Great sights to see in New York, Australia, London and Israel - but could you live there? Comic song

I was wondering about this and wrote a comic song to sum up my feelings, putting the case for and against the frenetic city life and buzz of New York city contrasted with the laid back lifestyle of Australia.

In America and Singapore (and Asia - where the hard-working Chinese run businesses) you often see people working late at night and weekends.

Singaporeans can enjoy a giant waterfall for free at the Jewel shopping mall by terminal one at Changi airport. Within the city there's the peaceful, free Botanical Gardens and the Night Safari.

Singaporeans travel to Malaysia to shop and to Australia to relax. The Aussies might stop work at five and go off for the beach and beer party.

Australia
Ayers rock is no longer a free for all. Many start with Sydney, its opera house and bridge, a dinner joining in the chorus of Waltzing Mathilda. Others prefer Perth. Or drive along the Great Ocean Road to see the 'Twelve' Apostles, mis-counted pillars in the sea. 

Israel's Attractions
In Israel the city people often have two jobs to make ends meet. But the religious people stop work for the Sabbath. However, the majority of the world's Jews are in the USA and are secular.

Israel has the antiquities in Jerusalem with its museums and sacred places of all religions, See the old city of Jerusalem with its quarters for Arabs with the great mosque, Below the mosque is the Jewish Wailing Wall, all that is left of the great synagogue, the tunnel, Christian Armenians, and Roman remains, mosaics of old synagogues from the time of Jesus, churches galore,biblical memories of Abraham and Solomon, David and New Testament's Jesus.  You stay in cities such as see the art deco (actually Bauhaus) white Thirties city of Tel Aviv.  Or out to visit a hotel on a green kibbutz, the pool and waterfall oasis of Ein Gedi or the rust coloured desert and tall Pillars of Solomon, Masada, or the beaches of Eilat and float on the Dead Sea.

Malaysia
Malaysia, Singapore's northerly neighbour, is much more laid back than Singapore. The Malays are not Arabs. They are party people. An American expat told me her husband was sent to manage the opening of a factory in Malaysia. They took on staff and the first week all went well. Friday the staff all got their first week's wages.

Monday nobody turned up. They were happy to sit around until the money ran, out and then go back to ask for a job.

You have the city of KL with the twin towers familiar from the movie Entrapment featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones.


American flag

USA
Of course, having lived in the USA I know that not all America is the same. New York, New York. The UN, the twin towers memorial, the spiral Guggenheim gallery of art, or to Ellis Island and the statue of Liberty on a ferry.

The south is more relaxed. They speak slower, too.

The West coast is more relaxed than the East with coastal LA and misty, artsy hilly San Francisco, or off to the wine country. The real cities or the fantasies of Disney in California or Florida. You have a choice, cities or scenery.

At the weekends we used to drive off. You can go out of the cities to see the blue ridge parkway along the east coast, or over to the the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Monument Valley and numerous national Parks.

Here is my Song:

We went for a walk around New York and I said, 

Let’s talk about New York

I said, 'The skyscrapers are a mile high ..!'

But he said, 'You can hardly see the sky!'

I said, ‘This is the place I want to live!’ but he said;

 ‘One of us has to give

'I want to live in Australia, 

the place where I was born

'I want to see the sunset

 in the place where I saw dawn

'You would love koala bears

And you'd love the kangaroos!'

But I said, "And be eaten by crocodiles!

But to you this isn't news.'

He took my hand and with a smile
Said, 'Florida has crocodiles'

Yes, take a tour of them, alone
This land has troubles of its own

I shrugged, though I was broken-hearted 

But bravely smiled as he departed

But every year we meet again 

and we repeat the same refrain

I say, “Let’s walk around New York, 

Don’t you love it? Let’s have a talk,’

I say, ‘This is the place I want to live,’

But he says: ‘One of us has to give

'You’re the only thing I lack and 

That’s why each year I come back

'Yes, my dear, I love it here

But I'm going home to the beach and the beer

' 'cos I want to live in Australia,

 The place where I was born

'I’m going back, to see the last sunset, 

In the place where I first saw the dawn.’

...

D'you want to know the moral?

I know that you're not thick

But I assure you others are

Thick as two short planks and a brick

The lover's moral is think before

'Cos war brings love but love brings war 

Before you pick a foreign love

Decide if you're prepared to move

If not, the moral's plain to see

You'll end up single just like me.

I'd be the one who you forget
If it wasn't for the internet 

'I know you've a good memory

But others are a pain

'You tell them once, tell them twice

Then have to tell the story again.'

'Yes, I have a great memory

But I love to hear your voice

'I listen to the same old stories

Old friends don't have a choice

"I'd rather hear about old times

Than hear of other men

'So you tell me about our love

I'll hear it once again.'

We went for a walk around New York and I said, 

'Let’s talk about New York,'

I said, 'The skyscrapers are a mile high ..!'

But he said, 'You can hardly see the sky!'

I said, ‘This is the place I want to live!’ but he said;

 ‘One of us has to give

I have nothing more to say
But can't you meet me half way?

And so we went to London
Met on St Pancras station



But that was neither here nor there
Just a brief vacation

We went for a walk around New York and I said, 

Let’s talk about New York

I said, 'The skyscrapers are a mile high ..!'

But he said, 'You can hardly see the sky!

'I want to live in Australia, 

the place where I was born

'I want to see the sunset

 in the place where I saw dawn.'

'So you stay there - and I'll stay here
And we must meet again - next year!'

-ends-

Copyright Angela Lansbury
The penultimate verse sounded like he was about to commit suicide if young or die if old. I decided to give it a happy and humorous ending. The song structure is 'a round'.

I hope you like the pictures I picked. The Israeli sculpture has the @ sign in the man's head as well as the wheels.

Photos
USA
I love New York

AUSTRALIA
The 12 apostles, on the Great Ocean Road, AustraliaBeer photo in Wikipedia under beer article, photo by kgbo.

Koala bear, Australia

Koala and Kangaroo road sign, Australia

'Crocodiles, no swimming' warning, Australia

US flag

Beer, Australia

Ayers Rock, Australia

Internet sculpture in Israel.

Date	15 June 2013
Source	Dr. Avishai Teicher via the PikiWiki - Israel free image collection project
Author	Dr. Avishai Teicher
Permission (Reusing this file)	This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. Attribution: Dr. Avishai Teicher Pikiwiki Israel

New York street scene

St Pancras station, lovers meeting or farewell, sculpture, London, England, UK. In Wikipedia, photo by Oxyman.

Useful Websites
Singaporeair.com

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

Dishes I Probably Won't Try - Dancing Squid and Oysters in July

Dishes I probably won't try for the first time or again:

1 Oysters - eaten live. England and the USA and elsewhere.
2 Dancing squid (from Japan) just like what they sound like. Found in Japan. See YouTube.
3 Suckling pig.
4 Snails. (Escargot in France, also from some speciality restaurants in London, England.
5 Horsemeat (France).
6 Bird's Nest. Soup or otherwise.
7 Locusts. (All sorts of insects are available bottled for Christmas as novelties or gourmet gifts in speciality food stores such as Jackson's of Piccadilly in London.
8 Dog (China).
9 Wichita grub - actually I've had this in Australia. Ground up and white like potato soup or puree.
10 Snake steak. (I've had this in Shanghai. Looks like sliced up salmon, a circle with a bone or hold in the middle, but salmon has better flavour.)
11 Puffer fish. Poisonous if not prepared right with the poison removed. Why would you risk it? Admittedly whenever a restaurant prepares your food, you have to trust your chef to take every care.
12 Crocodile. I have a certificate framed on the wall which assures me that I ate this in Florida some years ago. As they say, the past is another country.
13 Durian. The fresh fruit tastes and smells dreadful. However, the ice cream or cake made with a tiny amount tastes delicious, like chestnut.

No thanks. No comment.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer 

Christmas treats: Oyster and crab photos; where to eat crocodile, grubs, durian, and exotic foods

In London all many restaurants are serving turkey and Christmas pudding and every office and club wants a group party, ideally a Friday lunch, finishing so late there's no point going back to work, might as well do some Christmas shopping. What exotic food can you buy? Maybe a hamper for the hosts? Or an exotic food for your friends who invited you for a Christmas meal or New Year's eve. Should you buy them a treat or taken them for a meal out? 

For some of the people you know chocolate covered insects these would be a gourmet treat. For other people they would just be a joke gift. It might be an idea to ask - and check prices.

What can you take? What would be a treat? Or maybe treat yourself? Or just enjoy window shopping.  Caviar? Real caviar from Russia is expensive. Caviar is the egg cells from a fish. I've tried real caviar and, don't tell anybody, but I prefer the cheaper imitation from supermarkets from different fish. Yummy. Many people will be happy with imitation so called caviar in little pots from the UK supermarkets. You can buy it coloured orange or black. 

Shellfish? Many restaurants such as Club Gasgon also sell bottled French foods.

Restaurant oysters.

Oyster photo. Courtesy of Trevor Sharot.

Crab shell. Supermarket crab.

I am afraid the crab has gone. Somebody ate all of it. Not me.

Crab shell. Photo by Angela Lansbury.

You can see from the fork in the lower left of the crab shell picture that the crab shell is about the size of a fist, much larger than an oyster. This is not news to people who eat shellfish. 

But my pictures will solve a mystery for people like me who never eat shellfish. Like me and some of my friends and acquaintances. 

When I was a child we never had frogs nor horsemeat (horse meat not horse men which spell check prefers), eaten by the French, along with snails and oysters. In England we regarded eating horse meat with the same sort of horror and suspicion that most people in the UK still regard these exotic fruits:

 1 DURIAN

I ate durians for the first time in a Thai restaurant in Singapore in the 1990s. D u r i a n s (spell checker, horror of horrors, corrected this word to drains), are eaten in season in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and now available from some restaurants in London. 

Durian? It smells strongly of sulphur. It is banned on the Singapore MRT underground trains and buses and taxis. You will see signs.

The durian fresh fruit I can't eat. But the flavour in ice cream and cakes is wonderful, like mashed banana and chestnut puree. Green. Like pistachio.

2 ANTS 

Chocolate covered ANTS and other insects.

3 LOCUSTS 

(All kinds of insects available at Xmas time from the major food department of big speciality department stores such as Fortnum and Mason, until stocks run out,.

4 CROCODILE 

(I have eaten this in Florida, in the USA.  I have a souvenir certificate which I was given on a travel press trip in the USA, somewhere stored hidden behind something more important in one of the 100+ picture frames in my home.) 

5 WICHITY GRUB SOUP, Australia.

Soup eaten in a restaurant in Perth, Australia. The grubs are not wiggling around and leaping like tiny dolphins, nor china depictions of the Loch Ness Monster, as I had feared. Just a thick white soup rather like potato soup. Neither disgusting nor delightful.  As they say, try anything once. (If I appear to have written nonsense, it's because Spell check thinks W i c h i t a  is more likely than w i c h i t y.)

6 BUFFALO meat. USA.

Buffalo or bison were a mystery to me, a visitor from London to the USA in the 1980s. Not to be confused with Buffalo wings, which are chicken wings in sauce, first served in a brain Buffalo in bad weather when chicken and sauce was available and not much else so the cook created a new dish from what was to hand.

7 SNAKE from China. Mescal from Mexico.

Eaten in Shanghai and many parts of China and Asia. Also seasonal. A snake steak is slides so a portion looks like a piece of salmon, circular thick white or pale pink meat, texture of cod, with a circular white bone in the middle.You also see snake inside large glass bottles of wine and flagons of wine. 

Mescal from Mexico is a drink with a larva inside. It is sometimes called a worm. Not a worm. Not live.

9 EXOTIC NUTS such as macadamia

Thinking back, when I was a child, most nuts were peanuts, which aren't nuts at all. W, almonds and hazel nuts were an expensive treat. Chestnuts only appeared at Xmas. Pistachio nuts appeared much later in the first Asian restaurants probably in the 1960s. Cashews were a treat. 

I had pecan nuts for the first time in the USA in the 1980s, and pecan pie. Now you can get pecan pie in American restaurants in London, and often in the bakery sections of supermarkets.

Then I tried macadamia nuts, for the first time, on a side trip from the USA where we were living, to Hawaii.

Chestnuts were a favourite Christmas treat in England, roasted chestnuts sold from stalls on cold days in November and December. In previous years they were sold outside the World Travel Market in London, outside Excel on the passageway to the Station. 

When we went on holiday to Jersey in the Channel Islands  we discovered that tins of chestnut paste imported from nearby France were much cheaper and more readily available than the same tins in London supermarkets.

We bought half a dozen tins and had chestnut puree on vanilla ice cream for a quick self-catering lunch on holiday. We took two leftover tins home and enjoyed our holiday treat for a fortnight (two weeks) back in Britain.

10 EXOTIC FRUITS -  such as mango

Mangoes were also exotic. Now orange mango juice and transparent red or pink cranberry juice are everywhere in supermarkets in the UK. Hotels buffet breakfast in the UK and Europe, as well as the USA and Asia, often serve in addition to the class orange juice, apple or pineapple juice.

Exotic Foods

Back to shellfish. Now shellfish is in every supermarket in the UK. We can even eat durians from Asia, foods from all over the world. When I was a toddler for several years after WWII ended in 1945 you could not even eat a banana. We still had food rationing until 1952. Yay mother told me you had to queue for bananas. 

For more on oysters, see my previous post on oysters.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Author and speaker.

Singapore and Safety: Building Sites, Roads, Buildings, Dogs

   In Singapore building sites carry signs about safety such as helmets must be worn, statistics on the safety of buildings sites, roads carry signs giving statistics on accidents. The same applies often in the USA and UK.
   Signs in monkey areas on walks around reservoirs warn you not to feed the animals. Most adults know why. But small children and unsupervised teenagers don't. the reason is that animals act like small children. They grab for things they want, such as food, food containers, and new, interesting items. They move towards people and containers who habitually give food.
   They hit or bite or attack anybody who tries to take away food, or appears to cheat with an empty container, refuses to hand over food, or tries to take away food and toys.
   Once you have grasped this principle, it's easy to understand that if you feed animals on a regular basis, whether you throw food from a bag in a park or piazza, or from a balcony, or from your back door, you will attract birds, animals and insects. If you throw sandwiches or sweets or food wrappers from a boat or a lake or riverbank in a hotel, home, or city, you will attract the local wildlife.
   Tourists may be unfamiliar with this concept, or unfamiliar with the local wildlife. We arrived in the USA from the UK. Our child walked from the restaurant with a leftover sandwich. He walked out of the back door of the hotel. I chased after. there he was, sandwich in hand. about to throw it into the water next to a sign warning: CROCODILES - DO NOT THROW FOOD WHICH ATTRACTS THEM!
  But what about dangerous animals? Where are the signs in zoos warning you not to drop hats, not to stand near netting for a photo with the animal.
   What about houses where child visitors are in the same room as an animal.
March 2014, yet another accident involving a child and a dog. The four-year-old girl is dead. The mother was injured trying to rescue the child.
    Another incident involved a child taking a bone from a dog. Dog-lovers say the dog was not to blame. The child was not to blame either. The fault was allowing the two to mix.
   If we cannot rely on owners, we must bring in legislation. While we wait for that to happen, how about a simple sign. A child doesn't understand 'beware of the dog'.
   Most visitors don't understand. Most owners don't understand.
   Signs could, or should, read: 'Dangerous dog. Must be contained. No children to be allowed on this property.' Copy Singapore building site signs and give the vital numbers to call when help is needed. 'Hospital tel: .... Vet tel: ....  Police tel: .... Insurance company tel: .... That way we might save lives of humans, and the animals which would otherwise end up being put down.

Crocodiles Kill Child Swimming In Australia

Reports of a child missing presumed dead in crocodile infested waters in north Australia. Kakadu Park, where Crocodile Dundee was filmed, north of Alice Springs. About 13, unlucky 13, killed.      Comments say that weather is hot but people, adults and children, locals and tourists, should swim in swimming pools.
Are there nearby swimming pools? If so, are the swimming pools free or cheap?
If so, there should be a sign with a cross over swimming and a picture or nearest swimming pool. I suggest the words: "DO NOT ENTER WATER. Crocodiles live in these waters. If you want to swim, nearest swimming pool is at ...."
The same applies to areas of the USA, Florida, and Singapore.