Chinese New Year

We got back into Singapore in the beginning of January.
The first few weeks were spent house hunting.
And before we knew it a holiday was upon us.

Chinese New Year is huge in Singapore.
It's a holiday celebrated in late January, early February.
People really get into the spirit of New Years here.
They spend weeks preparing and shopping for food, decorating their homes and cleaning.
One of the places they do a lot of that shopping is in Chinatown.
Naturally, Chris and I had to go and see what all the fuss was about!

  

CNY is more about family than anything else.
People spend the days and evenings eating traditional Chinese meals, visiting family, and eating some more.
To them it's a time to purge everything from the old year, to ask for forgiveness and to renew connections with everyone dear to them.

This year also happens to be the year of the horse (my lucky year!!!).
Chinatown had a huge horse lantern display down the main road.

I also got to participate in lo hei at a function at work.
A bunch of us stood around a bowl of mixed shredded veggies, fish, and cinnamon powder, and on the count of 3 shoved our chopsticks into the mixture and tried to throw it up as high as possible to bring us good fortune.
I love when I can learn something that opens my mind up to a whole new way of looking at the world!

Singaporean Chilli Crab

Every country is famous for one food or another.
Singapore's food is the chili crab.

We've been meaning to try some for a while, but have never gotten around to it.
While strolling through Chinatown last weekend we made an on the fly decision to get one at the Chinatown Seafood Restaurant.
It was epic. SOOO tasty. No wonder Singapore is famous for this goodness on a food dish.

There were a lot of utensils provided to eat this with, we used our hands and a great big spoon.
Not sure if you're supposed to eat the "sauce" it's cooked in, but we made sure to finish that too.
We had some little buns to dip into the sauce which are really good with it.
We also had some garlic prawns; those were great too, the shells practically fell off the prawns.

Any other food special to this part of the world someone can recommend for us to try here?

Pieces of Chinatown

The fish spa we went to was located in Chinatown. We were hoping to get to do a few more adventurous things but didn't realize things started to close around 8p.m.
So we walked around and explored what was opened.

I love lights. Creative, colorful, lanterns, lamps, anything. There's just something about them that makes me smile.
I might one day do a post on all of my favorite chandeliers... yes I have favorites. And there are stores upon stores here stocked with hundreds of them.

Fish Spa

We recently went to a fish spa. What is a fish spa you ask? It's a place where you go and put your feet/hands into a fish tank and the fish then eat the dead skin/dirt off of your feet/hands.
We loved it! It doesn't just make your skin smoother but it's a half hour of laugh therapy. Depending on how hungry the fish are they'll attack your feet from every which way.
They wiggle in between your toes, slap themselves around, gnaw at the skin (relax, they're tiny fish with no teeth).
We learned a lot of places have communal tanks because it's quite expensive to maintain (GPB $2.50/fish), but the place we went to had individual tanks for everyone and UV lights to kill any bacteria that tries to grow in the tanks.
The best part about this place though were the people running it. The little older lady loved my hair and chatted away to us like we've been there a hundred times, and her son then came in and gave us tips and tricks and shared all sorts of great knowledge with us.
Our feet definitely looked a bit better, but I think this kind of treatment is required on a regular basis to see major improvements. We'll definitely be back.

Address: Chinatown, Pagoda St 70a | Phone: 656222 2492 | E-mail: steven@alleviatespa.com