Singapore, Day 3
Dave here. Sunday was our last day in Singapore. Suzanne and I spent it wandering around the city by ourselves, and then finished up with a laid back evening at Mark and Swee Leen’s place.
We started our day with a breakfast of nasi lemak at a hawker market on 6th St. in Singapore. This is a traditional dish that Malaysians and Singapore residents eat at breakfast time. It’s one of my favorite dishes from this region, and comes complete with small crispy dried fish—you eat them whole—coconut rice, a larger cooked fish, sambal on the side, a hard-boiled egg, and perhaps some vegetable pickle. There are also many variations on the dish, evidently. In the U.S., I first got it in a Malaysian restaurant where they served a chicken curry with it rather than the larger cooked fish.
After our breakfast, Suzanne and I headed to Little India. The change in environment was profound: immediately we were surrounded by different architecture, smells, sights, and people. We stopped into a Indian sweets store, where I purchased an individual milk burfi (the woman working behind the counter thought I was absurd for only purchasing one, but she was good-natured about it) which tasted a bit like a piece of coconut fudge—it was delicious. We also stopped into a fabric store where we had an entertaining conversation with the older shopkeeper. He chuckled at our intolerance for the heat and humidity, and told us that this was a relatively mild day in Singapore.
Speaking of, once we could deal with the heat and humidity no more, we escaped into a shopping center at the bottom of Little India, where we had a supermarket adventure (videos to follow, as soon as we can find a reliable enough connection to upload a bunch…). Let’s just say that the fruit and vegetable selection at this supermarket in Singapore is quite different from what we are familiar with in the United States!
From Little India we headed on to Chinatown (and got the chance to take the Singapore subway again, which we are now in love with).
Chinatown offered another completely different perspective on Singapore for us to compare with the heavily developed steel, concrete and (carefully landscaped) jungle environment we had so far been exposed to. While there are similarities with the Chinatowns in New York and Boston that both of us had experienced in the U.S., here it felt like we were far more “wrapped” in Chinese culture—perhaps this is because Chinese culture is one of the dominant aspects of Singapore society.
Our first stop in the People’s Park Centre was to get a foot massage. This was a pretty involved process, which took about half an hour, and included a short shoulder massage at the end. It cost about $20 Singapore Dollars (~$14 USD) and was well worth it.
After that we headed through the gauntlet of merchants outside of the mall to get some food in the hawker centre nearby—we found a small Chinese restaurant where we got some hand-made Chinese noodles, fresh cooked greens, and a “Chinese hamburger”—which was little more than some braised pork in a sort of hard flour bun, but it was tasty.
We were pretty beat at this point, and feeling ready to head back for a break. At Mark and Swee Leen’s place, we took showers (something we’ve needed to do multiple times a day here, every day) and rested up before dinner…when we both tried durian:
And that was our last day in Singapore.
