Food, Glorious Food, and Denouement [Singapore 2018]

Besides family and tourism, the other aspect of a trip to Singapore is the food. We ate out a lot, because the cost of prepared food isn’t that high compared to the cost of groceries, and there are numerous dishes that you can’t get in America. Or at least you can’t get good versions of them in America. While Ann Arbor has a bar for every day of the month (at least), it’s surprisingly lacking in Chinese food. There’s one place off North Campus that’s good, then a couple American-Chinese restaurants around town, and a Panda Express at the commons. So this was my opportunity to get some decent Chinese food, plus a mix of Singaporean/Malaysian/Indian food, plus the kind of weird stuff.

We had satay a couple times. I like the meat, but as you may have guessed based on the three hundred peanut butter and jam sandwiches I eat every year, I’m really in it for the peanut sauce. One night we met up with some of my father’s friends for dinner at a Peranakan place and got chicken curry. Another night we had dinner with a couple of my aunt’s and one of my mother’s cousins and had dim sum and duck. There was a lunch with family friends where we just got dim sum. We had variations on noodles, bao, chicken rice, porridge, kaya toast, egg tarts, pineapple tarts, Pop-Tarts – wait, not that last one. There was a lot of food.

Clockwise from top left: Duck, dimsum, satay, curry

And then there were green worms, tentacles, and the obligatory I-went-to-a-tropical-place coconut. The green worms are pandan-flavored noodles, and are part of cendol, shaved ice topped with coconut milk and palm sugar syrup served with the noodles. You can also add other ingredients, like red beans, durian, corn (. . . why?). It’s good. Then probably the most unusual thing I ate was the tentacles (cuttlefish). Tasted fine to me. But the first time I ate blue cheese I didn’t realize it was blue cheese until three-quarters through the meal, and I’ve had the assorted-body-parts-and-fungus-soup at Chinese restaurants, which was also fine. The coconut was a coconut.

Clockwise from top left: Cuttlefish, cendol, crab*, and coconut

*Soft shell, dry ice for theatrical effect

Now, to end this series of posts. To summarize, we went to the following:
Day 5: Singapore Botanic Garden (with National Orchid Garden) and Southern Ridges
Day 6: Gardens by the Bay
Day 7: Sentosa – Trick Eye Museum and S.E.A. Aquarium
Day 8: Jurong Bird Park and Night Safari
Day 11: Asian Civilisations Museum
Day 12: Sentosa – Fort Siloso
Day 13: Singapore Zoo and River Safari
Day 15: Bukit Timah Hill
Day 17: Singapore National Museum (same link as the Asian Civilisations Museum)
Day 20: Hong Kong

There’s nothing we saw that I would categorically tell people to avoid, but your enjoyment may vary depending on your idea of fun. For example, if you hate sweating, Singapore is the wrong country for you, but if you find yourself there anyway, you may not want to haul yourself up Bukit Timah Hill. Or if you have a phobia of coral, the aquarium is probably not the right place for you. But if you like flamingos, go to the bird park.

Within a little over two weeks, I managed to see ~85% of my extended family, including 13 out of the 14 great-grandchildren on both sides of the family; eat a slightly ridiculous variety and quantity of food; and visit over a dozen quality tourist attractions. I’m glad I made the trip when I did. It’s been awhile since I had a big vacation, and it was a good time to go. Grad school vacation days are probably more flexible than real job vacation days. Hopefully it’s less than eleven years until I see my relatives again.

With that, we return to regularly scheduled posts about the Revolution (new season, same old losing record¹), grad student life (why do I have one-sixth of an onion and two dozen eggs in the fridge?), what I’m reading/watching (we got Netflix), and Ann Arbor in winter. Because if you guessed that snowstorms, negative thirty windchills, single digit temperatures, and black ice were absolutely no deterrent to me going to work, grocery shopping, or trekking through the Arboretum, you’re right.

Singapore skyline at sunset

¹Except, unbelievably(?), worse than usual.