Singapore Sling

I was puffing and panting even before I could reach half way up. The pagoda stood seven storeys high, and the spiraling stairs inside seemed endless. It was at times like this that I realized that I have come past my glorious days of fitness and endurance.

Not surprisingly, Esther had none of my difficulties and she made it to the top in good time. But Tay did surprise me, as he was pretty comfortable with the task too, in spite of his age. He must have seen at least ten summers more than I have. That is, if there was a summer season in Singapore. To me it looked like the summer and rainy seasons were one, and it prevailed throughout the year.

From the top of the pagoda we got an excellent panoramic view of the Chinese Garden and its neighbourhoods. The garden was lit up beautifully, with a number of bright and colourful models of the wonders and cultural symbols of the world erected amid a sea of glowing lanterns. This was the Chinese mid autumn festival. Singapore was alive with three colourful festivals all being celebrated at the same time. If you went to Little India, you could see the magnificent Deepavali decorations featuring a thousand glowing peacocks, and elsewhere you could see equally impressive displays of colour and light welcoming the Malaysian Islamic festival of Hari Raya Puasa and the Chinese mid autumn festival, aka the mooncake festival. There were mooncakes everywhere, in shopping malls, hotels and on billboards all over the city. Orchard Road, the numero uno shopping district of Singapore, had all its trees decorated with their trunks wrapped tastefully in red silk with beautiful white dots on it.

I have been here for two weeks now and there is one more to go. While here, I am enjoying the gracious company and hospitality of my hosts Tay, Ram, Lawrence and their colleagues. And so is Esther, who had flown in from the USA a week back. Work has been satisfying too, with deadlines being met and goals achieved with only a few minor hiccups here and there.

I experimented quite a bit with food, trying a different type each time. Tay helped me decide whenever I blinked at the menu. At the Long Beach seafood restaurant, I ate lobster meat raw. Yes, raw. I also ate the meat of Canadian Geoduck. I had never heard about that creature before, but here I could see a number of them alive in a glass tank before choosing to eat one of them. Tay said it’s a kind of crab, a huge one at that, but it didn’t look to me like a crab at all. It looked like a portable vacuum cleaner at best. It had a roundish body with a shell covering it, and then a long trunk that resembled an elephant’s trunk. And I ate it raw as well as cooked. It was actually served raw, shredded pieces of meat on an ice platter, and you had the option of dipping it in boiling soup that was kept on the table. Metal strainers were provided for this purpose. And when I dipped a piece in the soup and held it there for a couple of minutes, one of my colleagues said I was spoiling it by overcooking. Then the waitress brought a big bowl of prawns, each of them at least six inches long, all alive. They stared at us from the bowl, and hustled and jostled to get out of it. I was wondering how we were going to eat them. Luckily help was at hand. The waitress transferred the entire live lot into the boiling soup bowl, and held them down with the lid when the poor souls thrashed about violently in their death throes. It lasted for only a few seconds though. After about five minutes, they were ready to be eaten, all hands and legs and antennae. I have to admit that the meat was delicious. And so was the soup it was cooked in, which we devoured after finishing the meat part.

I have had a number of such interesting experiences during my visits to this country. Last time, a Sushi restaurant at Wisma Atria served me wasabe, which I hadn’t known about. I thought it was a kind of green chutney, which probably it was. What I did not know was that it was a close relative of RDX. Esther warned me that it was too ‘spicy’. My immediate thoughts were in the lines of ignoring it, as an Indian didn’t have to take seriously an American’s warning about the spiciness of food. But I let better sense prevail and took only a very little measure of the seemingly harmless paste with the tip of my chopstick.
It is hard to explain what happened in the next few seconds. My tongue was partially paralyzed in the first second, but what followed had more spectacular results. Its vapours went up my sinus cavity, or in that general upward direction, and exploded there. My face went red; I dropped my chopstick and covered my lowered head with my hands as I got a first-hand experience of how it would be like to get multiple short circuits on some gadget that was implanted in my head. Later I learned that wasabe wasn’t supposed to be eaten like that, you had to mix it with soybean sauce and have small dabs of the mixture with the meat and fish that you ate.

Among the many ‘touristy’ places that I visited in this island country, one that I liked most was the botanic gardens. I had thoroughly underestimated the place when I stepped inside, expecting to see something similar to what we have in Ooty, minus the nice, foggy atmosphere. But the gardens here occupy a much larger area and are more beautifully landscaped. Good roads to walk and jog, serene lakes, lawns, different types of gardens including an exclusive orchid garden, and large trees. The best of them all is the patch of tropical rainforest that you can trek through. I was caught in awe, left staring, by the giant Jelawai tree that towered over the other tall trees around it. This was a place where I could spend whole days, doing nothing but taking the nature in, and reading a good book. More than the lawns and artificially done gardens, which this park had in plenty, what attracted me was the raw, wild beauty of the tall trees, creepers and undergrowth. Unfortunately I couldn’t spend enough time here, but this is one place that I would return to if I get a chance later.

I can go on and on, touching upon everything I saw, liked and disliked here. The near-perfect metro transit system that consisted of trains and buses, the vibrant malls of Orchard road, beautiful slant-eyed girls wearing minis and shortest possible shorts, hawker centers and food courts, the 280-metre skyscrapers of the central business district, the merlion, fun boat rides at the Boat Quay and Clark Quay, the omnipresent durians, tourist attractions in the overhyped Sentosa island that include underwater aquariums and artificial beaches… well, I better stop before my readers desert me.