We’ve just landed in Singapore and I’m about to make a very big mistake but I don’t know it yet.
I’m still wearing the sexy spandex flight socks that make me look like some sort of 17th century pilgrim and I’ve taken off my bra. My armpits smell of baked beans. My face is puffy from water retention. I’m sure my breath probably smells worse than my armpits and although Andre was born without nasal glands I decide to still brush my teeth in one of the airport bathrooms and change my tshirt so that I feel a bit fresher and more human. I’m not sure if I can drink the tap water here so I make a big fuss about spitting and not swallowing and worry that I might have already poisoned myself in my half-asleep state. But I haven’t. This is not the big mistake I am talking about.
The Singapore airport toilet looks pretty nice, clean and normal. The only real difference from Heathrow being that it has a sign above the loo which from the illustration seems to be telling people not to stand on the toilet seat and pee or poo from a great height. I remember this being a ‘thing’ in Asia from my previous travels to Hong Kong about 10 years ago. Maybe it’s fun to poop from a standing position and splash your own ankles as it bombs the loo like a teenager at a pool party. Maximum impact. Maybe I’m missing out on one of life’s purest pleasures by not toileting from on high. Either way, it’s not allowed in Singapore’s Changi airport so I know now’s not the time to try out local customs. So this is also not the mistake I was talking about.
Speaking of great heights, the most immediately noticeable thing here is how much shorter the local people are than Westerners. Maybe the exhaustion is making me childish but I get the giggles as we move through the corridors and Andre asks me why. It’s not politically correct to say, but I say it anyway…’What’s it like to feel tall for the first time in your life?’ I ask him. He shoots me a horrified dagger of a look and tells me I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT say things like that. Andre is a couple of inches shorter than me and I’m only saying what’s true – at home he is a bit of a short arse. Here he is a monolith of a man. Which then leads me to realise that here in Asia I am Brienne of fucking Tarth. Just call me Empress Godzilla Gargantua Monstermunch for the rest of the day because here I am head, shoulders and thundertits above most other humans and it feels very odd. I can almost feel the ground and buildings shake as I walk.
Now I completely understand why, when I order cheap knickers from Aliexpress in size Large, what arrives is so petite it would fit my little dog better than me. It has been a lesson I’ve needed to repeat enough times that now the dog has a fantastic wardrobe of clothes and I finally order size XXXL when ordering in from this far overseas (which rocks my fragile self esteem every single time).
Near the loos I discover something exciting. It is a butterfly garden! An airport…with a BUTTERFLY GARDEN. I had heard that Changi Airport was the best in the world according to the (very strange) people who rate airports and now I start to see why. I rush back to find Andre and tell him so we can go and see it together and on the way pass a koi carp pond inside the building, with massive fish elegantly turning circles to soothe anxious passengers and next to that is a pair of mechanical foot and leg massage chairs which are free to use!!! Singapore is cool. Humid, but cool.
We enter the butterfly garden. We look at butterflies. This is cool. They are eating chunks of pineapple. This is also cool. But I am too tired to even think of better adjectives than ‘cool’ and all I can think of are those foot massage machines and how achey my feet and calves are after being scrunched up in an aeroplane chair for 13 hours. I plead with Andre to come with me so we can have a go on one before we get breakfast. I pause only for a moment to try to process the sign above the robotic chair which says ‘Experience pain with pleasure’.
‘Clearly a mistranslation,’ I say to myself, as I pop my butt on the chair and slide my massive hams into the weird mechanical bootees and press GO.
‘Jesus H. Chrrrrriissst!’, I screech as this scorpion of a machine greedily grabs my swollen calves in its mechanical jaws and gnaws on them like a geriatric alligator. I rapidly and desperately press all of the buttons on the control panel one after the other thinking I have obviously pressed something incorrectly, but this merely gives me a choice of having my foot bones crushed in a vice, my ankles grated with bricks or my calves tortured by the angriest hippo mouth in all of mechanical history.
‘What’s it like?’ asks Andre innocently as he slides his shoeless feet into the chair next to me. Here is someone, I think, who clearly cannot tell my sexual ecstasy face apart from my victim of medieval torture face, even after all these years. So I let him press GO, so he too can share this enlightening cultural experience of a cruel tourist trap with me.
‘Bloody hell!’ He yelps, pressing all the buttons in quick succession as he falls for the same trick I did. In the end we find the last button on the panel provides a comforting warmth and vibration which helps take the edge off the sensation of having lowered your legs into the whirring parts of a combine harvester of your own volition. And whether because we are too tired to move, or some part of us has found that pleasure-pain sweet spot that was advertised on the machine’s sign, we stay there for a good ten minutes, side by side, grimacing and wincing, having our feet and lower legs tortured until it times out and we step free, relieved and tingly, getting a little sense of what it must be like to get a foot massage from a therapist who really really hates you.
Best of all, while we were being tortured, our phones have connected to the airport Wifi and an email has arrived from the art couriers to let us know that our sculpture, ‘Icarus had a Sister’, the main reason we are taking this trip, has finally left Heathrow and is officially on it’s way to Australia and is due to arrive ahead of us in Melbourne at 10pm tonight!
I can feel my bum hole relax quite a few further notches on the sphincter scale of stress with the enormous relief of this news. We celebrate with breakfast in one of the small airport food concession stands selling something called ‘Kaya Toast’ which was recommended highly by Trip Advisor aficionados as one of the things to definitely do while having a whistle-stop tour of Singapore.
Kaya toast turns out to be delicious. It is a thick white bread, lightly toasted and basted in some sort of coconut butter. It’s sweet and really coconutty and utterly moreish. Even Andre, who isn’t a massive fan of coconut in all its forms, likes it.
It’s traditionally served with a runny poached egg and tea. I drink the tea (it tastes like tea – you get no eloquent descriptions of that from me today) and push the runny poached egg towards Andre. I prefer my chicken ovulations cooked PROPERLY. Andre likes his semi-raw, the consistency of toddler snot. I’m sticking to the sweet Kaya toast and not listening to him slurping the egg. Meanwhile a small, old female member of cleaning staff tries to tidy around us. We ask her how to say ‘thank you’ in the local language. She tells us it is ‘谢谢’ (siah siah). We mispronounce it multiple times with enthusiasm and she smiles warmly and nods politely, clearing away our breakfast debris.
“Time to get out there.” I say, and we fill out the forms needed to allow us daily access to Singapore (a bit of respite before we continue on the next leg of our journey to Oz). We pass an enormous pair of ‘try-on-able’ golden wings that remind us of our beloved Icarus sculpture, before stepping out into the blazing 34 degree heat of the day, still regretting how much we brought to carry and how many layers of clothing we’d chosen to wear. I have not yet made the terrible mistake I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. That moment is still ahead of me. I blink in the bright sun at the beautiful colours of the street ahead of me and innocently step towards my fate.
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This cheered me up no end!
Love mum x
Aww thanks mum. Did you have to Google who Brienne of Tarth was? 😉 x