*Blink*

Ok, for the record, Coke™ Blak™ is just yummy yummy yummy. YUMMY!

Ok, now THIS is cool. You walk up to a coke machine and have no change? No bills? No problem. You have your phone, of course. So send a properly formatted text message to the address on the Coke machine to get your beverage!

You can SMS for taxi’s, radio station contests, COKE, and all kinds of things here. In the US, you are hard pressed to find people who can spell SMS.

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?!??!

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.

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

Ask Steve. Enough said.

Chris Low doesn’t like Sichuan food. I suppose because it can get pretty spicy. Needless to say, Sichuan restaurants were not on the list of places we would go normally. Despite this, probably after a bottle of wine at Saint Julien, Chris and Kim agreed to have dinner again with us, this time with Kim’s brother William and his wife Rebecca–at a Sichuan restaurant!

At any rate, the restaurant was in the central business district (I can’t remember its name right now but I’ll get back here with it when I do) on the 58th floor of an office building. This place was pretty darn nice, I must say, but they didn’t make the best use of the fact that they were on top of a building. I mean the dining room had round porthole windows rather than floor to ceiling glass.

At any rate, no big. We were there to finally get some great Sichuan food and to meet William who was as much of a wine person as Steve. (Don’t get me started about seating arrangements and dinner conversation…)

ANYWAY, one of the schticks of this place was the tea service. You had some very nice green tea leaves in your tea cup and the tea people would roam around with these hot water pots with extremely long spouts. We’re talking a 4 foot spout that was really pointy. You could put your eye out! They would come up behind you and flip that thing down from 4 feet away and after a delay hot water would shoot out directly into the cup until they whipped the thing vertical again. Amazing aim and control. Check out the video link at the end.

The food was to die for. Lots of different things. I’ve got a picture here of one of the dishes where the food that you were to eat was entirely buried by the peppers. Look at that picture. There was chicken cubes in there.

William and Rebecca were just terrific and I’m glad we got a chance to meet them. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing more of them if/when we return.

Here is the Quicktime video of the amazing tea pouring from my camera in the dark…

You will note that the title this entry is in all caps. THE POST BAR, you remember, the place where my hopes for a great martini were placed, has another name: FREAKING GORGEOUS. The Fullerton hotel is just lovely. I wouldn’t mind staying there at some point just to be in a place that grand. It would be like staying in a palace.

THE POST BAR looked totally right. The bottles of vodka were familiar and in plain view. I was ready to be given the Martini of the Trip.

It all fell apart shortly thereafter. Same thing, S$30. Oh well, look at the beautiful pictures. They were all taken without flash in a very dim setting but I set the camera on stuff so I did the best I could without blinding the other patrons. Well, us, really.

The coffee situation in Singapore has been sub-optimal for me. As a rule, I’ve been avoiding caffeine in the last year which means decaf coffee. Well, decaf coffee is not a big thing here. Perhaps its not a big thing anywhere but the US. In fact, if you order decaf coffee at our hotel, you wait a little and get your own little pot of decaf — instant decaf. Yay. Even the regular coffee really wasn’t that much of a treat.

As I was writing this entry I realized that I was being too hard on the hotel in the restaurant because what establishment of any size serves fabulous coffee. I guess I just have edited bad coffee out of my life at home to the extent that my expectations are high.

The coffee situation being what it was, I did the only thing I could do — switch to tea! Tea here flows like, well, coffee does in the US. It is yummy. And practical.

Did I mention that the in room coffee service is instant also? INSTANT?!?!!? Tea was the solution in my room as well. Of course, it was all caffeinated tea so I have been buzzing like a cheap fluorescent light all week. Cool.

Ok, as everyone knows (and I mean everyone), Steve made a list of all the foods that he (we) were going to have to try on our last trip to Singapore. The only item that we didn’t get to try was Roti Prata. This was because nobody really seems to serve it until late at night and by then we are tired, or didn’t have someone to tell us where to go or whatever.

Well, this trip was turning out to be a bust for Roti Prata as well until Friday night after going to a restaurant at the top of a building (pretty darn cool — more on it and the super long tea spouts later) we talked Sam into taking us out for Roti Prata.

I can’t believe that we waited so long for this stuff. MOO! Think crispy multi layer bread in the vein of Naan, except more crispy. It can be plain, or have stuff like mushrooms, egg, etc. in it. Then you smear it with some sort of curry gravy and suck it down like you haven’t eaten since, well, since you drove over from the restaurant on top of a building. *cough*