Fried Rice Paradise

While waiting for the Prince George River to ebb from the hallway (every so often the cleaning ladies will literally flood the hallway with water that runs like a freaking river past all our rooms, and I come out of my room and I see this woman standing in rubber boots in the rushing current, and she motions to me to keep to the high ground until the floods subside, so I'm trapped in here until then), I'll reflect on my week so far.

First off, the title of this post comes from an actual song "Fried Rice Paradise", which is currently stuck in my head unfortunately. It's sort of the pop-anthem of Singapore from a while ago. On YouTube:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=FUYfjwfKPuQ&feature=related

Haha, I like the last guy's comment on the video. Apparently this was considered a controversial song because of how colloquial the language is, using the Mandarin/English mix that is commonly heard around here, called "Singlish", and the government even banned this song from playing on the radios for a while, because they wanted the population to learn only proper English and proper Mandarin, not the interracial bastard child of both. I just admire the dude's pants... reminds me of Shamoor Anis at the 80s party in his brightest shade of teal.

OH SHIT THERE'S A JUMPING SPIDER ON MY WALL RIGHT NOW!!! :) :) :)

I'm very excited now because my new best friend (this jumping spider) is going around gobbling up these damn ants that keep coming into my room. He is quite voracious, I must say, reminds me of Sim Ant the old game. But I'm glad he's on my side because these stupid ants just don't get it... they come in everyday by the hundreds for just some tiny crumb on the floor, and I just squish them with my foot and they subsequently die by the hundreds as well. So their cost-benefit ratio is terrible, considering how many casualties they suffer for just a bit of food smaller than they are. But they refuse to learn and keep coming, in even greater numbers each day. I'm surprised I haven't yet wiped out their colony, they must have multiple queens or something.

OK now about Singapore again... Haven't learned much that's new, but did go to dinner the day before yesterday with a group of native guys who went to one of NUS's many "Overseas Colleges" for a summer internship. This particular group went to Silicon Valley... and they loved it haha. They can't wait to go back, claiming the working atmosphere there is much better for free-thinking, entrepreneurial-minded people than Singapore. Not to mention the climate. Just hearing them reminisce about Silicon Valley prompted me to do the same... oh California, how I miss you my beautiful girl, even though I constantly make fun of your eccentricities...

These guys were really nice to me though, and they took me to a traditional Chinese New Year's dinner that started off with a weird dish that I have never seen before, but is apparently very traditional for this time of year and quite popular in Singapore. It's called "yusheng", which literally means both "raw fish" and "abundance" (in Chinese you have many words that sound exactly the same, called homophones, and this is one example). Basically, it's a mixture of every ingredient that Chinese find particularly auspicious... and I mean everything. When it arrived at our table, I could not recognize anything on the plate. It literally looked like some kind of salad that resulted from the crash landing of a rainbow. And on top of that, the waitress came back with more stuff in bowls that she sprinkled on top while telling us what each of those ingredients represented, such as five spice powder for good luck, kumquat honey for romance (as a group of mostly single guys, we could have used that for sure), plum sauce for wealth, shrimp crackers for something else, etc, etc... I can't even name everything that went into this, but it's something like jellyfish, daikon radish, white ginger, red ginger, peanuts, crackers, bunch of different sauces, carrots, peppers, orange peel, and of course, raw fish... and more. I was very hesitant at first to try it, but after we all mixed it up together with our chopsticks, shouting "good luck" in Chinese as we did, each of us dug out a portion and consumed. It was actually delicious. We ate it all very fast, all the different flavors actually combined extremely well, I was impressed. Oh wiki actually has a good article on this stuff, so look up "yusheng" if you want some better explanation.

Anyway, those guys were really cool and I hope to hang out with them again soon. Or if they come back to Silicon Valley I'd be happy to help them with a "start-up" plan... for a restaurant that may introduce this delicacy to us back home haha.

Ok, what else? Anything? What about this riddle that I found on the top of my bubble tea yesterday, and that I still can't figure out... Every cup of my bubble tea comes with some riddle written on the top in Chinese, which I never bothered to read until now... this one is quite strange and I think I'm missing a lot in translation. I reads something like "Meeting a long feather's mother is called what?... Answer: Bird, because "jiang" (JOHN) mother bird". Wtf... Next time I'm just going to enjoy my tea without giving myself a brain hemorrhage.

Played more tennis as usual, and even went swimming after today's match, as my opponent insisted we go try the pool. I didn't bring a bathing suit... so he lent me one of his. Bad news, he was European (French), so of course the suit is one of those skimpy little speedos... all I can say is, if you get one of these make sure you are in a country where nobody cares. In the US I would have rather killed myself than show up to the pool in that, but here it was alright. And no, no photos, thank you very much for asking, though. It was a nice swim regardless, and afterwords I introduced him to sushi, which he never had before. He actually liked it, I guess you can always count on the French for good taste in food. I was also surprised how many French words in food I remembered, as I could translate some of the different fishes, like "thon" for tuna. Oh, and PS, sushi here is really cheap and still quite good. So skip Japan and just go to Singapore.

Ok I think the floods have finally subsided, so I may once again stroll gallantly down the hall like a conquering hero... Now I'm headed for a English linguistics experiment that Rachel said she got $10 from, woot for $$$.
Cheers!