Singapore food

As I promised some blogs ago I would tell you more about the food and drinks in Singapore. Food is next to study or work the most important thing in the life of a Singaporean. You see and smell food everywhere and you can buy food on every single corner of the street. In Tilburg I prepare my food always by myself or with my roommates, here I did that only once. This has two reasons, it is more expensive to do groceries and prepare dinner yourself than to buy it somewhere and the food here is so amazingly good!!! The most common place to eat is in a food court, which is a collection of food stalls from different countries. You can choose Thai, Indian, Korean, seafood, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Japanese or Western food. I have to admit I love almost all the food, but in my opinion Korean is the best. Although, seafood is also very very good. 

For most dishes you pay around 5 sing dollar, which is 3 euro’s and most of the times it’s served with soup. You have food courts where they don’t have ac, so the prices will be lower and you’ll see many locals. At university we have two food courts and we have lunch and dinner there, which means two hot plates per day. I think only Dutch people aren’t used to that, because all the other exchange students are used to eating two times a day a hot plate and find it weird that we have bread for lunch. (They say we have two breakfasts per day haha). So I start my day with bread (with Calve pindakaas!) and then have lunch and dinner, which includes most of the time rice. This sounds boring, but I promise you, the rice here, especially fried rice is delicious and different from anything you tasted before. Around 2 days a week we eat a cheap restaurant, there you also pay around 5/6 dollars for a plate. We try to experience as many restaurants as possible and though it might look unhygienic and you sit on plastic chairs, the food is every time surprisingly good. I really love seafood, but in the Netherlands, for students, that’s just too expensive. Here I can have seafood fried rice for 4 dollars, and the rice is filled with prawns, squid and other white fish

Same as with food, you can buy drinks everywhere. On my 5-minute walk to university I pass two Starbucks, a mr. Bean (you can buy soy bean milk there, which they drink a lot here), and 3 other drink sellers. If you buy coffee or milk here, you get it cold, so if you want a hot drink you have to notice that. I kind of learned how to drink coffee here, as I like the cold coffees. Another common drink next to the soybean milk drink is bubble tea. This comes originally from Taiwan and is milk tea with pearls. You can ask for pearls in every drink here, and they are some kind of little candy balls. In food courts you can buy fresh fruit, but for 50 cents more they make it a juice, so as you pay around 3 or 4 euro’s back home to get a nice fresh juice, here you get it for 2 dollars. You can imagine I drink that a lot! Another favourite drink for me is Oreo Icecream shake, which are Oreo cookies blended with ice cream!!! So for non-alcoholic drinks the choice is huge and it is very cheap. Sadly alcoholic drinks are very expensive, for a can of beer in a supermarket you pay around 2 dollars. Luckily the drinks are free in clubs on Wednesday evening. Another easy way to obtain cheap alcohol is buying it at the airport (bottle of wodka = 8 euro’s) when you come back from a nice trip!