Lioness in Japan

I’m probably the last Singaporean who had never been to TWG, a popular tea cafe in Ion Orchard. They serve up English style scones, cakes, tarts, and pretty macarons with a seemingly endless list of tea. I had the watermelon green tea drink called Pink Beauty (I think??). It was so refreshing and just what I needed on a hot day.

I don’t usually like scones because they are hard and powdery but these were done really perfect — soft but firm? Does that makes sense?

It was a great place to nibble and chat with a girlfriend.

Am I crazy over putting my photos in collages or what?

I used to run the 11km around Macritchie Reservoir with the kangaroo. I would always find it so hard to drag myself there and dodging trees roots and tripping over rocks would always make me groan inwardly, “Why the hell do I do this to myself?”

But it always feels so damn good after I emerge from the jungle of trees.

It’s one of my favourite places in Singapore. Do try and go for a hike or a run at least once if you are in Singapore. What’s the point of being in a tropical country if you don’t experience some jungle, right?

The kangaroo and I go back to Killiney Kopitiam Siglap purely for nostalgic reasons. The famous lontong has been watered down (to cater to droves of people who come for this very dish) but we would still make the hike in a cab from my folks’ place in the north.

I tend to have very short stays in Singapore and don’t really have the chance to gobble hawker style food. I mean, none of my friends fancies chowing down on oily fried food without air-conditioning.

Also my folks are pretty health-conscious and seldom eat at hawker centres but they do make homey delicacies that make me more than happy.

And if I think about it, I never did indulge in hawker food very often when I lived in Singapore because it was just so rich and unhealthy. I’ve also become very much less hung up on local food compared to three years ago.

So our trips to Killiney Kopitiam are such a treat and worth the SGD40 return cab fare.

I had the opportunity to catch Singapore Day at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The promise of hawker food was the only lure for my friends and I (in the end, I missed out on the food because I had another event).

However, there was also a a special Mambo Jambo session that got everyone on their feet too. Leading the hand actions were Hossan Leong and Michelle Chong in her Barbarella incarnation. It was a total hoot dotted with cringey moments.

More interestingly, Singapore Day is a travelling festival that goes to Shanghai, Sydney, and Paris, too. The purpose of this event is to attract undergrads to consider going home after they finish uni overseas. There were quite a number of career booths helmed by EDB, the army, banks etc, offering entry-level positions upon graduation.

Apparently, this is a huge event that attracts Singaporean students from all over the US who converge in New York for this rare day of local treats. My friends who were there earlier heard that some folks even drove down from Toronto – not even in the same country, oh my!

It was a surprisingly fun day hangin’ out in sunny Prospect Park with a whole bunch of Singaporeans.

My friend Sheyx came over to Tokyo recently and brought with her two packets of Laksa La Mian by Prima. OMG, these are so good and MSG free!!!

Although laksa at home is not eaten with la mian per se (the original version uses thick rice vermicelli), though if you count yong tau fu laksa then we do eat this with other types of noodles. It is so good. I kind of stopped stocking up on food back home because of luggage constraints and I’m seriously getting used to not having Singaporean food.

But this just re-opened the door to my old taste buds. If you are a Singaporean expat, you NEED this. Thanks, Sheyx!! I had both packets in one weekend — that was how good it was!

I always feel so healthy when I come to New York because it’s just so easy. You can find organic produce everywhere and not just Whole Foods, and similarly, you can find all sorts of activities good for the body and soul, if you so choose.

I’ll admit, I went to a yoga class at Go Yoga because a friend is a regular there, so it was easy for me to just join in. It’s not like something I would seek out on my own but perhaps it is something to keep in mind if you are so inclined.

There is only so much sightseeing I can stomach before I get bored and being part of a slice of Williamsburg life is more fascinating to me than a wax museum, for instance.

And it was an eye opener that women outside of Japan are okay with wearing tights to a yoga class. In Tokyo, women wear shorts or a short skirt over tights or a very long top that covers the bum when doing exercise. I suspect it has to do with being shy about exposing one’s crotch area, although technically it is covered up but you know what I mean.

Needless to say, I was the only one wearing shorts over my tights. Ah, the trials and tribulations of being an expat – you are constantly muddled over what it the “norm” or not.

Such a mundane detail aside, Vinyasa Yoga was just what the doctor ordered for my stiff running legs and harried soul. This yoga centre has a casual friendliness that I warmed to naturally and the class was vigorous in the sense that the muscle work felt intense with its long periods of just holding one challenging pose after another.

I’ve been on a streak of showing you the things that were given to us by various friends, haven’t I?

Today’s one is Yakun kaya jam, brought to me all the way from Singapore by The Frou. She was here on a business trip and we caught up over dinner where she surprised me with a bottle of this and a pack of Chinese herbs for boiling soup. Excellent gifts for any homesick Singaporean.

Usually, kaya is eaten over a generous slab of butter on toast. Sigh, it was a great Saturday morning breakfast. I usually keep it clean and healthy from Mon-Fri, but I like to imbibe a naughty brunch or two on the weekend.

I love it when it snows in Tokyo. It’s quite unusual for it to bucket down white fluff and the last time it happened was quite a few weeks ago. I suppose it always gets colder before it gets warmer, if you know what I mean. There were snowy pictures of Tokyo all over Instagram on the last day of February. 2012 is a leap year so it does make this day feel a little special. I braved the cold to fetch a book I ordered from a bookstore which was a nice break on a stay-at-home workday for me.

I went to a salaryman bar in Shinjuku for a friend’s birthday nijikai (second party) last weekend and we were quite a big group so it seemed that a multi-level salaryman like Yamato in West Shinjuku was the answer.

It was crammed with tables and people. I asked who usually came to these smokey 24 hour booze joints and it seemed mostly salarymen and college student haunt these places for 180JPY beer and 500JPY eats. You can find mostly grilled fish, sushi, yaki-soba etc. type dishes here. The otoshi (the obligatory appetizer that starts the meal in any izakaya) was a gruesome mix of innards stewed in shoyu. Even the Japanese at the table didn’t touch it so we gaijins just followed suit.

The drinks menu boasts all types of shouchu cocktails below 500JPY, though you’d be treading on dangerous ground if you attempted their wine — a friend who ordered a glass of red did not recommend that I did the same for myself.

The star of the drinks menu is really Hoppy, a strange hybrid of half a mug of shouchu topped with Hoppy, a type of beer-like beverage that tastes like beer but has little or no alcohol content. It tasted like diluted beer to me which was actually a good thing because I don’t fancy beer, but this may be the very reason beer lovers would hate it. My Japanese friend seemed to enjoy it immensely that night.

Totally late in talking about this as it happened in late Jan but it was an unforgettable party.

We totally outdid ourselves this year. We cooked and cooked and cooked. I started preparing my soup stock for my dumplings three days before the actual day. We had 30 people swarming the buffet table who seemed genuinely interested in a Singaporean Chinese New Year.

We even had food labels in English and Japanese to explain the meaning of each dish. And a dragon puppet and red packets. We had pineapple tarts, almond cookies, love letters, toted all the way from Singapore from various Singaporean friends.

The fried tofu salad was the first to go, I think, and while it was yummy, its label did indicate you could get richer eating these supposed “gold tiles”.

Next year it would be at my place and this would be a tough act to beat.