Shopping malls, hawker centers and one lost bear
Trip Start
Jul 15, 2007
1
143
195
Trip End
Jul 16, 2008
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Singapore,
Singapore
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Last night we flew into Singapore from KL quite late. Katharine has developed a troubling habit of taking other folks property without permission. In the cab from the airport, she took Alec's second-favorite stuffed animal Bear Bob out of his backpack. And left him in the cab. When Alec realized he was gone, he was utterly heartbroken. Bear Bob has been a constant companion since London. He is the (pretend) father of generations of Webkinz stuffed offspring of a wide variety of species.
We read Katharine the riot act. A minute later I looked up to see Katharine dressed and heading out the door with her backpack on. "I'm going to find Bear Bob," she told us. We convinced her to let us try other means before sending a nine-year-old girl on a hopeless quest in a strange city.
Hawker center
Or perhaps not so hopeless. When I went downstairs and explained our dilemma to the bell captain, I was astounded to learn that they record the license plate of every taxi that brings a guest to the hotel. After scattering Singapore dollars liberally around the lobby, I went up to the room to await news.
Within an hour the taxi driver was located on the way home to his family. Bear Bob was returned to the hotel. I told Katharine that both the cost of tips to the energetic bellmen and the extra taxi fare to the cab guy who brought the stuffed animal back are definitely coming out of her allowance.
I suspect my threat of debiting her allowance rings a bit hollow, since our calculations of weekly funds due has long since run aground on the twin challenges of keeping track of the various items the kids buy with their funds, and also constantly converting the running balances into new currencies. If we owed Katharine 200,000 rupees at the end of India, and she spent 600 bhat in Thailand on carvings plus $20 U. S. in Cambodia on purses for her friends, how many Vietnamese dong are left against which to charge $50 Singapore dollars for bear-recovery operations?
After several weeks in second-world and third-world countries, where even a week dollar has traction given low prices, here in Singapore we feel like poor country cousins again
Weird
. Our hotel is a block off Orchard Road, the main shopping and office strip in Singapore. We had lunch in the food court in the basement of a nearby multi-story mall. I savored my very nice slice of mushroom pizza, because I could only afford to buy one. Amy and Katharine looked for new shorts, and found a nice pair...for $70 Singapore, which is about...$70 U. S.According to chef, author and now television personality Anthony Bourdain, Singapore is one of the two best places in the world to eat. Since the beginning of the trip, my fantasy has been that the Hemphill family is on a round-the-world food tasting tour, experiencing the best cuisine on five continents, bravely eating where few Americans have gone before.
The reality is that my wife and kids have gone on strike against unfamiliar foods. Katharine is not just a vegetarian, but a picky one, greeting the appearance of any new food, vegetarian or not, with closed mouth, set jaw and stony glare. Alec refuses all new foods. Amy is great on vegetables, but refuses most carbohydrates and just about all meat, poultry or fish.
Singapore is wealthy, developed and multi-ethnic
Singapore Slingers
. With a first-world commitment to sanitation and safe food-handling practice, Singapore has brought street vendors into large, clean hawker centers. A year ago I read an article in the New Yorker about Makansutra, a food guide to Singapore's hawker stands. A team of roving tasters rates hundreds on hawker stands on a one-to-three ricebowl system. The top rating is "die die must try". I could not wait to hit the hawker centers, and had a fantasy of having lunch and dinner at a different stand each day. Three days in Singapore, six meals in all, a chance to share a dozen or more top-rated dishes. Instead we ate mostly at the food court. We got to a hawker stand once. I started with the least-challenging dish I could find, Hainanese Chicken Rice. White-meat chicken, rice cooked in chicken stock, brown gravy and a scoop of chili sauce.
I made the mistake of taking Jack with me to the booth to order the chicken. One look at the whole poached chicken, neck and head attached, that the stall operator cuts into neat boneless slices with a massive cleaver, and Jack was a vegetarian for the day. I end up eating three Hainanese Chicken Rice platters. Amy and the kids had pasta with red sauce from the sole Italian food vendor in the fifty-booth center.
For you dedicated foodies, here is the link to the Makunsutra web-site: http://www.makansutra.com/reviews/2008_0414/index.html
