Liquid Singapore

Curious how to find or get a drink in Singapore to go with your meal?

Bam, right there. This is a hawker center drink vendor, you get the exact same type of drinks at a restaurant but maybe a few other types of beer, set up and ordered exactly like you would order from any other hawker stand.

Luckily ordering drinks is much simpler than ordering a meal. (Refer to my “Point and Pray” philosophy.) As I said drinks are pretty standard here with only four main categories; soda, sour drinks, Milo or Horlicks, beer.

Soda is simple here; it’s the same soda you would get anywhere else in the world. Except maybe by a different name…

That is Singapore’s equivalent to diet coke. They call it light instead of diet, why? Your guess is as good as mine.

Sour drinks are a little harder to understand, but basically the flavors are plum, lime, lemon or some combination of those three. Weird right? But don’t worry these drinks are like swallowing a whole party packet of warheads, the flavors are normally mellowed out by something like cucumber (For lime.) or tea (For lemon.)

Milo and Horlicks. I was confused by these two drinks at first, thinking they were the same thing but with different names in different languages. But apparently Milo is darker in color and Horlicks is lighter.

But don’t be fooled into thinking these are anything special, see that picture above? Put the Nesquik Bunny on the package and it’s the same product. Both are basically malted hot chocolate, costing you more to make them “iced” or to add ice to the drink. (Remember Singapore is HOT, so to freeze anything makes the cost go up ::cough:: Ben & Jerry’s ::cough::)

What meal wouldn’t be complete without beer, even if beer is massively expensive in Singapore it’s still a favorite.

That is Tiger beer, locally brewed and generally the cheapest beer you can find, putting you back only about $6 SGD during the day. (Late at night this price can skyrocket.) You don’t get to see many different brands here however, so the other most common beer I have found is Heineken followed by a Japanese beer called Asahi. (You might remember Asahi from a certain post I made about a stylized version of Astro Boy.)

So there you have it, four kinds of drinks and all you need to know about them.

Evil, evil little robot boy.

I’m no fool, I knew coming to Asia that there would be significant cultural differences between my old life and what awaited me in Singapore. But nothing could have prepared me for this:

That right there is a demonic vampire Astro Boy, and he seems to be a little “too excited”.

I wasn’t ignorant to some of craziness of Asian culture, I had seen plenty of game shows from Japan and even been an avid anime fan as a child. (I’ll still watch a show of Pokemon given the chance, and think that The Last Airbender is one of the best shows to come out on Nickelodeon in a long, long time.) So I thought I was prepared for almost anything.

But given the conservative nature of Singapore I never would have thought that a poster like this would be around, at least not in public and certainly not in a major tourist hot spot. (One impression I have of Singapore so far is they take great pains to make the country look as good as possible, hence the no chewing gum laws)

I couldn’t get a picture of the whole poster but it was around a whole store, and on the other side it featured Kim Jong-il in shutter shades. So the entire thing was generally weird. So as it turns out the poster is for a Japanese beer company named Asahi, which is to be honest one of the best beers you can buy here in Singapore so maybe they have a little more leverage than the average advertiser.

I guess this is more of a cautionary tale in that you should always expect the unexpected and that although you might think a country is really strict, but everywhere has a little bit of a wild side.