In addition to being the historic home of the muslim Malay rulers of Singapore, this area was also the home of islamic scholarship in the area, and the transportation hub for Asian muslims making the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.  They would make their ways to Singapore from Indonesia and Malaysia, settle their affairs, and pack onto ships for Mecca (before flights became available and affordable).  Some people made a nice business of organizing Hajj trips, and could advertise their services as “licensed pilgrim brokers.”

But not all Muslims who came to Singapore for the Hajj proceeded to Mecca.  Plenty of them stayed in the area around the Mosque, and were dubbed “Haji Singapura” – pilgrims to Singapore.

And at the end of the street farthest from the mosque, there’s the Halal Swedish Bistro!

I don’t know what that means, whether your Swedish meatballs are certified pork-free or whether the smoked reindeer was properly bled before being smoked, but there you are. I ask you, where besides Singapore will you find a halal Swedish cafe?

I’ll start my Bali blogging with a few pictures of food styling at the Komang John Cafe in Amed, on the east coast:

The margarita on the left sports a lime spiral, a sprig of something from the garden, and a frangipani blossom. The lime-accessorized beaker on the right contains, if I recall, pineapple juice, or possibly mango.

This is nasi goreng, one of the most common dishes in Bali – nay, in southeast Asia. Rice stir-fried with veggies and spices, with an egg on top and some sticks of satay tempeh and tofu on the side. But look how they put the soy and chili sauces in little cups made from cucumbers and carrots; and the cucumber garnish in the middle is pretty charming, too. Those little flying saucers on the right are shrimp crackers, freshly fried and crispy.

This is nasi campur, another very common dish. The banana-leaf cone contains rice, a mixture of red and white. There are prawn crackers, slices of tempeh with a sort of BBQ sauce on them, some slices of Bali omelette (with veggies in it), and sticks of lemon grass whose ends have been covered in a paste of fresh fish and spices and then grilled. There are a few other things on there as well, a couple of curries, salads, relishes, etc. Bon Appetite!

So you soon learn to live with geckos, even though this means that you go around scrubbing their black excrement from the white tile floors, white walls, and yes, even the white ceilings – I am not sure how they manage to poop upwards and make it stick to the ceiling while they’re up there, but they do.  Truly Nature is wondrous.

So I’m not really surprised when I come into the kitchen early in the morning and hear a rustling sound in the trash can.  The geckoes are foraging in there, and when I turn on the lights they skedaddle.  Or when I go to put away the dishes from the drainer, and something with a tail skitters away from me as fast as it can, and climbs the wall to safety on top of the cupboards. I can’t say I regard this as a cheerful morning greeting (before coffee, nothing is a cheerful morning greeting), but these things don’t startle me.

But I do jump when a gecko leaps from the top of the cupboards onto my hair.  A soft little bounce over my left ear, and then the little guy falls squashily to the floor below, landing on his feet, and takes off for parts unknown.

And yesterday I was most surprised at the kitchen counter, when I was making toast.  Unwrap the bread, fine.  Take out two slices and put them in the toaster, well and good. Depress the toaster ignition button, and out flies a shocked and horrified gecko, leaping clear from the toaster cavity by a few inches, landing on the counter and lighting out for the territories.  He’d been peacefully napping or nibbling bread crumbs in the bottom of the toaster, probably hidden himself well out of reach when he saw the bread slices coming, and then was shocked – shocked! – by the wires around him heating up.

I’m just glad he didn’t leave his tail behind.  The toast tasted fine, BTW – no hint of roast reptile to upset even the most delicate gourmand.

Aren’t they cute?  Mei, can you translate the cake characters for us? I can read “moon” and “good,” but not the other two.

Anyway, by chance we stumbled across a bakery that sells really interesting bread and does a mean grilled cheese sandwich: Simply Bread.  It’s in Bukit Timah, the ex-pats’ haven – no surprise there – in Guthrie House, off Sixth Avenue.  We found sourdough bread there that actually tastes and feels like genuine California sourdough – and a plain cafe-like ambience that’s reminiscent of Berkeley bakeries.  Fortunately it’s staffed by professional Singaporeans, rather than university students, so you can actually eat within a half-hour of ordering – a distinct advantage over Berkeley if you’re in a hurry.  Unless you’re in the U.S. and have to include flight time to Singapore – then Berkeley wins.

But for hungry homesick northern Californians in Singapore, Simply Bread is a good remedy.

“Hi.  I’m your taxi driver from the airport to your hotel. Once we get there I’ll be detonating my trunkload of explosives. So sorry.  Have a nice ride!”

“Hello taxi driver.  I’m a Chinese Singaporean.  No, I’m not a Muslim.  Do you know what they serve to eat on Singapore Airlines?  Slow-cooked PORK spare-ribs with barbecue sauce!  Stir-fried PORK and veggies, cooked in pure PORK FAT.  Delicious!  I ate a lot of it.  And it was followed by pastries made with lard, which of course is PURE PORK FAT.  A bit greasy, but so crispy!  I am just chock-full of PORK products.  I probably have PORK FAT running through my veins, even!”  (I.e., if you blow me up, I’ll splatter pork on you and your body will be completely contaminated.)

“Oh, interesting.  OK, I guess I won’t be blowing up the taxi this time.  Enjoy your visit!”

NB: Singapore Airlines also serves halal food.

NB #2: My friend is a vegetarian.

The crowd was mostly students, of course, and that’s great.  They’d worked hard to find sponsors for a high-end social experience they could share, in the ballroom of a downtown hotel, and they provided the entertainment as well.  The participants were distributed in traditional Chinese fashion, at circular tables of ten surrounding with lazy susans.  There were lots of people on the waiting/serving staff, and at least four hotel event managers with walkie-talkies running the food service.  Unlimited drinks, but no alcohol.  An MC and two guys running the audio-visual show from a computer next to the central dais.

A traditional Chinese banquet, I think, has zillions of courses, which this one also had – took HOURS to get through them all, and they were all very tasty and fairly expensive. Well, to me, with my largely vegetarian diet, a meal that includes  duck, chicken, fish, shark-fin and abalone soup, scallops and veggies, and a few other courses is quite high-end, but you may have other ideas.  The key here is that it takes hours for the food to be cooked, plated, served, and consumed, course by course, so you need entertainment.

What would traditional entertainment be, at a banquet where you had to keep your guests happy and at table for 3 hours?  Maybe some Chinese opera, some martial arts displays, poetry-writing contests?  Dancing girls?  Drinking games?  No alcohol or girlie stuff was allowed here, and apparently modern engineering students don’t go in for poetry or kung-fu displays, so what we got was a beauty pageant. 

From an organizational point of view this works well.  Young smart people modelled clothes, makeup and hairstyles provided by sponsors – a win-win.  And the sheer amount of hair gel on display was truly impressive – shows what a variety of effects you can achieve within the limited palette of straight black hair.

This was interesting for its departure from U.S. beauty contests.  One reason was that the participants were all students from the engineering school, so their friends were the audience, and there was some slightly raucous interraction between tables of banqueters and the people going across the dais.  It was also relatively non-sexist: there were as many male as female participants.  They had to do four things: do a choreographed dance all together; do a formal wear demo; a beach wear demo; and a casual wear demo.  And a couple of professors had to judge the winners – nobody wanted that job!

They showed off the formal wear in couples, not just sashaying down the catwalk, but doing some acting in little scenarios; the offended girl, the dancing night out, the boy sweeping girl off feet for the big exit – interspersed with attitudes struck to show off the clothes (supplied by the sponsors).  It looked to me like auditioning to be in a soap opera, and maybe that’s what it really is.  Plus it looked like fun, and a chance for these particular students to do some acting and escape the prosaic reality of student life.

The beach wear was very modest, I was happy to see –  at an academic gathering, you don’t really want to see a parade of flesh.  The girls modeled sun dresses, and the boys had tank tops and board shorts.  The one risque moment occurred when three boys pulled off their tank tops just before exiting the stage, and the hoots and howls of their classmates were highly appreciative.

All this was interspersed with food service for those of us not in the pageant, and by the time the casual wear demo started I had had enough and needed to come home.  I’d had enough food and noise, along with the other profs in attendance had lent age and respectability to what was after all a youth function.  And because neither my husband nor I had to judge the pageant, thank god, and had been seated at a table with other professorial types (and a toddler, who was loved by students and faculty alike), we could leave.

So what to make of this?  Constrained by tradition (the long banquet format) and the interesting cultural mix of Singapore (no red meat or alcohol, so you can accomodate Muslims and Hindus), along with the modern ideal of non-sexist entertainment that involved amplified music and could be offered in spurts, between courses, I have come to the conclusion that a fashion pageant was in fact a great idea.  It highlighted a lot of what I like about Asian student culture: good cheer; inclusion of elders and babies as a matter of course; hard work and organization; and supportive teamwork.

Here in the university’s pool complex there are mostly coconut and jackfruit trees.  The coconut trees have orchids bound to their trunks, and are most beautiful.  The jackfruit I didn’t even notice until one day last week, when I happened to have my camera with me.  As you can see, these are getting ready to harvest.  I think the pool people will get them – they probably planted them in the first place, and since they maintain and guard the pool from 7 a.m. until 8 or 9 p.m., they certainly deserve whatever they cultivate.  

I have yet to try either raw jackfruit or durian.  Clearly my time in the tropics is wasted, despite my enthusiasm for rambutans and mangosteens.

Bon appetite!