Singapore - lah!

Well, I am back from Singapore and since I didn't get a chance to write about it there, I will talk a little bit about it here.  We lived in a clean, new hostel in Little India called "The Mitraa," or friend, operated by an Indian-born Singaporean who, along with a Filipino named Nelson, sleeps less than four hours a day.  The front patio was occupied late into the night by a pair of Irishmen who were always drinking and smoking with a quiet Indian student, and any foreigner they could get to play cards with them.


We spent the first two entire days in Singapore visiting their zoos: the bird park, the regular zoo, and the night zoo.  We went from morning till closing time, until our feet hurt and we were hungry because the food in the park was too expensive for us to waste our money on.  My zoo employee companions viewed these park visits with passionate and enthusiastic diligence, maybe a little relieved to be within their familiar field amongst an exotic and unfamiliar environment.

I did get to meet up with Annabelle, who took me away from the parks for a while to tour Singapore's glittering consumerist side - malls, strips and mall food courts.  We had Singaporean food and talked about Singlish, which I think is some kind of creole birthed out of Chinese and Malay people trying to teach each other English.  Indians were probably also responsible.  This diversity and fusion is apparent in the food we ate and their names: "Mee Goreng," "Laksa" and "Hainanese Chicken Rice."  The first is a noodle dish, "mee" being "noodles" in some kind of Chinese dialect, according to Annabelle.  Laksa is a spicy noodle soup, whose name originates in Persian or Chinese or Hainanese (Wikipedia).  And the name "chicken rice" is just funny to me, because it's just two nouns thrown together, as if in a desperate attempt to get the point across that there is chicken and there is rice in here.  The name would make more sense if the dish was some kind of chicken-flavored rice and "chicken" acted as an adjective.  But instead it's like calling a sandwich "meat bread" or a banana split "ice cream banana."  It exemplifies my impression of Singlish.  I do hear that they have grammatical structures in there somewhere; but to me, it sounds mostly like gibberish that might be Chinese, but suddenly has English words, and that convalesces into funny-sounding sentences.

Bread Ice Cream!