A bit of sociology and politics

In Singapore, elderly parents can sue their grown children if their children can afford to support them but aren't.

Jen and I find this amazing. The whole idea of bringing suit is an import from a western rights-based tradition--there was no analogue of the Magna Carta or the Enlightenment in Asia. Yet this rights-based legal framework is used in the service of a distinctively Asian moral framework with its strong emphasis on parental fealty.

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The most expensive boys school in Singapore is called Raffles Institution. The fancy, upscale shopping center is called Raffles Place. The swankiest hotel is the Raffles hotel. Raffles is the most coveted brand in Singapore. Who is Raffles?

He is Sir Stamford Raffles, employee of the British East Indies Company. He is also the much celebrated founder of Singapore. This surprised me, somewhat. Apparently, the shrewd Raffles saw what an important role Singapura could play in disrupting Dutch control of the region, and found a perfect opportunity in a succession struggle in the local government. Hussein Shah had been the crown prince of the Johor kingdom, but his younger brother was made sultan, and supported by the Dutch, while Shah was away getting married. It seems Raffles saw his opportunity to have British power back the older brother as the rightful ruler, establishing a port and very favorable trade conditions in the bargin. Within a few years, the British had control of what was then, officially, Singapore. Though none of the sources I've read say as much, it sounds very much as if Hussein was a puppet ruler proped up for British economic gain. Put together, these facts really stood out for me. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that other former colonies I'm aware of don't celebrate their colonial history the way Singapore does.

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While McDonald's, Sizzler, and Denny's are kind of down-market brands in the US, they are approaching upscale in Singapore, as symbols of Western affluence and social mobility. The Denny's is actually a quite fancy (and pricey) sit-down restaurant--a very different affair from its counterparts in the US.

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92% of Singaporeans live in subsidized government housing (buildings from the housing development board--so called "hdb's") that are given for 99-year leases. Here's what they look like from the outside:


We have heard and read several accounts of the government reclaiming private property in the name of a national project, only to re-sell it for commercial purposes. Singapore superficially resembles the bay area in many ways, so it's easy to forget about what seem to be deep political differences.

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We've also observed that there seems to be a lot of racial tension between the Chinese, now the ethnic majority with most of the economic and political power, and the native Malay population. The Malay stereotypes include many of the same "animalistic" charateristics that whites attributed to blacks in the US: they are often seen as a more earthy, emotional, and passionate people, as well as simple, uneducated, ambitionless and lazy. Conversely, the stereotype of the Chinese is that they are money grubbing, ruthless, and cold.

Someone in the market told us that there are mandated caps on the number of Malay families allowed in each HDB high-rise. In other words, a Malay family could not lease an apartment on the open market if there are already too many other Malay families in the building.

We noticed what to us seemed like a subtle incongruity in the museum. The HDBs are considered low-class housing (even though the vast majority of Singaporeans live in them). One of the plaqards in the museum that discussed the HDBs seemed (to us anyway) to imply that Malays were primarily the residents of the HDBs; yet Singapore is 80% chinese, and no mention was made of them.

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We also learned, to our surprise, that there is no free public education in Singapore. While the fees for primary school seemed nominal to us, the fees for kindergarden appeared quite steep. Singapore has a very high-stakes exit exam from primary school that significantly determines what quality school the child can attend afterwards. These two facts together are quite troubling, because we suspect that only wealthier families can afford to send their children to Kindergarten. It will be exactly those childen who are then ahead in primary school, do better on the exit exams, and secure themselves a place on an upwardly mobile path. In short, we fear that there may be a great deal of inequity built-in to the system early on.

Anyway, just a few observations we've had so far.

Lunch at Iggy's

A few days ago when we visited Khir's friend A.K., we heard he was a chef. It turns out he's a chef at Iggy's which made it into S. Pelligrino's list of top 50 restaurants in the world last year.

We went for lunch yesterday and were treated to 8 of the most fantastic dishes I've ever eaten. Sadly, I didn't take photos of any of the dishes, but here's what we had:

Amuse Bouche: Uni with cauliflower mousse in a ponzu jelly. Burrata mozzarella, vine-ripened tomatoes and basil. While this one was interesting, by comparison it turned out to be my least favorite of the lunch.

Summer Salad: Mushroom, tomato, avocado, mesclun, red onion, fine herbs, truffle and Hollandaise. The words here don't really capture it. When it says "mushroom", they mean a wonderfully marinated and grilled piece of portobello that's wonderfully delicious on its own. Similarly for the rest of the ingredients. The black winter truffle shavings on top were also delicious.

Mushroom: Mushroom cappuccino. We kind of rolled our eyes at the name of this one, but it turned out to be one of our favorite dishes. Just as cappuccino is an intense concentration of coffee taste, this turned out to be the most intense concentration of earthy mushroom flavor we've ever experienced. It was a dark, slightly creamy, wonderfully earthy mushroom soup (served in a cappucino glass) which totally floored us.

Tomato Tart: Tomato tart, basil, and Parmigiano Reggiano. Once again, ingredients sound simple and straightforward, but the trick was all in the execution. Definitely the best tart I've ever had. I'm only sorry we're lacking photos!

Sanma: Grilled baby pike, olive rice and fresh thyme oil. I took this photo from their website, but this is exactly what ours looked like.

The pike was so tender it almost melted in our mouths. It also had a very smooth creamy taste almost akin to sushi. The olive rice had some kind of small puffed grain mixed in which gave it a nice crunch and a subtle flavor something like barley. Definitely the best fish I'd ever eaten in my life (that is, until the next fish course...)

Duo of Tomato: Essence of tomato and soda. This was edging into the realm of molecular gastronomy. In chilled shot glasses we were served a cold, translucent cabonated liquid which tasted like tomato and citris. It had a very light and delicious, and surprising flavor.

Capellini: Capellini with zuchini, smoked mullet roe and shallot. This one was khir's favorite. I don't remember there being any mullet roe, and I do remember small shrimp and very small seaweed flakes mixed in. In any case, whatever the changes, it was exemplary. This is another one I found a photo of online. Again, not my photo, but this is exactly what our dish looked like.

Seabass: Slow-cooked seabass, caviar aubergine, tomato confit and poultry jus. Once again, we kind of rolled our eyes at the description, but the dish itself outdid the pike, even though we thought it impossible. Though not mentioned in the description, there was a kind of fresh olive tapinade on top, as well as small pieces of some kind of light fried fish cracker. The fish, again, was incredibly tender and flavorful, but what made this dish for me was the interplay of flavors. I tried each of the four main flavors seperately, and in various combinations; it was an amazing lesson in how flavors can build-on and compliment each other. This was, for me, the highlight of the meal.

Predessert: Soursop sorbet with lime foam. Another one served in chilled shot glasses, and another lesson in the pairing of tastes. By themselves, the soursop sorbet was good but unexciting, while the lime foam was very tart and a bit overwhelming. Together, they were perfect.

Duo of deserts: Chocolate cylider, french toast, home-made maple ice-cream. Caraibe chocolate bar, mascarpone ice-cream, green lime zest.

Here are some photos from other blogger's web pages. The only difference is that we had both of these plated together.

I wish the photo of the french toast were a little better, because this one doesn't really capture how perfectly golden, moist and delicious it was. The interior was moist and soft while the exterior had a thin carmelized crust. Amazing.

According to Jen, the real chocolate lover between us, just as the mushroom course captured the essence of rich mushroom flavor, this dessert was the most concentrated chocolate flavor she'd ever had. The photos are a little deceptive because they can't capture the incredible flavors, but we wanted to try and give a little idea.

Finally, here's a shot of all of us: me and jen, khir, ak, and Iggy's pastry chef, followed by a shot of the entire staff (taken from Iggy's website).

Some views around Singapore

Yesterday it rained right before dawn, and continued to drizzle a through the morning, so we took advantage of the uncharacteristic cool to walk for several hours in the Singapore botanic gardens, which are only a few blocks from Khir's house.

All of Singapore we've seen so far looks kind of like a fancy botanic garden to me; there are well-kept trees, plants and flowers everywhere. Singapore is a very well groomed city. Khir told us that much of this was part of a beautification program by the government many years back to make the city distinctive on the world stage; they wanted to become the "garden" city. There are parts of Singapore that don't fit the new, expensive, sparkling clean city stereotype as well, but we haven't been to those yet. (Though we will soon. Singapore is a very small country; you can drive all the way across it in about an hour).

Here are two shots that are pretty characteristic of the downtown area where Khir lives. There are many trees lining the streets, and many of the flower adorned pedestrian overpasses.






In the botanic gardens themselves, we traversed raised walkways through a large jungle section with many varieties of jungle trees we'd seen only in pictures. We walked through a special "ginger garden" exhibit with members of the ginger order (which apparently include 40 species of banana tree!). We saw a garden of many kinds of medicinal herb, another of fruit trees where we found a durian tree with small unripe fruits, and several lakes.







We also saw several temples, including a Chinese Buddhist temple, an Indian Hindu temple, and the Sultan Mosque where Khir received his early Islamic education.

Here's a shot from Chinatown. "But wait!", you say, "for a country that's 80% Chinese, isn't that like asking where's the China Town in Beijing? It's all china town, right?" This was the historic china town where the Chinese lived before they were the ethnic majority.



Now it's mostly trinket shops (like many China towns I know), but still with a few interesting craftspeople plying their own trade. This man, for example, was making wooden clogs.



And there were still several very beautiful buildings.



This is a shot of the outside of the Indian temple, whose interior was extremely intricate and amazing, but also unphotographed by us.



And finally, the Sultan Mosque, with Khir acting as tour guide for us and an Italian couple that we kind of picked up along the way.

What We're Eating, part 2

Today we stopped by the house of a friend of Khir's to see their new baby, and were invited to stay for lunch. They were a very nice family, and fed us a delicious lunch of dry mee siam (rice noodles cooked with Malay spices and shrimp), a kind-of pudding made from mung bean and durian, and a delicious bread pudding for dessert, as well as a very fragrant sweat tea infused with pandan leaf. Another linguistic note: mee is the Chinese word for noodles, and Siam is, of course, the old name for Thailand. Also, one of the sons in the family is a chef at a very high-end restaurant in Singapore (also recently featured in a food magazine alongside one of Gordon Ramsey's restaurants in London), which we have reservations for on Thursday, so that will be very exciting as well.




For dinner we went to Sammy's Fish Head Curry, whose specialty is, you guessed it: fish head curry. We were each given a large banana leaf as a plate onto which several waiters immediately deposited white rice, curry sauce, sliced cucumber, and so on.


The fish head curry came in a large clay-pot style bowl.

Even though it looked a little scary, it was definitely one of the best curries I'd ever had. Khir explained that the cheek flesh of the fish is the tenderest part of the animal, and he was absolutely right.

We also had two of the largest shrimp I've ever seen. Each one was approximately the length of my hand (fingers extended), but I'd accidentally already eaten mine by the time I remembered i wanted to take a photo of it. Oops!

During the day we were on a walk to see Singapore's merlion (about which more later) and we stopped at a stand to buy some sweat corn ice cream. The vendor took out a big square block of the ice cream and cut off a large section of it to serve between two thin wafers. It tasted like delicious sweet corn. We loved it!

2 Days in Singapore: What We're Eating

We've been in Singapore two days now, doing and seeing all kinds of things, but we thought we should report about the most important thing first: the food.

Day 1:

Khir and Terry were kind enough to pick us up from the airport, and take us straight-away to dinner at a Chinese restaurant that was open late. It was hopping with young people, and the outdoor seating was more than welcome since it was still quite hot and humid at 11pm.

We'd had a nice meal on the plane, so we just snacked on a little dim sum: har gow, dumplings with chili crab, and thai-style fried rolls with tofu, all of which were fantastic.

On the way back to the car, Terry had to stop to try some grilled meat from a street vendor.

I stopped a little further along for some otak-otak.

The word 'otak' means brains, but repeated twice it means 'that which looks like brains'--in this case, fish cake barbecued in a banana leaf. (On a similar linguistic note, the word 'layang' is the verb 'to fly', while layang-layang modifies it to mean, literally, 'that which glides'--the word for kite!).


Day 2:

For lunch, Khir brought us to the famous Victory Restaurant on Arab street (which was apparently recently featured in Gourmet magazine) to try murtabak. Just like pizza is called calzone when it's folded over on itself before cooking, murtabak is quite similar to paratha. Here's a shot of Khir ordering for us, as well as a little bit of the preparation.



It's typically eaten with a curry on the side. We had both a chicken and a fish curry for dipping.



To drink, we had a distinctive type of chai tea, called Teh Tarik. Teh, of course, is tea, while 'tarik' means 'stretched' which describes its preparation by pouring it a long distance through the air, from cup to cup, as a means to froth the milk it contains.

Ok, gotta split this one into two posts...

One day in Sydney

Our somewhat circuitous route to Singapore takes us to Sydney for a day, first. Leaving California, we were pleasantly surprised when the ticketing agent waved our visa application fee for Australia ($70 savings right there!), and handed us boarding passes for seats 56 j and 56 k. Neither Jen or I had ever seen seat numbers or letters so large before!

And indeed, our plane was huge (including what appeared to be a second-story). It boasted individual monitors on every seat with a selection from 80 different movies (that we actually wanted to see (!)), many music cds, audio books, and video games. My seat mate on the other side turned out to be a Peruvian man who owns Inca Runners, and we talked for a long time about what we saw and did in Peru. He was on his way to a skiing vacation in Australia.

We arrived at Australia in the morning but it took us quite awhile to get out of the airport. First we had to negotiate a little bit with the customs agent who was concerned that we'd been in Peru in the last 6 days, but didn't have yellow fever inoculations (even though, as we explained, we hadn't been in any jungle areas). Then, a different agent in quarentine spotted Jen's new juggling balls, and needed to cut one open (a little) to make sure there weren't any seeds or shells inside; which, of course, there were. He was on the verge of confiscating them, while I was asking whether we couldn't just keep them in the airport for a day, or maybe stay in the airport the night ourselves, because we were flying out the very next day. Finally he relented and cautioned us not to take them out of our bags during our night in Sydney.

We took a quick shuttle ride from the airport to Backpacker Headquarter hostel (past Harry's Singapore Chili Crab, which I'd read about on the internet!), where we checked into our dormitory-style bunks. Paying $40 for bunk-beds in dorms with shared facilities was certainly a shocking change from what we were used to in Peru. As it turned out, while they weren't exactly tidy, they were quiet during the night, which we thought was a great success for a Friday night. It was our first experience this trip in true "backpacker" hostels, and we definitely felt out of our element among a crowd that seemed focused primarily on partying. Is a party in Sydney really that different from a party in California or Singapore? We didn't really see the point.

We spent the afternoon wandering around Sydney which is probably the most beautiful big city we've ever been in. We expected cars to drive on the left, but didn't think that pedestrian traffic would, of course, also be on the left. This proved difficult for us to remember, since we naturally tend to step right in the micro-negotiations with oncoming walkers. All of the crosswalks had reminders stenciled on the ground to "Look right!" for traffic. We were told later that, even with the precautions, Sydney has over 300 pedestrian traffic accidents a year.

We found an excellent book shop with an extremely friendly clerk in the travel section, who gave us advice about Vietnam, detailed his selection (at length), talked with us about California, and generally shared our excitement for things. Jen thought he could tell that we probably weren't in the market for his books, so he encouraged us to stop back past his shop after we return from Asia if 4 months to tell him how it went.

We walked down to see the Sydney opera house, and were about to walk over the bridge when the wind picked up, clouds came in, and a light drizzle started. I was ecstatic, if somewhat cold in a t-shirt and sandals.

The light in the evening was the most beautiful, amazing light I've ever seen. The cloud cover dimmed the ambient light to a soft dusk, while a breath-taking golden yellow suffused the entire atmosphere. We walked home, past sky scrapers, parks, squares and fountains through this ambrosia, finally arriving back home with the darkness. For Dinner, we enjoyed the delicious fare of the neighborhood restaurant "Mum's Thai Takeaway".

In the morning it was back to the airport, for our flight to Singapore (which also served an excellent curry meal--the best I've had on an airplane) to meet Khir and Terry at the airport. But that story will be for next time.

Odyssey home

When we left off, we were headed for Huaraz.

Huaraz turned out to be a bit of a tease, because there are all kinds of great long treks and adventures in the nearby Cordillera Blanca mountain range, but we didn't have enough time or equipment to go on any of them! We'll add that as a thing to see next time. Instead, we spent a few days wandering around the town, and going for short day-hikes, all in view of the beautiful snow-capped peaks that were out of reach to us.

Then began our Odyssey home. We left our hotel room at 10 in the morning, hung about town, and took the overnight bus back to Lima. Dawn was just breaking as we rolled into Lima, where we dropped our bags at a hotel and spent the day re-exploring our old Lima haunts. At around 6am, when the streets were still empty with a light drizzle falling, we heard the unpolluted sound of hundreds of cooing pigeons in the square outside San Francisco cathedral.

At 10pm, we took a cab to the airport and proceeded to wait for our flight which didn't take off until 1:45am! Right as I began drifting off to sleep, they turned on the cabin lights and served us dinner and coffee at 2:30. (For those keeping track, this is night #2 without a bed). Back to the lovely Mexico City airport by the morning, we felt surprisingly chipper. We occupied our 12 hours there by sleeping some on the benches, enjoying our first non-nescafe coffee in 6 weeks, and doing some programming (me) and poker (Jen).

In the evening we took our final flight back to SF, arriving 63 hours after we left our hotel in Huaraz, to my wonderful parents who picked us up with La Costena burritos in hand.