May 2nd, 2008 - Singapore, Singapore

Being in Singapore feels a little like being in limbo. It’s weird to no longer be in India. It’s weird to be at the same place we flew into 3 months ago – jet lagged from Vancouver. It’s weird to be exposed to a lifestyle that’s almost like being back at home, but not quite.
When we arrived in Singapore 3 months ago we weren’t particularly impressed – it felt like a watered down version of what we would shortly experience, so why bother?! Now it’s like we’re in a watered down version of home, and it’s reminding us of the lifestyle we’re more used to, but also of the lifestyle we’ve gotten used to. I suppose what it really feels like now is that we’ve come up for a brief gasp of fresh air – after which we plunge right back into cheap third world country traveling.
On the whole it’s been a rather heady experience, and we’ve been exploiting it to the max. We stopped in the airport café immediately upon arrival (red-eye flight) partly because we were starving, and partly because we saw the bagels they had on display and couldn’t overcome our urge to have a bagel with cream cheese - a completely unknown food combination in India. Thank you Gloria Jean’s. (It appears to be a chain café here, we kind of love the name!).
Our hostel is a hostel, not a hotel or guest house, but it’s services are far superior to most of the places we stayed in India. In both countries we chose the cheapest options, here it just happens to be 3-5 times the price. Here though, we get hot showers, air conditioning, free internet service, free breakfast… What more could you ask for?! Granted if an Indian-style guest house had been available at the prices we’re used to ($4-$9/night!), we’d have stayed there – but even with the drastic increase in sleep budget, the increase in amenities is a definite cause of joy at the moment.
We spent the morning catching up on the internet (and waiting for our room to become available) before heading out for food. Evy has been planning on having a burger here for months, somehow consumed with a completely atypical craving for red meat. Also, Singapore is known for it’s food – its options are endless. We discovered very quickly that our stomachs’ consumption rate cannot compete.
Items would pop up out of nowhere – Chinese wiener buns in windows, a passerby with a mint chocolate ice cream – little items that I’d forgotten about but are particular sporadic favourites of mine. Tasty all in themselves, and they’re everywhere! We haven’t seen this kind of variety in months! So we went whole hog, and I mean piggy just like the roast piggy they advertise everywhere.
We designated the burger for dinner, and so that left us with hundreds of options for lunch. It was quite a lunch. We had dim sum (um hello steamed bbq pork bun, I’m addicted to you), we had ice cream, we had coconut candies (free at the local meat shop), and, one of our favourite discoveries, this sort of bacon that seems to be very popular – different flavours, different meats (does that mean it can’t be called bacon?!), these cooked flavoured sheets of meat are pretty stellar. It would be Lindsay Fisher’s personal heaven!
Altogether, it was a late lunch, around 2 we figured. Except then we realized that we’d forgotten about the time change. You might think that discovering you had lunch at 5pm would effectively prevent you from having dinner at a normal hour. Well, no. Not when you’re leaving the next day into a land where once again chances are low for getting a good burger. At the moment though, more important to us after ‘lunch’, was the thought that we might miss out on the Art Gallery exhibition we’d read about and thought we had plenty of time for.
Though short on time, we weren’t up to paying for a cab and figured a little exercise would be good for us. And so we waddled, as quickly as our overfull stomachs would let us, to the Art Gallery.
With 55 minutes to spare, we once again revisited the feeling of being in a 1st world country – wandering at leisure through a huge, beautiful, wood-floored old building that in this case was currently housing an exhibition by Alberto Giacometti. Our lack of time prevented a more extensive viewing of the rest of the gallery but I really enjoyed that particular exhibit.
We figured walking some more should hopefully help us make room for our long pre-destined burger, but when we attempted to make it to the 2nd hand book store listed on the handy Lonely Planet map, we didn’t quite realize what we were getting ourselves into. Those scale things aren’t always as accurate as they might seem – objects on the map may be further than they appear. A lot further. Especially if you start off by misreading said map. The store was closed by the time we got there, so we turned around and started plan B – look for somewhere to eat (of course!).
Nothing really appealed – McDonalds isn’t exactly what you’re looking for when you want a really good burger. Lonely Planet didn’t have any suggestions for the area either, so we decided to keep walking, see what we might see. The place we ended up at was more due to exhaustion than anything else, but it ended up having exactly what we wanted. We shared the burger and salad (we’re not completely degenerate… well, we try not to be…). But then they had this thing called the Brownie Sundae Explosion, or something similar…
The one thing we’d found particularly distressing in India and Nepal, regarding their desserts, was the complete lack of ability to create a tasty chocolate dessert. No matter if it was listed as a German Bakery or a French Patisserie, if the product was labeled as the most intense chocolate dessert you’ve ever tasted, or if the waitress recommended it as her most favourite chocolate dessert ever – it was not a real chocolate dessert. Either it was dry and old, it was ‘choclatey-flavoured’ rather than chocolate, it was dyed brown but lacking in cocoa powder – the options of deviation were astounding. Why we were led to believe that this might be different, I’m not sure. Perhaps it was the marshmallow listed as one of the ingredients alongside the chocolate ice cream, chocolate brownie, hot fudge topping, nuts, etc. Anyone who understands that pieces of marshmallow and chocolate ice cream are one of the most fabulous ice cream combinations ever could well have accomplished a tasty chocolate dessert. And so we ordered it. And so we ate it. One of the best chocolate desserts I’ve ever had, though my tastes may not have been as typically particular given the long chocolate-dessert drought. Either way, we’re seriously considering going back there when we’re back in Singapore on Evy’s birthday… Not that our lives revolve around food or anything…