This is what afternoon tea looks like in Kuching:
Not quite the tea and scones you were thinking, hey? The first dish is a local dessert called ais kacang, and it's shaved ice topped with jelly, fruit, red beans (the kacang), syrup, milk (condensed, evaporated, or coconut), and some other stuff, all up to the whim and fancy of the hawker. The second dish is belachan beehoon, and it's basically rice vermicelli (beehoon) with a gravy made from fermented shrimp paste (belachan). Usually you get julienned cucumber and slices of boiled cuttlefish with your belachan beehoon, and sometimes you even get slices of century egg. This one didn't have any century egg, but they gave us a bit of sambal belachan in a tiny orange dish, and it was really spicy, and I mixed this into the beehoon and it was superb!
The real photowalk was after tea, and I took some snaps of the blooms. It was interesting to see the different stages of growth. It would have been better if we had more variety though, as the museum grounds had mostly hibiscus plants. At least I think these were hibiscus plants. My knowledge of botanics is pretty bad.
I had some pretty crazy shots as well. Like this one:
You might be staring and wondering what's so crazy about it, and you've got a point, there's nothing crazy about it. Nothing crazy about practically hugging a pillar and putting your face against it and aiming your camera at the sky and trying not to breathe and staring into the viewfinder trying to get the symmetry and standing there while the whole world zooms by and laughs. Nothing crazy at all.
We went to the waterfront to try to catch the sunset but that didn't work out. No pretty orange purple hues today.
Dinner was at Jade Pot Tea House, where I had the usual, Taiwanese spicy pork noodles. This time it was really really really really spicy. I guess the waiter mentioned to the cook that I didn't find their spicy noodles that spicy after all, and they must have been very liberal with the chilli and pepper in an effort to make me weep in pain because the noodles that night were a deeper shade of red (it was more pale yellow than red before), and you could literally see the flecks of chilli and pepper (you could feel the powder on your tongue). More importantly, we caught the kitchenhand/chef peeking out at us a few times, probably hoping to see the gulping down of glasses upon glasses of cold water or something. I cleaned the bowl. No extra water, no frantic fanning of the face, no sweat. They must have been in shock.
