Finally! Somebody said it!

Delicious Steamboat

Today I went to celebrate Chinese New Year to my local friend's house and we had some awesome traditional dinner. The dish is called steamboat and I love it! These are the ingredients:

First you have this base soup that is made out of boiled tomatoes, carrots, onions and tons of lemon grass. You then need additional food to complement this, that you will add later when the soup is boiling. You can have:

Bee Hoon (the rice noodles),

mushrooms (the salad is for something else),

and dumplings, fishballs and meatballs.

You can also add shrimps, tofu and different kind of sauces. The pot is put in the midle of the stove (the thing covered in aluminium foil) until it starts boiling. Meanwhile you can put butter on the remaining aluminium foil area in oder to fry some of the things (some shrimps or dumplings, sausages, meat...).

You can add the sauces into the soup as well as mushrooms, tofu, dumplings and so on... and then everyone can take some while combining it with some of the fried goods around the pot. It is really, really good and I guess if we ignore the whole frying with butter thing it's quite healthy. 

It's also a lot of fun to do, so a big thanks to Karen who invited me over on this special occasion! :)

Lighting up the sky

I have been to Chinatown a couple of times these last days and I must say I am amazed every time I see all the lights! This is what the streets look like right now:

The light of the lanterns is really nice and if you look close...

...they are boxes with the different horoscope signs on them. And they are really cute, too! If you take on step back on the other hand...

...these lanterns form a snake as well! :) 

This one is pretty huge and goes all along the main street in Chinatown. There is no doubt of this years' animal, that is for sure (I wonder what they do for horse or rabbit though...)

Oh, by the way, the snake I showed you in the last post was made out of lanterns as well:

This is all so huge and amazing! They really know how to celebrate their holidays (I wonder what this looks like in China itself!)

It's incredible to just walk along the streets in the center of Singapore these days so there is not one day I don't take my camera with me now!

Happy New Year!

Happy new year everyone! 

As some of you might know, today is the first day of the chinese year of the snake. There have been many celebrations around Chinatown and the festivities continue for the next two weeks.

The decoration is pretty neat, just look at the huge snake made out of lanterns that goes along one of the main streets! I am very tired today so this is a short post, but I'll show you more decorations these coming days. Good night!

I can rest in peace now

Just like Angkor Wat in Cambodia there was one place in Singapore that I decided I had to visit during my stay: the infinity pool on the Marina Bay Sands Hotel. This was a tougher one than the Lara Croft temple, because only people staying at the hotel have acces to this pool and one night there costs around 400 euros. It seemed like some pretty difficult mission and today, finally, I accomplished it! This is how bad that place looks:

The view is AMAZING and the pool looks as if it just ended in the middle of the air. 

There is actually not only one but three fences to avoid people to fall out of entusiasm as they are taking their pics:

(Btw. That is the face of pure joy and happines that one would expect to find at such a place...)

But it's not only the pool! They have this amazing garden area with awesome wievs to the back of the building (gardens by the bay)!

I had to take advantage of the fact that I could enter the pool all day long so I went again to see the views at night .

I spent all day running around in the lab until very late, but I had these two amazing breaks that made this a very pleasant Thursday. I am so glad I had the opportunity to do this, big thanks to Valerie and her friends and to Helen for joining me on my night-trip!

成田へようこそ

On my way to the States I stopped at the Narita airport in Japan. I only spent 2 hours there but you could already get a rough idea of their culture just by walking around and trying to understand the signs in the shops.

This is what the airport looks like. The conveyor belts had some loudspeakers at the end that would warn you about their ending. This was very funny the first time I saw it, slightly annoying after walking over them a few times and pretty insufferable after having to wait next to one of them for a couple of minutes. I am pretty sure I will repeat that short sentence in japanese in my sleep for the rest of my days. 

Haha, that is so stereotipical japanese! No idea what they are selling, but I am sure I'll have a good trip!

I exchanged some money in order to buy some food at the airport (the goal was to get some sushi (in Japan - haha!) which turned out to be impossible). The coins are very cute, I especially like the ones with the hole in the middle (I think everyone prefers these, I don't know why most of the countries don't have them anymore...). 

After running around for a couple of hours I got in a plane filled with Japanese people. Next stop: LAX.

Where I hid this time...

The reason why I did not post anything in a while is because I took a short trip and I did not have my laptop with me. I will show you some pictures of the journey these following days so you'll have to forget about Singapore for a while...

In case you were wondering, this is where I went:

What do you say? You can't tell anything from the picture? Well, I can't blame you, the image is pretty aweful, but that is the closest I got to what I actually want to show you. Let's zoom in:

California, baby! "And why?" you will ask me. Well, I spend a few days at Caltech for an interview and it was amazing! 

It has a great campus and even greater people, you'll see in my next posts. 

Welcome to Los Angeles!