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  #51  
Old April 28th, 2004, 09:33 AM
Miguel Cruz
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Default Australia Via Asia

Tchiowa wrote:
Miguel Cruz wrote:
I have had 100% luck avoiding getting ill from food courts, street food,
etc.


Your experience is rare.

On the other hand I have been made ill many, many times from hotel
restaurants.


And that experience is even more rare.


I'm aware that you travel plenty too, but my work puts me in contact (and on
trips) with lots of people who travel globally for a living. My experience
here is pretty much in lockstep with theirs.

This is not a debate that can be won here; it's just a set of contradicting
assertions, without the potential to gather supporting evidence (unless you
want to fund a study). So I'll leave it.

If you think that closed restaurant kitchens don't employ far more dangerous
and disgusting practices, then you must be wilfully lying to yourself.


If they are being inspected they aren't. But the food courts do this
kind of thing routinely.


Food courts are inspected every minute they are open by their customers (not
to mention routinely by Singapore's health dept). Restaurants only have the
latter.

Anyway, I'd be fascinated to have you come up with any evidence that people
are getting sick from Singapore food stalls (I'm sure you can google up an
upset stomach from 1974 or something, but something relevant and reliable).

It has been a few years, but the last time I stayed in a youth hostel
in London (early 1989n or 1990) it was about 3 pounds.


The only way that's happening now is in a (probably illegal) gymnasium-size
room full of bed-bug-infested bunkbeds, 45 minutes from the city centre by
tube.


This was in an "official" Youth Hostel in downtown London.


Well I can promise you that ain't happening now. For instance, the YHA in
the City of London (I guess that's what you mean by "downtown") is 24 pounds
a night: http://www.yha.org.uk/hostel/hostelpages/784.html

I stay in a Singapore owned hotel. I eat at Singaporean owned
restaurants, which include the food courts. The fact that I don't eat
in the $2/meal food courts or stay in the $20/night hotels doesn't
make them one iota less Singaporean.


Well, then I don't understand what you're arguing. The $150 hotels are just
as available in Bangkok or Jakarta or wherever else you're touting as being
more Asian than Singapore. So if someone goes to Bangkok and stays at the
Marriott and eats at TGIFs, it's Asian, but if they do it in Singapore,
Singapore is American?


I stay at the JWM in Bangkok. When I am there I and dealing with the
Thai employees I see and feel the Asian culture. The way they talk and
act, their attitudes, etc. I am currently staying at the JWM in
Jakarta. Same experience. But when I stay at the JWM on Orchard Road I
don't get that feeling.


Can you describe this in a little more detail? I don't know what you mean. I
feel the same in an international hotel in Frankfurt as in Guatemala City as
in Sydney. Annoyingly deferential staff and tediously familiar surroundings.

In Bangkok I stay at a better hotel (the JWM in Singapore doesn't
compare with the Bangkok version), eat at better restaurants, etc. and
find it a whole lot cheaper than Singapore and I never lose the
feeling that I am in Asia.


Again you've given me nothing to think this isn't some sort of mental block.

If they go to Singapore and just do all the same things they'd do at home
rather than taking advantage of what Singapore has to offer, then either (A)
they have no interest in experiencing Singapore, or (B) they're incompetent
at it. If the former, they have no basis for arguing that Singapore is
boring or expensive; that's a situation of entirely their own design.


So you believe that what Singapore has to offer is "$20 dorm
rooms"????? Cheap and not necessarily healthy food courts?


Food courts are absolutely completely healthy, not to mention fun and
interesting and incredibly tasty.

I don't think "$20 dorm rooms" (whose quote is that? not mine) have anything
to do with what Singapore is about. However I do think that the
comparatively cheaper price of accommodation from the middle range on down
makes it a less expensive place for many people to travel, which, if you
recall, was the issue with which you got me back into this thread.

Why is it that people need to live at a lower standard than they
normally do in order to "experience" Singapore? (or anywhere else for
that matter)


They don't. This is a construct of your design. You may pick and choose what
you'd like to have like home and what you'd like to have be unique to the
place you're visiting. If you choose to have everything like home, however,
you shouldn't be surprised if everything is like home. Seems self-evident.

It's that kind of attitude among the backpackers that I detest. They
go to Thailand or Nepal or Bali and then hang out among the poor so
that they can "experience" the local culture which really boils down
to purely mocking them.


Whatever.

I doubt that's true. Compare the number of beds occupied by backpackers vs
the number of upscale hotel beds occupied by westerners and I'd guess the
backpackers have the upper hand.


Not a chance.


Well, we'll have to see if anyone can find some stats. My "not a chance" vs
your "not a chance" doesn't get us very far.

Backpackers may be more visible at the dorms you refer to, but they
are a tiny minority of Singapore tourists. Take a look at the airline
counters.


Yes, I've done that. How do you subtract out the residents and only count
the tourists?

miguel
--
Hit The Road! Photos and tales from around the world: http://travel.u.nu
  #52  
Old April 28th, 2004, 11:29 AM
Markku Grönroos
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Default Australia Via Asia


"Tchiowa" wrote in message
om...

Actually that distinction is the core of what I said earlier in the
thread. Singapore has lost a lot of its "Asian-ness".

It is very difficult to penetrate Asia culturally from outside. It is quite
different from America for instance which is mostly European.


  #53  
Old April 28th, 2004, 04:48 PM
Chris Blunt
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Default Australia Via Asia

On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 08:33:11 GMT, (Miguel Cruz) wrote:

I stay at the JWM in Bangkok. When I am there I and dealing with the
Thai employees I see and feel the Asian culture. The way they talk and
act, their attitudes, etc. I am currently staying at the JWM in
Jakarta. Same experience. But when I stay at the JWM on Orchard Road I
don't get that feeling.


Can you describe this in a little more detail? I don't know what you mean. I
feel the same in an international hotel in Frankfurt as in Guatemala City as
in Sydney. Annoyingly deferential staff and tediously familiar surroundings.

In Bangkok I stay at a better hotel (the JWM in Singapore doesn't
compare with the Bangkok version), eat at better restaurants, etc. and
find it a whole lot cheaper than Singapore and I never lose the
feeling that I am in Asia.


Again you've given me nothing to think this isn't some sort of mental block.


I guess some people have a concept in their mind about what Asia
'should' be like, and they confuse modernisation with Americanisation.
Asian countries are modernising, some faster than others, but that
doesn't mean they're no longer Asian.

Singapore is still in Asia, so by definition it must still be Asian,
even though it may no longer fit the image that most people have of
what they expect an Asian country to be like.

You don't see cowboys riding horses and having gunfights outside
saloons in dusty streets in America any more, but does that mean that
America is not longer 'American'?

  #54  
Old April 28th, 2004, 05:45 PM
Markku Grönroos
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Posts: n/a
Default Australia Via Asia


"Chris Blunt" wrote in message
...

I guess some people have a concept in their mind about what Asia
'should' be like, and they confuse modernisation with Americanisation.
Asian countries are modernising, some faster than others, but that
doesn't mean they're no longer Asian.

Something like that. However, it is funny that there are folks around who
recognize these tendencies particularly in Singapore but not for instance in
Thailand. I guess they are not very honest to themselves.


  #56  
Old May 1st, 2004, 05:57 PM
Nono
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Default Buying someone else's cooking (not about Singapore, no wives Thai) WAS Australia Via Asia


"Tchiowa" wrote in message
om...

[snip]

Next thread, please.


In a major Asian city this year, a police officer arrested a street vendor
after the latter told him what was in the bucket beneath the charcoal
brazier. The Muslim style kebobs were neither lamb nor mutton but horse.
To get that woolly flavor, the skewers were floating in a sheep pee
marinade. Another vendor guiltridden turned himself in as he was getting
too much business from schoolchildren who adored his lamb-style kebobs that
were made of a compound of pork and mouse.

A few years ago in the same city, a cooking oil wholesaler to the street
vendors was caught skimming the frozen top layer from the sewers.

Meanwhile in NYC, a street vendor received plumbers in his apartment who
asked him what was going on in the bathtub. The plumbers never bought
bread off the carts again.




 




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