Banana leaf rice is a seemingly simple dish. First, your “plate” is a banana leaf, rolled out in front of you like a placemat. Then a generous scoop of rice is plopped in the middle. Next, come an assortment of curry sauces and vegetables. That’s the basic dish, and it’s meant to be eaten with your hands.

Not wanting us to miss any of the good stuff, J Chan felt it a good idea to order a bit more. So, our meal had the addition of fried spicy calamari, fried chicken, and fish. One difficult, yet fun, part of eating the meal was trying to do so the traditional way – with only your right hand. As an American, it’s not a way of eating that I’m used to, but in actuality, it’s a more practical way of eating once you get used to the correct method. (Hint: scoop the food onto your fingers, and push into mouth with thumb)

Here’s a video we filmed on Jack’s iPhone of us eating banana leaf rice. (sorry for the low quality – hit the four arrows to go full screen):

There are several HFC’s all over Singapore in Little India, Chinatown, and elsewhere, so it’s not that hard to find one. What you might find difficult is choosing the best food stall to order from when there are so many choices, most of which look delicious. So here’s the best way to attack the HFC’s.

1. Decide what you want to eat.
Do you want chicken rice, char kuay teow, satay, or fish ball noodles? The last thing you want to do is get stuck wandering around an HFC trying to decide among all the options. Everybody else will know exactly what they want, where they’re going, where they’re sitting, and how to do it all. This only makes things worse for you if you don’t. I recommend chicken rice – it looks simple, but if you choose a good stall, you’ll be amazed how delicious it can be.

2. Choose a stall serving what you want.
Rule of thumb – look for the places with a queue. The locals know what’s up, and if they’re waiting in line, it’s because it’s worth it. Also, look for the busy cooks. The chefs standing around aren’t busy, which tells you a lot. The best stalls sometimes even sell out of food completely, so don’t be afraid to go earlier rather than later.

3. Order the dish and then sit down.
You can sit anywhere there’s a sit. Don’t worry about sitting close if the nearby tables are taken. The hawkers will bring you the food. If you’re out of view, point to let them know.

4. Pay when you get the food.
If you’re a foreigner, they might let you wait until you’ve finished eating, but it’s standard practice to pay when the food comes.

5. Don’t worry about cleaning up.
In Singapore, there are specific people paid to keep the HFC’s clean. As you’ll soon notice, Singapore is a very clean city.

Bonus Step: Watch the video the below: Know Before You Go. It’ll give you a few images of the Chinatown HFC in Singapore.

I plan to do a more thorough post expounding upon some of the must-try Korean dishes in the future. For this one, I’ll let Jack’s pictures, videos, and voice do the explaining.

Eating Our Way Through Korea (video)

The tenderness of the meat combined with the spicy red-pepper spices and vegetables make this dishes one of the standards that I eat in Korea. It’s never hard to find a haejang-guk (pronounced hay’-chong-gook) restaurant in any town in Korea. Just act drunk and tell any passing Korean “pay go pah yo” which means “I’m hungry.” They’re bound to direct you to a haejang-guk restaurant.

Now, there’s a subtle art to eating the dish. It’s brought to you in a steaming hot pot usually with some spinach draped over the pork bones boiling in the broth. Don’t be alarmed by the bones – you’ll be eating the meat and tossing the bones aside.

Here’s how I eat it – and my recommendation for how you should eat haejang-guk.

Step 1: Remove meat from bone. Do this by holding a bone still with your spoon (or fingers) and scraping the meat down into the broth with your chopsticks. Some will fall easily, others will resist.

Step 2: Remove bone from soup. Pick the mostly meat-bare bone from the soup and place it in the empty white bowl. While picking at the other bones, this one will cool, allowing you to pick it up with your chopsticks (or fingers) and gnawing off the last bits of meaty goodness. Yes, it’s worth it.

Step 3: Enjoy. Wait a second for the soup to cool. Eat the kimchi’s sides while you wait. Try each of them and figure out which ones you like the most. Then, grab your spoon and dig into the haejang-guk.

Hint: Spoon a little rice before dipping into the broth. “Mah-she-tah” – “delicious!”

Enjoy the video below of us eating two different types of haejang-guk, the traditional pork dish, and a seafood version with clams and crab.

I woke up this morning with the intention to ride up the mountain. The only difference today was that I decided to ride by the nearby soccer field to see if anybody was out playing. I wanted a little outdoor activity and I was willing to jump in a pick-up soccer game, basketball game, or even a game a catch. What I got was a 15 kilometer mountain biking race!

I didn’t jump in the front of course. I waited until the slackers were making their way around the start of the track before I headed off in the same direction. We started along the road in front my University, and took a right up the road that runs along the reservoir. When the cherry blossoms are in bloom, this is one of the most beautiful roads in the world on which I’ve been.

The reservoir road runs up the mountain and gets real steep real quick. Pumping away in my lowest gear, most of us were crawling up the mountain. Yes, many of us hopped off our bikes and pushed them up until the path leveled out a bit. But, man, once we got to the top and it started downhill – I quickly flipped to my highest gear and FLEW down the mountain. I’ve ridden this trail a few times, so I knew when to slow down and when to let it go, and I was able to blow past a few of the race participants.

All-in-all, I rode for about an hour and a half up and down the mountains behind where I live. After the race, I stopped to chat with one of the more serious competitors and he informed me that it was a 15 km race. He was from a city about an hour away and had driven here just for the race.

Check out the video below for a taste of the views. What a beautiful day!

Here’s a video. Enjoy.

The first cultural difference I was taught on this subway/train was that it is against the rules to talk. Yes, that’s right: no talking on Tokyo trains on weekdays. Hundreds of commuters on public transportation heading home from work, out to shop, over to a friend’s house, etc. and one must respect the rules of a library. Coming from America, this surprised and somewhat perplexed me.

Don’t get me wrong: I get it. It makes sense. Nobody wants to hear high school kids chatting on their cell phones, or old men and women discussing whatever it is they discuss. Nobody wants to hear how drunk some college kid plans to get this weekend. I get it. But, I thought this idea to be a bit like communism: good on paper but practically impossible to put into practice. Not so in Tokyo. Library silence at 5:00 pm on a subway in Tokyo; the kind where if you talk, you feel awkward because you’re the only one and you sound disproportionately loud.

The caveat is that this only holds for Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday on a subway/train is what you would expect (if you come from New York, D.C., or Chicago). People are chatting at average volumes on the subways on Sunday and you wonder if you’re in the same city. But if it’s Thursday, hold your tongue.

The story goes that older businessmen get easily angered by others talking on the train. Public transportation is their chauffeur to and from work, and they don’t want others annoying them while in route. Legend holds that when somebody would talk on the subway, older men would yell at the person to be quiet. With the culture of respect, if the younger person didn’t quiet down, the older man would feel justified to start a scene or even get in a fight. The train conductor would be called upon to take care of the matter and this would sometimes delay the train. With the sometimes robotic-like culture of punctuality in Japan, nobody wants a late train, especially during rush hour, so the (unwritten?) rule was put into effect: Monday to Friday there’s no talking on the train.

Just as this story doesn’t do the experience justice, neither does the video below. But watching it won’t hurt.

Setting: Earthquake-ravaged Pisco, Peru circa July 2008.

The mission: To build earthquake-resistant sanitation units which included a toilet, shower, and large sink for the less-fortunate residents of Pisco. The unit had been designed, and prototypes had been built. However, documentation containing information on how to construct such units was scarce. The deadline for completion was approaching and plumbing needed to occur on a fast and efficient basis.

Enter: one British and one American voluntario. Mike (aka Mixto) and I had been given the task of organizing a list of all of the materials needed to plumb a sanitation unit. We had a drawing of the unit with no parts labeled, a list in Spanish that may or may not be parts that were bought for previous units, and no experience plumbing.

Two heads together and a full night of work later, we thought we had translated every part of the Spanish list and matched it with every part we imagined necessary with the exception of the very last item on the list. There was a mysterious entry that read simply, “Mixto codo”. We knew that “codo” translated to “elbow” and determined the other listed “codos” to be necessary curved pieces of pipe. However, this last “mixed elbow” was throwing us off as we didn’t feasibly believe that we needed any other parts to complete the sanitation unit.

The next day, Mike and I are at Grumpy’s plumbing shop going over our list of plumbing materials needed for a complete unit. We basically want Grumpy to put together “kits” of all of these pieces so that if a voluntario plumber were to come to the shop, he could pick up everything he needed in one fell swoop. Grumpy is checking over the list and seemingly confirming that we are ordering the correct parts. When we get to the last item on the list, ‘mixto codo’, he asks how many we need. Actually, we were hoping you could help us with that.

Mike takes this opportunity to ask Grumpy what exactly a ‘mixto codo’ is. Grumpy explains… in Spanish. Neither of us understands. Grumpy can tell, so he explains it again, this time with hand gestures. We see that he is gesturing an “elbow.” Yes, we know that part. What’s the ‘mixto’ part? “Que es mixto?” we ask.  Grumpy explains. Our Spanish is lacking. We still don’t understand and Grumpy is getting slightly frustrated that we’re held up on this apparently simple concept.

Then Mike gestures for Grumpy to draw a picture handing him a pen and paper. Grumpy immediately draws an elbow pipe with no threads on one end, and threads (like a screw hole) on the other end. Mike and I exclaim together, “OH!… a MIXto!” We had figured out un-threaded codos and threaded codos. A mixto codo was essentially a combination or “mix” of the two!

Grumpy smiled at our exaggerated displays of understanding (we had spent a lot of mental energy trying to figure this part out and were relieved to now understand). But wait, now that we know what it is, we still don’t know if we need it for our sanitation unit. We already designed the whole sink, toilet, and shower system and didn’t come up with any places missing any parts. Now that we know what it is, I’m not sure we need it. Grumpy asks us how many we would like to purchase.

Mixto looks at me to see my recommendation. I shrug. “Zero? Maybe we don’t need it. I don’t know.”

Mixto turns from me and faces Grumpy.

“Cinco, por favor. We’ll take five,” he says.

A puzzled look attacks my face. Mixto glances at me and answers my thoughts.

“Look at that thing. It’s half threaded, half un-threaded. It’s beautiful. We need at least five of them.” I couldn’t argue with that.

Henceforth Mike became known simply as Mixto.

Epilogue: Days later, after plumbing our first sanitation unit to near completion, we had used 4 of the five mixto codos. While in the back of the truck, riding back to Base Camp after a day of plumbing, Mixto pulled the 5th mixto codo pvc pipe from his pocket. I remarked that he had done a good job ordering 5 of them when at the time, we didn’t even know we needed them. Then I asked what he was going to do with the fifth one. He responded, “I’m going to drill a hole in it and make a necklace out of it.”

I looked at him for a second while the wind blew in our faces and the truck bumped up and down the pot-hole-riddled street. I politely reached for and took the small piece of pipe in his hand, looked at it, and asked, “you’re going to drill a hole in it?” I waited for him to realize that it was a piece of pipe designed as basically a curved hole, and thus did not need to be drilled in order to become the charm of a necklace. He caught my intention and we laughed together.

The next day, on the job, Mixto was found wearing that mixto around his neck… with an extra hole drilled into it and the string threaded through this extra hole. What can I say? His name is Mixto.

Wrap a gift worth $10 or LESS! You can buy something, or simply bring something from your house. It can be a good gift, a horrible gift, for a girl, a boy, funny, or whatever you want. Funny and ridiculous gifts make the game fun!

All the gifts are placed together on the floor (in “the gift pool”).

Each person playing gets a random number.

#1 chooses any gift, unwraps it, and shows it to everyone.

#2 chooses any new gift, OR can STEAL the gift from #1

If #2 STEALS the gift from #1, then #1 chooses a new gift from the gift pool.

#3 chooses a new gift, OR can STEAL the gift from #1, or #2!

If a gift is stolen from you, you can then STEAL a gift from one other person, but NOT the gift that was just stolen from you, OR you can choose a new gift.

This continues until all the gifts have been distributed to each person playing.

SPECIAL RULE: A gift can only be STOLEN 3 times, and then it cannot be stolen anymore!

Rule #1: Two nights max. Never stay in Vegas more than 3 days, and 2 nights. A) Your body can’t handle, B) Your mind can’t handle it, and C) Your wallet (or purse) definitely can’t handle it. The first day and night are fun. Soak up all the lights, the action, the excitement, and gamble a little. The second day and night are either a crazy blur, or a chance to see what you missed the first day. The third day you’re either hungover, or simply over it. Go home.

Rule #2: If you’re not willing to lose it, don’t gamble it. That’s the only gambling rule you need to stick to. The rest is up to you. Set aside an amount of money you plan to lose in Vegas and don’t gamble a dime more. If you lose it all in the first night, you’re done. Watch your friends or go see a show. If you’re smart, you’ll pace yourself and enjoy the money you spend on the various games that you probably can’t enjoy back at home. Whether it’s $100, or $5,000, set your limit and stick to it.

Rule #3: Stay near the strip. Vegas isn’t cheap, don’t try to do it cheap. Now, you don’t have to spend $300 for a room at the Bellagio, but you definitely want to be close to the strip. I recommend the Tropicana or maybe Hooters. Hooters is a dump, but it’s a comfortable bed a half block from the main area. Tropicana is the cheapest hotel/casino actually on Vegas Blvd. You should be able to get a room for under $80 on a weekday.

If you follow these three simple rules, you will have done Vegas right. Thousands of people regret their time in Vegas for one reason or another. Of the ones I’ve met, it’s because they broke at least one of these three simple rules.