*Blink*

Well, Steve & Lynne left this morning for their 10 days in Japan and I’m all alone again. So sad. Happily, they should be updating their blog, Hundred Acre Woods so we can all share in the glory of their fairly comprehensive itinerary in Japan.
An extended trip to Japan will most likely be nothing like Singapore due to the fact that communication will be more difficult — even though Steve has been working pretty hard on learning rudimentary Japanese, we all know how that usually turns out in actual practice. However, everyone appreciates someone trying to speak a language — even if it is mangled.

They, of course didn’t bail before going to see the Post Bar in the Fullerton hotel for some exotic beverages, Saint Julien’s for oysters and Kir, and the Palms seafood restaurant for CHILI CRAB!!! WOOHOO!

The dinner at the Palms included Chris and Kim Low (and Ester!), Samuel Low and his fiance Quintella, Steve and Lynne and I! I had a great time as usual. Sam and Quin were just back from an extended trip to Europe and had some, uh, adventures to share.

I leave Wed August 3rd early in the morning. Looks like the weather is clearing up in time for me to leave! Typical, really.

Well, actually it is fish head curry. A specialty here in Singapore.

Chris took us to a restaurant that serves it over near little India. A really nice restaurant with lots of indian stuff, however their specialty is this fish-head curry. Now fish-head curry is a dish that we have been hearing about since our very first trips here, but have never really been overly motivated to try it.

Well this trip, our time was up, er, we got to try the beast. Now we get to the restaurant and Chris says we should probably get the large serving for the three of us. So we do, and a bunch of other miscellaneous food.

Well, the “large” part of that order wasn’t referring to the serving size, it was referring to the fish head size, and by extension, the serving size. It is difficult to get the scale of this thing with these pictures I took from my phone, but that white bowl is a large serving bowl, and the spoon in it is a large serving spoon. This sucker was hyuuuuge.

Unnerving, but tasty. We seem to have done it justice. Nobody went for the eyes though. Imagine that.

I just couldn’t resist any longer. I threw caution to the wind and bought a Motorola RAZR V3 (Black) for myself. Everyone said that it was a beautiful phone with wonderful construction but had terrible operating software. After using it for a couple of days, I’d have to say that they are right about the construction, but the software is just fine except for the address book. It has only single-letter searching, which makes a long list a bear. Also, if you have multiple entries (emails, phones of the same type, etc.) for a person there is no way to differentiate (that I have found) between themSpecial Edition Black RAZR V3
.

One of my favorite things. Guavas. Mmmmm. Here you can get them peeled and sliced and sprinkled with plum powder, on a stick! Yummy.

Waiting for dinner at a restaurant, we were tired and hungry and started making up diversions. One such diversion was this successful mind-over-eye trick.

Before:

After:

Its nice to see some familiar faces. Even Steve… AHAHAHAHAHAHA. I’ll post some incriminating pictures as soon as I get them.

Here are two “informational” placards in my hotel room that made me snicker.

The first is the little card in the pocket of the bathrobe. You can click on the images to open a larger version if you can’t read them.

The second, on the stem of the lamp next to my desk.

I arrived back in Singapore on the last day of this year’s great singapore sale and was anxious cut a swath through the Kenneth Cole, Hugo Boss, New Man and Top Man shops. Sadly, I needed to go purchase a special phone for a work thing and arrange to get it shipped overnight to Australia. It ended up taking until 2pm because I walked to the Funan IT mall which is only a kilometer from the hotel as the crow flys. Sadly, the streets didn’t work like that. e to mention vast construction due to a new MRT subway line being built. It took a while to get there and it started to pour rain just as I was a block away.

After finding a place that had the thing, I got it and then started to walk back during a lull in the rain. I took a different route, which didn’t seem like the most direct on the map, but certainly worked better than the other one with the exception that it stared to rain again half way there. I was forced to duck into a mall, which was great except that it was all home furnishings. I snuck out the side door and behold Fish & co. I was starving so I had lunch. I ordered the fish of the day “sambal” style. Now sambal is a sauce that we have at the house that we use by the tablespoon to season entire dishes. Well, my fish came smothered with sambal. Like gravy. It was on the edge of too hot for me, and I really enjoy hot food.

One thing that I found interesting was that I’m just about as far away from the USA as you can get and I was sitting in a restaurant listening to music that was exactly the same as I would at home, watching an American baseball game on ESPN one one monitor, Formula 1 racing on another, and MTV on yet another monitor. On my table was an advertisement for a contest to win an “All American Vacation” sponsored by Tobasco™.

Anyway, I finally made it back to the hotel around 2pm and regroued for my walk down Orchard Road the other way — back to the area where we stayed before.

Lets just say it was crowded. Like Christmas at the Mall of America crowded, which is funny because I was talking to my friend Rich about Singapore and he said “Is it still like visiting the Mall of America except with a lot more Asian people?”. Despite this, I hit all the places I was looking for and ended up getting a fantastic deal on two Kenneth Cole shirts.

Yay!! Now its 4:30 and my feet are tired. I think that I’ll finish writing this little beauty and then mosey on down to the lobby and find a dinner plan.

And spawn stores are just all over Asia.