Kevin Kelly's fun photos of Asia

My friend Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired and founder of Cool Tools) is currently touring Asia and posting lots of wonderful photos of his travels.

You have not lived 'til you've had this Chinese dessert made from half a loaf of white wonder bread and ice cream.

Found on a car windshield parked on a street in Singapore. Spoof? Misplaced elitism? Dumb ad?

My favorite Chinese vehicle so far. You ride in the back facing backward. It's based on a tricycle motorcycle.

In 2002 Taschen published a book of Kevin's photos of Asia from past trips, called Asia Grace.

Kevin Kelly's photos of Asia

• [Mariana]

  McDelivery is very popular in Singapore. I’m sure that’s what the decal is alluding to.

  EDIT: Eh, maybe not. Looks like it’s a tie-in to an unrelated service. Carry on!

• [Aeron]

  Malaysia also has the McDonald’s VIP stickers. It’s a real thing made by McDonalds for their customers, some kind of frequent buyers program.

  http://www.mcdonalds.com.my/highlights/img/card.swf

• [SedanChair]

  You have not lived ’til you’ve had this Chinese dessert made from half a loaf of white wonder bread and ice cream.

  And you sure won’t be alive after you’ve had it.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    And you sure won’t be alive after you’ve had it.

    Or maybe you’ll just wish that you weren’t.

• [twianto]

  If it’s an ad it’s genius, not dumb! How many ad campaigns can claim that they reach thousands of customers on the other side of the world?

  (Also, Wonder Bread is a North American brand of sugar-flavored air held together by gluten. Rest assured that most rectangular white loaves of bread around the world do not quite achieve Wonder Bread’s unique nothingness and lack of taste. Not suitable as a generic noun.)

  • [penguinchris]

    Actually, that sort of Asian dessert-bread is very similar to Wonder Bread, if not essentially the same thing (it varies of course). It’s pretty sickening to eat, especially when it’s dressed up as an actual dessert like in this photo. The bread in the photo looks slightly more dense and probably more sweet – like angel food cake but worse :) 

    But rest assured, Wonder Bread-like-bread is used as a dessert food too!

    The worst part is that this is really what most people in certain parts of Asia think of when they think of bread, because bread in the way we know it in the west doesn’t have a traditional basis in Asia (they eat rice instead).

    I’m not a bread fiend by any means but I do enjoy a good quality bread once in a while. When I lived in Thailand off-and-on for a year I tried most local varieties of bread and they’re all pretty awful. The ultra-processed Wonder Bread-type stuff was most common and you couldn’t really even get the type of “normal” grocey-store white bread that’s most common in the west (not that I like that type of white bread either).

    • [twianto]

      Yeah, I know, just called “eating bread” (bad translation of 食パン on my part) in Japan, which would be my country. Except it’s not quite the same, hence the tongue-in-cheek comment. ;-)

      (But fret not, there’s plenty of actual bread-like sickly sweet puffy white stuff all around East and SE Asia.)

• [bcsizemo]

  Ice cream and Wonder bread?…  And here I thought Karo Syrup, white bread, and a pat of butter was weird.

• [Adam Brown]

  We have similar McDonalds stickers in Australia. The “VIP” gives you a small discount/upgrade, but the real trick is getting drivers to have a McDonalds sticker in their field of view whenever they drive! (The backs of the stickers have another logo, facing the driver at all times)

• [jmv]

  That tricycle totally needs to be covered in UPS decals.

• [MooseDesign]

  The trike taxi is definitely a fun experience… My brother and I got a ride in one in Xi’an and as two 200+lbs men it was a hilariously tight fit and the lady driving us couldn’t stop laughing. Once the hilarity had subsided we got to concentrate on the terror of having the city buses whiz by within an inch of the bike or tap the rear where we were sitting in order to get into their bus stop area. All in all, lots of fun though…