(I was going through my blog post list to see if I had any unpublished drafts and found this astonishing little travel-entry, thought I'd post it for amusement's sake, and, well, since I did spent time writing it so, might as well publish it)
Singapore slinging stuffing
Singapore: 10 - 11 Jan 2015
By about 11am on Saturday, we were already on our third meal.
By 5pm, we've had five separate food events.
(Apologies for the poor photo quality...I was using my old Samsung and was rushing to take the pics so we could eat)
If you're Asian, you probably wouldn't bat an eyelid. This is what we do. Ok maybe it was slightly over the top, but...I'd argue that this was quite reasonable given we were a group of 5, we were in Singapore for less than 48 hours, and, well, this is Singapore - what else is there to do? There might be a couple things that the Singaporeans have built, but really that's just an excuse to give you something to occupy your time while you digest, so that you can eat again soon.
I had collected a handful of recommendations as well as revisited some places from my previous SG trips. I was the designated trip-planner, and so it's really no surprise that everything in our itinerary was food. Luckily Singapore is quite small, and we were able to walk or MRT to most places.
First stop,
Tanjong Pagar for
Nasi Lemak as prescribed by Dawn. It was also listed on some blog for having the best Nasi Lemak, and lo and behold, there was a queue there even though we arrived before 10am. So we queued. And the sauce and drumsticks were definitely worth however long we queued (probably only about 10 minutes).
We then walked (for efficient digestion) to our next stop (ok less than 10 minutes away) to
Tong Ah Eating House - which one of the google results told me was one of the top
kaya toast places. Of course it was nothing more than a humble (but spacious) hole in the wall, a stall by the door and round tables of all sorts of sizes underneath white fluorescent lights. After sitting and looking lost for a while, someone tossed us a menu - there was set A, B or C. Tea, tea with milk, or tea with milk and sugar, or coffee, coffee with milk, or coffee with milk and sugar. Thin toast, thick toast or steamed bread. 3 sets of thin toast for 5 tourists please. Butter & kaya wedged between slices of small thin toast. 5 minutes gone. 5 tourists utterly satisfied.
Another short walk took us to
Maxwell Food Centre, by then it was nearly 11am and started to get busy. There was already a queue at
Tian Tian Chicken Rice. But the queue went fast, and so did our two chicken rices.
Digestion break - wandered into a Buddhist temple, around China town, down the metro and around the malls on Orchard road blah blah blah
One of the icons of
Orchard Road was the
ice-cream sandwich stalls. We got 3, sat on the steps of a glossy mall, and passed around ice-creams wrapped in bread of psychedelic colours. Simple amazing pleasures.
The shiny commercial world that is Orchard Road got dull after about 20 minutes, so we dove underground again and tunneled our way on the MRT to Little India for some watch-shopping in Mustafa Centre. On our way out and still pondering our next food-move, it started to rain and we found refuge in an Indian cafe, and before we knew it we were tucking into a few
roti pratas and
teh tarik. The cheese prata was exceptionally good - the cheese was probably a cheap cheese, but somehow still very aromatic and worked really well with the thin not-overly-oily pratas.
We took 15 minutes of a digestion walk - to our next eating destination,
Ng Ah Sio at Rangoon Road for
bak kut teh. Chunks of pork and pork bone in peppery, flavourful, beautiful clear soup. With rice and deep fried dough sticks and vegetables of course. At this point we were starting to get full. I think.
Another digestion break - we did the tourist thing and saw the Mer-lion, the view of Marina Bay Sands at the sea front, etcetera etcetera, walked over to Clark Quay for drinks...which then created another appetite for our grand finale -
Newton Food Centre. A bit touristy but it's got everything anyone can ever need. EVER. We ordered sambal stingray, chow kuay teow, carrot cake (law bak go), fuzhou noodles, chicken wings, vegetables, Milo dinosaur...and finally - and I do mean finally - we were completely utterly defeated. Done. Towels thrown. Mic dropped. Out.
But we were also champs considering how much food we ate. How much GOOD food we ate. Just about everything was made in about 3-5 minutes and tasted wonderful, diverse, satisfying - a rock concert for the senses.
Sunday was, I'd say, a bit less intense. A bit
My faithful friend and guide Google told me that the nearest
Ya Kun Kaya Toast was on China Street. The toast here was slightly more dense than Tong Ah but still very thin and crisp and more generous with the spread, so this is still my favourite.
During our digestion-walks, I realised how green and spacious this little city felt, even though - according to Wikipedia - Singapore's population density is actually higher than Hong Kong's (but Hong Kong does have a lot of unused space). Here in Singapore, roads and pavements were wider, trees felt greener and taller, there was actually space for grass in the urban areas, and what my favourite is: how they've kept a lot more of the old colonial-era buildings, and the urban Southeast Asian shophouses which I think has so much character and diversity (you still see a lot of them in Vietnam or Malaysia or Taiwan, but they've knocked 99.99% of them down in Hong Kong). And they keep the surviving ones in Singapore relatively well - they've got really hipster cafes and bars in some of them, while some still house mom-n-pop kaya toast shops or grandma noodle shops.
Anyway, back to our main topic. I don't even remember how I found out about
Jalan Berseh's Sungei Road laksa (probably google), but it was good. It was also conveniently located just a few minutes from where our 6th member of the group was staying, whom we picked up and taxied to Purvis Street's famous
Chin Chin Eating House for some legit Hainan Chicken Rice, and a bunch of other stuff.
.
We then headed to
Gardens By The Bay for a few hours to walk around and look at flora and fauna, admire a man-made 35m waterfall, take lots and lots of selfies (because someone brought a selfie stick with a remote and made the mistake of giving me the remote), and of course, digest.
Before heading back to the airport, we hit
Maxwell hawker centre again for a last ditch attempt of filling more Singaporean food into our bellies, but a lot of the stalls were closed for the mid-afternoon.
The trip ended with us eating
kaya toast while simultaneously getting free foot massages at a massage-chair in the airport. No wonder this is the best airport in the world.
Context: I was moving from Hong Kong to Tokyo, and was expecting to have much less access to Southeast Asian and Chinese food from Tokyo, which is why -
1. I was made food-and-trip planner for this trip...because it was essentially my farewell trip
2. We ate so much - because I wanted to eat everything, and I have incredibly kind and tolerant and quota-less friends.
