Incident With Shoes

The very first night that I got here, I ate some Indian food with a guy named Thiru.  I also bought some really great iced green jasmine tea made by a company called 'Heaven and Earth'.  Today, I walked out of my room to go to the vending machine to get some of that tea.  A girl, Cheryl commented 'oh, not wearing slippers'.  To which I responded, 'oh yeah, I guess being barefoot outside is an American thing.  And we usually call them shoes'.  But just a second ago, I sent her this Facebook message: 'but the Sinaporean system of strictly no shoes inside, and always shoes outside definitely works better' ; Because it is totally true. The floors of all of the Singaporean dorm rooms are all cleaner than mine. Especially noticable on white table. Tsk tsk. Time to sweep.

Ate Breakfast this morning.

See, breakfast in my hall is pretty mediocre.  It is just noodles or pasta, and by the time you are finished, you just think 'that was a little too much noodles'.  But there is tea and coffee.  I haven't had the coffee yet, but the tea is really good.  Here, the tea is really strong, but not bitter. It has complex notes.  For putting into it, we have sweetened condensed milk, sugar, and dried milk.  I like the tea so much that I even had two cups this morning.

I must, furthermore, mention, that there is an interesting coffee/tea drinking lingo around here.  If you go to a traditional coffee shop, you pronounce 'coffee' as 'kopi', and tea as 'teh'.

kopi/teh ping = iced coffee/tea
kopi/teh o    = coffee /tea with sugar but  no milk
kopi/ teh o kosong = coffee/tea with nothing at all
kopi teh c   = coffee/tea with dried milk.   'c' as in 'carnation'.

'manis' means 'sweet'.  There are words for 'more' or 'less'  but at this moment I forget what they are.

Have a nice day!