The Real World: Singapore, Part II - Food, etc.

Seriously, why can't I even write a title without using bizarre amounts of unnecessary punctuation? Anyway, we're back, baby. Only this time a lot sweatier and slightly more drunk.

Now that week 2 is coming to a close, we have learned a lot more about the place Sam and I will be spending the next year. Namely, that Sam and I are going to gain 40 pounds each if we don't adjust the way we're currently shoving food into our round American faces (more about that later). That, and everyone here thinks that I look exactly like Andre Agassi.

Either I look exactly like Agassi or Singaporeans love tennis and think that all bald white guys look alike. P.S. I dare you not to be drawn in by those eyes.

Food here continues to be an all-encompassing, continuous pastime. It seems that completely by accident, we set up shop in the food capital of the world. I used to think that American life was centered around eating. Frankly, I had no idea what I was talking about (Sam would inform you that this is not an unusual occurrence). Let me put it this way, there are about 70 separate restaurants on the block we live on.

According to Moore's Law, that means there are at least 25 million restaurants captured in this photograph.

JAILBREAK!!!

We broke Foxy out of dog jail yesterday.

Not even Nelson Mandela suffered this much.

She was a VERY happy camper, although she was greeted by the rude awakening that she is a heat-sensitive dog now living in an equatorial, tropical country.

She pants like a fat guy in a grease fire.

To add insult to injury it has been so humid lately that it rains every day.

Rare is the day when humidity can be captured via photograph. I bet you're sweating just looking at this picture.

As a result Foxy has to wear her raincoat a lot.

This look can be roughly translated as: "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

It is a huge burden lifted off our chests now that Foxy is out of dog jail. It was a real bitch (pun....intended?) getting all the way up to the quarantine station everyday from downtown. I mean I think anyone can identify with how annoying it is to take the MRT all the way up to Yishun and then transfer to the 171 to Sembewang. Am I right people? Is this thing on?

Ok, fair enough. Moving on, now that we don't have to visit Foxy at the other side of the island every day, we have a lot more free time to do Singapore things.

Like walk past important buildings.

Or do whatever this is called:

Is it weird that I totally wanna dip my junk in there?

But back to the food. Sam and I can't even describe the foodventures we've been on over the last few weeks. First of all, lets just talk about a phenomenon here that is both mildly confusing and particularly hazardous to my health. Singaporeans love desert more than any other nation on earth. There is literally a bakery on every street corner, and several on every floor of every mall.

You better know your cake history.

During lunch hour, guys will literally walk in to one of these shops, grab 3 chocolate whatever's for like $2 and that's his lunch.

Don't even act like you wouldn't grab any three items for $2.

And this is just one of dozens of bakery chains across the country.

This is Chewy Junior. Motto: "You're diet can suck our balls."

Of course there is a lot of food that we haven't had the chance to try yet but is nonetheless very popular here. One such culinary delight is a local fruit called durian.

Why haven't we tried it yet? Oh, maybe because it looks like it has dinosaur skin and smells like 10,000 miles of bad road. So smelly in fact that you aren't even aloud to bring it on trains or buses. There are even whole apartment complexes that do not allow durian on the property (thankfully, ours is one such complex).

There are even things we don't want to try at our beloved Cake History:

Silly, those words don't belong together.

One amazing part of walking to Chinatown is that on every street corner there is a fresh pork and beef jerky stand, where upstanding young gentleman grill up meat slabs and dry them out for your enjoyment every day.

You have no idea how manly I felt being so close to that much jerky.

One word of advice though. If you're going to walk, you better wait for the green man.

I was kind of hoping this guy would show up to help us across the street:

I would also have settled for The Nightman.

Once Greenman gets you to Chinatown. You really get a chance to sample authentic Chinese culture, unspoiled by western influence.

Is it racist to think that this is racist?

Chinatown is really fun and Sam and I had a nice day making sure to eat everything in arm's reach while walking as quickly as possible past anything of real cultural significance.

Fat guy in a little aisle.

Yeah ok fine, maybe Sam and I aren't exactly serving as cultural attachés during our time here. But we are having a great time, even allowing banal things like going to the grocery store to become minor adventures.

This is my "I think I should go see a therapist because for some reason
these fruit are turning me on," face.

I no longer wish to write anything else. Hope everything is going well with everyone. Tureff's out.

The Real World: Singapore, Part 1

The Tureff's

Sam and I have moved to Singapore. As a result, I'll be hijacking this blog for a few weeks to post some updates on our daily life here as well as regale you with stories that have only the smallest possibility of being entertaining.

It's hard for me to sum up our experiences so far in a concise, orderly manner, as that would take more than 1 minute of preparation before just sitting down and diarrhea-ing words into this page. I guess what I'm saying is: please bear with me as I struggle through this first post -- it's 6:35am here and Sam and I have not gotten what is considered to be the amount of sleep necessary to not murder people. I mean, just the sheer abomination of punctuation that just took place should be demonstrative of this fact.

I'll try to gloss over the traveling portion as much as possible, because while it was without a doubt hell exemplified, I don't want to spend too much time complaining about our white-people problems (our international flight was long....boo hoo).

Basically, from Saturday to Monday morning we did a lot of this:

And after that, we did some of this:

Then we did some more of this:

This is me being fat in Tokyo.

And on and on and on. The traveling was definitely unpleasant, but much like our dog, Foxy, I've already forgotten about it. Honestly the worst part was having to constantly provide documents for Foxy in addition to the never ending worry of whether or not we could get her to go to the bathroom between flights. If it weren't for that little a-hole (literally and figuratively, I suppose) it would have been an otherwise bearable experience. The reaction we have gotten to Foxy in Asia has been a tale of two equally bizarre extremes. In the US, everybody has close to the same reaction to Foxy: a wide smile, a barely audible "aww," the possibility of a quick pet and then they move on. In Asia people either react in extreme horror or freak out with unbridled excitement. In Tokyo, within minutes of each other we had a flock of girls run up to me, grab Foxy out of my hands and play with her/take pictures for like 5 minutes. 2 minutes after that another girl saw Foxy and completely freaked out, screamed and started waiving her carry-on bag in the manner a lion tamer would use a bar-stool. All she was missing was the whip in her hand.

And then we finally arrive in Singapore. I could immediately tell that we had left Seattle when Sam and I were handed this piece of paper:



Moving quickly along, another way we could tell we were no longer in Seattle, is that this guy jumped from the ceiling and ran up Sam's back about an hour after we woke up.

It's cool though, she handled it gracefully by screaming while gesticulating wildly.

Let's take a minute to clear up some misconceptions I had about Singapore.

#1. Everybody speaks English. This is so close to an accurate description. However I would add two words to this statement. I would say everyone speaks English to you. When people speak to each other they speak their own language, be it Malay, Mandarin, Hindi or another language that sounds like what the Prawns spoke in District 9. Additionally, Sam and I can't understand 20% of the people here, even though they speak better English than I do. We'll be sitting on the train and will just start laughing because we realize that the couple next to us has been speaking English to each other the whole time and we had no idea.

Ech. Typical Asian train station. Coming from the US its hard to adjust to the train stations here being "clean," and "sanitary" and "well lit" and all of the people "mind their own business" and move "efficiently" and "quickly" and the trains are "on time" and nobody tries to "stab you" or "have sex with you without your consent." I mean really, when are they going to join the 21st century?

It's no wonder we take cabs all the time:

Who wears a seatbelt in a cab?

#2. It is unbearably hot. Actually, I haven't felt that way at all. I mean don't get me wrong its not exactly Minneapolis here, but because it rains twice a day here for 20 minutes, it helps keeps the heat down. Seriously though, the rain here makes Seattle look like a little girl. The rainy season here is going to be off the hook. Let's illustrate. This is a gutter in the US:

This is a gutter here:

#3. All of your appliances will work here. Ok maybe this was not a misconception, just me not finding out something in advance. We get to our hotel and all the plugs (all one of them) look like this:

The people who designed this socket were obviously born without the gene that gives you the ability to experience penis shape humor.

There are a million small differences like this, for example, when you set the temperature in the shower, remember that the degrees are in Celsius, lest you experience my morning flash-boil.

THE FOOD!!!!

My favorite thing about Singapore so far is the food. In Singapore, people eat out for every meal, often in little "food courts" filled with these things called hawker stalls.

For about $6-$8 US, you and your wife can eat a laughably delicious meal for two. If you don't have a wife, for $2.50 US you can stare longingly into your Black Pepper Mee Hong Kong w/Prawn and contemplate dying alone. Each food court has a bunch of these stalls each serving food from a different country or style. You just walk up, point to a picture and announce loudly "I WILL PAY YOU MONEY AND YOU WILL MAKE THE PICTURE ON THE TOP RIGHT AND I WILL PUT IT IN MY TUMMY. THANK YOU."

Sam and I eat like kings for about $16 US per day.

The last thing we did yesterday was go visit Foxy in dog jail. According to Singapore law she has to be quarantined for 10 days upon our arrival.

Is the barbed wire necessary, guys?

We get an hour conjugal visit once per day. These visits are the most fun I've ever had. I can't even explain how exciting it is to sit in a cell with your dog for an hour. This picture captures only a small part of how enthralling these daily visits are:

I put a pack of cigarettes and a file in her squeak toy.

With Foxy out of the way, we get to do all sorts of exciting things.

Like stand on the street we live on.


And stand in front of some kind of fountain.

And take pictures of people very early in the morning while they brush their teeth.

Ok as you can probably tell I don't want to write anymore things. I'll make another equally banal post in the next few days and send it to you completely unsolicited. Bye!

Somebody left a surfboard on this hotel.

***Update: Some store names we like: Chewy Junior, House of Condom, Republic of Steak, Cake History