November 6, 2006
Three days to report on. The worst is that I procrastinate then when I have the most to report.
Backdrop: My sister Cornelia roomed with a Singaporean, Priscilla, during her studies at Regent College, Vancouver. Priscilla of course has friends in Singapore, but what's more, she has "jiemeis" - Sistas. Three of them had met Cornelia in Vancouver and so Cornelia hooked me up with them for a local connection. Considering that one of them works in a hospital, one of them works with juvenile delinquents, and one lectures on tourism, it's obvious I was in good hands all the way.
The main goal: see unusual sights and eat weird food.
So on Saturday Claude (tourism) and Adrienne (delinquents) picked me up at the hotel and drove to Changi, the east end of the main island that constitutes most of Singapore. (Changi is also where the airport is.) There we boarded a bumboat to Pulau Ubin (Malay for Granite Island), a small island with a couple hundred inhabitants that live in villages (kampongs) like those that used to cover Singapore - water from wells and electricity from diesel generators.
Bumboat: Malay for a motor-powered hull with a wooden superstructure that, if the ride lasted longer than the ten minutes it takes from Changi to Pulau Ubin, would rattle your jaw out of your skull. This is also why the captains always need a lengthy rest chewing betel leaves and building their maxillofacial muscle tone before going on the return run. The word is not related in any way to buttocks or homeless people.
I should also note that the two rides on the bumboat were the only thing I managed to pay for while in company of an of the jiemeis. Now that's hospitality.
On Pulau Ubin we rented bicycles and rode around, Claude and Adrienne in shorts and short-sleeved shirts and me in long jeans and a long-sleeve white dress shirt. I think everyone's first thought was that I was crazy. I had a double rationale: I had no other pants and I burn easily.
And I sweat easily, as Pulau Ubin proved. Even though we cycled slowly and the island is basically flat, by noontime my shirt was drenched, and it hadn't rained. We stopped at a beach, at a roadside hut where we had fresh coconut, guavas, and a bare-chested introduction into medicinal herbs by the uncle-ah that Adrienne expertly chatted up, at a Thai temple, and at the shrine of the German girl. This shrine was built to house the urn containing the remains of a German girl that had allegedly died on the island in WWI and whose remains had been exhumed because it stood in the way of a quarry or something of that nature. Someone had pasted a laminated newspaper article with the above information to the bright yellow shrine. It also reported that the man taking care of the shrine had opened the urn to find it empty. Nevertheless, pilgrims come from as far as Myanmar and Thailand.
Back in the kampong near the jetty we had a lunch of garlic fried prawns, wild boar, chili veggies, leather jacket (the fish, not the garment), and other delicacies I can't remember. I tried an oldenlandia drink, which is supposed to cool you down, but only succeeded in cooling my desire to try odd South East Asian drinks.
Note to fellow tourists: Before eating in Singapore, make sure you've brought your own paper napkin.
Adrienne and Claude dropped me off at the Singapore Expo, where I had to walk past the Intimate Asia exhibition to get to Wine for Asia, the exhibition I'd read about in the Straits Times. Australia occupied the largest area, followed by New Zealand, Italy, Argentina, France, South Korea, Spain, Germany, South Africa, and Chile. Mexico and Venezuela showed tequila and rum, and India showed a shiraz with a smoky flavor that intrigued me enough to buy it. After at least two people from the French pavilion invited me to sign up for a talk on wine tasting, I relented and listened to thirty minutes of wine tasting for dummies. Fortunately, I am a wine tasting dummy, so I enjoyed the talk.
Wine tasting for dummies in brief: The 5S: See (look at the color: whites go from light to golden and reds from intense red to faded brownish colors with age), Swirl (set the aroma free), Sniff (to recognize the grape ny its scent), Suck (to get the flavor - look for balance, the texture - look for smoothness, and the finish - look for a long, pleasant aftertaste), and Savor (swallow or spit). What to say: if the wine is young (light white or intense red) praise the aroma, if it's old, praise the bouquet, if you dislike it, say something nice about your hostess's dress and move on to the next wine. For those tasting champagne, bubbliness becomes the sixth criterion: look for small bubbles that rise at constant rate.
Thank you, Ministère de l'Agriculture et de la Pêche!
For dinner, I met Sharon (hospital public relations) and her friends Joan and Marcus for dinner. Marcus suggested putting Hello Kitty on our microscopes and then blaming the distributors if anyone thinks we're not serious about science as a scheme to sell more in Asia. We ate at a hawker centre, one of the few places where Singaporeans will actually condescend to eat without aircon. You choose a table, which at least one person must guard at all times, and then go about searching for food from the different open stalls. We had roti john (Malay for John's bread - I'm serious, lah!), satay, fried baby squid, some turnip roll the name of which I've forgotten, and in the end ice kachang - not a Malaysian rapper but shaved ice with sugary syrup poured on it. Mine had yummy durian puree on top and, like all ice kachang, half-baked red beans and grass jelly beneath the shaved ice. I had a spoon of that and that was all.
Sharon and I went to the Mustafa Center in Little India after that and spent two and a half hours traipsing through the huge shopping complex crowded with other shoppers. From mattresses to fake jade Merlions, Mustafa has it all, except for tennis shoes in my size.
Merlion: Not Mermaid, not even Merman, the Merlion looks like a prawn with nostrils and a toupet. If you thought Canada erred in its choice of the beaver as national animal, visit Singapore.
On Sunday I attended church with Sharon. The senior pastor spoke on 1 Corinthians 12:1-6, mostly on spiritual gifts and prophecy. I listened and took notes. We went for lunch in Holland village, the yuppie part of town, and had chicken feet among other things. I'd always thought they'd be fried to such a crisp that the bones would crumble between your teeth, but the opposite is true: they are stewed in a sauce for who knows how long until you can suck the skin off the toes, like an itty-bitty soggy corn dog without the sausage.
Somehow that reminds me: I have now been told by two sources that century eggs are made by marinading them in horse urine. ("It's a tonic.") Considering that, they taste surprisingly good. Also, I can now say I've ingested horse pee without referring to a beer. Here's to achievement that makes a difference.
We drove to the Queensway shopping complex and again, no luck with shoes. Apparently, my size is the most common men's size in Asia. (This led to Adrienne later singing some song about a Ladies' Man in a public parking lot because to her, my feet were ladies' feet.)
We almost scrapped our plans to go for a walk in the Bukit Timah (Malay for Lead Hill) nature reserve, the highest point of the whole Island at 164 meters and one of only two rainforest parks close to a major city, because of an intense downpour. But the indecision it caused lasted longer and caused us to stay the course and meander up the hill, through dense growth and cicada song. I'd always been told that no light hits the jungle floor and imagined walking in a rainforest to be like walking in a haunted house, except the noises would be for real. But either Bukit Timah is tame or my expectations were misplaced. It was like a regular forest, except the trees were different and the greenery more layered and everything was wetter and misty.
For dinner we went to Arab Street, to an eatery off Jalan Sultan (Malay for King's way). There we had murtabak and tulang (named after a Malay hit of the sixties). Tulang qualified as my weird food for the evening: a mutton bone with very little meat on it, the delicacy being the marrow inside. In the end I had to resort to a straw to get out the marrow. Like everything else except the murtabak, the tulang came slathered in a bright red sauce that at the end of the meal covered my fingers and face. Fortunately, I'd remembered to prepare my paper tissue to mitigate the mess.
Thank you, Claude the organizer, Sharon the shopper, and Adrienne the glam!
Today I ate less for breakfast (eggs on toast - I skipped the "museli") and lunch (spicy McChicken or whatever they call it) and dinner (durian puff and mars bar). It's nice to compensate. At McDo's I was in for a surprise: suddenly, Amy Grant's perennial favorite "Baby Baby" played from the loudspeakers. I'd never before consciously registered that wicked funky keyboard solo.
Ok, that's it. Time for bed.
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