Our M Club dinner with drinks last night. Went to bed early.  Note that we essentially did nothing in Singapore. We catch Thai Air from Singapore to Subarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok.  Started in some strange sounding and dingy looking lounge.  No tomato juice for a Bloody Mary.  Had Asahi Beer and a glass of Chardonnay with curry rice, which was lukewarm, but okay.  Huge chunks of good-tasting beef. Thailand is, geographically, 700 times larger than Singapore, with 13 times more people.   However, the annual GDP are very similar, $495 million for Thailand and $467 million for Singapore. Thus, the GDP per capita of Singapore is $82,808 and $7,082 for Thailand. Singapore is #1 in world competitiveness, Thailand #40. Global Peace Ranking:  Singapore #6, Thailand #92. Almost everyone in Singapore was fully vaccinated against Covid-19  by September of 2022.  Thailand is now up to 77%. Thai people are friendly.  While not unfriendly, Singaporeans are not particularly friendly.  Singaporeans

 There are  differences  worthy of mention between Japan and Singapore:  1.39 S$ to the U.S. $1. Virtually everyone in Singapore speaks English.  Not so in Japan. The shock of cold in Singapore reminds you that you are not using a warm Japanese washlet toilet.   Most of the 50 or so TV channels in Singapore are in English.  In Japan, perhaps half dozen. The one huge negative factor is World War II.  Travel throughout the Pacific Islands, Oceania, China and Southeast Asia, and you get the same understated, but emotionally wrought response about  Japanese occupation of their territory .  It has been more than 80 years, but feelings remain.  One reason: The   Kempeitai   (the Japanese   military police ), which was the dominant occupation unit in Singapore, committed numerous atrocities towards the common people. They introduced the system of " Sook Ching ", meaning "purging through purification" in   Chinese , to get rid of those, especially   ethnic Chinese , deemed

Since this blog was created more than 15 years ago, 2.92 million individuals have visited this site from 221 countries.  There there are only 195 actual countries, but there are domains for places like Antarctica, so there are 26 locations not considered to be nations.   For a reason I can't explain, more people/million from  Singapore  visit this blog site by a very large amount : Singapore   75,161 USA   706 Canada  450 Australia  319 UK   292 Netherlands  236 Denmark  216 France  141 Germany  140 Japan    76 Thailand   50 I will be visiting countries shown in  BOLD ( blue)  print on this global adventure. The key question is why is Singapore so far ahead?  Maybe because English is the dominant language of the country. But that's also true for many other nations.  Anyone in Singapore:  send me an e-mail if you think you know why.   PATKENTAK@HOTMAIL.COM    Perhaps because Singapore is technologically advanced and particularly curious about what I write. Okay, then, we were y

We leave the Tokyo Westin at 6:30AM Sunday morning to catch a flight from Narita Airport to Singapore.  Thus, I won't have time to post an article that day.  So, I send this now, and not long after midnight Hawaii time will come a second posting to cover that absence.   By the way, did I tell you that it is cold in Tokyo?  44 F. As I indicated yesterday, I've been to Robuchon many times. Click on this  to see some of my previous visits.   Ten years ago I indicated that Joel Robuchon, a quarter century ago, was named Chef of the Century, and that he is five years younger than me. He first retired in 1995 at the age of 50. His cuisine is retrogressive, harking back to the earlier days of French cooking before all the micro-stuff you now see, called  molecular gastronomy , created in 1988, but only began to become prominent around 2000. He passed away five years ago at the age of 73. It was another perfectly clear day in Tokyo today, so we had a perfect view of Mount Fuji from sun