NATAS TRAVEL FAIR 2008 Part 1

Last Saturday, I was at Singapore Expo for the NATAS Travel Fair. I was collecting some travel guides and brochures. We need to pay an admission fee of $3 for adults. The fair was over a three day period and saw a record of 65,000 people visiting the fair. The travel companies make a few millions during this 3 days. Singaporean love to travel.

Look at the crowd queuing to enter. But the queue was fast moving. I was lucky when I was there at 1.30 pm on Saturday, the queue was much shorter but later in the afternoon, the queue was so much longer.

Inside the exhibition hall it was so huge that it was not very cramp or stuffy. The air conditioning was cooling enough to handle the huge crowd.

Lots of good bargains and discounts at the exhibition for travels to many countries. And all these come with freebies.

For more photos on the fair, you could view them at my travel blog.

National Day 2008 Preview - Fighter Planes

I was taking video of these fighter planes during last saturday national day preview. The real parade will be on National Day 9th August 2008. National Day is our Singapore's Birthday, she will be 43 this year after gaining independence in 1965.


Watch the video especially towards the ending part. I find out about the ending part action only when I load the video into the computer.


These five fighter planes was supposed to form a pattern together upon reaching the destination in Marina Bay but I found out towards the end of the video that one of the plane was right behind the first four planes.

What do I know about planes....I thought the last plane was slow and trying to catch up with the first four plane but my husband and son said this is the way they create the formation. The planes dont take off all at the same time, so each of the plane had to catch up with the front planes when they take off to create a formation. Wow not an easy task but they did well for the show at Marina. Saw in the papers that they could create a heart shape with the smoke from the plane.


I wont be watching the parade live cause it is not easy to get the tickets. The tickets are issued via balloting. But I get to watch these planes live as they flew over me. :)

Kreta Ayer Wet Market - Final Part -Exotic Animals

Today my post is the final part of Kreta Ayer Wet Market.
This stall sold exotic animals.

The above is known as operation fish or Snakehead Fish.

In Asia, the snakehead fish are eaten in two ways. The smaller snakehead fish also nicknamed Operation fish, also known as Haruan, is recognized in Asia Pacific countries as a remedy for healing of wounds and it is best consumed as a herbal soup after operation/surgery. It is true cause it is quite effective but you need to cook with some herbs.

The bigger snakehead fishes are used for cooking with porridge or mee hoon (rice vermicelli).


The cages you see in the stall contained only certain exotic animals such as turtles, eels, frogs, etc. It used to sell snakes, small creatures but I think they are not allowed to sell many exotic animals anymore as they are endangered species.

We have frog farms in Singapore and they are breed to be sold to customers. Favourite dishes are the frog legs cooked with spring onions and ginger, frog leg porridge claypot, etc.

The kreta ayer wet market is located at the basement of chinatown complex at Block 335 Smith Street. You can view the map showing how to go to Kreta Ayer Wet Market from Chinatown MRT Station from map .

Kreta Ayer Wet Market - Part 4 (Chicken Stall)

Still at Kreta Ayer Wet Market.........today my trip is to the chicken stall.

At the wet market, we could buy the whole chicken or just other parts of the chickens. These are not frozen chicken but fresh chicken. The black chicken you saw in the chiller are used for herbal soup. Traditional Chinese soup made with Silkie also uses ingredients such as Dang Gui or tang kwei, wolfberries, etc.

From the wikipedia source, the black chicken is known as the Silkie. You can learn more about it from here.

The chickens and ducks are first slaughtered in the slaughtered house and then distributed to the different stalls in the market all over Singapore. The chickens are to be kept in chillers for hygenic purposes and prevent food poisioning. Customers can see them through the glass window of the chillers and choose their chickens by pointing them out to the stall vendor.

The same way of storing in chillers goes for pork, beef and muttons too.

Tomorrow will be a very exiciting post which would show some exotic animals. This is the only wet market that sell these animals.

Blog Problem

Geez, I keep getting this and get booted out of my own blog. Seems like many of my fellow bloggers faced this problem too. Sorry if I dont get to visit your blogs.

I found this on blogger.com

Quote:

Some blogs have been mistakenly marked as spam. Affected users are not able to post to their blog and received an email indicating Blogger classified their blog as spam. We are actively working to correct the issue. — latest update on Friday, August 01, 2008

Unquote:

Source: http://knownissues.blogspot.com/

I got this message from Jim:

Quote:

This is Jim, sitemeter is the problem. Google sitemeter down I had to change the code;
August 2, 2008 10:58

Unquote:

I had to remove sitemeter from my blog temporary and see what happen.

Latest Update: After removing site meter, it seems to be ok at the moment. Geez. Thank you Jim, you are a genius. :)