Textick

26th November, Oxford Hotel Singapore, Saturday 10:30pm

From where I’m sitting, I look up and see the reflection of wallpaper peeling behind me, unpainted walls yellowed with mould, dust-bunnies forming colonies on every surface. We fucked up our reservation. And this is where we’ve ended up. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not terrible, but I’m not taking the fall for getting us into this one metre bedroom rather than the bedroom I envisioned 80 Singaporean dollars would buy us. I’m unrealistic, apparently. Or I just thought 80 bucks would at least get us washed curtains. This has been a very interesting first day.
It begins, when, probably when I was thirteen and first got a taste of travelling. I went to the UK, England, Scotland and Ireland, had a lot of fun, appreciated things that thirteen-year-olds appreciated. Since then I was determined to go travelling as soon as I could, but finances always got in the way. Until I met James, who was happy to fall in love with me and work full-time while I finished my degree. So here we are. On day one of the first major adventure of my life.
We sat on the plane in Perth airport for an hour while a baggage problem was sorted. The pilot mumbled overlong explanations of it all. *intercept! Just saw an advert for KFC delivery! This place is so far ahead of us* James and I were sitting in two of the three middle seats, and the guy next to me was a young Singaporean named Joe, who was heading home for Christmas. By the end of the flight we had exchanged contact details with him and we’d all taken photos. Our first friend!
Now matter how often people had told me that Singapore was humid, nothing prepared me for the fog of hot air that wrapped around me the second we left the airconditioned confines of the airport. I’m leaving my jeans with our London luggage in Singapore.
It seems to me that Singaporeans are extremely proud of their country. We’ve been told three or four times about the wonder that is the new terminal of Singapore airline, and have been thoroughly convinced of the wonder of Singaporean food, both through preaching and practice. As our new hosts, Philip and Diana, drove us to our hotel Philip pointed out a lot of interesting buildings and sites. I’m yet to see this so-called crazy cleanliness of Singapore. Perth’s an extremely clean city, though, so perhaps I’m just used to having litter-free streets.
We arrived at the hotel only to discover that we were booked to arrive tomorrow, and they had no room for us. So we walked to a “very close” Internet café which ended up being the next building, no the next building, no the next building. Finally we log on, only to find, to our disgust, that we were indeed wrong. So no room.
By this time I’m getting stupidly tired and my leg is starting to hurt so much that I’m beginning to convince myself that I have DVT. But then I see the ninja’s. People are crammed around a large stage in the middle of the Raffles City, watching an uncoordinated, badly timed but brilliantly uncool ninja show. And as we watch, it occurs to us that this isn’t a normal ninja show. Though Philip tells us they’re ex-assassins (ex-assassins who can’t dance, I think) *interception! Just took a photo of James breaking the law by chewing gum. We’re so bad* Anyway, though Philip tells us they’re ex-assassins, I feel slightly dubious. And I think it has something to do with the massive Bat symbol above the stage. And sure enough, on he storms, in all his black caped glory. It’s BATMAN! And he kicks those ninja’s butts, and then we have to move on. To dinner.
We eat in a restaurant called Kopa Tiem, where the service is extraordinarily good. Their weekend specialty is roti bread, and we watch the chef stretching the bread. The waiter is the one who asks us if we’d like to watch, and he recommends meals and smiles a lot. He’s the Fonz of waiters. The food rocks, and we eat until my stomach is so full that the food is having to find refuge in my oesophagus. But we’re not paying, and were we normal backpackers, we’d never be able to afford it. Then we get dessert. Singaporean dessert is apparently nothing like anything in the world. James gets a durian coconut ice thing, and I get some weird hot soup with lychee-like fruits and white fungus. It was exciting, but the novelty quickly wore off.
Phillip and Diana walk us back to our hotel, where we’re hoping we’ll have a room. They detour by the Raffles. My DVT is starting to climb up my leg and head towards my heart. My ankle is throbbing.
The first time I’m brought out of exhaustion and into genuine excitement is when we see the original Raffles, with the men dressed in 19th century Imperial dress. We crunch across the loose gravel driveway and immediately feel like we’re dirtying the hotel. It’s stark white, with chandeliers outside and everything polished and a live pianist. The people here are filthy rich. James says to me,
“The thing with money is that when you’re poor, you’re poor. You have nothing. But there’s no limit to how rich you can be.”
We trudge on. The DVT is definitely near my heart now.
When we get to the hotel, we have a room. Yay! But as we enter the corridor, the overwhelming mustiness and scratched numbers on room doors makes me think that we might not have been so luck after all. But you know, I don’t care. I just want to go to sleep.

27th November, Oxford Hotel Singapore, Sunday 11:45pm. Our One Year Anniversary.

It’s easy to forget you’re in Singapore, that you’re a tourist, until you notice someone looking at your backpack, or you look around and realise you’re the only Westerner in a restaurant, or you see a straight black hair in the sink of a bathroom.
Our day started off slow. We slept. We slept until every single inch of our body was recharged from a week of panicked packing and partying (alliteration!). When we woke around 10:30, we meandered around the room. Despite the general dodginess of this place, it’s not hard for somewhere to feel like a home. All you need is a bed and aircon, and you find yourself feeling relaxed. Plus the bathroom is nice, which is all that really matters.
There’s something exciting about preparing for your day out. You put on your sunscreen and your hat and pack some snacks and maps, and suddenly you really feel like you’re on holiday.
We started by heading towards Little India, via a Church of the Saints Peter and Paul, where we saw a bumper sticker that said something about some kind of saint “pray for us.” We also grabbed a smoothie from a place called Sloosh. We went because the name of the story was in bright, dripping letters that we could see from our hotel window. The drink was expensive and small (we had a peach and orange with silken tofu smoothie), and it cost $4.90. Although it was good, it was pricey. Little India was incredible. This was what I wanted to see in Asia. Faded shopfronts, battered window shutters, vines climbing up cracked walls. The shops are tiny, narrow, jam-packed with merchandise. Small black birds with orange beaks and feet hopped around, joined by tiny brown finch-like birds. At one stage, the finches hopped around my feet, with apparent disregard for my presence. The Mosque was enormous, glistening gold domes and crisp white walls. James noticed the homeless man sleeping in the corner of the Mosque, and discreetly took a photo while I was wondering what the hell he was suddenly being so quiet for. The man didn’t awake. He looked so restful and happy. The strange thing with Little India, however, was that it was totally deserted. Only a few cars went down the streets, and most shops were closed. I thought perhaps this was typical of a Sunday, but people we mentioned it to later seemed surprised by the emptiness. As we wandered the empty streets, we were suddenly captured by the lure of Indian music drifting down an alleyway. We walked towards it, but were unable to find the source. We assumed it was coming from the Mosque. So we wandered through a pedestrian mall, which had quite a few shops open, and admired a street filled with silk merchants, and then tried to find lunch. We had our first encounter with trusting our gut instinct to not eat something, and decided to head out of Little India for lunch.
We attempted to go to the Mosque to have a look, but a man told us “two.” I thought he meant two dollars for entry. He really meant we had to return at two, because they were praying. As we walked toward it, we saw an older lady, who we later encountered again. She recognised us from the Mosque and vice versa. She was from Perth, her partner was an Englishman who lived in Bombay and they had met in the middle for a weekend tryst. We decided they’d met on the Internet. He looked lonely, she looked trashy. She worked for an Ascot restaurant and had stringy, out-of-date thinly curled blonde hair, a slight belly (kids, most likely), and an ankle-length 1980s style dark print dress. He was sweating like I’ve never seen anyone sweat before. He wasn’t overweight or anything, but his shirt was saturated and sweat was literally dripping off his forehead. It wasn’t even that hot.
After meeting them, we wandered across to an office building called The Parkview Centre, which is the single most beautiful building I’ve ever seen. Like something out of Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ or a Batman movie, it is relatively new, but designed to look stylistically 1920s/1930s. There were enormous brass statues of historical figures, such as Chopin, Dante and Dali. Inside the ceiling was about 50 metres high and covered with intricate brass carvings and paintings. There wasn’t an inch spared from copper or brass. What’s more, there was a wine fridge (James claims it was a wine rack, but it was behind glass so I don’t know) stretching to the ceiling. The floor was marble and the place took words away.
When we ate, we went to a noodle bar called Ramen. It was expensive, but we couldn’t find a seat in the food hall. We finally headed towards our tourist excursion around 2pm.
Fort Canning wasn’t too far away, but we had to walk around many road works. There seems to be building and road works happening everywhere in Singapore. Fort Canning was the base for the British in the 1940s, when they were defending Singapore from the Japanese. We went here to tour the bunker called The Battle Box, which has animatronic displays. The tour wasn’t for another twenty minutes, so we wandered the grounds. A Hindu wedding was being prepared in a section of the ground, and we were lucky enough to get a photo of the bridesmaids. I asked them when one caught my eye, and they were relatively happy to oblige.
The tour itself was…interesting. It began with a video we couldn’t hear, which was interrupted halfway through by an Indian family who chose to chat through most of it. Then for the tour we were given headphones and guided through the rooms by a guy who was frequently not there when the headphone commentary was finished. We’d stand around awkwardly waiting for him to reappear. The most frightening part was when the door first opened, and an air raid siren burst forward and a voiceover yelled “Gas Attack! Close the door!”. This frightening, jumpy type commentary didn’t reappear, unfortunately.
Animatronic stuff freaks me out. Wax is too lifelike, and it’s still too close to my having viewed “House of Wax.” I kept imagining they were swaying slightly on the spot, or kept expecting them to jerk their heads my way and blink. The animatronic was actually very, very, very jerky and obvious. It probably would have been better without it; it was too token an effort. There were also these holographic binoculars we looked through to view first the room, and then the way the room would have been way back when. It wasn’t as cool as it sounds.
Despite all this, it was a short tour but an interesting tour, and since we didn’t have much time it fit in well to an hour of the afternoon. And Fort Canning Park is stunning. I felt like I was in Perth Zoo the whole time! We also saw a shrine called a Kopitan(?), where a man was mopping the floor. He wasn’t a caretaker, he was just a man who wanted to show some respect.
Phillip picked us up at 5:30 in his Jaguar. He had his daughter Joy with him, who was very friendly. We went to their place via East Coast Park. Now, in Singapore, knowing how ridiculously expensive real estate is, Philip and Diana’s apartment had double doors. It cost $2 million. The floor was marble and everything was jade. There were ornaments everywhere, plus more ornaments behind glass cabinets. We didn’t even want to breathe on anything.
Then Diana started feeding us. We ate dried Durian, dried ginger (which was like fire in my throat), a snakeskin fruit, and dozens of bite-sized pastries. Then we were still expected to eat dinner. Oh, and they also gave us apple strudel and chocolate covered potato chips (which are a genius invention!). Then Diana’s niece Mei showed up with her husband, Cheung, and their three children, Jordan (13), Joodia (10) and Jesreel (8). Joodia and Jesreel had brought instruments to play music for us. Great, I thought kid musicians. Listening to Joodia and Jesreel play will go down as one of my travel highlights, I just know it. They were incredible. They played solo to begin with, intensely watching their hands as they slid around the notes. Joodia played first, a stringed instrument that is always heard in Chinese music. The notes are haunting, a beautiful crying, sweeping from soft to loud and sending shivers straight down to my toes. Then Jesreel played a guitar-like instrument, that she plucked with such ferocity and speed that I almost killed her when she admitted she’d only been playing for six months and neither of them practiced frequently (their exact words were that they practiced seldom. I thought seldom was an interesting word choice). Then the girls played together. They were like twins, whispering in each others ears, giggling over what to play, then striking a song together without skipping a beat of time. At one time, during another solo, Jesreel giggled halfway through and said her instrument was out of tune. Joodia walked over and helped her tune it.
Then we met the dog! A miniature pinscher, that looked like a chihauha cross Doberman! It was 14, but sprightly and energetic. It was named Splinter.
Dinner was at a Thai restaurant called “Lemongrass.” At first I thought it was a dodgy neighbourhood restaurant (made more obvious by the fact that there were no Westerners to be found), but when the food arrived I was gobsmacked. There was a whole pineapple, scooped out with rice inside it, parcels of chicken wrapped in an aromatic leaf, Tom Yum soup, mango salad, fried fish, etc. Our waiter looked like the guy from the Ribena ad; he was African and wearing a bright purple uniform. Also, there were two boys in the toilets playing on their mobiles, and when I went into the girls, there were two girls also playing on their mobiles. The boys thumped on the door and told them someone needed the toilet and they came out giggling. Strange.
Diana and Phillip insisted on about six dishes, dessert, and then coffee. I skipped coffee for a small ice-cream, to keep them happy. I’ve never eaten so much in my life! Then we drove around Singapore, admiring the Christmas lights on Orchard Road and stopping for petrol, where an older man filled the tank and washed every single window. Finally we were dropped home gone 11. The night had flown. Now it’s time for bed.

We saw a snail without a shell, but it wasn’t a slug, but it was a slug. James said it was a “hero in a half-shell.” The shell was kind of flattened over it’s body. It was weird.

We also met some random guy named Mohammed, who talked about his time in the navy and asked about our stay. He was kind and we were unnecessarily suspicious. But he was a little dodgy, and we kept expecting him to try and sell us something.

Oh yeah! We saw cigarette packets that had photos on them, rather than saying like “smoking is not good for you.” The photos were grotesque pictures of blackened lungs, deformed babies, cancerous throats. They were stomach-turning, and guaranteed to turn you off wanting to buy a packet. Also, alcohol can be bought everywhere but it is sooooooooo expensive. There are no designated liquor stores, but you can buy beer from the 7-11. A can of Jacks and Coke is $10. Imported beer like Kilkenny is $11 a pint.

We’re watching soccer again. We love ESPN.

I’ve bitten my tongue somehow. And I don’t have DVT. But we both do have blisters.

I’m still sooooo full from dinner.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Travel, Singapore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.