Only day two?!? Oh my.
Today started completely unlike yesterday: the alarm didn't go off and I woke up a good hour later than I intended. I had plenty of time before we were due at the theatre (10am), but so much for the morning stroll to the quay. I headed down to breakfast, where the others were mostly finishing up. Not particularly hungry still, I stuck to a bowl of congee and some fruit.
Yesterday morning I scolded myself for automatically asking for coffee with breakfast...I thought, dang, I'm in Asia, I should have gotten tea. So this morning I got tea, and almost immediatly regretted it, as it was plain old yellow-label Lipton. Sigh.
Today was the first day of work in the theatre, a 10-5 day (with a lunch break) to load in, tech, and do a run of 52 Pickup. I'll gloss over the minute-by-minute, but the highlights included several hours of not doing much while the six-man crew strung up six pieces of tieline to hang the three small drops; conveyor belt sushi; discovering that the required fireproofing of the drops had caused the design to bleed (effectively ruining the drops), then being told that it wasn't really necessary to do after all; and taking almost half an hour to write the first preshow cue. We ultimately got to run the show for about 15 minutes (we did 7 cards), which is only slightly less than any other times when three of us had an hour and a half to load-in, tech, and be ready to go. I don't think the crew is union, but you wouldn't know from watching them.
Anyway, we wrapped at 5, and the five of us (Monique was taking photos, and Mark was having music rehearsal time) had a brief layover at the hotel (happy hour in Andrew and Llyssa's room for me), then walked up to the big marketplace known as Bugis ("Boogies").
Bugis is roughly equivalent to a Mexican mercado, with a warren of little alleys running between hundreds of retail stalls hawking cheap fashions, watches/belts/sunglasses, tourist T-shirts ("Singapore is a FINE city -- $500 for littering, $1000 for jaywalking..."), sprinkled with buddhist trinket vendors, fruit stands, and cloth merchants. Being Singapore, there was of course a food court attached, which was strangely reminiscent of the state fair, but with each stall selling some variety of noodles or fish-head curry instead of french fries and elephant ears. I came across a durian market, which had piles of the stinky bombs the size of my car just out on the sidewalk. Interestingly, it was just around the corner from the dumpster, and I'm not sure which smelled worse. The fruit market next door, however, had an amazing assortment of things I'd never seen before -- like Rambutan and Dragon Fruit (which I tasted yesterday, but it looks completely different on the outside) -- along with a ceiling of green bananas, buckets of lychee, and more. There was also some interesting architecture that reminded me of Miami.
We'd all agreed to meet up after some time wandering through Bugis, and from there headed a few blocks further on to Serangoon road and the heart of Little India. Destination: Kamalas Villas, recommended highly by the guys in the lighting booth as the best Indian food in town. While they might work a little slow, they know their food. It has a whole selection of the south Indian specialties, dosas, idly, uthapham, and so on, many of them served on a banana leaf, and while they gave us forks and spoons, scooping with the right hand was really the order of the day. I got a thali-like meal, with saffron rice, two different curries and several chutneys, which in the end I couldn't do any kind of justice. We allowed the waiter to talk us into a selection of indian sweets before the meal, and were not disappointed, since they were amazing (Gulab Jamun, some cashew nut paste, fresh milk halwa, and a couple other things) and we were all too full after to even think about dessert. The five of us got bloated on more food than we could finish, and the full tab including lassis and the desserts was a lousy S$42! It felt so wrong, and yet, so very right.
In an effort to walk off the pounds, we ignored the tired legs and skipped the option of a cab ride back. The change in neighborhood as we crossed into Little India was remarkable, with the smell of durian and exhaust giving way to incense and curry, the Hong Kong t-shirt and cheap watch stalls becoming sari shops and bollywood video stores, and religious imagery shifting from Buddha to Kali and Krishna. As we wandered after dinner, Monique and I quickly got completely lost in a fabric store of some sort, and ultimately spent a bunch of time dawdling around in little shops as they closed up for the night. Check out the special edition Barbie. We meandered back to the hotel, indavertently stumbling across several of the recommended sights, including a mosque, a brightly colored Hindi temple, and a temple to the goddess Kuan Yin. We also came across a large Buddhist fundraiser of some sort happening under a large tent divided in two sections. One side featured a small stage, blinking lights and a bad pop singer, while the other side had several large golden statues of various Buddhas, a wall of buddhas, and several hundred people being led by orange-draped monks doing the devotional "three steps and kneel" walk while a soothing repetetive chant played over the PA. I have no idea quite how they were raising money, really.
Finally, we encountered a crowd around a display window at the Raffles City Mall where we were yesterday. Occupying three large display bays are four men from Australia who are living there as a 14-day performance art installation for the Arts Fest. A Butoh group here for Flipside (staying at our hotel; we saw them at breakfast) had just finished some sort of interactive piece, where I gathered they were somehow engaging the other men through the windows, judging from the smeared white body makeup on the glass. Kinda sorry I missed that.
Once again quite worn out. Tomorrow is off until 6:30pm, when we head in for the first performance of 52 Pickup. Apparently both shows are about 80% sold, which is great. The only plan for the day otherwise is an 11:00am shuttle to Chinatown, and winging it from there.
