Pre-departure days

I am typing this staring at the last piece of my Vietnamese chicken, my last lunch on a rainy Friday afternoon in Singapore... We are heading back home on Sunday at dawn, today is the last day of B's work and I am at the apartment wrapping up my work before I tackle the Packing Challenge... The last two weeks have really been nothing but a countdown to the departure. We have tried to go out as much as we could and do as much as we could before we leave. Which meant a lot of food extravaganza, for the most part ;). We had to say "good bye" to all our regular dining spots, but at the same time we wanted to squeeze in a few more new places and new flavors. In the quest for the new food, we've discovered a great Korean barbecue place. I had never had Korean food before we went there last Thursday. The whole evening was a great adventure! We ordered two main dishes - something called Bulgogi (a beef dish) and a marinated chicken dish. Everything gets grilled right on your table so they set up quite a scene for these two dishes - with gas burners and everything. We had three people barbecuing the food for us at the table. While they were doing that, we were served an abundance of side dishes, which apparently came with our two meat dishes. And when I say abundance, I mean about ten different vegetable sides, some seaweed soup and kimchi rice. We got full snacking on all those even before our meat was ready!

It was all sooo yummy! After dinner we went on yet another adventure - we tried the famous Singaporean foot reflexology massage. The spa that we went to is mostly famous for the fish tanks - it's a fish spa! Which means that you can soak your feet in a tank where the fish take care of cleaning all the redundant skin and callouses off your feet! So - a fish pedicure... It's wildly popular here and the fish tank section of the spa is actually nicely organized - most tanks are for two people, with computers with internet access sitting on top of a little table, so you can browse the net or read your mail, or blog ;) when you have your feet sucked clean by the fishes. Does it sound appealing? Not to me... I would maybe go there if I was challenged or drunk (or both) or as part of a girls night out. (which is really equivalent to both of the previous conditions together)... 

But for now - no thank you. This is what it looks like, for those interested:

We only tried the foot reflexology massage, which was actually really nice and relaxing (although at times quite painful). I wish we had tried that earlier so I could have more than one session... But maybe I will have a chance to repeat that experience in the future. We shall see. 

On Friday night we tried yet another new place - a Japanese restaurant called Tatsu. 

We tried some delicious katsu dishes (breaded fried pork - Bryan's favorite) they are famous for, as well as a lot of really good sushi...Tetsu was another place we wish we had discovered earlier. But there are SO many good restaurants here that having lived here for three months only allowed us to scratch the surface of all this yummy goodness... I still believe we made the most of the time that we had here, at least as far as trying various foods goes.

Two other things that I discovered in the last two weeks: a fresh coconut water / milk drink which I fell in love with - better late than never ;) and an absolutely delicious Japanese dessert that we found at the food court at the bottom of ION orchard. A company called Gindaco has three stands there and we noticed some time ago that there is aaaalways a line to their stand. Upon first inspection, we determined that they were selling something that looked like fried balls. Balls or no balls, if it's fried Bryan will like it ;). And it seemed like a lot of people liked them because with the plethora of choices available at the Food Opera @ ION Orchard it's really surprising to see a permanent line in front of one of the stalls there. So we have been wanting to try the Fried Japanese Balls for some time. And we actually went and stood in line and bought them one day this week. The balls actually have a real NAME and they are called Takoyaki. They were not my favorite, mainly because it turned out the insides of the balls contained octopus, and I am not very fond of octopuses, unless they are the friendly octopuses that you see in cartoons and not the octopuses that you eat or - even worse - the baby octopuses that they serve here on a stick, hardly fried and still moving, in my biased opinion, with their little eyes staring at you and begging not to eat them. So that's my attitude to octopuses - like it or not - which definitely affected my attitude towards the Japanese balls. However, Mr Gindaco stand also serves Japanese fried noodles which were quite tasty and - that's where we come to the most important part - the dessert fishes. There is a separate dessert stand by Gindaco and there they have several really large baking trays that look like giant sandwich makers with cutouts in the shape of FISH. They pour dough - chocolate or white - into the fish-shaped forms and then they fill ithe inside of the fish with custard or milk or coffee or fresh bananas and then they pour more dough on top and shut the fish trays close and bake the fish. And the fish comes out all hot and yummy crunchy on the outside soft melting goodness on the inside it's like a sweet Belgian waffle with a filling!! My favorite - Coffee Milk Fish. Bryan's favorite - Custard Fish. The first time we tried them (a few days ago! Oh, the wasted weeks when we passed by the fish and never noticed them smiling enticingly from their warm glass case...) we walked a few steps away, had a bite of the fish, ate it and immediately turned around and went back for two more. They are not really big - if THAT counts as an excuse to go back for the seconds of your dessert... By now the nice old lady that seems to live at that stand, making and selling the sweet fishes, is a good friend of ours and a smile of recognition lights up her wrinkled face when we approach. We have been visiting her quite frequently recently and we don't even care  - I know it's hard to believe - that our other Very Good Friends at the Haagen Dazs ice cream stand feel abandoned and betrayed. That's just too bad.

It may not seem obvious, but we actually did make an attempt to do other things than eat in the last two weeks of our Great Singapore Adventure. Two weeks ago we got to hang out with a friend of mine from Poland who does business in Indonesia and is a frequent guest in Singapore. He and a couple of his colleagues flew in on Saturday and we were to meet  them for dinner. Since they had just arrived from Poland I was certain that we would be parting ways not later than 9 pm because they would be exhausted. That only shows that after five years of living away from Poland I somehow forgot what Polish people are like, and that I should never underestimate them and their will to party...We ended up walking all around Singapore and having drinks at a few different bars in two different areas of the city, only to say good night around... 2.30 am... And I honestly think that Bryan and I were more tired and sleepy than any one of them when we were saying our goodbyes. Not to mention definitely more influenced by the alcohol that we drank that night - I think it was the most drinks I've had since my farewell happy hour in Austin... It was a fun night, including a bizarre taxi incident - at Clark Quay we stood in a very long line to a taxi stand to go to the Emerald Hill bars for more drinks and we got picked out of the line by someone who offered us all a cab ride in one taxi for a flat rate. We agreed and followed him to a big limo cab parked around the corner, which we all climbed into only to discover that the driver had rap music blasting out of the speakers and disco lights flashing all around  above our heads in the car ! It was pretty surreal, but a nice touch at the same time. It definitely added to our out-partying-in-Singapore experience...

Last weekend we decided to give Santosa island another shot - we went there once in the very beginning and that was it, so we thought we owed it another visit. We went there with our Irish friends Liam and Christine and their little Baby Lily. To get to Santosa we took a cable car, which was not such a great adventure for me as I really am afraid of heights. But it was definitely a more fun way to get to the island than taking the train... The views from the cable car were great - or so I heard, because I really tried not to look down too much. We walked around Santosa with them, went to see the Festive Walk at the Universal Studios which turned out to be nothing more than another cluster of stores and restaurants - i.e. another mall, this time outside, which was not very appealing during the day. Our friends had to leave early and we decided to stay behind to watch the Lake of Dreams fountain show at 9 pm. To kill time, we walked back to the beach area where somehow - and I still  to this day really don't know how - Bryan persuaded me to get on a skyride up the hill with him and go back down the hill riding a luge!!!! I will not go into the details of how scared I was going up the hill in an open seat that was no different from a ski lift, other than instead of skis we were pulling our luges under our seat. At the top of the hill we got helmets and we got into these two plastic luges, me wearing a much too short a skirt for such an adventure and down the hill we went!!!! This part WAS fun, I have to admit. We chose the jungle trail (the other one was a Dragon one, which we thought would be more for kids.. - the luge being such an adult thing to do, in general...) and we rode down the hill along a 650 metre paved track that went through a jungle-like forest and took us back down to the beach. It was exciting (if a tad scary ;)! After that, we had dinner at a Japanese Ramen place and then went to see the Lake of Dreams spectacle. Which was a little disappointing. I mean the first 10 minutes of it were actually impressive with the fountains and lights and even fire on the water but then it just got plain boring. So we left the fountain show after some 20 minutes and took a cable car (my THIRD time high up in the air suspended on a metal rope in a little cubicle that day! Enough for the next five years, if you ask me) back to Singapore.

And last Sunday we went back to the Botanical Gardens. It turns out that we saw the most interesting part of the Gardens on our first visit, so this time we explored the Ginger Garden and just walked around. B insisted that we also go to the Evolution Garden, which we did, but other than a bunch of stones there was not much there so we left pretty quickly. And that was it as far as sightseeing goes... The one thing we did not do was to go to the Marina Bay Sands hotel / casino combo but maybe we will still have a chance to do that one day...

Tomorrow is our last day here. I am extremely excited to be going back home to Austin although I know that I am going to miss some things that I am leaving behind. I like living in the city where I can walk everywhere - neither of us really misses driving, which is kind of weird. We are definitely going to miss the delicious and diverse Asian food that we have been living on for the past three months. I have discovered so many dishes and flavors that I did not know before - some of them so spicy that they made me cry, most of them delicious. I am even going to miss their weird congee porridge-like dishes. And the noodles, ah, the rice noodles in all their shapes and forms...I am going to miss them too. Our weekend brunch  heavenly light and fluffy pastries from BreadTalk, the out-of-this-world Milk Pans from the Provance Bakery... And don't even get me started on the broken-hearted old lady from the Fish stand who will wait for us to come back for our daily fish and then one day she will realize that we are gone and her daily sale drop is going to become permanent...Singapore is not a bad place to be. I only wish we could bring ALL our friends here. Then living here would be so much more fun! I know Bryan would also need ESPN, burgers and tex-mex to complete this ideal picture. And I could throw in an item or two - like watchable MOVIES at theaters!!! Not to mention someone to go and see those movies with (I miss you Amy!!!). But Austin - we are on our way - towing with us a serious number of pieces of luggage, a lot of yet-unseen photos and stories untold... See you soon! Good bye Asia. I know we will see you again. But for now - thank you for the very encouraging first encounter.

quiet August

Wow, time has just been flying by! We realized yesterday that (if nothing changes) we have just a little over two weeks to go here... And August has really not been a very eventful month for us. Mostly because of B's work - it dominated our lives for the first two weeks of August, as Very Important Things were happening at his work and Very Important People came from all over the world to be a part of these Very Important Days... Which introduced some variety into our lives, I met a lot of new people from B's company and I enjoyed it thoroughly - not every day do I get to sit at a table with people from Japan, China, India, Australia and US (and Poland...) at the same time - so much information to exchange, so much knowledge to gain about culture and places I have never been to.. But also so much practice in understanding various accents of English - I am getting good at it but still have a looong way to go... The sand settled at the end of last week when the last group of people left and we stayed behind... Getting back to our pre-Hectic Two Weeks routines. 

Somewhere around that time B tried Durian for the first time. It was a work thing - a tasting organized by some of his local colleagues, so I did not get to go. The good news is that nobody threw up or fainted! And - as far as I know - everybody present tasted The Fruit. On the day preceding the Tasting I had a long conversation about it with Jenny from B's work - she is Malaysian and she grew up eating durian - allegedly her parents even have a durian tree in their garden. She claimed durian was DIVINE. That's exactly the word she used. Repetitively. DIVINE. To describe something THAT smelly as divine - it really gets you interested. Especially when at the same time you are shown this clip on the phone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQj-hFfmYkQ

All you keep on thinking is how can something THAT smelly taste SO good? And curiosity is born. So the next day they all went to taste the durian. Luckily for me they also tasted a lot of other fruit, some of which B brought back for me to try. They tried to give him some durian to bring back to the apartment for me to try but he refused flat out. I imagine the smell would linger here for weeks, considering how small a space we have here... As for durian, the only information that, after a lot of nagging, I managed to extract from B, was that it had weird consistency, it smelled even more awful as you got closer to it and that it kind of tasted like a sweet, mushy avocado. It DOES sound DIVINE, doesn't it?... I tried to ask some other people who participated in the tasting for their impressions but to a simple question "did you like it" there was never a simple answer - just a lot of twisting, turning, hand wringing and weird facial expressions followed by non-specific phrases like "well... you know... uummmm... kinda...", until Chris, a very nice guy from Austin was kind enough to whisper "Nobody Really Liked It" into my ear. Will I ever try it? I don't know. I know now of the place where one should go to try it - the place where B and all his work colleagues were taken for the tasting - it's a little store in a strip mall where a truck of durian arrives straight from Malaysia (that's where, allegedly, the best durians come from) every week day at 6 pm so if you are anxiously awaiting the fresh durian during the durian season - that is THE place to go and stand in the line and wait for the King of Fruit to arrive in all its smelly glory, by a truckload. During these pre-tasting and post-tasting conversations in smaller and larger groups we formulated a lot of speculations as to why and how come the locals may indeed love durian, for example: maybe their taste buds get ruined early in childhood... We also tried to come up with a similar food item in the western cuisines that smells god-awful but people LOVE it and simply devour it. But we could not come up with anything (well, I kind of secretly came up with something, but I would NEVER ever admit it out loud for fear of being lynched either by my own husband or by my Louisiana friends back in Austin ;)).

For me, the upside of the durian tasting was the most delicious mango I have ever eaten, a bag of fresh longans and some MANGOSTEENS. Which I absolutely fell in love with. They are hard to peel and B had to show me how to open them (having been taught to do that by the durian and other fruit masters from his work) without spilling the juice all over me - the mangosteen juice stains are supposed to be very hard to remove, and I am not willing to verify if that's true. There is not much FRUIT in the mangosteen fruit but whatever there is tastes sooo good...I have discovered so many delicious fruit varieties here in Singapore! If only for that reason, living here has been worthwhile..

Monday, August 9 was the National Day in Singapore. It's the local independence day so everybody was off and the locals as well as the expats, were celebrating the 45th birthday of Singapore. The big celebration, including a very long and complex parade and an air show, was long sold out. The only thing to watch without the precious ticket was the fireworks, which we were invited to watch at B's friend's from work apartment with a view of most of the Singapore, including the Marina Bay where the fireworks were happening. They were really pretty impressive, synchronized fireworks set off both from the ground level and from the tops of the highest buildings at the Marina Bay. The show lasted a long time, and it was really awe-inspiring. And we got to have a very good view of it from the 23rd floor of an apartment building in the Novena area.

Tuesday, August 10 (two days ago) was the first day of the 7th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, which means that for a month now Singapore will be witnessing the Hungry Ghost festivities. It is sort of a Chinese version of the America Halloween - the Chinese believe that during this period spirits are released from hell to visit their relatives here on earth. So everywhere we go we run into some serious meals prepared for the ghosts - in front of restaurants and stores there are tables set up with fruit, smoked  ducks, chickens, rice. Apart from all these offerings, we also witnessed some "hell money" burning on a busy street in the city center! And then there is the smell of incense sticks... they are burnt practically everywhere. We are planning to visit Chinatown in the next few days, since part of the Hungry Ghost festivities are Chinese street operas - we are hoping to catch a glimpse of one of such performances.

Otherwise not much has happened...It appears like we are going back home as scheduled, which means that I will be back in Austin in less than three weeks, at least for some time... We are still hoping to make one more trip out of Singapore but the destination is yet to be determined. Also on the list of things to do - a visit to Holland Village, to the restaurant serving, we've found out, the best Chicken Hor Fun in town. And on the same note - we were told that the ultimate Chicken Rice (a signature Singaporean dish) is served at the Chatterbox restaurant at the Mandarin hotel - just a block down from our apartment. I've had some pretty tasty chicken rice (which basically is a dish of rice cooked in chicken broth, which makes it very flavorful, served with steamed or roasted chicken and chili and garlic sauces) but I want to have the point of reference to be able to tell whether the chicken rice I've had was good or just so-so - and that's why we are going to pay a visit to Chatterbox and try their chicken rice, overpriced or not. I have tried the other "signature" Singaporean dish - chilli crab at two restaurants so far - Jumbo Seafood at Clark Quay and No Signboard Seafood at the Esplanade - and I can say with all certainty that the one at the No Signboard Seafood is waaay better - the sauce is thicker, more flavorful and a bit less spicy - I LIKE. Shocking as it may seem, I have NOT had the Singapore Sling yet... But there are still more than two weeks to go so I am hoping that this may change! And all my observations concerning this famous Singaporean cocktail will be duly reported.