Day Seven: Redux

Thank you all for reading.

Now I remember day seven.

Day seven.

It was Saturday and Akira didn’t have to work. We got out of bed late and had coffee in our room and went to lunch at one of the hawker centers.

There were two near the hotel, the Airfield Cafe (where my favorite dim sum place is) and another no-name place across the road near the park where all the transvestites are said to hang out. The second place was suggested by Akira’s coworker (the guy who Akira canceled with on Friday), and we had eaten there once or twice before, but I didn’t find the place very appealing. I don’t have a problem with most street food--I mean, I’ve eaten from street carts in the US, Mexico, Thailand, Japan, and Australia--but I had a bad feeling about this place.

In Singapore, some governing body or another issues a grade based on cleanliness. A is the highest rating, and is seen in hotel and fine dining places (as well as chain and fast food restaurants that have relatively stringent sanitary standards). B is the (unofficial but common) highest hawker center stall rating. C is given to so-so joints. (I risked a lot of C places.) And D is definitely an eat-at-your-own-risk stall.

Many of the stalls at the no-name hawker center had D ratings. I had tried a duck rice dish one night, and the rice was fine but the duck had been coated in a brown, congealed fish-based gravy. I had two bites and abandoned it. Akira tried a fish soup from one stall and beef satay from another. (Satay was one of the recommendations the coworker supplied.) At the satay stall, a minimum order was ten sticks. I didn’t touch them, and Akira gave up after eating four. The fish soup was edible.

I was ready to throw in the towel and head back over to the other center, but Akira’s was more reluctant. After all, his trusted coworker had insisted that the no-name center was a good place, so he tried again at another stall. He ordered a mutton curry and ate a bit of it. (I passed on any more stall food in favor of later buying some sour cream and onion Pringles and Tiger beer from the hotel gift shop.)

We thought we’d try the Singapore Zoo and the Night Safari. I wasn’t particularly interested in the zoo (I don’t usually care for zoos because I don’t like looking at living things in cages), but Akira was, and we both wanted to see the Night Safari. (Yes, it is a zoo, but I found the concept--a zoo only open from six p.m. to midnight with displays of mainly nocturnal animals--intriguing.) We decided to aim on getting to the zoo around 3 p.m. Unfortunately, we misjudged our travel time (which was via the hotel shuttle, three MRT lines, and a bus) and didn’t arrive at the zoo until 4:30.

The staff at the zoo entrance was reluctant to sell us tickets ($15 SGD + $5 SGD for the tram), saying that ninety minutes was not enough time to see the zoo. Since I wasn’t interested in the zoo I didn’t care, but Akira seemed disappointed. We inquired about the Night Safari and were told that tickets ($20 SGD for entry and $8 for the tram) weren’t on sale until 5:30. The cashier did offer to sell me a ticket at 4:30, but said that, if it rained, there would be no refund.

That made me take a closer look at the weather situation. It had been cloudy all day, and every day there had been a rainstorm in the early afternoon. Only today, the rainstorm hadn’t yet happened. I asked Akira what he wanted to do, head back to the hotel, buy a ticket with the possibility of being rained out, or not buy a ticket and wait an hour until the other ticket booth opened. He wanted to wait and see if it would rain.

At the convenience store near the entrance, we bought a bag of tortilla chips and a couple of drinks and took a table under a canopy. We ate the chips and watched people streaming out of the zoo, which closed at 6 p.m.

We watched and didn’t talk much.

I have to say that, despite the hours and hours we had spent conversing on the phone and via Skype, we really didn’t talk much while we were together in Singapore. Not only did Akira seem uncommunicative, his English level actually seemed to regress. I found it a bit frustrating.

Just before five p.m., it began to rain. It was a light drizzle, then a less-light drizzle. People were already lined up at the Night Safari gate and the tables in the area were filled by people killing time until the tickets went on sale. Akira asked what I wanted to do. “Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said. He agreed. We got back on the bus. Our stop was directly in front of a hawker center that was next to a fruit stand and a 7-11. Checking out the fruit stand, I bought a custard apple and some jackfruit. Akira wanted plums, so we bought a small basket of those. I needed small change for the subway, so at 7-11 I bought a couple of small diet Cokes.

We got back on the subway which took us back to the airport where we caught the airport shuttle to the hotel. I don’t remember what we did for dinner.

It was not a memorable day, except for one thing: I did remember that day seven was the day that I realized that there were problems between Akira and me. There were problems with our relationship that we could try to fix--but there was absolutely no reason to bother.