Or can you?
While I was eating my plate of roast duck and rice from a hawker stall I noticed that another hawker had an ‘A’ rating placard. The Singapore hawkers are graded A-B-C-D according to cleanliness with inspections every six to eight weeks. There is some dispute over whether the system is effective — 150 people got food poisoning in April from one stall — but as a foreigner my stomach is still fairly sensitive so I will take any assurances offered.
Posting grades is mandatory but widely ignored and many customers ignore the ratings as well. Some people claim there is a bias toward high-end shopping centers while other stall owners simply say they do not have the time. One man quoted in the news said that if his stall is dirty, he will be the first to die.
Lovely.
Dangerous . . . that duck is so dangerous. Along with the rest of the world, Michael Jackson is everywhere. The Navy Exchange is playing him nonstop, the radio stations are playing tributes and local nightclubs are giving free drinks to people who dress in all black or white.
I realized that I had not checked to see the rating of the stall where I purchased my lunch and groaned when I saw a C rating. And then my stomach really flipped when I realized that the ‘C’ belonged to the stall next door and mine had nothing posted.
Two days later I appear to be relatively normal.
Our daughter likes the acoustics of our tiled bathroom. With the door closed she will stay in there for a long time belting out songs from The Sound of Music or having conversations — usually arguments — with imaginary friends.
So it only seemed right to give her an audience when I opened a moving box and found four Godzillas. They are encouraging the use of hand sanitizer and one of them is holding a package of wet wipes.
Citrus stayed with them for nearly ten minutes. She mainly growled at them, although she also told them the same thing she tells me at least once each day in a menacing voice with her finger pointing:
If you have any respect for who we are and what we do, YOU will be gone by morning!
Her favorite line from Kung Fu Panda.
Elysia was concerned that the Godzillas might be too scary so this morning I asked Citrus to name them. The first one, naturally, she named Daddy. The others she named Tasha, Nina, and Mike.
She welcomed me taking photos, one more thing I will have to help her remember some day.
Now that we have stopped traveling we realized fairly quickly how little food we had in the refrigerator. This morning I dropped Citrus off at pre-school and headed over to a recommended wet market at Chong Pang City, located one neighborhood away in Yishun. I envisioned returning with bags full of vegetables, fruit, fish and poultry.
Before going I dug out our copy of Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, a cookbook and travel journal of Southeast Asia that my brother gave us a year or two ago. The authors have translated most ingredients into western equivalents, and I have never feared Asian supermarkets, but in general I get very aggravated when a recipe calls for cilantro from a specific bank of a river, an obscure type of lime, or something that Whole Foods sells for more than the price of gold. So I had not tried any of the dishes.
Now that we are in Southeast Asia the obstacles are different. Why pound away with a mortar and pestle when you can buy the sauce? Why bother cooking when you can have a similar dish at a hawker stand for $2?
Still, I was determined to cook something. I looked at the fish at the market. There was a lot of it. Some looked familiar. The fishmonger only knew the Chinese names and I only knew that I was looking at a red fish or a long fish or an ugly fish. Never mind details like quality. I skipped the fish and went to something more familiar, roast pork.
I asked for roast pork and got something different than what I was thinking. I think it is crispy skin pork. I resorted to pointing to the bright red pork and then frustrated the cashier by not knowing how many kilograms I wanted. Medium size!
I looked at the produce. Is that cilantro or parsley? Maybe Thai cilantro looks like parsley or maybe it’s neither. Is that vegetable a bitter melon? Is that zucchini? Or maybe they have bitter zucchini, too. I don’t want anything bitter, better move on.
Found fresh chicken, nevermind the odd one with black skin. But then I realized that we had chicken last night and if I am going to cook it tomorrow, I may as well come back to the market tomorrow. Move on.
And so it went. In the end, I got the pork, some “U.S.A. cherries” and a kilogram of rambutan branches, which I gave to Elysia as a sad, hairy bouquet, to munch on at work. And I got a $2 plate of roast duck and rice.
Singapore is rewards-points crazy. Sure, in the United States there are airline, credit and store card loyalty points, and a few stores have membership clubs. But here everything including the Singapore Zoo, our daughter’s pre-school, and even buying pork buns at the mall food-court can be had with a discount if you are carrying the correct loyalty card. It seems a bit random, but if you buy enough pre-paid mobile phone cards at 7-Eleven, you get a free cup of mashed potatoes.
We applied for a bank credit card partly to get some of the discounts and also to stop paying the one- to three-percent foreign transaction charges on our U.S. cards. Over three years those charges can really add up! But despite meeting the income requirement for foreigners, we received this cryptic letter from the bank:
The Bank has thoroughly assessed the application based on our credit evaluation criteria and wish to inform you that it is unsuccessful. We apologise that we are unable to disclose the reason(s) for the unsuccessful application as the criterion is confidential to the Bank.
They won’t tell us, but we think we submitted the income information in the wrong format. Once again, do anything slightly differently here and the process is derailed.
A few months ago I heard good advice for military families moving to new duty stations. The impulse is to spend your first six months unpacking and getting your new house in order and to spend the last six months packing and waiting for the next move. As a result, you spend a year of your three-year tour puttering around the house when you could be exploring your new community. (The other two years are spent wondering where you will be moving next, but that’s another issue.)
We have now been in Singapore for two and a half months. In that time we have already traveled to the Philippines, Malaysia, and back to California. So it is no wonder that today was the first day we felt okay with inviting friends over for dinner. About fifteen of the 300 moving boxes remain and most things on the floor are in semi-organized piles.
One of our neighbors is a Coast Guard family with a little girl a few months younger than Citrus. Sometimes they play together, and other times they play along side each other, and they seem to get along well. Each of them was competitive, in a polite way. After each claimed that she was the tallest, they got down to business. PCS (Permanent Change of Station) boasts.
Nearly every time I have heard a public speaker in the milspouse community — at a family deployment briefing, conferences, magazine articles — the introduction includes the number of moves the family has endured:
Kelly has moved 18 times in fourteen years and has been through five deployments!
So tonight we had two three-year-olds. One started with an innocent, “I used to live in another house.” And then my daughter recited that she lived in Virginia Beach when she was a baby, and then in “downtown Silver Spring, Maryland when I was 2 years old and also in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland when I was 3 years old.”
As with the milspouses, I half expected her to follow this throwdown with a break-dance spin and pose. Top that, _____!
It was a stalemate so things did not degenerate. They moved on and made sugar cookies with a set of cookie cutters my mom gave to us several months ago.
In my last riveting installment, I requested a 3,286-mile grocery delivery from the Yakota Air Base in Japan. That was on May 3rd.
In early June I got word that the Office of the Under Secretary Defense, in a memo dated May 20th, announced a new policy ending the use of the Military Postal Service by the commissaries to ship groceries.
On the one hand, you can see how things could get out of control given the thousands of service members and their families stationed around the world. Unlike those deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, we have easy access to supermarkets. Shopping from Japan allowed families here to substantially reduce their grocery bill but in the end it was a nice gesture by volunteers at the commissary that became too popular.
Still, I had not received my groceries by the time the policy was changed. Some emails from Japan indicated my order was coming while others suggested that the order would need to be cancelled.
Today ten boxes arrived, perhaps the last order out of the store. Images in my head of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon. Okay, perhaps a little too dramatic considering I was waiting on pasta, peanut butter, shortening and ice cream cones.
I take excitement wherever I can find it and for today, this was it.
TERENGGANU, Malaysia (June 23, 2009) Lt. Graham Hull, signal warfare officer aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon (DDG 93) and Lt. Cmdr. Elysia Ng, staff judge advocate for Commander, Logistics Group, Western Pacific, stand among members of the Malaysian Armed Forces during a group photo following the opening ceremony of the Malaysian phase of Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT), a series of bilateral exercises held annually in Southeast Asia to strengthen relationships and enhance the operational readiness of the participating forces. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Michael Moriatis/Released)
Many other official photos are available here.
Q: You return home after four days away to find the power off, a circuit breaker flipped most likely due to the daily lightning storms. The house is at least 85 degrees and has been warm long enough to melt all of the ice in the freezer’s ice maker. The frozen shrimp has been warm for five to eighty six hours and shrimpy water has leaked all over the freezer. You throw out almost everything in the refrigerator and freezer.
You have three pounds of Peet’s Coffee in the freezer that you carried 8,500 miles. Choose one of the following:
a) You throw the coffee away. It may be Peet’s but nothing can stay free of shrimp smell.
b) You drink the coffee. Good coffee can kill off anything.
c) You throw the coffee away. Good coffee can kill off anything except your memory of the overpowering shrimp smell, which you will remember early each morning when you pour a cup.
What do you do?
We leave the hotel tomorrow, good timing since I have tried everything in the buffet at least twice. I liked almost everything. Sweet curries, spicy sauces, fun fruit — although durians are not allowed in the hotel despite being the pride of Malaysia. Too smelly for the foreigners I guess.
Citrus and I have spent nearly all our time either eating or in the water. We were in the pool with about twenty teenage girls yesterday. I was covered nearly head to toe to prevent sunburn, they were covered head to toe in hijab dress. Whatever the country, our daughter always finds attention from the girls and they tolerate me because of her.
The CARAT exercises with Malaysia wrapped up today with more meetings as well as beach volleyball with the U.S. Marines, Navy and the Malaysian Armed Forces. I incorrectly assumed they would play against each other, forgetting momentarily that this is a mission to encourage cooperation. Everyone played together.
Tomorrow we will probably drive north to see more of Malaysia and then will head back to Singapore. Hopefully the automatic cat feeder has been doing its job.
We are on the east coast of Malaysia. I have the rough job of applying sunblock, moving the beach chair to keep it in the shade, and making sure our daughter does not drown in the pool. My wife is working with the Malaysian Navy.
Our car made the seven hour drive without any problems or near-misses. The divider line of the two-lane highway sometimes seems to be merely a suggestion as cars constantly pass each other in both directions.
We drove without working air conditioning, one of the few cars with its windows down. Every once in a while I thought I smelled the engine burning but it turned out to be farmers burning leaves or people burning their garbage and the air changed from hazy to clear several times but it is nice where we are staying. There is a strong breeze and when there was a torrential rain last night the air actually was cool.
The hotel is a five-star. Translation: A 3-star in the United States. The buffet is great. It is a good thing we are only staying three to four days because I love sweet curries. I will have to do the aquatics exercise class when we return to Singapore.
We have yet to explore much beyond the hotel but will try the beach this afternoon after I read my travel guide. I vaguely recall a warning that the sea floor drops off suddenly and an undertow that will keep you from swimming ashore. It was not much reassurance to read that “there are plenty of boats who can fish you out.”
I can imagine the news going out to friends and family: “After applying sunblock liberally, Mitja and Citrus were last seen drifting east in the South China Sea.”