Wednesday

The thing about spending the better part of a day with Stellou is that you never know where it'll take you.

There might be breakfast at Ang Mo Kio Street 61. Not pictured are the chwee kueh (as mr brown defines it: "steamed rice cake topped with chopped preserved radish"), fishball noodles, "black" carrot cake, iced chendol and thick, fragrant coffee that we leisurely put away over the course of one and a half hours.


There might be a car ride downtown to Shenton Way. Stellou approved of the multitude of pink shoes, of course.


There might be Santa Claus grinning down at you from the shiny aluminium wall of a Japanese restaurant, completely unperturbed that his traditional salutation has been thrown into reverse. This is also the restaurant that also seems to be the only place open at lunchtime at Katong Village, its neighbours being fine nocturnal establishments like Beer Belly Pub and Chevy 57.


There might be an MRT ride to town later, en route to which we discover that even our humble park names can be bought and paid for by international corporations. Americans and their Tostitos Fiesta Bowl or Busch Memorial Stadium might be used to this sort of usurpation, but I'm a little dismayed that it's snuck into our public spaces. Next thing you know, we'll have the Creative National Stadium or Osim Singapore League.


Eventually, there might be a great deal of rummaging at Kinokuniya, followed by a decorous farewell at the platform of Orchard MRT station. Most importantly, there has been the repeated uttering of the immortal lines, "There's this girl from Singapore I met in London, and she's so cool, you know, she's so cool that we keep forgetting that, yah lah, like you, we forget that she is not an IJ girl but she's so cool anyway."

Thank ... you ... ?

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