Asia

Newest food weakness: salmon pepper rice

Salmon pepper rice from Pepper Lunch

The griddle is super hot and sizzles for at least 10 minutes after you get it.

The salmon is raw when they place it on. The rice has pepper, corn, and scallions/chives on top with butter and sauce on the inside. You mix it all up, letting the salmon and rice cook, then dig in! So delicious that I eat this at least once a week! I would eat it more often were it not 400+ calories and so greasy. But still, 400 calories isn’t bad! You can also ask for extra salmon or an egg. I sometimes would scoop out the butter from the center of the rice pile if I didn’t feel like having so much butter. I would also save some of it for another meal if I got full. A good way to do it could be to get the double salmon serving and save half of it for another meal (bring your own tupperware!).

Graduate student expenses in Singapore (updated monthly budget and sample spreadsheet)

I made a preliminary budget a few months ago, and now after having settled in and miscellaneous moving costs have been covered, I am going to aim for this budget and track what I spend. I was tracking my spending at home too in NYC, but now it is even more important for me to do this because my income is lower and I have more expenses. (FYI, I receive a monthly stipend of SGD$2000 from a scholarship to cover living expenses. This would increase if/when I pass my Qualifying Examination…) Continue Reading

Rethinking worldliness

What would you do if a gang of monkeys threw coins at you? How would you escape out of a bus if it fell on its side during a rainstorm? I thought about these on my trip to India. In mid-2012, I was lucky enough to be sent off to India for work purposes, and was able to take vacation days to stay around after the meetings and see more than just the inside of a hotel.

At the airport, the hotel had sent 2 people to pick me up. We arrived in the perfectly luxurious hotel, tucked away from the center of Delhi. Meetings are what they are, but it was interesting to experience the biggest blackout in Indian history that took out most of Northern India but also be minimally affected by it. It is easy to complain. The elevators were not working. The lights flickered. The A/C turned off in the middle of the night. But in the bigger picture of things, many more people suffered much more devastating results. Continue Reading