“Murah-murah” at Kuching Sunday Market and Sibu Central Market

Hate for the chilly atmosphere but long for the crowded stalls? Head for the local markets that will do you a favor.  Smell the welcoming scent and greeted by the warmth that you will hardly found at the department stalls. When travelling, include a local market shopping spree in your itinerary could be a marvelous idea if you wish to see the authentic local culture and the people’s ways of living.  

Kuching Sunday Market and Sibu Central Market will complete your exotic journey to the East while living the wooden puppets, key chains, and seashells to the souvenir shops. You will see things that you have never come across – live hens and ducks wrap in the newspaper, durian that appears in bright orange colour, local mandarin and longan with the skin in green colour, and you can squat to watch the cock fight performance. Get the fresh local vegetables and fruits in season and you can ask the sellers on how to eat them in the ‘most appropriate’ way. You might inspire the housewives to share with you the best home cook recipe while they are bargaining with the sellers in a very creative way just to get few cents discount or to have some small free spring onions.

As in Sarawak, you will find the ethnic groups such as the Iban and the Bidayuh are selling more exotic type of products yet cheaper in price. Don’t underestimate them, they are the simple kind of people yet produce the purest honey that costs only RM15. They sell the freshly harvested vegetables from their unpolluted lands. As for the food hunter, by familiarize with the raw ingredients from the market, you will know how to order the best local taste in the restaurant.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you bring back home the secret of cooking midin and paku for your kitchen master? This is where it worth a visit that you will never regret.

Forget-Scent-Not

Smell the scent, sense the fragrance, is a method used to recognize and to familiarize without touching, seeing, and feeling. Scent, a powerful chemical that enables a cub or a child to associate its mother without seeing. And because of the scent, a stag will produce a musky pheromone to attract a doe during the rut, that people use it today to perform the similar function, to get the aphrodisiac sensation, except it is based on no season. Unfortunately, our body odor is not pleasant all the time. At times, some liquid are dripped onto the wrist or the back of the ear lobe, believed in the fragrance to be carried by the vessel and distributed inconspicuously. This magical potion that has been called perfume, the blending of alcohol with variety of oils extracted from flowers, fruits, or synthetic, causing especially the women, who have probably impossible of tracking its era of her association with fragrance, to be indulgent in it. One of the tourist spots, the must-do activity in France is to visit the perfumery. Although the tour comes with a perfume vial as a door gift, it would become more exciting and anticipating if the 'fragrance tour' has completed with a present when the smell guessing activity is carried out. About the door gift, sorry to say, it smells of mosquito coil, in which i admit that i don't appreciate some of the 'arts of smell'. Yet, the tour lady who works for this Fragonard Parfumeur is someone worth my notice. Her thin sharp nose, the act of placing the perfumed sticks in front of her nose is sexy and really soothed the eyes. The journey of discovering perfumes today can be as easy as obtaining a sample from the cosmetic counter,in which i have one, Midnight Rose from Lancome. Or is it only as determined as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, the perfection can only be achieved?