Asia for beginners

 there we wandered through the cold rooms, a welcome respite from the heat, past black tulips, bizarre bright electric blue roses and flame lilies from Peru at scary prices. We filled the taxi with orchids and took them back to the house on Jilan Manis and put them in huge glass vases.
Then time for pre-prandial gin slings at Raffles Hotel. There are great bowls of peanuts on the tables and you chuck the shells on the floor. My two year old granddaughter liked that a lot!  No longer on the foreshore, dwarfed by the modern buildings on the reclaimed land around it, Raffles inside, retains all the elegance of the old Meikles Hotel.
Singapore is at the heart of a melting pot of different countries, cultures and languages. And you can eat anything, but Nonya or Peranakan is the cuisine of the original Chinese who migrated to the Straits and married local Malay women.
I even went to a San Sui restaurant which honours a group of tough and independent Chinese women who chose to work as labourers rather than prostitutes in the early last century.  Less than a hundred of these indomitable women, now in their eighties and nineties are still alive.
After Raffles we went to a Chinese wedding in a five star hotel. The bride and groom appeared in different outfits as we ate our way through a nine course banquet.
The delicacies included Abalone, fish maw (swim bladder) sea cucumber, scallops, steamed Canadian cod, bamboo pith and roast Pi Pa duck. It ended with ‘sweetened water chestnut cream with egg served hot’. All interesting, nothing memorable and I felt a little unwell the next day . . . Pi Pa duck is roast and then deep fried apparently. Not quite the thing for someone who’d spent four days on a drip in a hospital in Thailand! 
After the banquet my four male companions and I walked for an hour in the relative cool of the evening then went for a midnight Chinese massage!
A week later, back from a business trip to Bratislava my friend announced that he craved Korean cold noodle soup. It looked strange, the noodles are black, but it had such a remarkable effect on my stomach that I made a few enquiries. Much under-rated, Korean food is particularly healthy and the black noodles are made from arrowroot — which is very good for upset stomachs! I didn’t find black noodles in a Korean supermarket nor in the Japanese one where we did the week’s shop.  The Japanese presentation of food is superb, especially the fish. It was just after the earthquake and customers were making donations. 
A few days later we visited a Burmese Buddhist temple and stumbled, by mistake during a torrential downpour, into another wedding and were invited to stay for a memorable Burmese biryani. Cooked by friends, the groom apologised because it wasn’t ‘five star hotel!’
At the top of the island the trains run above ground and somewhere around apartment block 800 the sameness of this immaculate city state started to pall. I longed for someone to misbehave, just a little. Maybe eat something on a station platform, take a swig out of a water bottle on a train or a bus, or even chew gum, which I normally detest, but no one did. Except me, at the zoo when the designated picnic area was wet. I ate a sandwich while telling the giraffe and zebra, sweltering in the 100 percent humidity, about the wide dry, plains where they were supposed to live. Then I left, relieved that no one had caught me!
 
– g.jeke@yahoo.com