Singapore Diary - 3rd Day

When I realized the day I arrived at Singapore that I'd have to walk a fair bit to get around, it made me happy, despite the at times unbearable humidity, because I thought it would help me control my weight that was reaching slightly risky limits. Little did I know that I'll undo all that exercise - and I have walked a lot - by succumbing to the culinary temptations of this city.

I woke up late second day running at 8:30 IST, the time I used to get up in Kolkata and at home, which does not bode well for someone who needs to be in office by 8:30 Singapore Time from Monday. Have three days to adjust.

Went to Shenton Way, Singapore's Wall Street and the place where I'll be working, to understand the directions and look for cheap eating options in the area. Found a nice bookstore at the ground floor of the building next to it. On the way, we decided to have lunch at Lau Pa Sat, one of the many hawker centres of Singapore. I had a Crispy Garlic Roti Prata. It's a curiously named dish, resembling a parantha, drenched in oil and filled with different ingredients. One is quite filling.

After exploring the Shenton Way area and the bookstore, along with browsing through a few guide books, we decided to visit the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority office that is situated close to my office. It's a brilliant concept where a fairly boring topic like planning of a city has been turned into an enjoyable experience by using a combination of huge models, interactive games, touchscreens and several other tools. If only DDA could come up with something like that. There's so much planned for Singapore that I won't be able to see, at least in this trip. Noted down several places that I would like to visit in the next few weeks after seeing their models, photos and videos.

All this walking had made us hungry again and we decided to have a light snack at one of the underground shopping areas along the MRT stations. At a lot of eating joints run by the Chinese here it gets really difficult to understand what they are saying or even make yourself understood. So much for everyone in Singapore knowing English. Even if one manages to understand the difficult accents, the food ingredients have completely different names and it takes me several attempts to get an inkling of the items on my plate. And I am not the only one with this problem apparently as most stalls at hawker centres have pictures of each dish with the price mentioned along with it. So in most cases it is fairly obvious what all you are being served. But not always. I was feeling particularly adventurous today and ordered a dish that I was not even pronouncing properly, and the lady at the counter, after a lot of effort, was only able to get across the fact that it had some meat and eggs with noodles. The dish arrived, and tasted pretty decent. Most dishes here have very strong flavors, but are not very hot and are quite an experience. The first thing that I did on returning to my room was to look for it on the net. This is what Wikipedia has to say about Mee Rebus (pronounced as Mee-Ray-Boos).

We had to go one station beyond our stop to collect a few clothes that I had given at the laundry (why are all laundries run by Chinese who don't understand English at all and keep smiling irrespective of what you ask them and then suddenly turn angry?). Finding a laundry close by was the last thing we needed, and now we are officially well-settled here. We were walking back and chanced upon this fantastic bakery run by a group of women that is a pure delight for a foodie. The smell of freshly baked bread and cakes and doughnuts is mind-boggling. We had to have a doughnut each. And we went back again after dinner to get some bread for tomorrow's breakfast. I also bought some coconut jam, which has a very nice unique taste and I have made a note to carry a small jar home when I return.

That brings us to dinner. After resting for about an hour we decided to explore Little India and covered a good part of it comparing the prices and the menus at the various restaurants as well as making a mental notes of things we can buy later as gifts and souvenirs. There are several Punjabi, Bengali and Pakistani eating joints apart from the usual Tamil ones. But after walking for a significant distance we finally decided to eat at the place where we had our first meal after arriving in Singapore on Tuesday. It's a hawker centre at the edge of Little India, and the difference in my understanding of the place was astonishing. I was feeling badly out of place and lost the first day. I was feeling confident and completely at ease tonight. We bought a few slices of Dragon Fruit, which was the sole experimentation done by my neigbor, who's a vegetarian, but could barely eat one small slice. It smells funny, has a slight tinge of sweetness but is mostly tasteless and has way too many seeds that look like insects. I had a dumpling noodle soup garnished with dried fish to wrap up the day.