| Monday, August 13, 2007 |
| the adventures of marco polo and his guides on the strange island of temasek |
Ok, Marco Polo's last name isn't even Polo, it's something that Sheena came up with upon learning that Hannah's NZ exchange friend (who is actually German) was called Marco. It hadn't crossed my mind at all, and I thought it was really funny so it kinda stuck. Of course I don't call him that to his face...
Hannah wanted to bring him to Sheena's mom's fruit shop (technically it's her dad's, but somehow I just think of it as her mom's) today, so I met them after last service today, along with Tommy and Yunxuan. They'd been cycling at Ubin the whole day, so all arrived clad in shorts and sports shoes. Yunxuan had fallen down on the rocks so she had bandages on her arm, knee and a scrape on her shoulder, poor thing. "She didn't cry at all!" said Marco Polo. "She was a very good girl."
When we arrived at the fruit shop (which used to sell only durians until recently), Sheena was having a very animated conversation with her Thai cousin (she is half-Thai), who had insisted on calling me Yellow Shirt the last time I visited because, well, I was wearing a yellow shirt. She was so engrossed that she apparently didn't notice us. We stood there for a while to see when she would finally see us.
She soon did though, and our tabletop was soon piled with mangosteens, durians, coconuts, longans and something that she called "the cousin of rambutan". It was a very dark red, and instead of being hairy as rambutans are, was more prickly, even though the pricks weren't sharp. You opened it by twisting it like a bottle cap, and the fruit looked exactly like a rambutan. It tasted milder than a rambutan to me, and I liked it because the seed skin didn't come off as easily when you pulled the flesh away.
"What is the cousin of broom?" Tommy asked Marco Polo, who didn't know. "Mop!" Tommy said, and laughed hysterically. Me, Hannah and Sheena laughed too, because it was an inside joke, which started when we were playing Taboo in caregroup years ago. If you don't know, the aim of Taboo is to get your team members to guess a word without saying certain key words on the game card. Tommy had gotten the 'mop' card and said, "The cousin of broom!" which turned out to be a surprising efficient way of description.
(Actually my favourite one is still, "Guys like to eat girls' what?" to which the answer is 'tofu', hahaha!)
Back to the fruits. We were all curious to see Marco Polo's reaction to the king of fruits, the infamous durian that foreigners tend to find repulsive. "How was it?" I asked him after his first bite. "Interesting," was all he said. He went to eat even more. When Sheena expressed surprised that he had no problems with the durian, Hannah quipped, "Marco eats everything!" to which he said, "That is somewhat true." Later he said it was funny that such a big fruit had such small seeds. Maybe he was expecting it to be all fleshy inside.
We had donuts too, which a friend of Sheena's dad had bought. They were from Munchy Donut, which, according to 8 Days, have some of the best donuts in Singapore, nevermind the three-hour queues outside Donut Factory. We ate until we could eat no more and even had to bring back some of the durians.
Tommy wanted to bring Marco Polo to Geylang after dinner, and kept telling Hannah that she could not come. We came along anyway, all three of us girls. It was a real eye-opener, I've never been to Geylang before. All the girls lined up along the pavement, all made up and dressed up with nowhere to go but one of the many cheap hotals in the area. We walked a distance behind the guys to make it look as if we were not with them, to see who would get approached first. It happened really fast; one of the girls in a black party dress reached out and touched Marco Polo's shoulder, and we started giggling behind them. Congrats were offered when we caught up with them, but now I wonder why - it wasn't as if the girls could afford to choose. A good-looking stranger who pays you for sexual favours is not much different from a repulsive one who pays you for sexual favours, right?
We squeezed through crowded alleys, which were makeshift gambling 'dens' engulfed in Bangladeshi workers and cigarrette smoke. People threw notes onto tables, illuminated by bright plastic table lamps. I didn't get to see much as there were people on all sides of me; it was like being in some kind of giant human blender. We had to hold our bags close to us in case anybody tried to snatch them; it was actually faintly thrilling, having to do this in safe old Singapore. There were people hawking pirated VCDs too, at five dollars each, which I thought was way too expensive. I saw one of the Bangladeshi men hugging another from behind. I heard prices being quoted around me, men leading girls off, others in negotiation. There was this giant sign on one of the buildings which said, "The Love Shop", which I guess was some kind of sex toy shop. I thought the name was rather ironic.
I saw a side of Singapore today I'd never seen before. Seamy, hot, sweaty, dirty and sticky, too much impersonal physical contact. We saw the Indian girls and the China girls and the Indonesian girls. Some of them were really very pretty, pretty enough to be models. We were probably the only girls there, other than those who were eating at the many coffeeshops in the area. The girls ignored us, naturally, but the men stared. I wondered what they thought of us. I guess it was pretty obvious we weren't 'working girls' from the way we huddled together and the way we were dressed!
So that is it, our adventures for today. And what did Marco Polo think about it? With an imaginary mike held under his chin by Yunxuan, he said, "I have a lot of thoughts now but most of them are wrong, so I won't say them." After a while, he said, "Well I do have something else to say." The imaginary mike was whipped out again. "At the end of the day, I still love my girlfriend very much, and she is very beautiful."
Awww....
Shortly after that, we said goodbye and boarded different buses. I missed my Kallang MRT stop (grr!) - I have a tendency to miss stops when I'm unfamiliar with the bus route. But thank God, the bus went to Bugis, where I called my parents to pick me up. (Later I found out that they were almost home when I called and detoured to pick me up, so nice :)) While waiting for them I popped into Mos Burger to grab something to eat; I was hungry after squeezing my way through Geylang and having had nothing for dinner but some fruits and two donuts! I was served by a very sharp and sprightly old man who embarrassed me by telling me I was pointing to the wrong picture when I said I wanted butterfly prawns, and then proceeded to serenade his colleague and the cash register with Fly Me to the Moon.
On the eastern end of the island Sheena was having an adventure of her own with no cash of any form on her and no umbrella in the pouring rain, but I shall leave that story for now...
(Just trying to blog in a more descriptive way. Doing Feature Writing makes me miss writing stories :)) |
posted by esther @ 12:02 AM  |
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