1. For the second time in just over two years, I was in Melbourne on work. I was slightly more used to the place this time, and didn’t mind wandering around by myself as much. I had good pho at Mekong, visited Nobu a couple of times and realised the truth behind the advice to enjoy the best in life in moderation and remembered, while walking around one of the mini-marts near the hotel (or was this in Narita or Los Angeles? Darn – now I think it was in Narita, just passing through, when I was being nasty to an acquaintance-colleague) and coming across a display of Dove chocolates, that I used to adore those two-square packages of melt-in-your-mouth roof-of-the-mouth-laving luxury. Now I don’t.
2. Increasingly, I don’t know where to get good caffe latte in Singapore. In general, Starbucks’s has weak foam and no espresso kick. I now have almost all my lattes at Bakerzin – at least the foam there is consistently thick and the taste of espresso occasionally surfaces.
3. Starbucks has BRILLIANT customer service though. I have an egg-white wrap (double-toasted) and a venti iced coffee with a dash of milk nearly everyday at its branch at The Central, and the folks behind the counter there are unfailingly smiley even when they are really busy. (They remember my “usual”, heh.) When absent-minded me lost two Starbucks cards (basically stored-value cards which can be registered at the Starbucks web site and topped up), Starbucks allowed for the cards to be de-registered (i.e. made unusable, preserving the value in the cards), sent an email to say they were sorry I lost my cards, replaced the cards and allowed me to transfer my unused $$ over to the new cards. I didn’t expect all that! This reminds me: I need to put something on its Facebook page.
4. I wanted to write about this before it won all those Oscars, but I really enjoyed The Artist. I thought it was a vision sumptuously, painstakingly, lovingly and comprehensively realised :) (Though, to be very honest, I still think it’s gimmicky :p)
So, I haven’t blogged since that last past about Bali. That’s a gap of more than eight months.
I’ve wondered why. Simple laziness is the tempting and probably substantially correct answer, but I feel there’s more. Maybe part of that is busy-ness, though goodness knows I haven’t been too busy to eat a lot and sleep a lot and read a bit and cruise the Web in near-obsessive, increasingly desperate hunts for pointless utterly pointless sports news. Maybe part of it is the sort of busy-ness that squeezes mental stamina out of you, the sort of mental stamina that then has to be replenished by idly allowing your face to be tanned by the light from your desktop LCD screen over the weekend. Maybe part of it is just lack of inspiration, or the self-perceived version of same (but when is something not self-perceived anyway?). And maybe part of it was the (self-perceived) meaningless-ness of whatever I would have written. Or maybe, the question is the wrong one: I wondered why I haven’t blogged; maybe it’s more apt to ask why I should have.
Hmm. Well. I should have, because I thought I liked to blog. I think I like to blog. It’s troubling that there was that long period of time during which I apparently did not want to blog. *thinking thinking thinking* Blogging is writing, yes? So, maybe I wasn’t writing well at work. Or was writing too much.
(Heh, funny how I came to “work” as a reason for not blogging. But maybe it’s not so funny – “funny” as in “strange” – maybe it’s not so funny, since we work for so much of our lives. If there is a reason I haven’t blogged, it’s probably linked to my work, just based on the universe of reasons in my life it can possibly be linked to.)*
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Anyway, while I have not been blogging, I’ve collected some thoughts to blog about. A lot of these surfaced during my various work trips. I was in Brussels earlier this year, and when I came back home and cleared out my suitcase, I found a red-tipped matchstick, nestled amongst my clothes. I don’t smoke, the hotel room I was in was a non-smoking one, there was no sign that anyone had tampered with my suitcase, so it was a complete mystery how a red-tipped matchstick ended up in my suitcase. But maybe what happened was, the lady who cleaned out my room smoked and carried around loose matchsticks and inadvertently dropped one in my open suitcase. Something innocuous and non-esoteric like that. Maybe.
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I think it was during the second-leg flight to Santiago. I ran through the in-flight entertainment system’s various contents, and there were two Jason Mraz albums, a studio album and a one with songs he performed “live”. Both had the song “I’m Yours”. I’d of course heard the song several times over the radio by this time, but listening to the “live” version in a artificially closed personal space – with the crowd going wild after the first two notes of guitar twang and Jason Mraz’s free-wheeling slightly raw style – was a more moving, more buoying experience, and something I credit for keeping me sane during that flight. (I then listened to it on repeat nearly the entire way back to Singapore.)
I saw a few sides of Chile. Santiago looked a little unmaintained, but walk-able and open, with wide wide streets. Wine tasting at the Concha y Toro vineyard was an… experience, with the sommelier brandishing his classic sommelier’s nose and the likeably pretentious sommelier’s jargon, and truly in my view enriching our enjoyment of the bottles of red and white on show. Valparaiso looked in many ways like a modern European seaside town, with posh developments all around. We had lunch at a restaurant along the Valparaiso coast, and the appetiser of lightly blanched white fish, clams, crab meat, prawns and squid, fresh from the sea and drizzled with lemon juice, hit the spot!
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Long-haul flights offer one time alone, to be introspective. I think that’s the only enjoyable bit about them.**
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I spent many hours with my bosses during these work trips. One of them, retiring soon, is a generous, opinionated man who’s been doing his job for longer than I’ve known about Transformers. Recently, back in Singapore, he was in a meeting, at which several briefings had been scheduled for very important and busy people who’d just joined the ministry. The briefings were overrunning, as they do, and near the end of the day, even though it wasn’t his turn, my boss gave his briefing. What he did not know was, there were some colleagues from another department outside the meeting room, who had been waiting and waiting for their turn to brief, and that in fact they had been scheduled ahead of my boss. When it turned out that my boss’s briefing would be the last one these very important and busy personages would be around for that day, the colleagues from this other department were understandably quite upset.
This department is located on the same floor as ours, and, once he’d settled some matters in his office, my boss walked over to this other department to apologise to each and every colleague who had waited for their turn which never came partly because my boss took up some time to do his own briefing. His was the good-natured sort of apology, “sorry about it”, with a smile, unreserved, un-phony.
I gave my boss a hard time about skipping the other department’s turn (well, as hard a time as I could – I know my station in life) – how could you!, I said to him. When I heard about his apology afterwards, I really had to shake my head, in admiration. Will miss him.
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The influence I wield over the lives of colleagues that I supervise/manage/lead is unexpectedly heavy. This struck home when a conscientious new (well, sort of new) colleague called me on the phone to tell me, in between choking sobs, that her dad had been diagnosed with cancer and the doctor had given him only six months to live. As I held the phone to my ear and listened to her crying, I could only cast about for something to say, something comforting and decent and supportive and helpful and which did not betray the fact that one of my first thoughts in the mess of things, as I remember it, right alongside “what must she be feeling now?”, was “how about her work?”.
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A couple of things I have enjoyed these months, that I’d like to share:
1. Theme song from “Cheers” – Over the years, I think I’ve enjoyed other sitcoms more. But not other theme songs. Poignant and meaningful and true.
2. 戒不了 – I enjoy this Malaysian writer’s little pieces of whimsy and philosophy. (They are in Chinese, which in my opinion can carry boundless nuance in a small space in a way that makes one marvel at the human capacity for creating meaning.) Try these two: http://kitcheah.blogspot.com/2011/09/blog-post.html (title loosely translated as “Only for a little heartbeat”, about why one writes) and http://kitcheah.blogspot.com/2008/05/blog-post.html (“Reason for being happy”, about how one is no longer another’s reason for being happy)
*There have been some changes at work – five new colleagues since March. And more changes to come. Big, scary monster-type ones.
**On one of these flights, I saw a flight attendant who behaved in the same way I’m sure a colleague would have if this colleague had been one. (It’s times like this when I think there may well just be a finite number of types of people in the world.)
Since I discovered Skinny Pizza (see reviews here (with pics of the below-mentioned squid ink pizza) and here) last year when my colleagues and I happened upon the Wheelock Place branch for lunch, I’ve been there maybe six or seven times. When I introduced my sis to the place, we had the truffle fries (a must-try that has gotten less and less special with each visit; I think it’s gotten more oil-laden and less truffled…) and the curry chicken babaganoush (we agree that the hard-boiled eggs are a touch of genius, and that the Skinny Pizza folks could be more generous with the curry gravy). When I introduced my pal to the place, we had the squid ink pizza at the Suntec branch, and it was good – the squid ink gravy that soaks the centre of the pizza is an appetising mix of savoury and slightly sweet tartness. And when we had it again last Friday at the Wheelock Place branch, the grilled calamari and prawns were done to perfection, with just the right bit of char. The only imperfection was the red onion slices that were strewn over the dark crust and that left a lingering sting in one’s palate. On Friday we also had the bitter chocolate tart, and while this was yummy on many levels – like a multilayered piece of fine chocolate – it also packed the sort of richness (heatiness, we Chinese would call it) that has been known to lead to spontaneous nosebleeds.
Later in the evening, we heard Corrine May’s Song for Singapore over the radio. Corrine May has a wonderful rich voice, and I think she puts up a great performance for this song. It’s just a pity that some of the lyrics are cringe/wince-worthy. Seriously – “I want to sing, sing a song for Singapore”? “You’re my brother, you’re my sister”?
P/S. I am reading a joke book. I have been unable to read heavy-going fiction recently; “A Heartbreaking of Staggering Genius” and “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” sit mouldering and unread on my table and my bookshelf, respectively.
PP/S. So here’s a joke from the joke book: “Men like cars. Women like clothes. Women only like cars when they take them to clothes.” Funny, and with a decent level of accuracy :p
PPP/S. Opposite to cringe/wince-worthy are the lyrics for Sarah McLachlan’s “Do What You Have to Do”:
I had the fortune of tasting some very yummy foie gras at St Pierre’s – I didn’t even mind the slice of apple underneath it, which is a big deal (as those who know me would know) – but after watching this TED talk, I won’t eat it the same way again.
Recently, I discovered that wedding couples have the same glassy-eyed look at their wedding dinner. You know, it’s been a long, hectic day, and they’re trying to take it all in because it’s so meaningful, but the day’s become a pageant of things done for tradition and there are appearances to keep up, especially at dinner, where strange relatives and old classmates appear together, groups of people who had nothing to do with each other, all gathering for the same important, happy event, and it is for you that they’ve all turned up, and there are speeches to be made and toasts to be drunk and drunk and drunk. It’s a hectic whirl, and glassy eyes, from the couple of weddings I went to in the last few months, are the norm for wedding couples.
Also, I discovered that I can’t deal with salty toothpaste. Colgate has this new ‘mineral salt’ formula I think, and the first time I used it to brush my teeth I was still barely awake, and my instinct was to swallow the damn concoction because it tasted savoury. It’s a conditioning, part of my upbringing – eating savoury stuff was a satisfying experience, almost all of the time. And I realised that the day they make deep-fried stuff-flavoured toothpaste is the day I die of toothpaste poisoning.
Another discovery, or re-discovery, because I continue to be surprised by it: MRTs are so much less crowded during year-end school holidays. It’s stunning. Wonder of wonders, I actually got a seat the other day, a really comfortable bit of space. I could put my bag on my lap and open it up and take a book out and read it with my bag on my lap and everything. That was the most pleasant MRT ride I’ve had in months.
Also not long ago, I discovered Kij Johnson, who’s rekindled my enjoyment of science fiction and whose kooky titles just make reading her that bit more fun. I know so many of us read genres and you may not read sci-fi, but just try her out. Read “26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss” here (you’ll see that the story’s won many awards and you’ll see a link to a cool reading of the story). Then read “The evolution of trickster stories among the dogs of North Park after the Change” here (you’ll see it has nothing to do with evolution and all to do with an utterly superb re-imagining of the beginnings of a creation myth). And then read some more :)
And just at the end of last month, I discovered “Skinny Pizza”. Read a review here, and others here and here. I have eaten at Skinny Pizza twice, both times at the Wheelock Place outlet. Skinny Pizza’s gimmick is of course the skinniness of its pizza – basically, it’s to normal pizza what tissue prata is to normal prata. Skinniness in this case made the pizza crust super-crunchy, which is both good and bad. When I tried the curry chicken pizza, I found the gravy-laden centre portion absolutely delicious, full of the traditional Indian curry flavour, and the outer edges overly dry. But I can live with that. What I wouldn’t be able to live with, is if they discontinued their truffled fries. It’s too bad that they are ordinary shoestring fries – if a higher grade of cut potato was used, they would be matchless. As it is, they are still the most tasty fries I’ve ever had.
When a colleague first introduced me to Oomphatico’s a couple of months back, she called it “Oomphalicious”. I dined there for the first time with my pal last Wednesday, and I think “oomphalicious” wouldn’t be an unsuitable way to describe some of the food we had :)
We started with pan-fried chilli garlic calamari with lemon mayo and rocket salad. The calamari came in four broad, lightly scored rolls – two of them with a tinge of orange-pink, two of them a pleasing white – with a small bunch of rocket salad on the side. Drizzled with lemon juice, the orange-pink calamari (cuttlefish?) turned out to be a tiny tiny bit chewy, with an understated squid taste set off nicely with the lemon and the peppery salad dressing; the rolls of white calamari were just ultra-yummy, tender and tasty with a slight sear of pan-fry.
We shared two mains: the Kurobuta pork belly, slow-roasted and with a vindaloo emulsion on the side, and linguine with fresh clams and mussels in a white wine sauce. My pal and I agreed that the Kurobuta was over-roasted – or at least the crisped skin was; we couldn’t cut through it with a steak knife – but the pork went very well with the tangy vindaloo. The linguine was good, not too rich, with generous helpings of clam and mussels. The white wine complemented the taste of sea in the sauce just right, so one could taste both the wine and the seafood. My pal finished the sauce’s last dregs.
And then, for dessert, we shared “that expensive chocolate dish”. (Yup, that’s what it’s called on the menu.) This was really four miniature desserts: ice-cream stuffed with chocolate chips on a tiny slice of spongy cheesecake; a nutty (too hard) chocolate truffle on a really tasty chocolate chip cookie; chocolate mousse; and lava cake.
The chocolate mousse came in a tall espresso glass, and upon first tasting it my pal exclaimed that they’d put olive oil in it! Later she remarked that this was an interesting chocolate mousse, which was usually among the most boring of desserts. The mousse literally engrossed me – I’d scoop some in my mouth, flatten it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth and then lave, lave, lave at the particles of mousse, at the oil, turning the taste over and over in my brain as I circulated it in my mouth, figuring it out. One of the chefs (the restaurant was a little understaffed, but provided excellent service) later explained that the mousse was topped off with olive oil, limoncello and coffee liqueur, and that a more liquid version of this dessert was used as a churro dip at breakfast in Spain. It was a really fun dish, not least because while we were trying to figure out the strange taste of the mousse my pal thought she tasted soy sauce and sesame seed oil :p
The lava cake was simply delicious! It was just on the right side of warm, and the substantial but not too thick layer of cake was just crisped enough on the edge, the chocolate liquid and rich and not too sweet, the sprinkling of flakes of salt an absolutely inspired touch. My pal thought it made the cake taste like peanut butter :) I’d scoop some of the cake into my mouth, making sure to get a flake or two of salt, and chew, and when a flake of salt – I think using flakes instead of grains was absolute genius, by the way – was encountered and detonated, flavouring the rest of the gooey cake… that was a little bit of pure yummy-ness right there! :)
We talked throughout dinner and after that, on a bench in the shopping centre, and after realising it was late and finding our way out, on the way to her home. About how motivated we were at work, about how her mum had just undergone an eye operation and was worried she wouldn’t be able to read words on a computer screen, about how weird the idea of olive oil in chocolate mousse was, about what the future could hold and whether or not to seize an opportunity that had presented itself, about a couple of toxic colleagues, about a new boss, about being a new boss, about how chocolate bars were better than smaller packages of chocolate, about a mutual acquaintance’s wedding, about when we last met, about whether she had her shoulder-length hair when we last met.
As usual, when we parted, I felt a sense of loss – there was so much more to talk about – but also a sort of weary joy.
I was just in Geneva again – got back the two Fridays ago – and, apart from some stressful work involving the chaperoning of a couple of important personages, it was a rather fun trip. (Although, thinking back, I still wish I felt less stressed and more prepared.)
The only free weekend we had, we rented a car and drove all the way to Tasch, from which we took a train to Zermatt, from which we took another train to snow-capped Gornergrat. The thing I remember about Gornergrat, along with the snow and some unexplained swathes of bluish-green water that looked vaguely reminiscent of sulphur pools I saw in New Zealand, was an absolutely giant Saint Bernard – it was sitting there, tongue lolling, with another less impressive specimen, and would have made for a scary sight, except that like all Saint Bernards it looked utterly benign (if more or less ignorant of your presence) and bereft of ill will. I think if I got lost in the Swiss Alps and one of these trudged up to me with whiskey in the keg attached to its collar, I would be quite assured :) On the way back from Tasch, we had dinner at a great Italian restaurant at Montreux. (I’ll try to find out and post its name.) Now, I’m not a salad fan but the seafood salad – with an appetising vinaigrette and generous portions of grilled littleneck clams, octopus and squid – was absolutely delicious.
Speaking of Italian food, if you are ever in the old town part of Geneva – that’s across the bridge from Gare Cornavin – you may wish to try the seafood (fruits de mer) spaghetti at the Spaghetti Factory. It’s good too :)
And so after about 10 days, the work was over, and a colleague and I made our way back home via Heathrow. Okay. (I’m taking deep breaths now as I gather myself to talk about this objectively.) I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re flying SQ and you fly back to Singapore via Heathrow, you have to claim your baggage and then check it back in. In other words, you have to go through immigration so that you are in the London side of the airport for a good half hour to an hour and then check yourself and your luggage back in. And go through snaking queues leading up to metal detector gantries and the most un-chipper security personnel I’ve ever seen. Not a happy experience. The 13-hour plane ride back was comfortable – I was lucky enough to be on a flight that was about 75% full, and I was the only passenger on my set of three sets next to the window; I think that says something about the economy, no? – but I really wouldn’t want to fly through Heathrow again, ever.
P/S. Oh don’t think I did not take photographs – I did, but I stupidly updated the software in my phone without making back-ups. Sigh.
I am in Geneva because of work – day after day, the meetings remain lengthy and tedious; sometimes it feels like the participants are pedantically and often petulantly discussing obscure ways of preparing honey-baked ham or some other matter of similar significance, instead of trying to come up with concrete ways to address major labour issues – but given the food I’ve eaten, I could well be in Geneva on one of those culinary escapades. I don’t quite keep track of the days via the meals I have anymore, but there have nevertheless been memorable meals.
Twice last week my colleagues and I girded ourselves for gambas à gogo i.e. prawn buffet. The star of the show: steamed prawns stir-fried in garlic butter, served on large shallow trays in their juices and bits of garlic, as many prawns as you can peel and eat. Yours truly is a classic spoiled peasant princeling – back in Singapore my dear mum and brother would peel my prawns for me; I don’t even like to have to pull the tail off prawns that have been otherwise de-shelled - but after an awkward start I was proficient enough to chow down the succulent, garlic-infused pink commas one after another. And “chow down” are appropriate words – the way we Singaporeans tuck into good prawns is vastly different from the dignified pace the Swiss shell and bite and chew their prawns and daintily mop up the juices with bread. We are messier, and we eat more, much more. I think I peeled more prawns at those two sittings than I ever have – admittedly, this would not be that inconceivable or impressive an achievement – and I just wished that I had photographic proof of those decimated trays and heaps of shells to show my folks. My colleague thinks that every time we come to Geneva for the prawn buffet we severely deplete the local prawn supply and cause a serious price hike, and if you see one of those photos, you may agree.
Oh right, I said we did this twice last week! The first time, on Monday, we had the gambas à gogo at le Furet. The first few trays of prawns were good, but there wasn’t much gravy to mop up with the shoestring fries (also free flow). The second time, Thursday I believe, we went to Le Corail Rose, which I thought had more consistently succulent prawns, more and yummier garlic gravy (which carried the taste of prawn in spades, while le Furet’s was merely salty) and chunkier fries (also free flow). And, in anticipation of the massacre, Le Corail Rose provides lobster-bibs, decorated with a drawn-on bow, so you look neat and formal while you rip into the doomed crustaceans.*
I like prawns done any number of ways, and I like mushrooms in its many forms and regardless of how it is prepared too. We were in Annecy, a French town about 75 minutes via bus from Geneva, at a charming restaurant and served by a very capable (and very busy) waitress whose command of English was limited. We ordered a lunch set that came with mushroom soup, and when she repeated our order she said something very like “cappuccino”. She got it wrong, we thought, but when we pointed to the text for mushroom soup on the menu to clarify, she nodded curtly, said something very like “cappuccino” again, briskly collected our menus and left. She came back after a while bearing six cappuccino cups – those glasses that are held up with a metal “ear” so that you don’t burn yourself if the contents are too hot – of vaguely cappuccino-coloured stuff, topped with vaguely cappuccino-like foam. A colleague sniffed it and said it smelled savoury.
I know now, after doing a bit of Googling, a bit more about mushroom soup done cappuccino-style. But at the time, I was new to this unfamiliar way of doing soup. We were given soup spoons, so I dug past the foam and tried a spoonful, and found that the soup was delicious, thick with mushrooms. There was a small stick of dough fritter, very light, almost crumbly, studded with toasted sesame seeds on its top side, and that was the next thing I dunked into the mushroom cappuccino, about two inches of it, which I then bit off. That bite of fritter - sesame seeds, deep-fried flour, the crispness of the fritter, suffused with mushroom soup – tasted like a little piece of the best pie in the world. Then the soup cooled enough to be drunk like cappuccino, and that capped a very satisfying first course to what turned out to be an otherwise ordinary meal.
Geneva’s not an interesting place in the usual way towns or cities are interesting. There is a fairly long shopping-dedicated street, and restaurants galore of course, especially if you know where to look, but it’s not an interesting and dynamic place in the fashion of a Shanghai, say, or a San Francisco even. But it is interesting in other ways. For example: The Swiss have extremely well-behaved dogs. They bring these dogs – I’ve seen boxers, pugs, huskies/marlamutes, chihuahuas (one was shivering like mad in the icy wind), various types of spaniels, pekingese, dachshunds - to the shopping centre and up the bus and tie these dogs to something near the supermarket entrance when they go inside for groceries, and I’ve never ever seen one misbehave in the slightest. Another example: Sirens are an enigmatic staple of the Geneva night. I have seen maybe one car accident – my memory is hazy on this regard – in my whole time in Geneva, but I hear many sirens every single night. (They are common in the daytime too.) Do that many fires break out? (Haven’t seen any telltale smoke.) Do that many people get injured on the nearby ski slopes? (Mmm… possible. Near those ski resorts, you see many people in casts.) Do that many cats need to be rescued? (I have seen maybe one cat all this while – it’s uncanny, the contrast with the number of dogs I’ve seen.)
P/S. I brought way too many clothes to Geneva, but one of these pieces of apparel was a sweater – I was going to say it was ill-fitting, but because of my sideways expansion it’s become almost well-tailored – given to me by a pal just before I went to San Diego for an exchange programme while I was in university. (That’s… *counting*… 8 (!) years ago now.) I’d forgotten about it, I think; I am well-insulated and rarely wear sweaters in Singapore, so I hadn’t worn it in a while. It felt oddly comforting to wear it.
*Incidentally, you know there’s this dish called “drunken prawns”, yes? The better-known version of the dish is essentially prawns – fresh as fresh can be – steamed with a strong dash of liquor; I’ve seen whiskey used for this, and shaoxing jiu. I’ve also seen the not-so-well-known version of “drunken prawns”. This was at one of those seafood places at East Coast Parkway, where these prawns – once again fresh as fresh can be, indeed still leaping and flopping all over one another - were shaken in a transparent lidded pot with some wine (whiskey I believe) and soy sauce – until they were drunk – and then peeled and eaten while they were still shuddering in one’s fingers. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it myself, folks, and I’ve since seen it more than once – my dear dad and bro are both big fans. (Another account of someone savouring this dish can be found in this article by an author who had to research Chinese food for his books, about halfway down the page.)
I think I must be, despite the great company of my colleagues. I woke up one day humming a fragment of a song, and later in the day I found myself singing out loud in my head the lyrics. They go like this.
景色依旧良辰不在，人儿几时回来。 [The scenery is as it was, but the good times are past; when will he come back?]
I don’t think I consciously meant to remember the rest of the song; at least, I don’t remember trying to recall the rest of the lyrics as actively as I sometimes did when I genuinely wanted to remember a song; but, all through the day, at odd moments, I would catch my mind turning these lyrics over and over; the sense was that there was more to look for.
Then today, I found myself singing another part of the song.
我有诉不尽的悲凄，寄托在梦里带给你，[I have uncountable sorrows, which I entrust to dreams to bring to you.]
虽然千山万水隔离，但愿在梦里相依。[Although mountains and seas separate us, I hope we can lean against each other in dreams.]
And immediately I realised (maybe it was an after-the-fact rationalisation; it occurred too quickly for me to tell the difference; our minds are mysterious things) that I had been singing that song because of the line “although mountains and seas separate us”, because that vast immutable distance from a certain bedrock of familiarity was what I had been feeling through all those colourless meetings, even though the meals have been uniformly good to excellent and despite the great company.*,**
I prescribed a call back home for my homesickness, and I am happy to report that it’s abated, a bit :)
*Ok, not totally colourless - the meetings have been enlivened by a brusque Indian who breaks iron-clad protocol at his will and stands out like a caveman would in genteel society.
**A recent “fruits of the sea” pasta – mussels, squid and shrimp tossed together with al dente spaghetti in olive oil and white wine – and the second prawn buffet in a week were particular highlights. A galling episode occurred after the pasta meal: we went to a restaurant in the Old Town part of Geneva for warm chocolate cake – we had heard from a colleague who was stationed here that it was good, the warm chocolate cake – but when we ordered, the proprietess of the establishment (known for its roast chicken, which smelled delicious) told us that she had many customers and could not serve us if we didn’t order anything else. The thing is, this was at 9-something pm, by which time all reasonable folk would have had their dinner, don’t you think?!***
***Ah well, it was really her perogative. And the restaurant was crowded. *grudgingly, still fuming a bit* I guess in these times she would have an added reason to squeeze as much profit out of her operations as she can, and that’s what she did.
It is coming to the end of my sixth day in Geneva – I’m here for about three weeks on a work trip – and I find myself marking each day by the meals I have, especially dinner, easily the highlight of each day, possibly because each day is work and then dinner and then back to one’s hotel room. On my first day here, my colleague – who’s been to Geneva many times – introduced me to Upper Crust, which specialises in ready-made subway sandwiches with generous fillings. For dinner, we had beef pho at one of Geneva’s ubiquitous Chinese/Vietnamese restaurants; the pho turned out to be marvellous fortification against the chilly evening wind. On the second day, a colleague who works in Geneva and her husband hosted us for dinner at their apartment, and her husband made some baked (roast?) chicken and summer veggie soup with sausages that really hit the spot on a cold damp night. On the third day, this colleague herself made us some chicken rice for dinner! The rice was painstaking studded with ginger and chicken skin, and the chicken itself was presented resting on a bed of bean sprouts and lettuce, ringed by tomato slices. The meal was accompanied by a light stew of braised straw mushrooms and eggs and a clear soup that went very well with the chicken, fully up to the standard of professional hawkers in Singapore :) On the fourth day, this dear colleague and her husband brought us to a different Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant, where I again had beef pho, which turned out to come in a beefier, tastier stock. On the fifth day, we went to a restaurant whose 梅菜扣肉 (essentially pork belly braised with preserved mustard cabbage) my Geneva veteran of a colleague kept raving about. Together with that, we had stir-fried pak choi and Sichuan chicken and white rice, and it was like a slice of home, it was. The stir-fried pak choi was some of the best I ever had, the Sichuan chicken tasty and the pork belly was just a little too lean, but still mouthwateringly yummy. If you’ve tasted preserved mustard cabbage, you’ll know how it combines a delicate sourish taste with a tender juiciness that makes it extremely appetising, and this dish really just demanded the rice to finish it with. What a wonderful meal we had! And today, just this evening, we went to an Italian restaurant near our hotel – another recommendation from that Geneva veteran – and I had a very good spaghetti aglio followed by some homemade tiramisu, which was of just the right texture and brimming with coffee liqueur. The Italian restaurant comes highly recommended by me: the pizzas that my colleagues had came from a wood stove and were simply delicious, with just enough crust, not too much cheese and generous portions of ingredients; the music got my colleagues and I listening and commenting in an almost synchronised manner about how listenable it was; the service was superb; and certainly not least – I am still burping up coffee fumes :)
Geneva has been memorable because of the food I’ve had, and also because I’ve inhaled more second-hand smoke here in the past few days than I have in the last year in Singapore, because the buses and trams here are so punctual and technically advanced and I like the way they stop at every stop and don’t open their doors until a passenger presses a button to alight or enter the bus, because I saw a distinguished gentleman whose thin face was dominated by a moustache of fearsome bushiness bristling sideways past his ears, because the sky here is so calm most days – it’s been milder than I would expect here apart from a couple of gray chilly drizzle-pocked days; on the first day I think I could have gotten a tan from the sunshine streaming in through my hotel room window – that jet trails often linger and linger, because sirens – of the police and the ambulance types – are frequent day and night beyond all plausible explanation and lastly, at least for these six days, because my colleagues and I had to look all around the area near our hotel and then cross the river to the shopping district before we came by seemingly the only place in Geneva that sold Rolex watches, a place with a door lady (yes, a lady whose only job was to ask if you were visiting their store – which was the sort of place that makes me feel that I should use a more exclusive word than ‘store’ and that sadly but understandably that more exclusive word is beyond my limited peasant vocabulary – and open the door for you if you were so doing) and snotty saleswomen.
Oh, and today Joseph Stiglitz gave what to me was an eye-opening and scintillating talk at a session of the International Labour Organisation Governing Body. Man, you should have seen the staid old assembly hall hoppin’ like a rock concert venue before U2 took the stage. I took some notes, so should be able to relate some of the topics he touched on in a later post :)
