Singapore (24-25 Aug)

So after almost a full year of being in Luleå it was time to use the return leg of my air ticket to visit home for a couple of weeks. On the way, I had a 36 hour stopover in Singapore, where I visited my high school buddy Geordie and his wife Evangeline. I had had only 4 days home in Luleå in between coming back from crazy experiments, so was still a bit exhausted, but gotta see as much as possible anyway...

The thing I miss most about living in Luleåland is the lack of good, cheap Asian food (my favourite cuisine). There are 2 good thai restaurants there, but mains are ~30-40 $AUD, and the chinese restaurants are so-so though a bit cheaper. No quick bowls of noodles to be had.

Our first outing was to a hawkers market, a huge food court where each stall specialises in something like noodles, seafood, satay, or drinks. This is the fast food of Singapore - cheap, usually fried, with a focus on meat and carbs. It was great! I had my fave char kway teow, satays, and for the first time: stingray, which was really tasty. In a couple of days I could start saying this was my preliminary revenge for what happened to the Croc Hunter.



In terms of stinky stinky foods, Japan has natto (fermented soybeans), Sweden has surströmming (fermented fish) Australia has... vegemite? (byproduct of beer fermentation). Notice the link: controlled rotting. But Singapore is a bit different because it has the famed Durian, a spiky green fruit that comes naturally rotten. It smells really bad, of rotten eggs and more. A durian shop can be smelled hundreds of meters away, and the fruit is officially banned from being taken on public trasnport.

It took Geordie 3 years to get able to 'enjoy' durian. I had 3 hours.

And actually, it was pretty good. It does have a kinda slimy, fleshy texture to it, but aside from the smell it tastes like vanilla, a bit like custard apples. But strange to eat with such an unpleasant smell lurking around, and which stays on the fingers for quite a while. Would I eat it agian? Yes.

Me, Geordie, and Durian

A typical residential street, where Geordie's in-laws live

I don't have a good picture of it, but a great thing about Singapore's streets was the greenery. Being a tropical island, all the main roads and freeways are lined with massive, green trees, which is very different to the unending grey concrete + billboards on the commute to work in Chicago.

During the day I did two things I didn't actually plan on doing - waterskiing (or wakeboarding) and electronics shopping. Geordie had taken the day off work, and I thought I would just hang around and see touristy sights, but in the end we tried this rope-pulley skiing system set up on a a lagoon just near the hawkers market. It was quite hard, and I only got around the whole circuit a couple of times. Maybe I should have turned around...

Shoppingwise I ended up going to SimLim Square to try and fix a problem with a hard disk and did some shopping. For dinner we caught up with E and had the Singaporean specialty Hainanese chicken rice for dinner, Chinatown for dessert, and little india (Mustafa's emporium) for some more shopping.

At the chicken rice place

Geordie and E

Chinatown. largely the same as most Chinatowns I've been to

Grasshopper trying to lift the cauldron of boiling hot herbal tea

Me!

Although the time was way too brief, it was great to catch up with Geordie and E. Thanks guys for all the driving and running around - next time I'll try and give it a few more days.