The best place to eat out in the world

🥇 Singapore is the place to go if you want to eat really interesting and very tasty food at rock bottom prices. Look no further foodies! Here is your heaven:

Huge papaya. I didn’t try one. Not quite sure how to handle it! More a family feast I guess, but I think they were selling it sliced in manageable portions. I was just amazed at the size of them:

Young coconuts minus the shell. I frequently saw people drinking coconut milk with a straw from these:The pink things below are dragon fruit. I’d only ever had one of those before in the UK and it was horrible! But in Singapore, they’re riper and sweeter as well as spectacular to look at. Inside they have white flesh flecked with black seeds throughout. All of which is edible and tastes slightly sweet. They were so much nicer here. I had been so disappointed with the one I had in England years ago. It was tasteless and had a texture similar to boiled potato, which was a massive let down having admired the look of it!:There are some really artistic cakes on sale in the malls in Singapore:Japanese style mochi (a kind of pastry filled with a delicately sweet bean curd, I think):You do get westernised food in Singapore, too, though it’s often more expensive. This was my smashed avocado on toast with lime, chilli flakes, toasted pine nuts and poached egg. Very hipster!:From a traditional outdoor hawker centre this was mushroom noodle soup. They sprinkled fried anchovies on top:The best veggie curry ever. Served on what I guess is a banana leaf. Ooooh it was gooooood:Calamansi juice. (A type of green skinned sweet lime, that tastes more like orange to me):The following 4 pictures were all elements of the same meal…

Some kind of greens, delicious:Chicken roasted in some very tasty way. I guess it must be a marinade? (And a little bit of pork too at the top of the picture):“Nonya style” Achar pickles (also delicious);Chilli sauce. Shiv said if the chilli sauce was bad, it could ruin the whole dish. This one was goooood:Then there was the rice to go with all the above, which is the classic Singaporean dish, chicken rice. The rice tastes amazing, cooked in the juices from the chicken. But it just looks like normal rice, so I didn’t bother getting a picture.

This was a traditional sweet, warm egg tart from Chinatown in Singapore and some green tea. The pastry was melt in the mouth:Hawker Chan’s Michelin starred chicken rice, with seasonal green veg. And the unfeasibly small bill:Kopi a kind of coffee made with condensed milk. Which tastes surprisingly nice:Some more western food. This was my treat following braving the high swing bridge type thing at the super tree skywalk at Gardens by The Bay:Veggie bento box. Including soup, green beans, chilli sauce, potato curry, rice:Veggie gyoza (dumplings):

Delicious world cuisine

Foodies, you’re going to love these next few posts. I’m just going to picture the best I tasted in each place.

Switzerland

Basel leckerli as recommended by my brother. Delicious sweet sort of gingerbread type things but instead of ginger the flavour is more orange zesty and a bit lebkuchen-esque. And they have a thin layer of what tastes like water icing on top as well:

It’s very difficult to be veggie in Switzerland, and nearly impossible to be vegan (well, I exaggerate, but it is tricky). There’s just too much cheese and cream and meat about! For my last dinner of the tour I did have veal in a creamy sauce with chillis along with the salad and chips:

Raclette cheese 👆🏼melted to order at the table using a little grill thing and then poured over new potatoes. With salad and gherkins.

Flammkuchen; a kind of very thin pizza with bacon, cream and characteristically stinky Swiss Munster cheese melted on top:

Chocolate orange cake at the convent:

This was a lovely aubergine dish in a Turkish restaurant in Switzerland. Apart from the dipping sauces I expect it was probably vegan. And delicious!:

Beer is what is drunk in Basel. Other drinks are available, but, well, why not? Apparently, the MacDonald’s in the centre of the city opposite the fancy town hall is the only MacDonalds that sells beer. Or at least it was a couple of decades ago when my brother lived here. I was going to investigate but then ran out of time.

I do enjoy a good breakfast/brunch. Since I arrived in Switzerland at 7am, I took myself into Zürich and treated myself to this delicious breakfast at a lovely old fashioned café. I particularly love Bircher muesli (usually consisting of oats and grated apple soaked in yoghurt overnight, with other seeds or dried fruits or fresh berries or pomegranate seeds sometimes added as toppings). This is the most pink Bircher I’ve ever seen! It tasted delicious though.

We had quite a few delicious meals at the convent, too, but it somehow didn’t feel quite right taking photos of them! There were a lot of spätzle based dishes (a type of pasta), and quite a bit of meat, and always plenty of salad or vegetables to go with them.

Best in the world (ii)

Best views in the world – impossible to judge. But the most unusual ones and also the most awesome ones were in New Zealand. But then Arosa in the Swiss Alps was pretty awesome too, and the Tahoe Rim Trail. And Trang An, Vietnam. See? Impossible.

🥇 🦅 Most beautiful birdsong in the world – New Zealand

🥇 Stillest place – Catlins Lake, New Zealand

(followed by Lotus Lake at the Múa Cave, Vietnam, though the stillness there was interrupted by a couple of drones. For ages I thought they were a swarm of weird Vietnamese insects and kept scrutinising the lake water under the wooden walkway for them. It was only once I climbed up the 500 steps that I heard the same noise again and saw the drones.)

Most tasty meal in the world – tricky, very tricky! I had some truly delicious meals in California, and New Zealand, actually pretty much everywhere! More unusual meals that stand out were those below:

The veggie pho (noodle soup) N cooked me for my last breakfast in Ninh Binh.

And the banh my he cooked the previous morning. Delicious (tho not veggie):

Also the street food tour in Hoi An:

Black sesame soup
Special Hoi An noodles

Passion fruit juice

Award winning Banh My

Cakes made with sweet bean curd

Ach! There were so many lovely meals. I might have to do another post all about those… 😋

The best in the world (i)

Based on my (obviously limited) research, I thought it’d be great to do some awards… firstly for accommodation and flight related things…:

🥇 Best shower in the world goes to… a convent! Well, who knew? – Diakonissenhaus Riehen, Switzerland

🥈 Second best shower in the world – my aunt and uncle’s shower in Auckland, New Zealand

🥉 Third best shower (and bear in mind all of these top three showers would be fit for a king or queen) – Nobbs Flat, Milford Road, New Zealand. En suite showers in wooden huts in the middle of nowhere. There’s no phone signal, but the showers were great!

🥇 Best airline vegan food – Air New Zealand, though closely followed by

🥈 Singapore Airlines, with their delicious coconut and mango sago pudding.

United Airlines were not in the running. (A cheese sandwich is really not vegan🤨) Neither is Swiss Air (Swiss quiche also not vegan. Though I could’ve probably asked for something else, but didn’t want to forfeit the also unvegan Swiss chocolate they give you at the end of the flight!!)

🥇 Best airline in the world – Air New Zealand

🥇 Best airport in the world – Changi Airport, Singapore (it’s like a small country in itself, including museum rooms where you can learn about various Singaporean cultures, fresh greenery growing up most of the walls, and arranged in incredibly artistic displays with water features throughout, lots of places where you can sit in squishy seats and relax, lots of eateries, quiet jazz playing throughout… you get the picture).

👎🏼 BUT most annoying immigration procedure – Singapore… I couldn’t get cross with the quiet jazz playing and the leaves everywhere but I do wish there’d been a sign or someone telling us to fill out landing cards /pointing us to them before we’d queued up for half an hour only to get turned away to go fill them out and then have to queue up again! (My luggage had been taken to lost and found by the time I got through that little lot!) This happened to me again when I re-entered Singapore over land from Malaysia (doh!), only this time without the calm sophistication of Changi airport to help me simmer down. It was late and I was not a happy bunny!

Having said all of this, it wouldn’t have been an issue if I were a more observant person, no doubt! But other people were also caught out by it.

🥇 Most comfortable form of transport – luxury coach, Malaysia

🥇 Best trains in the world – Switzerland (I spent quite a while worrying I was in first class, having only paid for second class, because…what could have been improved? I was in second class.)

🥇 Best hotel in the world – Royale Chulan, George Town, Malaysia

🥇 Best Homestay – Mia Spa, Ninh Binh, Vietnam

Farewell Switzerland

The last lovely evening of my world tour. I’m so grateful for time together with such special people. I can’t really imagine a better way to end three month’s travelling.

Here are some pictures from my last day in Switzerland today. By this evening I’ll arrive in probably a wet, dark and cold UK and I reckon I’m going to find it tricky believing that only this morning I was seeing this. What an incredible time of sharing memories, philosophising and enjoying fresh mountain air and incredible views. (And also learning some better techniques for negotiating slippy slidey snow!!)

From the train ride back to Zürich. Not great photos but you get the idea. I think my ears popped about 6 times on the way up and about 4 on the way down:

Snowshoeing

…in a white out! Well that was quite an experience!! Some of my photos would’ve been like this:

…if I’d bothered to take them. But then occasionally the mist and cloud lifted so we could see stuff. It’s really unnerving when you literally can’t tell that the land you’re stepping onto is significantly lower than where you were before, because everything is so completely white (even with sunglasses on)!

With the snowshoes it’s possible to walk on terrain you’d never manage otherwise. It was great to try a different method of getting from A to B than skiing or snowboarding (or slipping and sliding!). I can ski. Sort of. But I’m not confident, so was happy to give it a miss, as was Liz. But in today’s whiteout I don’t think skiing would’ve been much fun for anyone anyway.

The normally beautiful view from the flat was reduced to this this morning:

But undaunted, we headed out:

Thank goodness for the shuttle buses that pick you up and drop you off at stops all along the major ski and walking routes for free. I thought the snowshoes would be quite small, but of course the point is really to spread your body weight over a wider area. I felt like I was walking like a duck or something most of the time, but it really means you can enjoy walking with no worries about slipping and sliding everywhere or ending up stuck in the deep snow drifts. I’ve no idea how deep the snow was today. At no point did my feet or the walking poles hit the ground beneath it. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere with this much snow before!

My last stop

Well. This whole trip has felt a bit like when I toured New Zealand with my Aunt and Uncle, and whenever I said “Wow!” at the view, Ken kept chuckling and saying “You ain’t seen nothing yet”. I have arrived in Arosa in the Swiss Alps for a few days with my good friend Liz and her husband Phil. You will not be surprised that I have pretty much spent the whole time here so far with my jaw on the floor. It even snowed especially for our arrival! Here are some pictures.

The bridge we went over on the train (one of several):

The view from the bridge:

And other views here:

Wiener Schnitzel:

And Capuns (a kind of Swiss version of stuffed vine leaves only they’re chard leaves, and stuffed with a kind of pastry mixed with bacon, cream and cheese, in a very Swiss cheesey creamy sauce 😋):

Farewell Riehen

To finish our time together Sr Delia and I prayed with and for one another in a beautiful little chapel in the convent. We prayed with an icon she had painted as well, which I thought was extraordinary, even though she was at pains to explain that it was just a copy.

Icons depict certain aspects of the character of God (or of a saint from church history) that the artist wants to meditate on. So they are not the object of anyone’s worship, but more like a window helping people to focus on some aspect of God, who is always bigger than any picture, of course.

The left hand side of Jesus’ face (ie the right as we look at it) here represents the suffering Christ on the cross, and the right hand side (on our left) the risen Christ. But what I noticed most was the luminous word of God. Perhaps because I’ve spent a while in this country with all the Reformation talk. The Reformation, at its best, was all about giving ordinary people access to the word of God (the Bible) in their own language, so they could read it for themselves and not have to rely on whatever the priests told them it said. Well, that’s my very “power to the people” simple summary, anyway.

One evening we’d watched In Pursuit of Silence (a documentary film I mentioned in an earlier blog post) together. In response, Sr Delia gave me this, which I am looking forward to watching:

It seemed a very fitting way to finish our time together to pray and commit each other to God, and also to pray for the communities we each belong to. It’s quite an extraordinary thing to pray for someone and to be prayed for by them. I thank God for that gift.

Mariastein

One of the things I have most loved about my time with Sr Delia have been our walks and talks together. It was such a gift to have a week to catch up, to muse about life and theology and all sorts of things.

On one day we took the bus to a little village on (or maybe just beyond) the outskirts of Basel, and then spent the day walking through beautiful countryside at a leisurely pace, towards this famous (at least in Switzerland) pilgrimage site.

I have no idea what these berries are called. 👆🏼 If anyone knows, please do comment!

We stopped halfway up a hill by St Anne’s little fountain and Delia shared this delicious anisbrötli with me (a kind of sweet aniseed biscuit/cake). Apparently it’s quite easy to make. Hmmm might have to try that!

And here’s the Church with the grotto underneath it that people come here on pilgrimage for. Much though I like the very simple unfussy Reformation style churches, it was kind of nice to see a bit more church bling here! I’m not quite sure how this church survived the Reformation without having all the bling stripped away. Presumably it was partly because it was in the middle of nowhere?

In the church there was an exhibition depicting the life of Mary by the Italian artist Stella Radicati. She made the angel Gabriel look pretty fit, I thought! And I liked that Joseph was taking responsibility for carrying the baby while the couple fled to Egypt, looking suitably worried:

Hundreds of plaques line the walls of the tunnel that leads to the grotto under the church containing a famous statue of Mary. People have sent the plaques to record their thanks for answered prayers.

I didn’t take any pictures in the grotto as the light was poor and I didn’t want to disturb the pilgrims there. But, as often happens to me in these traditional holy buildings, I found I felt more connected with God just outside, surrounded by beautiful views of the natural world than I did inside the building. I guess it takes all sorts to make a world, as my Grandma used to say.

We repaired to a local café where Delia persuaded me to try Vermicell. A slightly sweet dessert made with cooked chestnuts mushed up and then squeezed through something like an icing bag to make the worm like shape.