This book is brilliant and I wished I’d read it before I taught the Food & Culture anthropology module at Macao’s IFT. It’s an easy short read all about edible history that takes you through trade routes, wars and the evolution of food to industrial farming, Mao’s failed Great Leap Forward campaign and the effects […]
The final book to Kevin Kwan’s best-seller trilogy, I enjoyed Crazy Rich Asians and Rich People’s Problems best. The denouement moves quick in this final book and is a real page-turner. I suppose I particularly enjoyed it for its anecdotal history of the war and Japanese occupation, My late grandmother used to tell us similar […]
Camoes Garden is also known as the “white pigeon nest” garden in Mandarin, because at one point, it was home to hundreds of white pigeons who nested there. One of Macau’s oldest garden parks, Camoes garden spans close to 20,000 square meters. Built in the 1770, it was the house of a wealthy Portuguese merchant […]
I took up the offer to visit my old friend Fish and spend time with her beautiful family who were on an NGO secondment in Melaka. Spending quality time and reminiscing about the old days over 17 years ago (!) had to be my favourite part of the trip, never mind the food. I love […]
When I last caught up with Jen in Beijing a couple of years ago, she mentioned she was researching a book on noodles and was planning a trip across the silk road to investigate the history and story of noodles. I’m so glad I picked this up at the library and thoroughly enjoyed it. There […]
I teach an anthropology course to final year students at IFT the hospitality school in Macao and this book is a real gem full of anecdotal stories, more so than hard history facts which gives leeway for making your own conclusions to certain things. Ian Croftan’s Curious History of Food & Drink is a really fun […]
This would have made a great film for the food and culture anthropology class I teach at the hospitality school IFT Macao. Chef Peng, the guy who invented the dish passed away earlier this month, and the documentary digs deep with historians and food writers like Fuchsia Dunlop and Jennifer Lee (who wrote another great […]
Apart from the gastronomic pilgrimage on our agenda to Restaurant Paul Bocuse, the textile museum was on my to-do list. Since I took up sewing classes this year. The Textile Museum was on the verge of closing down this year as funds were pulled out, I didn’t follow up on the news but it was […]
The Macau Taipa library still has no system of filing their books Charles Dickens alongside Slyvia Plath and Dickens… it’s neither time, genre or author based (like most libraries around the world it is filed with a system in alphabetical order of the author’s last name). I picked up the book by chance and based it […]
An Art Deco journey through Shanghai’s belle époque for Lonely Planet Shanghai is home to one of the richest collections of Art Deco architectures in the world. Unlike Miami and New York, some buildings of the Art Deco era in Shanghai combine elements of both Art Deco and “Chinese Deco”, fusing elements of Chinese […]