Advertisement
Published: January 15th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Day 50: Singapore
In the morning, we biked to Little India for a delicious breakfast of fresh roti and tea tarek. We marveled at the pleasure of biking around this town, where we could bike on the sidewalks as they all had ramps, making the riding smooth, fast and easy. We then went in search of a bike shop, as we needed to have our bikes boxed up to ship with us, via plane, to Australia. We found a good shop and were told to come back at 5, when they’d have time to box us up.
We then visited Maxwell’s Market, one of Pearl’s recommendations for our touring of the city, and one of the seven wonders of the world. This place was a large food court with two-hundred tiny food stalls, placed side-by-side in a big barn-like building. Each place specialized in mastery of one type of food, ensuring your food would be wonderful no matter what you ate. Many of these stalls had been operating for twenty or thirty years. Pearl had recommended we try raw fish congee, from one particular stall, a dish we never would have chosen on our own. Oh my Buddha was
she right! This dish featured a heaping plate of salmon sashimi, a huge bowl of congee, like a thick-rice porridge, and a plate of chopped green onions, chilis and carmelized onions. You stirred all of that in to the congee, along with a sweet hoison-like sauce, and the outcome was simply heaven. (The dish was so good we later decided to visit Singapore for the sole reason of enjoying it again.) Anthony Bourdain, the travel food writer, visited Maxwell’s Market the previous year and was just as ecstatic about the place as we where. It was heaven for food lovers.
We biked to the waterfront, a beautifully imagined area very reminiscent of Circular Quay in Sydney. The area even boasted a giant porcupine-looking Opera House, a direct imitation of the gorgeous Sydney Opera House, only with a slighty different animal imitation. Oh, it was so lovely by the bay. We staged a photo shoot in front of the city skyline, taking dozens of amusing photos, in an attempt to prove to ourselves how buff we’d become from our biking. We met a group of a dozen Sikh men from India, who were delighted with us and our bicycles, and
insisted on photographing us in every different area of the harbour as we repeatedly bumped in to them during our touring. They also enjoyed taking numerous photographs of themselves with our bicycles. We thought they were hilarious. They invited us to visit them at their home, in Punjab, India. We, of course said yes and took their card. They told us their hair, wrapped up in a cloth atop their heads, and uncut as Sikh custom dictates, fell down to their knees. They showed us their tiny swords, another requirement for all Sikh men. The piece de resistance was a fabulous statue of a MerLion, apparently Singapore’s symbolic animal, a combination of a mermaid and a lion, and something I’d never even heard of before.
We watched the tourists walking slowly down the street, and felt delighted to be upon bicycles, able to swerve right around them, like snowboarders. We biked back to the bike store, where we sadly watched as our beloved vehicles were disassembled and put in boxes for the plane ride. The boxes were huge, much bigger than I’d expected, 6 feet long , 3 feet tall and 1 foot deep. When the boxing was finished,
rain was pouring down outside, the bike shop was closing, and it was rush hour, meaning taxis would charge us a large surcharge plus the fare for a transport. So we went next door, to an outdoor Chinese restaurant, to wait it out. It rained forever and we waited for hours, not willing to let the boxes get wet, which could have compromised their strength.
We realized our boxes were so large, not only would we be unable to share a taxi, but we’d have to each get a van taxi. As we were miles from our guesthouse, the cost would be enormous. So J had been asking bus drivers if they were going to Chinatown and if we could take our giant boxes on, for two hours. The answer was never a double yes. Finally, thanks to his perseverance, we found a bus driver that would take us and our boxes and was going right to Chinatown. As the bus was already at the bus stop and waiting when J got the double yes, he ran back to me, we grabbed our boxes from the rear of the restaurant where we’d stored them, and then we ran down
the s
Advertisement
Tot: 0.178s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 11; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0503s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb