(And why are you not?)

Some mornings, in the early seconds before wakefulness, I see in my mind a hot bowl of hei mee — prawn noodles. The bright yellow noodles in a pastel blue plastic bowl, swimming with shelled prawns, fried onions, and deep fried pork lard in steaming hot brown soup. And then I can almost smell it — the onions, the prawns and the lard in hei mee. But then I awake to find myself miles away from anything like it. In those moments, I really miss being in Singapore. It’s so cliche for an overseas Singaporean to talk about missing Singaporean food. I don’t even know why I think of hei mee, since it’s not anywhere on my list of favourite foods. But when I was still a kid with dorky glasses and a bowl-like haircut, my mother would wake me on Sunday mornings and take me to Whampoa to slurp up my Sundays’ hei mee. I guess that explains it. But why am I still here in Shanghai?

Opportunities

They’re here. They’re growing, and they’re here to stay. Eyes are on China, most are set on Shanghai.

Costs/Choices

Cost of living in Shanghai is not low, but choices are available to stretch your dollar, or your RMB, so to speak.

Clothes

Why buy clothes, shoes and accessories from the boutiques or department stores when you can get imported/to-be-exported clothes at the Qipu Lu Wholesale Market? Or get your shirt/pants/dress/suit tailor-made out of your own designs at Lujiabang Fabric Market?

Entertainment

Pirated DVDs: 5－9RMB depending on quality.

Pirated Wii Games: 5RMB

Pirated Software: 10 - ? RMB

Pirated Books: 10 - ? RMB depending on size, thickness, hardcover/paperback

Movies: Varies for different cinemas and titles. But generally, cheap in the mornings, half price on Tuesdays and after 10pm everyday

Bank

The minimum amount to have in your savings account before the bank starts to charge a fee is 500RMB. If you don’t have at least 500RMB, the bank will deduct 2RMB from your account every month you don’t hit the minimum.

In Singapore? It’s S$500 and S$2.

Transportation

Buses: 2-4RMB depending on distance

Metro: 3-6RMB depending on distance

Taxi: Starting fare at 12RMB, therafter 2.40RMB per km or equivalent waiting time. Midnight surcharge starts at 11pm, with the meter starting at 16RMB and the fare hikes by 30%. No surcharge for booking a taxi other than from dazhong company (charges 4RMB).

Very useful tip: You can haggle with taxi drivers after 11pm for a 20% discount if your journey is fairly long, and if taxis are in abundance where you are.

Everything

Accessories, clothes, shoes, books, software, computers, cameras, photo printing services, snacks, dog food, cat food, dog clothes, cat clothes, anything can be purchased on TAOBAO.COM and delivered to your doorstep! It is also currently my new past time.

Convenience

The months of winter are the hardest to leave the house. To gear myself for the almost unbearable Shanghai winter, I apply moisturizer to my face, slather it all over my body (it’s necessary for it to really be ALL over). I wear leggings, pants, a shirt, a woolen shirt, a jacket, a scarf, a beanie, earmuffs, gloves, and then strap on my pair of winter boots. What usually takes 15 minutes — getting dressed to go out — takes 30-45 minutes during winter. So of course being the bum that I am I’d much rather stay in, and the conveniences in Shanghai allow me to do so!

Food

Almost every eating establishment provides the service of waimai, which is to deliver your ordered food to where you are. In Singapore I’m only aware of food delivery restaurants like KFC, Macs, Pizza Hut, Sakae Sushi. In Shanghai, food delivery for any eating establishment is a given! To me, that’s a god-send! I realize I’ve become very attached to this convenience. When I lived in the wintry months in Vancouver, I had to get my ass out of the house if I wanted to eat decently, and I even had to tip them! I don’t know if I can ever get used to living without the convenience of waimai anymore.

Tickets

Other than the relatively lower costs of concert tickets, I can order tickets online and have them delivered to me at no charge!

There are several avenues of getting concert tickets:

1) Buy from the authorized dealer either at the ticketing office or online,

2) Buy from sellers on Taobao who are selling them at a cheaper price,

3) Haggle with scalpers lingering around the concert venue just before the concert.

To give you an example of how you can cut costs by buying concert tickets on Taobao, I just attended Zhang Hui Mei’s concert in the middle of last month. The listed prices for her concert tickets started from 280RMB (Jacky Cheung’s started from 180RMB). We bought tickets at 300RMB for 580RMB seats!

Airplane tickets can also be ordered through the phone or Internet and delivered to you at no charge.

Best thing is, you only need to pay after you receive the tickets!

The Heart

What else can I say, the heart is getting very comfortable in this adopted city.

Even though I’d still have to wait till I return to Singapore to have the hei mee I’ve been strangely fantasizing about, living with someone who can whip up a bowl of Laksa at will definitely helps a great deal. *big wide grin*

In very bad taste, here’s a Christmas E-card from MCYS.

Singaporeans tend to make this simple equation. Singaporean identity = Singaporean food. We spend our lives talking about food, and how good it is. We dedicate our lives finding the best food in town. For those who live abroad, they bring boxfuls of food/pastes/spices from home, and learn to cook versions of the famous Singapore cuisine. For those not culinarily inclined, they will pay exorbitant (think S$20 for a bowl of laksa) prices at restaurants to satisfy their stomachs with it. For those… you get the idea. We love our food and we can’t get enough of it.

Or can we?

Let’s backtrack to the first few months I was away from home. Even the smell of chicken rice lingering in the air made my throat tighten.

Now, I can look at a Singaporean restaurant’s menu and nothing, NOTHING speaks to me.

This can mean one or all of a few things. Has Singapore food lost its meaning on me? Do I no longer feel my identity attached to craving for laksa, chilli crab, hainanese chicken rice, bak chor mee, char kway teow, fried carrot cake (black), roti prata, chicken curry, fried hokkein mee etc? Or is it that Singaporean food holds no meaning to me when it’s not eaten in a hot and smoky hawker centre with designated seats for smoking, and the drinks stall staff impressing you with their fantastic memory of customers’ drinks?

It may the case of how the eating experience is just different so the food becomes just that, food.

Perhaps I attach too many external factors to the eating experience when it should just be about the food. But how can I enjoy it per se? Take my favourite black pepper crab for instance. Yes I do love eating it so, and I can probably eat a whole kilo of Sri Lankan black pepper crab on my own, but my crab eating experience is simply not complete without my mother there to eat it with me (and foot the bill). I’m supposed to abstain from eating seafood, crab being one of the prime abstinence because of high cholesterol content which will kill me (really, because I have familial hypercholesterolaemia), and my mother will never let me hear the end of it. But during the twice yearly homecoming, she buys me that crab meal as a kind of ritual to welcome me back, not without nagging about my diet, but nevertheless we enjoy our crab-eating feast together (and she pays).

Have I lost touch with my foodaholic nature? Hardly. If anything, I’m more a foodaholic now than ever before. I learnt the magic of laksa, bak chor mee and crabs only after I left Singapore, actually. And I’ve been catching up ever since. My tastbuds have also grown more diversified — Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and of course they’ve acquired a liking for kimchi and all the Korean dishes made with it. More exposure to other cuisines is something I hope to achieve in time to come. Reaching higher thresholds of spiciness of different kinds is also something I want training in.

As for Singaporean food, it’s best eaten in Singapore, with friends and family.

These pictures were taken in various Singapore bus stops, early February 2009, with a Nokia N95 8GB.

What is common in these three public service messages from the Singapore Police Force and the National Crime Prevention Council? Apart from the usual offence of being very tacky (playing with alliterations, feminine rhymes and syllable rhyme in Careless/Cashless, Reveal/Regret; and antonyms in Believer/Deceiver), it is also very SEXIST. Which is so typical and habitual of them/[insert any public service body]. I beseech you to look at such fallacies with open eyes and never allow yourself and your children get accustomed to it.

Stronger than the actual didactic crime prevention slogans, Singapore residents will come away with this misconception:

Who are victims of crime? Young women, middle-aged women, old women. They will be victims — of pickpockets, of robbers, of cheaters. They will be careless, they will reveal too much of their wealth, and they will be gullible believers of tall stories such as the infamous magic stone. Who are the criminals? Men. They will prey on young women, middle-aged women, and elderly women to steal, rob, and bluff.

Women = careless, foolish, helpless. victim.

Men = scheming, dishonest, evil. culprit.

Open your eyes.

Stereotypes are so yesterday. And really,
evil is woman.

Hah. Happy Women’s Day (8 March 2009)!

Singaporeans are mocked, laughed at, and made fun of because of our reputation with our language(s). Can’t blame foreigners or ourselves for doing so because these exist:

(found this powerful image at STOMP’s website, under “Friends of Stomp”)

For the majority of Singaporeans, being Chinese, we pretty much have a confused mother tongue, or a different concept of monther tongue, and as the ads imply, we do not speak good English, and we need to be told that Mandarin is “cool” to be encouraged to speak it. These “encouragements” come in various embarrassing ways:

Go Malay and Tamil! Our hopes are on you guys to show the world we do speak a proper language or two. Or else we’ll soon have Malay bagus! or Tamil अच्छा!

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This semester has seen Fudan’s course selection system introduce the English interface for the first time, which is an incredible feat, knowing the jwc people. However, of course, there are English issues such as:

Obviously a direct translation from Chinese, but sounds kinda cute?

Experiencing an amount of inertia when it comes to blogging. The notes in my phone are piling up from the random things I want to blog about, and I don’t know how else I should put them down other than yet another post about random things. (Not the 25 random things about me ok don’t worry)

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On Thursday I went for my debut Shanghai/overseas job interview. On a rainy winter day. Once I entered the interview room (it was a large meeting room), I wasn’t sure where to place the jacket I just took off.  Should I just dump it in the chair next to the one I’m supposed to sit on? In the end I wrapped it on the chair, and then realized I didn’t know what to do with my scarf. With the lack of winter garment placement practice, I hid my scarf in my bag. On departure, I wasn’t sure whether it was alright to make the interviewer wait while I put my jacket back on, so I just carried the whole damn thing all the way to the entrance.

I believe it was also my first interview with a Caucasian, a co-founder of the company. Standing at 1.9m or taller, I did not feel intimidated because I kinda grew up with a brother almost as tall as him. In fact, I liked the interview with him because 1) he laughed at almost all my attempts at jokes 2) his questions were asked in a friendly way 3) when he sits down he doesn’t tower over me.

For instance, instead of asking, what are your strengths? as many of the interviewers in Singapore would read from a script that has been photocopied since 1999, he asked, “If your best friends were right here, how do you think they’d describe you?”

I’m not sure if I want to do what I do a little in my leisure time as work.

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My mother and I have different travelling habits. I want to save as many pennies as possible while she would pay pounds to save the trouble. To her, it is always better to pay more now for the ease (e.g. taking taxis instead of trains/buses) than to pay more later for hospital bills in the event that due to lugging luggages you break your fingers.

But she would walk to three different supermarkets in different shopping malls to compare the prices of a particular product and then walk back to the first mall because it was 10 cents cheaper.

And she’d rather use a plastic bag to shelter herself from the rain than buy an umbrella or poncho.

I don’t get my mother.

But I admit we’re getting more alike than I’m comfortable with.

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Malaysia toilets always have that hose for washing down under. Japanese toilets have one or two bidets (toilets that have warmed seats and washing tubes with squirting functions, complete with power choices, buttoned) and always with disposable toilet seat covers. Seoul toilets also have limited bidets. In Bangkok the hooks for bags are placed really high, I don’t know why. Singapore toilets have a sitting : squatting cubicles on a ratio of 8:2. Chinese city toilets, if not the drain system, then sitting : squatting is 2:8, sometimes 0:10.

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Singapore MRT stations have escalators or lifts at every station, at any necessary point of elevation or depression. This convenience you cannot find in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Bangkok. I have lugged around 10kg of goods in certain Hong Kong MTR Stations with the frustration of staircases where escalators or lifts would have helped. Ditto Seoul when I carried my luggages.

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S$30 on my Singapore EZ-link card can barely last me two weeks.

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Riding with the new SBS Transit buses in Singapore made me carsick a lot. All the adjusting of suspension did not work well with my stomach.

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Ironic how people ask me if I’m Korean, and ask MissY if she’s from Singapore. Many times.

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When I told MissY about how our Skype conversations are being scanned by the Chinese, she got angry and said let’s do a Skype call, where she’d say: Chinese governent SUCKS! I meant SOCKS! S-O-C-K-S SOCKS!

She wanted to test their scanning system I guess.

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I can’t read much on the Shanghai subway, even though I’m seated. The salient feature of all Chinese dialects is that it’s loud, and I don’t know why Chinese people like to talk on their cell phones as if they were in the club with blasting music. People sitting next to me somehow like to nudge me with their elbows as well.

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I don’t like the Korean strong sense of hierarchy, but appreciate being bowed to when the young Koreans bow to her (I’m almost always next to her).

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After living overseas for long periods of time, consuming different sorts of food has done wild things to my stomach. I’ve realized that the most important thing in life is not having lots of money/status/power, but the ability to move your bowels comfortably everyday.

The main concerns when living abroad are not visa applications, internet connections, the packing/unpacking or moving of houses, but they are: what to eat for the daily 3 meals. If in China, what is the least harmful food, or what food will only be damaging many years later?

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MissY just tried to teach me the meaning of  the Korean word “assa”. “Like yay! Like when you move on to the next level in Mario you go ASSA! Like I found coconuts for Tracy (in The Sims 2) I go ASSA!”

These days, I see her occasionally blowing into her Nintendo DS Lite. She’s building a fire for her The Sims character to cook fish or something. -_-

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Just shut my luggage.

Wondering if the mess in my room will be untouched for the rest of this year.

Heading to KL tomorrow morning for a mother-daughter thing (?!) before proceeding to Shanghai for what we all hope to be my last semester in that university. As to what happens after, your guess is as good as mine.

On a more optimistic note, I went to watch a bit of the Thaipusam festival today in Little India! Great stuff! But I don’t have time to upload the pictures and all now, so I guess you’ll hear from me in Shanghai!

…not as random as to list things like 1) I have always been scared of dogs (esp German Shepherds) because I once opened the house door to my brother’s bloody face (he was chased and bitten very very near his eye). 2) My Nokia N95 8GB phone is pretty much obsolete. Trade-in would be worth S$300 only, when I bought it just last year this time at S$1000+. 3) $100 is the new $10.

More like:

1) Did you know you can sorta bargain at Harvey Norman (and my mom says BEST too)? I’ve been looking for a Tefal Steamer to give my ex-boss as a wedding gift (it’s a very easy and healthy way to cook, suits modern lifestyle so I think it’s suitable?) since I won’t be able to attend her wedding this June. I saw a 3-tier Tefal steamer at Audio House for $69.90. Today I saw the same one going for something like $80+ at Harvey Norman. I told the saleslady at Harvey Norman and she offered to sell at Audio House price. Wah. Okay maybe this proves that I haven’t been doing any link-mom’s-arm-go-shopping, but yeah, didn’t know we can do that for prices.

2) Somehow I can’t bring myself to do the bargain-and-scold while purchasing things like electronics here. Too paiseh or something. Can’t be too vocally unpleasant to fellow countrymen.

Me: How much is it?

Salesman: 178

Me: Is that cash price? (they usually give lower for payments in cash)

Salesman: Yah.

Me: 170 can?

Salesman: (uses calculator) Cannot. 175.

Me: Ok.

3) In the past, I used to snigger at people who acted like lost tourists, not observant or adhering to signboards or basically “not smooth”. Today, I almost tried to borrow library books at the Library E-Kiosk. Either I’m getting on in years, or long periods of time away makes me jittery.

4) Long queues at all Transitlink offices to change EZ-Link cards. I beat the lines and changed my card at Bras Basah SingPost wheeeeeee. Just signed up online for free 6 months insurance coverage ($5000 for Permanent Total Disability) though it’s only for accidents on a public conveyance that uses ez-link. That gives me 1 week of being insured then.

5) I really like it that I can just go out with my hair only towel-dried. I need to live where there’s enough greetings from the sun.

For a step-by-step of the Great Singapore Workout, look here.

In an attempt to kickstart some exercise in this freezer we’re in, I let MissY take a look at the long-unheard-of Great Singapore Workout, and she loves it! But well, she loves all the National Day Parade songs I youtubed for her to watch too haha. Was it some minister’s attempt at fitness fun for Singaporeans which later simply fizzled out? I don’t think anybody did it again after those few years, not even in schools. Think it was overtaken by a supposedly New Great Singapore Workout, then there was the We Will Get There dance, and then there was the eye exercise (rub everywhere around your eyes)…

Hmm, I miss those school days.

Charged for oral sex

A MAN was charged in court on Friday with three charges of having oral sex with his Indonesian maid.

Ahmad Dapon, 53, allegedly engaged in oral sex with the 31-year-old woman in his flat on three occasions between April and May last year.

He is represented by Mr Subhas Anandan.

If convicted, he faces a jail term of up to 10 years and a fine.

The case has been fixed for a pre-trial conference on Nov 25.

Oral or unnatural sex is an offence in Singapore, punishable with a life sentence, or up to ten years jail and/or a fine.

They should add this to the Singapore tourist T-shirts. Singapore is a fine city: No Littering, No Gum, No Oral Sex.