Nut Vending Receptacles

Boiled peanuts being measured out.

Vendors are essential to a metropolis crawling with traffic. Nut vendors, in particular, provide non-candy sustenance to people like myself. The buckets of fried peanuts and cashew nuts, the steaming vats of boiled peanuts being rolled along.


Peanuts and cashew nuts, in a bucket with a partition.


A "door" for the cashew nuts, which do not share the same hole as the peanuts.

City Chickens

Fancy buildings.

Coming from Metro Manila into Singapore for me is kind of like being wheeled into an emergency room. It's a clean place, and you might have many existential thoughts.


A housing building.

There are neighborhoods though-- pockets of immigrants. Where you can see chickens on the street. That's where you go to soothe your aching need for chaos.


Chickens eating scraps outside a Geylang kopi tiam.


A typical menu in the back.

Cans / Ashtrays

Milk can ashtray.

Singapore mornings were spent people-watching and grabbing some indigenized coffee in any nearby kopi tiam. Business is brisk in most of them, and yesterday's cans are reserved for use as disposable ashtrays. A steady clientele means they never have to wash and dry another ashtray for as long as people order coffee with condensed milk... or dishes with ma ling (Chinese spam, which my nanny used to tell me was made of old Chinese people).


Ma-ling cans waiting to become ashtrays.

Drawer Handle Improvisations

Plastic rope and wire replacing handles at the durian joint.

Carboy Resurrected

...as a carrier attached to a bike.