, so you can definitely spend a few hours wandering, very worth the $10USD entrance fee.

(this beauty greets you right at the entrance)

There's one other pretty interesting (and hard to miss) exhibit permanently showing in the museum worth a look at, called the Foucault Pendulum. Used to visibly demonstrate the Earth's rotation, the pendulum makes a complete turn every 36 hours, so if you're willing to stand around a few minutes to watch you'll see a few dominoes falling over which the staff constantly has to put back standing. 

(we're way too restless for that though, so we didn't see anything fall)

Although I may be biased, I'd wager the best exhibit is the dinosaur room, by far. The museum puts up a good show with plenty of life sized models and a few rare artifacts to boot. If you're not interested in the shifting of tectonic plates or soil, this room alone makes the whole trip worth it, and is pretty much the reason we chose this museum as our only stop of the sort, since both Pris and I have a soft spot for old bones.

Alright, the more recent animal room is pretty likely to impress as well. But c'mon, look at that gorgeous beast up there.

(yeah it's nice looking, but there's no t-rex here)

I'm afraid to say we more or less breezed through the rest of the exhibits, because as interesting as natural history is, we just can't spend long looking at soil samples and gemstones.

(a little peace offering to those who do like this stuff)

All in all, it was a nice relaxing way to spend an afternoon considering most of the rest of our trip we barely had time to breathe. Just be thankful we haven't given into the temptation to talk all about all the great US foods we brought back. (...yet.)

The Japanese are insane (in a good way)

Hello again! (If anyone's still reading this?!) We're really sorry we haven't been updating so much as of May! We just got back from our vacation to Michi's hometown in Ohio and then straight back into work and unpacking and all that lovely stuff, so things have been real hectic. We should get regular again starting this June though!

There's so much to blog about but (1) my laptop broke (it's the one with the photoshop program so... no nice pictures anymore until I get it fixed) (2) we have too many pictures, so I'll make a really short post about... Japanese toilets.

...no, seriously. Japanese toilets.

Japanese airport toilets, in any case. We had to make a transit in Narita/Haneda on our way back to Singapore, and with a twelve hour layover there really wasn't much to do but admire the toile-- I'm kidding. But really, look at that toilet. Porcelain white and clean and smelling like cleaning agent, no spills on the floor, nothing. Perfect toilet. Except... what the heck is that thing sticking out on the side, you say? No way, a remote control? For the toilet?

Now with butt, intimate, and fake actions!

Yep, that's what it is. A remote for the toilet, and pressing a button either plays a flushing noise (for the embarassed ladies who don't want others to hear them do their doo-dah), washes your intimate areas, or jettisons your rear end. And let's not forget the stop button to put an end to any of that. There's even a water pressure selector and a volume control! It even comes with instructions for those of us who unfortunately don't have one of these beauties in our homes:

...needless to say, we tried it out. The verdict? Pretty cool to look at and to hear about, but not really that great of a deal and really unnecessary overall. In fact, the bidet and butt-washing functions felt more like someone was gently peeing upwards onto my nether regions with cool, clean water than doing any actual cleansing. Still cool though in any case, I mean, how many people do you know have sat on one of these?

And that was just one toilet cubicle. This is the handicapped washroom. Isn't it the most awesome handicapped washroom you've ever seen?