Day 2, and what did I do?

I woke up at 6, ate breakfast, and read. It was Buddha's birthday, which means a public holiday. But I live in Hong Kong, so today was the first day that Singapore didn’t seem like a public holiday.

At 10 I went for a walk, until 2:30. Then I went back to my hotel room. It’s hot outside. And I’m on vacation.

Though I have a hard time being a tourist. One reason I rarely take photos is that I can’t abide the reality of being seen as a tourist. Not so much out of vanity, but upbringing instead.

I grew up in a ‘tourist town,’ a place people came to visit that they obviously knew nothing about, judging by the constant barrage of idiotic questions directed (often rather snidely) at locals.

How could they tell we were locals?

Maybe because we didn’t look like stranded morons.

So I have always held tourists in the same light as junk bond traders, sewer cleaners, and fundamentalist Christians with less than 12 years of state-sponsored education.

I.e. I am very glad I am not one of them and I have no desire to be seen as one of them.

So I rarely take photos of places I go. Unless it’s an irresistible photo op, like the Meth joke in the previous entry.

Add to that my over-developed awareness of what Frantz Fanon may have called ‘the post-colonial condition,’ and I find myself totally unable to reduce other peoples’ lived realities into a snapshot for my vacation. No matter how bright the colors.

Yes, I do in fact go very far out of my way to ensure that I never enjoy myself or, God forbid, be happy for more than three seconds at a time.

As much as I may have denigrated this hotel in my previous blog entry, I discovered something yesterday that puts a whole new face upon this experience.

Having decided, at about 3:00, to take a nap, I closed the curtains to my room in an effort to potentiate the rather significant Singaporean sunlight.

I was, therefore, quite deeply impressed by how utterly black the room turned. So black that I needed to feel my way back to the bed. This, I felt, made my not-insignificant expenditure on this hotel completely worth it.

I woke up around 6:00, plenty of time to go to Orchard Road and do a bit of browsing (and people-watching/insulting) before meeting D’in Cheung for dinner.

Over-educated as I am, I under-estimated the evil powers of capitalism to twist geography and, it seemed at times, reality itself to its all-consuming will.

There is something essentially rapacious to me about malls in general, and Ion Orchard struck me as especially irksome, imparting what I must call a sense of spiritual debridement, as if the very nature and purpose of the place was to strip away all but the most important of instincts: shopping.

So I sought, naturally, to get the f@#$ out of the unbearable place at first chance. While not the easiest of tasks, it was still accomplished rather easily.

The problem, I soon found, was returningto the cursed structure. For it is asquat the Orchard MRT station, where I was supposed to meet D’in. Who patiently called me at ten-minute intervals only to discover that while in perpetual motion, I was getting no closer to my destination. I would diligently follow the signs to the place, and it is only now that I realize the signs were incomplete.

Phrases like ‘Across the street from’ or ‘Within eyeshot of’ had obviously fallen off or been stripped away by mischievous vandals.

Nevertheless, I did eventually manage to meet D’in and his wife. We ate dinner, talked about guitars, talked about Japan, and tried at one point to talk about LV (Mrs. Cheung’s abiding passion), but D’in and I both rather quickly ran out of things to say.

And I wonder why I’m single…

So we went back to talking about guitars.

We went our separate ways around 10:30, after the requisite photo ops:

I returned to my hotel, took a shower, and was fast asleep by midnight.

I awoke this morning at 7:00, ate breakfast, and am now writing this entry.

At 11:00 I am meeting Binevonto go shopping for used books.

And to look at guitars.

Before I go, here’s proofabout the seriousness of Durian in Malaysia, sent to me by my friend Yvonne, who also tells me that the crops near Changi Airport are pineapples.