Tuesday, March 1, 2010 AM Singapore

TUESDAY March 2, 2010

Breakfast on our floor then taxi to Chinatown. Visited the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, and lit an incense for Noi. Yes, the relic here is housed in a huge glass encased room with a stupa encasing the Buddha’s tooth. Just outside that big room is another room where there were some monks eating and studying and chanting. Later, they came and blessed people. Around that are spaces for meditation. They have a great Buddhist Culture Museum. The temple is only a few years old and it’s beautiful. The top floor has a rooftop garden and pagoda with 10,000 buddhas and the largest prayer wheel in the world.

Visited the Sri Mariamman Temple, a Hindu temple dedicated to the Mother Goddess (like a church for Mary, almost), but it was being renovated so there was not much to see. Visited the Fuk Tak Chi Museam which used to be the oldest temple in Singapore, when this area was right on the water!

We went through the cleanest Chinatown ever! I kept wanting to buy stuff and Steve kept holding me back, not giving me the required Singapore dollars I needed.
“But we’re in Chinatown!” I protested.
“We’re going to CHINA!” he retorted.
“Yeah, but, they probably don’t have Chinatowns there!” I yelled back.
“It’s ALL Chinatown,” he said. And all this just because I wanted to buy a swirly drum thing for Ryan. I needed Ana Rasco, I needed to call in a friend, a lifeline, but Steve wouldn’t lend me his phone.

I went into a Chinese herb shop because I was having an allergy attack and I bought some pills to ward off sinus problems and evil airs. I stopped sneezing but I couldn’t get rid of Steve.

Then we walked through Singapore City and all the areas we had walked the night before and kind of remembered them.

Took a taxi to Little India and had the best meal. The Four Seasons had printed a little book with suggestions for restaurants. This one was called Gandhi Restaurant (how can you lose with a name like that?) Steve just wanted air conditioning. To call this a restaurant was a stretch. It opened out onto the street, the kitchen right there in your face with a queue of people waiting for take-away. This part was not air conditioned. One of the workers motioned for us to go into the “restaurant” part. It was an unadorned square room with formica tables, packed to the last seat, of Indian men. Just men. I felt so female and pale, and unclean again. We were unclean, we were sweating like pigs. But there was air conditioning somewhere in the room. You waited until someone got up, or actually, until you were told where to sit, which was at a table with other Indian men. Unfortunately for the poor guy who was minding his own business eating off his banana leaf with his hands, we were told to sit with him. And I mean, this is not like at a food court where you might share a table but you share your own space off that table. No. Here, I sat directly across from this man, our knees almost touching. He ate with his right hand (you NEVER eat with your left hand) and played with his I-phone with his left hand.

There are no menus here, no utensils, no napkins, no specials of the day, no wine list. You are told where to sit and then given a banana leaf. This is your placemat and dish. A guy comes by with a huge platter of rice and just dumps it on your leaf. Another guy comes with these steels buckets of curry, coconut milk, vegetables, and ladles them out of the bucket and dumps these in piles on your banana leaf. You eat with your right hand, and of course, since you know YOU CAN NOT EAT WITH YOUR LEFT HAND, you keep it securely fastened between your knees. But of course, my nose itched, it started running from the Chinese herbs and the allergies and I had to use my left hand because my right hand was full of rice and curry and spinach. It was one of the most delicious meals I have ever had, and it cleared my sinuses, too. After the meal, you go to a sink that’s in one corner and queue up with all the very dark Indian men, and wash your hands in a sink, and then dry them on your pants because there are no paper towels. It was THE BEST!

I wanted to buy the girls sarongs off the street on Serangoon Street because Art told me to, but Steve was too hot, so we went to the hotel for an a/c break.