I love to go a-wandering

This has been a travel-happy year so far. I went to England with Mr. Manx in May, to make up for the awful aborted trip last year.

This is a horse having a bad day at the Horse Guards Parade. If I'd been the horse I'd have been cranky too, being photographed by all these crazy tourists. Damn you, crazy tourists!

Then I went to Melbourne in July and had a great time with my pseudonymed friends Mr. and Mrs. Monty (and their two tiny Montettes – let’s call them Hontette and Sontette), Camellia and Tinman. 

A glorious ramble through the National Gallery of Victoria and the Queen Victoria Park led to this lamp-post overlooking the Yarra River (which I’m just mentioning for reference; you can’t actually see it in this picture, sorry). I can’t swear to it, but this was probably along St Kilda Road. I think.

I thought that was going to be it for the year, but as it turns out, in the span of the next few weeks I will be taking short trips to Bali and Hanoi. I’m really excited because I love travelling and taking strange new photographs. On the other hand, I really hate flying and am terribly unprepared (planned itinerary - nope; changed money - oops; packed luggage - eh)… but that’s kinda part of the fun sometimes, isn’t it?

Dragon Beard Candy

 

OK, these look heck of a lot like maggots, but maggots they are not. These things are dragon beard candy, made from hand-pulled sugar strands wrapped around crushed peanuts. They’ve been around a long time – supposedly thousands of years, when they were made purely for royal consumption.

This candy brings back memories every time I see it, because my mum introduced me to them when I was about five. There was a vendor in Thomson Plaza who actually made the stuff on site. I cannot begin to describe how fascinating the process is. You start with a stiff golden lump of melted blended sugar, work it supple, then pull it till it’s like a floppy donut. Then you double the donut, and twist, and pull, and double it again and again, dipping it often into a pile of flour, until suddenly there’s masses of super-fine, snowy-white threads that waft at the ends. That’s the beard. It looks exactly like the most perfect beard. Then you cut it, use it to wrap small heaps of crushed nuts, and that’s that.

In Singapore’s humid climate, the shelf life of this candy is negligible, but that makes it all the more exquisite. You have to eat it all up fast, before it gets sticky and hard. My favourite part is always the beard. Nothing else on earth has quite that texture of semi-sweet dry threads that wilt on the tongue and vanish. The other way to eat it is in big chunks, chewing on the gooey crunchiness till it melts away.

My mum loved this stuff, and I think of her each time I see a box of dragon beard candy. This is one of my childhood memories.