(It’s a long one. You may wish to get a cup of tea and use the toilet before you begin…)
I have to get the taste out of my mouth. I feel like one of the giants from the BFG story picking lumps of human flesh out of my back teeth. I swear when they translate the word ‘Durian’ into English it has nothing to do with a fruit and in fact means ‘har de har har, sucker’. I am reminded of the explanation I heard about why they eat dog in some parts of Asia, having turned to it in desperation in times of famine and acquired a taste for the meat that lasted after the famine abated. But I genuinely can’t understand a culture that voluntarily eats the durian fruit. In times of famine, I think I’d eat my neighbours (sorry, Julie…nothing personal) before I ate one of those devil’s testicles again.
So I demand we go somewhere and get ourselves an ice cream, most urgently. This is a demand which is never met by a negative from André. Ice cream is his most favourite thing in the world. There is never an inappropriate time to suggest it and never a bad time to be eating it. He’d gannet through a pint of mint choc chip at your funeral if it was available.
It’s a hot day in a hot country and you’d think that ice cream would be easy to find, but we are wandering through the food market and all I can see are suspicious desserts. You know…those interesting ‘holiday desserts’ that you understand are massive treats in foreign countries but are just plain weird to anyone else. Don’t get me wrong, we adore and eat a wide variety of food styles from around the world, and largely the British are laughed at and mocked for our shitty cuisine, but the one thing we do really really well are puddings. Desserts if you’re fancy. Afters’s if you’re not. Foreign desserts (with the exception of French and Italian) are usually very disappointing compared to a good English pud. And after the trauma of the Durian, my hackles are fully up on high alert mode for suspicious Singapore cuisine so I’m looking for something I recognise as definitely delicious to take the taste away and soothe my poor wounded tumkin.
My courage and daring do on this holiday, the desire to try new cultural experiences, has already left the building running for the hills, lobbing spiky dung fruits at anyone who comes near. But here are the choices…
All your favourite desserts.
A stall selling puddings seems to be offering us a bowl filled with ‘sweet corn ice milk’. The accompanying photo makes it look as if someone has literally tipped a tin of Lidl’s sweetcorn into a cereal bowl and poured milk on top with a couple of dusty ice cubes for garnish. I have no doubt at all, that this is considered delicious by…..whom?…dogs who like to re-eat their own vomit perhaps, but it doesn’t tickle my fancy.
Then we have something called ‘Sour Sop’ where the photo looks like a serving of whipped mashed potato, eyeballs and glacé cherries. It does NOT look like ice cream. Then we have the enticing ‘Cheng Teng’ – I have NO clue what this is, but it looks like the aforementioned eyeballs in a thick onion gravy with dog food. A bit of googling reveals it is a dessert soup made of fungus. As yumtasticly tempting as fungus soup pudding sounds, I’m gonna keep looking, thank you kindly.
The coupling of these rather monstrous looking desserts with the more alluring-sounding ‘peach blossom’ makes me scared to trust anything at all on the menu even when it doesn’t sound too scary. I have suddenly become one of THOSE Brits. How embarrassing. The ones who ask for egg and chips in case they accidentally order the consommé where a tentacle reaches out from your bowl and pulls your eyes out with its suckers when you go to drink it.
When we spot something that claims to be ice cream we discover to our horror that it is DURIAN FLAVOUR. This must be the dessert equivalent of Haagen Daaz’s ‘Kick myself in the face with razor blades on my shoe’ flavour. Or that Ben and Jerry classic, ‘Your dead horse’s rotting carcass explodes in your face on a hot day.’ I am NOT buying ice cream here. Nobody else is either…no locals even….nobody wants these desserts…I wonder if this stall is in fact a fake frontage for some sort of secret society club house. You pretend to be ordering a durian chowder with fingernail clippings on top, they tip you the wink and let you through a flap at the back of the stall to a room full of dancing girls and casino tables.
My anxiety is rising the hungrier I get, with the taste of Durian still firmly on my palette. But André has spotted a 7/11 in the food court! This may be the sacriligious tourist equivalent of finding the only Macdonalds in Venice but it is a recognisable international symbol for the snack-seeker and our best hope so far. And lo and behold they have familiar looking ice creams, served in packets, with no contamination from durians, eye balls, onions or otherwise!
Ah sweet bliss that is a creamy soothing Magnum lolly on a hot day in a strange city. How I both embrace and love you and also squint at and resent the extortionate cost of you compared to local iced desserts. No matter…GET in my mouth you beauty! Cleanse and baptise my tongue from the satanic horrors of the Singaporian pong fruit.
I am semi-recovered, and aware that our few short hours in this beautiful city are ticking away. I ram my earlier trauma deep deep down the way we Brits are famed for and we push on, this time to one of the most famous Buddhist temples in the city.
This busy temple is called the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, and is home to several relics of Buddha. Not being a Buddhist, by any stretch of the imagination, I’m here for the art, the visual spectacle, and we are lucky that they welcome visitors from any belief system and any country of the world. We push up some steps past a huge golden idol and into the rooms behind which open up into an enormous hall with a high ceiling, adorned in red and gold, rows of lantern upon lantern cover every inch of the ceiling.
The walls are covered in continuous rows and shelves of little Buddha effigies, each one in a slightly different pose. Through reading the translated signs near these little statuettes we read that each section of the room represents a different Chinese astrological sign. I was born in 1972, the year of the rat, but the buddhas assigned to rat people like me don’t look much different to the Buddhas in anyone else’s year groups. I pass further down these walls – passing the displays of flowers, fruit and incense which are brought by pilgrims as offerings to Buddha. They are lined up along wooden bars in what look like colourful shot glasses. It may look like cocktail hour at Maidstone’s most spectacular new bar but no alcohol is allowed here. And no meat either…just in case you had a burning desire to walk into somebody else’s holy place with a kebab in your handbag.
These faithful worshippers believe the many relics of Buddha – bits of his bones, hair, teeth, skin, etc – have changed form into pearls, crystalline stones and other calcified formations. Devoted prayer and offerings made in earnest will cause these pearls and stones to multiply in number. Something they apparently ‘miraculously’ do fairly regularly according to the temple’s website.
I personally remain about as convinced of this as I am about ‘sweetcorn iced milk’ being a delicious treat, but I fully respect people’s right to worship as they please, so long as they are not harming anyone. And as no harm is done here and it brings great comfort to those who believe it, then I’m simply grateful to be allowed a small window into this world, which is so different to my own experience, beliefs and culture. The sheer devotion of the artisans who put together this incredible building and the many hundreds of near identical statuettes is utterly mind blowing. The majesty and vivid splendour of it all is undeniably impressive. However, I am allergic to incense and cannot spend more than a couple of minutes scooting round at high speed, sniffing and sneezing and wheezing as I go, snapping photos with my phone, probably missing out on so much in my hurry, without an educated guide to explain the unfamiliar to me. All I can do is taste a tiny sample of each location and try to connect with the emotions and devotion of those kneeling in prayer or chanting privately to a particular statue; all too briefly before dashing outside into the fresh incense-free air for the next stop on our frenetic tour of the city.
The chubby Buddha I met outside in the street reminded me that I was hungry again. This time for a proper lunch. I’d asked Tripadvisor for recommended vegetarian and vegan places to eat in Singapore but it turned out we were quite a long way away from all of the ones I’d noted down. So we followed signs for a large indoor food market, with two floors, crammed with dozens of stalls selling delicious smelling exotic foods of all persuasions. The biggest queue was for a street food seller who has a Michelen starred rating – known for his fantastic dumpling soups and chicken noodles. After queuing for some time to sample the famous dumplings we discovered from some friendly locals that they all contained pork, so we started wandering from stall to stall in search of vegetarian options. When I’d been in Hong Kong, I’d had a similar challenge trying to find veggie food. Something would be marked as a vegetable wonton and then one bite in we’d discover this contained a side helping of pork. Even salad (you’d think you were safe there) came with a topping of crumbled bacon bits. Food labelling is not the same outside Europe. The best advice is to expect the unexpected.
However, the proximity to some major Buddhist temples suggested that vegetarianism couldn’t be as unusual here as all that, and we started asking around until we found an entirely vegetarian stall. Can heartily recommend this place to any fellow veggie or vegan travellers. The Yuan Yuan Vegetarian Cuisine concession stand:-
I couldn’t tell you exactly what we ate as it was a case of point and nod and hope for the best. But it was all delicious, all meat-free, and really rather cheap too. We had a little bit of everything that looked good, including something that tasted like Seitan (fake chickeny stuff made from soya) but unfurled like a banana flower.
Post meal we both started drifting into a carb coma where the jet lag was starting to hit us, along with the weight of our backpacks filled with items we now realised were completely unnecessary for this part of the trip. We knew if we slowed down we’d miss some wonderful sights so we jumped back on the tube getting off near the old famous Raffles Hotel bar where they’d invented the Singapore Sling. Raffles was closed for refurbishment, but we didn’t really mind as we were there to see Singapore’s Merlion statue with the iconic Marina Bay Sands hotel in the background and to be fair the plane Singapore Sling wasn’t that delicious. I like a cocktail, but I’m more of an Orgasm kind of gal, if I’m honest. That’s the drink, mum and dad, if you are reading this. Honest.
One of the most entertaining things of this tourist stop offers is the sight of hundreds of people trying to get exactly the same shot for their Instagram accounts. There are two choices here – join in and do the same, or push everyone over the edge of the quay while they are too busy duckfacing to defend themselves. And as much fun as the latter might have been, we opted for option one.
But this view had a more emotional meaning to me. The Marina Bay Sands Hotel was where my friend Tony worked in security and where he’d promised to take us up to the famous roof garden to see a view of the city when we visited Singapore. His death, two days ago, from pancreatic cancer, made this incredible view of a place I’d longed to see so bitter sweet. I knew that I could still visit the roof garden, paying the standard entrance fee. But biting back tears, I told André I just didn’t think I could. Not this time. It’s still too raw, too soon. But one day we will come back, and we will book into the hotel for a night, just for a night I’m sure, given how expensive it is there, just so we can swim in that famous infinity pool on the roof. I make this promise to myself. One day I will get to see that view and swim in that pool of pools. I will raise a glass of something less sickly than a Singapore Sling to my absent friend and I will gaze out on the beauty of this incredible skyline from the pool in the clouds.
At this point of the day we were so hot and tired, with my back starting to play up and André getting tired of being my pack horse, so we glugged down some fresh juices by the side of the quay.
When I was a little girl I used to think that the fruits we got in our supermarkets at home were all the fruits there were in the world – apples, oranges, clementines, bananas, grapefuit, grapes, various berries, pineapples and if we were really pushing the boat out…tinned lychees.
I think I was 11 or 12 when my best friend, Claire, brought a ‘new fruit’ to school with her that a relative had brought her back from Mauritius. I was stunned to see, smell and taste a fruit I had never heard of. It was called a jamalac and was fresh and crisp with a deep pink outside and white flesh inside. I felt very special indeed being allowed to try this fruit that none of us even knew existed, and gripped it in my little hands like a treasure when Claire broke it apart to share with me.
It was a little bit bland, if I’m honest, but just the idea that out there in the world were fruits I’d never tasted has filled me with wonder ever since. And here we were at an exotic juice bar with half a dozen beautiful looking and unfamiliar fruits to try, each looking like an inviting colourful promise of sweet nectar, pulped with ice in the heat of the day.
But after my durian experience, I wasn’t going to be suckered again. I could still taste that evil on my breath and I was going to play it safe with some freshly squeezed pineapple. André opted for mango. Both delicious. No regrets. No dung burps.
Our next stop on the whistle stop tour was one I’d heard completely mixed reviews about – the ArtScience Museum, nestled at the base of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel in a very modern looking building. This central hub of the city reminds me a lot of Canary Wharf in London. It has well designed buildings, well designed public spaces and well designed tube stations, all set around a body of water. It’s kinda classy. A bit industrial-looking for sure, but in a sophisticated and futuristic style. But don’t get me started on that giant durian-shaped building by the harbour. Honestly…these people are OBSESSED!
Those critical of the ArtScience museum claim it is more suited to kids than adults. Those in awe of the place spoke of visual and other sensory wonders they’d never seen before in the world. Too tired to keep traipsing round the city with our bags, we thought we’d take the risk.
The basement holds the permanent exhibition space – and yes, it is more aimed at kids or at least those with kids. But I had André (a big kid) and he had me (even bigger one) so we shoved our bags in left luggage and slid down a slide into a dark space where you can paint with light and colour on digital canvases that respond to your touch and movement.
Each room revealed another digital wonder. I think the most fabulous of all allowed kids to crayon animals of their choice onto regular paper. These would then be instantly scanned and uploaded into a ‘world’ on the wall where their drawings would instantly become animated creatures, exploring the hills and rivers around the room. As a child I could have spent hours in this one space alone, having my drawings come to life, giving them names. In our family we were allowed to paint our bedroom walls with murals…and I used to imagine the fairies came to life and moved around my room as I went to sleep. But here in Singapore they can actually do that. It was like slipping into the future.
As adults, perhaps the best place to hang out is a room of digital art projected onto the walls that subtly moves and changes. By folding yourself into the walls, you become the art. Nothing tickled me quite as much as seeing Andre’s bald head become a canvas. The photos we took of me were never quite so vivid and interesting as those I captured of my beloved’s pink bonce masterpiece. Some things just look better when you are bald.
Leopard André 
Expressionist André 
CJ looking like a Jackson Pollock as usual
There is such a lot of visual wonder here crammed into a relatively small space, that it would be giving away too many spoilers to show you them all. But if you get the chance to go, ignore the Tripadvisor reviews that poo poo this fabulous place. They are probably written by the same sickos that recommended the Durian fruit, so forget them and go here.
We only barely had enough energy left to go to the top of the building to a temporary art exhibition of giant inflatables. This peaceful, simple, elegant show included an enormous photo-accurate representation of the moon, which I understand is going to Salisbury Cathedral in England soon. So you too may get the chance to moon bathe in a city near you. A surprisingly relaxing experience after the bustle of the city and the child-filled, noisy environment of the basement play area of this museum.
As we reached the end of the afternoon, not even a strong coffee in the museum café could keep Andre’s eyes open any longer. So we gave up our plans to stay for the nightly harbour light show or to visit the nearby cloud gardens. Knowing we had another chance to see Singapore for a few hours on our return trip reassured me that we would not miss out on these wonders. Besides, you really can’t argue with this….
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