Finishing the entire island

Visiting Singapore means for us a lot of visiting with friends and family. With less than one week left in country, time was running out to see everyone. We were going to need to eat a lot of food and take a lot of bus, subway, and Uber rides, but we were committed. On Saturday we went to a Chen family dinner party. On Sunday we ate dim sum in an old school restaurant with an old friend. On Monday I drank craft beer, talked to ang mohs (white people), ate curry, and still made it home in time to put Bobby to bed. Along the way, I engaged in one of my hobbies: spying traces of an older Singapore. Sometimes it's hard to find such artifacts because this island is always tearing down and building new.

Chen party

Christine's cousin, Justin, hosted us on Saturday for dinner. Justin and I are buddies because we both stayed at the Chen household back in 2011 and 2012. He was saving up some money before striking off on his own by staying with his mom's brother, Mr. Chen. I was saving up to keep my head above water while drowning in student debt. I went to Justin's wedding in 2012 -- back then on Facebook you may have seen an awkward photo where Justin and I are standing close together in the center of a group of about thirty wedding guests, and I have my back to his bride, Tyng Tyng; it makes it look like Justin was marrying the awkward white guy (who forgot proper dress slacks so had to wear jeans to the wedding). Justin grew up in Malaysia nearby Mr. Chen's parents but has been living in Singapore for several years now. In approximately 2015 he was approved by the government to join the Singaporean middle class. That is to say, the government began leasing him an apartment.

You hear it over and over: the government in Singapore makes it so easy to own an apartment. Well, they do if you're a Singaporean or a legal permanent resident and you meet a boat load of qualifications and follow a boat load of rules. The Housing and Development Board (HDB) builds and manages apartment buildings that Singaporeans can lease. Singaporeans can also use their government mandated savings, an account with the Central Provident Fund (CPF), to pay back the subsidized loans (fun fact: the Singapore government borrows the wealth from the forced savings accounts and invests it in Singapore and abroad). The apartment buildings are built en masse to house a population that has grown very fast over the past 50 years. The HDB is so synonymous with these apartment estates that the buildings and the apartments themselves are always referred to as HDBs.

Over the last 10 years the population grew faster than the supply of housing, and the government has had to build as many HDBs as possible. When people are pissed off about rising housing prices (i.e., when demand for housing exceeds supply), they are less likely to vote for the ruling party, the PAP (People's Action Party), which has never been out of power since Singapore was founded as an independent country in 1965. (Over the years, people have also been afraid to vote against the PAP because then maybe HDB would allow to wither the quality of housing estates in these wards voting for opposition.) The rules for qualifying to purchase a lease (because you don't really purchase the apartment; you buy the right to use it for a defined period of time) are complicated, and due to the supply and demand mismatch, you have to sign up and then wait for several years before being able to sign a lease and move in. So in the rush to build enough new housing, we have these housing estates like Punggol, where Justin lives, at the far reaches of the island, with thousands of similar-looking apartment buildings.

A scene from Punggol. Looks lovely with the waterway, right? Well, you would need some recreational activity lest you look out your window and get vertigo from staring into endless rows of identical looking apartment buildings. There is not much if anything in Punggol that was build before the year 2000. It is truly a planned community. There are over 1,000 HDB buildings in Punggol alone.

The party was fun. Bobby had fun with his relatives (until he got too tired, then we went home). Most of the family members don't drink, so Justin just kept serving all the drinks to me. As usual, I feel embarrassed, but what's the alternative? Not drinking with delicious Chinese food on a Saturday night? Luckily Justin likes to drink as well, and he had a few along with me. I impressed everyone with how much sweatier I can be then everyone else even in an air-conditioned room. I also impressed everyone by overeating.

Justin said this is Ipoh-style, where you dip ingredients into a near-boiling bowl of soup to cook them and eat them off the stick. We'll find out next year what makes this unique to Ipoh when we visit the Chen family homeland for Chinese New Year.

The uncles keep to themselves after dinner while the aunties obsess over Bobby. Mr. Chen is wearing a mask, he told me, because he had a cold and didn't want to infect Bobby. He told his niece, however, that he needed to cover his face because he robbed a bank. I'm not sure which is true or if we were both fooled.

Christine's cousin Nikki with Bobby and her boyfriend.

Tyng Tyng, Justin's wife, who still married Justin even when the awkward white guy tried to push her out of her wedding photo. Justin's surname, by the way, is Ding. So, what does that make Tyng Tyng?

Bobby actually fell asleep on the way to the party and slept for a bit while the rest of us got loosened up. He's happiest when he just wakes up, so this ensured his good mood for most of the party time.

Justin, Bobby, and Eric, surveying the spread and steeling our stomachs for overeating.

Long lost friend found at dim-sum restaurant

On Sunday Christine, Bobby, and I had brunch with the chap who first introduced me to Christine back when we were all in India in 2007. Alvin was an intern at Marico Industries, the company where I was also an intern. He introduced me to a number of Singaporeans that summer interning in India. He even let me stay with his family for a few weeks in Singapore when I started school at NUS and was looking for a place to call my own (i.e., cockroach-infested student housing for rent). Alvin makes a few appearances earlier in this blog's pages. He is apparently joining the Singaporean middle class now because he is purchasing an HDB this year and getting married (usually a requirement for purchasing).

The restaurant, Red Star, is quite old school, with its red chairs, tacky decor, and carts pushed around the room with dim sum. Nowadays you usually write on a piece of paper the dim sum pieces you want, and a waiter brings them. This old style is more point and eat.

Wrong way, Christine; the dim sum cart is behind you.

The room is big. I guess it has to be so that demand can ensure the rapid flow of fresh dim sum from the kitchens, to the carts, to the mouths. I'm not sure what the tacky decor has to do with it, other than that not much has changed at this place in 30 years.

Alvin thought that he and Bobby had a rapport, but Bobby was just in the blissful state that appears just after a nap and a bottle of milk: he slept on the way to the restaurant, and while we ate dim sum we fed him some milk. Alvin looks a bit like Manny Pacquiao and Tony Leung, no?

Craft beer and curry

Manbeer and I did some research on the Singaporean craft beer industry during his night off from working behind his bar. You can see how fast the beer market is changing in Singapore. Now there are bottle shops selling diverse beers; there didn't used to be. We knocked back a few at Thirsty, a bottle shop in a vintage Singaporean shopping mall in a neighborhood, Holland Village, famous for its large ang moh population and Western restaurants. I had some good times in Holland Village back in the day -- it used to be the only place to get Mexican food! Even those of us who have gone native still from time to time crave the foods of our homelands.

At Thirsty I met a number of craft beer fans, mostly from overseas. I even met a nice Scottish man who works for 7-11's international corporate office. It's good that I left when I did because too many more of those beers and I would have woke up with a hangover (also, Christine would have killed me, so I wouldn't be writing this). The selection of beers mostly consists of imports -- mostly from the U.S., where modern craft beer culture is most developed -- but I sampled some excellent Singaporean brews, as well, by Brewlandia. Brewlandia brews in styles popular in the US (i.e., IPA); I hope to see such local brewers somehow incorporate more local flavors, though I'm not sure what local flavors go best with beer. Hopefully someone with more talent is working on this.

Holland Village Shopping Mall. Old Singapore shopping malls do not look like you would picture a shopping mall to look. Whereas malls now have atria of several stories, wide foot pathways (because the volumes of people here are sometimes unfathomable), and stores of all shapes and sizes, the older malls are more claustrophobic, with narrow foot pathways, small store outlets, and nary an international brand in sight. It won't be long before this mall will be torn down and replaced with a modern mall, I'm sure. The property developers are just giddy with excitement.

Lorung Mambong, the main Holland Village thoroughfare lined with restaurants catering to expatriates and internationally-minded Singaporeans like me. 

Despite being famous as an ang moh hangout, Holland Village does have a hawker center serving up local fare. I polished off a Tiger here on Monday, as I did back in my graduate school days as well.

For dinner, I told Manbeer that in my remaining few days I only wanted to eat local food. He took me to another place that is quite old school. Samy's Curry is a restaurant serving curries and rice on banana leaves in an open air restaurant, set far off the road, on top of a wooded hill, in a former army barracks. It was delicious, and my only regret is that I couldn't eat more.

Looks delicious, right?

I made it home in time to put Bobby to bed. Since moving to Asia, it has turned into a longer, more drawn-out affair than it used to be; since Christine actually has to wake up and go to work in an office in the morning (and since Bobby likes to grab her hair -- mine is harder to grab), I am in charge of coaxing him to sleep, no matter how long it takes. This frees Christine to get a bit more work done before she passes out. Bobby likes to wake us up several times in the night to feed, and Christine's presence is mandatory for that show.


Old becoming new

On Saturday I also paid a visit to an old theater that has been turned into -- shall we say -- an upscale dining and entertainment venue. The Capitol Theatre was an art deco movie theater from the 1930s that became run down and abandoned. It was closed when I was a student. I frequently walked past it because it was near Christine's university, Singapore Management University, near the center of town. No doubt with no expense spared, inside it now contains several restaurants, a few boutiques, and a theater.

Outside the Capitol Theatre.

Inside the Capitol Theatre. It may best be described as a mall -- I mean, it was designed according to the standards I myself noted above: it has an atrium, wide foot pathways, and service outlets of various sizes. You can see the entrance to the theater on the left, and along the corridor on the right are various restaurants.