Friday 7th December 1984 – Singapore
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| We had a happy time in Singapore |
Woke up lateish this morning, but
had a substantial breakfast nonetheless before setting out again – this time
for Lucky Plaza a seven storey shopping complex.
Our intention was to have a look around Lucky Plaza,
maybe make another check on the videos and then go on to Centrepoint to pick up
the camera, pop into the office to say cheers and then have tea at Raffles
Hotel. Not that it was a firm plan, but it certainly didn’t work out that way.
We got hooked into Lucky Plaza
and the jewellers there. (Both Rab and I
loved fine jewellery. Regrettably men could not wear many items, so she tended
to double dip and get twice as many pieces). What lovely stones and pieces
they had there. How they all make a living I’ll never know. They must have
millions of dollars worth of stock and there were very few customers about.
Perhaps credit is easy and cheap? IT was decided that perhaps an amethyst or
two and some small diamonds may make a good buy, but not in Singapore.
Perhaps Bangkok
where they and gold are said to be very cheap.
A chance visit at another video shop
produced the startling news that there was another VHS model available which
combined recorder and camera, made by Telefunken. (The excitement here is because until this time, the camera and the
recorder had been separate items. Early models were so large and heavy that the
recorder had to be wheeled around on a trolley. They had become smaller and
lighter, with better batteries, but they were still two units. This was a
single unit with the tape cassette cunningly reduced to half size to make the
unit smaller. I’d been waiting for this for some years.) New on the market, it was not easily
available, so the story went, and this was why everyone was unloading their
videos and recorders at special prices before Christmas. Made sense, although
of course the reverse could be true – failed prototype model being unloaded to
unwary tourist as the latest! Time will tell which version is correct because
after a lot of humming and hawing and some grievous doubts we bought it (after
three visits to the shop). The bloke may well have been a conman, but he didn’t
give that impression (but then they never
do, do they?). We bought the set rather than his selling it
to us. Another thing which gave us a bit more confidence was that his prices
were a little higher on the other sets, so he wasn’t really a cut price
merchant and he also had a later model JVC than any other shop we went into.
Hope we did the right thing at S$3,150! (It
turned out to be a good decision. The camera worked well and gave us years of
good service, so all concerns were simply wrong.)
In between visits to the video shop we wandered through the rest of
the complex looking for shoes for Rab as her sandals were packing up. We must
have found thirty shoe shops alone and she finally managed to get a pair or to.
We also found a shoe repairer who said he could fix the sandals and also
managed to have a pleasant snack lunch of Singapore fried noodles with little
bits of prawn and sundries in a warmish chilli sauce – very nice.
Of course, having finally purchased
the camera, I could hardly wait to get back to the hotel to get it set up and
read up on the instructions, but it was not to be! In the first place, it was
raining again, which meant a 25 minute wait for a taxi (we couldn’t face the
walk as we were pretty pooped and had many parcels, including another twelve
cassette tapes). Secondly we had to get the packing started and thirdly, having
just done the packing, Lynn
phoned us and asked us if we’d like to join them all at the Satay Club in
Elizabeth Park. We considered it might be regarded as a little anti-social if
we declined, although we had intended to try and get some night shots of Orchard Road. In
the final event we did both, walking down Tanglin into Orchard and I managed to
get some that I think will be good. We also got the guarantee for the video
stamped as a matter of form,
although what good that will do I just
do not know. The queue for taxis was longer than ever, but there were plenty
about and we were soon on our way to the
Satay Club.
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| The chef at the Satay Club fans his fire |
Satay is a local dish and consists
of spiced minced meat of various varieties – chicken, beef, veal, mutton, pork
– impaled on thin bamboo skewers. These are then grilled and resemble mini
sosaties (a South African kebab) in
appearance if not in taste. There are various sauces in which to dip the meat,
the most popular being a chilli peanut combination – zehr gut as my friends in Germany might
say. We got a very pleasant old driver and we were so busy chatting away that
we overshot the Park. Fortunately I spotted it and he stopped amid profuse
apologies. We soon found the rest of the gang by the decibel count and had a
very pleasant evening for about Z$15 including a few beers.
At the end of the meal, we walked
down the embankment past the Merlion, Singapore’s emblem, and on past
the quay to see if we could find Change
Alley. We did but it was closed as most places were in Singapore after
tennish, except restaurants. Quite surprising really considering they only open
at 10.00 – 11.00 in the morning. We made our way to a taxi rank and waited for
ages, third in line for a cab. Two came by after a while, so we went to the
head of the queue, but then we waited in vain. Eventually a bus came by and we
all leapt about and shouted so much that the driver stopped and let us all
aboard. Strictly against regulations, but we were very glad that he did. We
rattled and wheezed our way home and got to the hotel with no more ado.
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| Some of the Christmas lights |
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