Aaaaand good morning please don't hurt me.
I scared her off with this. The trick is looking as large and threatening as possible so they think they can't eat you.
Nascent cannibalism averted, we descended to breakfast on the first floor. Ana sampled the mediocre Western offerings (eggs and sausages and the like) while I dug into one of the best breakfasts I've had in years, that being spicy lo mein that I went back for seconds of. My guess is the cook eats the lo mein and not the other stuff. Singapore being about 80 degrees out at that time of day, they swung the doors of the lobby and dining area open to the street so we could enjoy the weather and sunlight with our food, which was quite nice. Chinatown is one of the low-cost areas of Singapore but that just means it's nice instead of tragically hip and expensive.
This would have been very good even without comparing it to what the Japanese serve for breakfast, but that helped. Let's not think about what the Japanese eat for breakfast.
Fed and equipped with a tourist map, we pretty much just wandered out to see what we could see. First we saw a lot of Chinatown, with converted row houses and a lot of street bazaar action, mostly selling touristy stuff, some of which was quite nice. I saw a carved stone rhino I wanted but it turned out to be $400US so I had to pass. Ana snagged a jade pendant but neglected to bargain for it - the shop owner gave her $2 off out of, I think, pity.
Converted row houses, generally painted in loud but not obnoxious colors
Statue in front of an enormous Chinese-style temple near the hotel
All the side streets have shops and stalls and vendors of various sorts.
We mostly kept walking, looking at the map, and aiming for the areas of greatest urban density. We walked through Chinatown to the Riverfront district, which is decidedly upscale and hip (and expensive). We noticed that we were definitely still bowing to any random person we made eye contact with, which isn't so much necessary in Singapore. We'll probably still be doing that after being home (US home) for three weeks.
It's wall-to-wall restaurants and clubs and whatnot on both sides of the river for a mile or so
One part of it even had very phallic umbrella things covering the streets so rain couldn't stop the party.
We walked north from the Riverfront to the real heart of Singapore, which is the Orchard Road shopping district. To put this in perspective, people fly from Tokyo to Singapore to shop on Orchard Road, and it isn't like it's a lot cheaper in Singapore either. If designer swag is your bag, you'll love Orchard Road because they have designer outlets the size of department stores, on both sides of the street and multiple stories up. We're not so much into that but the money and flash was plain to see. Lots of five and six story malls too. We were passed by a yellow Ferrari 360 Spyder (no picture).
Malls with entryways like this. We didn't take pictures of this district much because 1) Gucci doesn't do much for me and 2) we were primarily concerned with lunch.
Speaking of lunch, we toured a food court or two and passed a number of restaurants without making a decision. As you might expect, we'd seen many restaurants we wanted to try until it actually came time for lunch and then nothing looked quite right. Interestingly enough, we passed a restaurant advertising Hokoriku cusine, which is the region of Japan where Kanazawa is located. Somehow, we didn't feel the need to patronize their business. Also, in the food courts they had Japanese sections (in addition to Chinese and Indian and who-knows, looked better than most food courts I've ever been in) and in these Japanese sections they were yelling out "irashaimasae" in the same tone they do in Japan and were selling the same food.
I know when Ana tells me she's hungry and then doesn't pick a restaurant it means her sugar is so low she's not able to make decisions, so we dived into the next food court we came across and got her some inexpensive and surprisingly good fish and chips from a place called...
Figure they know their niche, right? Wasn't bad.
I got a mango smoothie (cost 2x her lunch) from a stall down the way. Probably the best I've had, tons of real, fresh mango chunks. Before y'all accuse me of anorexia, please recall that I ate three times as much breakfast as she did. Also, I stole several fishes and some chips to boot.
The food court where we ate lunch was pretty much entirely across the downtown area of Singapore from where we started. We hadn't, of course, seen everything, but as far as the action in downtown Singapore, we'd walked through the most happening ~60% probably, so we got a bit of a lookaround in. After refueling at Chippy we decided to start headed back in the direction of the hotel.
We checked in a Borders on Orchard Road and they wanted about $17-22US for small paperbacks. We passed. Also looked at some shoes, because Ana needs new work shoes, but didn't see anything she liked, though some of them cost less than the books. We inspected a grocery store (that being the true measure of civilization) and discovered that Singapore is much friendlier to Western tastes than Kanazawa. They had a few strange fruits but mostly it was closer to a grocery store in the US except smaller, and all the alcohol was really expensive, presumably due to taxation ($8 bottle of wine in US or Japan = $30 in Singapore). Also saw an "under-promise, over-deliver" tshirt; thought of you Nik.
We took the subway most of the way back to the hotel and found that Singapore's MRT is nicer even than the Tokyo Metro, which means it is our new best-subway-ever. It helps that the MRT is much, much smaller than the Metro, and is run by only one agency instead of about five competing companies like Tokyo, but it is super clean, super fast, and just makes sense. They also use re-usable plastic cards for single-trip tickets whereas Tokyo uses paper. The cards have a deposit on them so you have to go to the machine afterward to get your dollar back but it has to make more sense for cost and the environment than the tens of millions of paper tickets used in Tokyo every day. The platforms have walls on both sides and the doors only open when the train is present, so you can't fall into or toss litter on the tracks. It also helps them climate-control the stations because they're not trying to cool the tunnels.
Plus, no durians, or else. I'm pretty sure no fine means they just take you out back and shoot you.
Going from the MRT station near the hotel to the hotel itself was interesting, because the sky opened and it was raining like bejabbers. We covered most of the distance between the station and the hotel under the overhangs of row houses but could not avoid getting quite wet. Thankfully, it didn't start raining when we were walking all over the city before this.
Wet Yankees in a mirrored hotel elevator.
That big walk around the city had left us pretty beat, so we grabbed a couple hours of naptime while it rained. We were on vacation, after all. After the nappage we got slicked up a bit and went out to eat at a pretty fancy place we'd already made reservations at called Wild Rocket, which the New York Times recommended for modern Singaporean cuisine.
Sappiness on the elevator going back down.
Wild Rocket proved to be far from anything much but our directions took us there without worrying about it too much. We'd gotten reservations for right when they opened at 6:30 so they were pretty dead but the interior was modern / elegant / clean and the staff quite professional. We ordered the works, the big fixed menu with matched wines for less than $75US each, which proved to be a damn good deal that I would be happy to purchase again. If they were in Kanazawa we'd probably go monthly.
Menu picture is a little blurry but hit the big version on Flikr and you'll be able to read it.
I don't particularly care to run down the entire menu course by course (we took notes), but I'll mention some things that really caught our attention.
The rice noodles used for the pasta course had a wonderful chewy texture and firmness to them that we don't normally associate with rice noodles. They were quite thick and almost looked like oversize bean sprouts but when the day comes that we finally get Ana a stand mixer with pasta-making attachment we might try to duplicate those. Instead of being average rice noodles, they were typical noodles made with rice flour, and really, really good.
And the Parmesan chip was like drugs for our cheese-deprived selves.
The fish had a "dry sambal" on it that contained dried or roasted legumes or possibly nuts. Usually you don't get the earthy flavors paired so much with fish but the crunch and contrast worked well with the buttery bass. The beef was heavenly. Just perfect and with a good drizzle of sauce to the side.
Every dish had something interesting about it, and they sometimes emphasized subtle texture and flavor contrasts and sometimes outright decadence as in the beef.
The dessert course shown in the picture had a novel presentation, where they poured Prosecco over the whole thing before serving. I think the raspberry & black pepper sorbet we had at Burning Tree in Maine was better, but if we hadn't had that this would have been tops for end-of-meal refreshment.
I thought it should have been a Disney dessert.
After wrapping up our two plus hour fixed menu, Ana got a mint tea and I delved into their whiskey selection. We also figured out that in Singapore, making eye contact with a server does not indicate that you want them to come over and talk to you. This proved to be true in several restaurants later on, as well. They just stare back at you and look slightly confused. If you raise your hand a little, though, the message is conveyed. Anyway, the whiskey list turned out to be a little thin but I ordered something that turned out to be not bad and asked a few pesky questions that brought their sommelier over to talk scotch with me. I don't think he gets many people who are interested in talking whiskey so we chatted for a while before paying the entirely reasonable bill and heading back to the hotel via MRT. We'll pick up next time with Day 3 unless Ana posts something about making cakes in the meantime.
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