This week's Mastercard ad and foodie post

Getting a table at Beach Road hawker centre: $0
Cab fare for some of us to get there and back: $25
Splendid hawker centre repast for five adults and one teenager: $45
Drinks afterwards at a shishka place along Arab Street: $18
Having said teenager look disturbed because he overheard "I prefer to pee in the cubicle instead of in the urinal" as "I prefer to pee in the cubicle instead of in your anus": priceless

For the record, the splendid hawker centre repast consisted of:

• yong tau foo (fish cake and other seafood-vegetable-flour concoctions served up with noodles or vermicelli)
• char kway teow (fried wide noodles)
• noodles with beef slices and beef balls in soup
• hor fun (more fried wide noodles, but in a seafood gravy), fried oysters, proper olua (oyster omelette, not the same thing as fried oysters)
• rojak (sometimes known as a salad, but far from any Western conception of salad: vegetables and deep-fried dough fritters in a sweet prawn paste sauce, with a liberal sprinkling of ground peanuts)
• carrot cake (the Chinese "black" kind)
• goreng pisang (deep-fried bananas) and similarly deep-fried slices of sweet potato.

Apologies to anyone familiar with Singaporean hawker fare but living overseas, whom I may have just made ravenous with hunger and homesickness with my litany above. We were trying to introduce typical local food to friends from overseas.

Surprisingly, olua was a big hit; we always thought of it as more of an acquired taste. Next food stop: satay at East Coast Park Lagoon hawker centre.

The thing about me and food is that I like it, I'll eat it and I'll compare where's a good place to get it. Terz, on the other hand, actually knows most of the ingredients in local dishes and can explain how some of them got to be that way. So he could explain that carrot cake has no carrots in it and is in fact radish cake, and that the misnomer arose from an inaccurate translation of a common Chinese term for "carrot" and "radish" into the English word "carrot". The things you learn about your own country when you're taking people around...