Food here is super cheap.
At the night market, you can pay $1 for any meal (about 50p), and you get far
more than you can feasibly eat without busting a button on your trousers. We
don’t understand most of the words on a menu, so in an attempt to be adventurous
have resorted to just picking random things on the menu, but this inevitably
will bring us out masses of rice and some sort of fried gristly chicken on a
bone and/or fish dish and never a vegetable in site. This has meant that we’ve
started gravitating towards the eateries which provide pictures of each dish so
that we can just pick the greenest-looking one, but they never look the same
and rarely have more than a few shrivelled leaves and a spot of limp onion. One
even came out doused in a kind of treacle/chocolate sauce, and what we thought
was onion in the picture was in fact tofu. As you can imagine, this is all a
joy to the digestive system!...
One thing we do love, is
their vast array of cold drinks on offer. It seems in the absence of alcohol, they
have had to become super imaginative with their drinking options. And the
crowning glory comes in the form of ‘ABC’. For those of you who have tried
Bubble Tea, it’s basically like a ridiculous, quadruple-decker,
diabetes-inducing, version of that. To quote Lonely Planet, it is ‘a hillock of
shaved ice, garnished with red beans, palms seeds, grass jelly, sweet corn and
lurid-coloured syrups’ (Nb. The red beans have no resemblance to a vegetable).
This is basically a heart-attack in a cup. But it tastes bloody good.
So, as one wise Bruneian
said to us with a chuckle and a pat of his belly…”You’ve not been to Brunei
unless you’ve put on at least 3 kilograms!” And he’s not wrong.
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