If I was under any illusion that the two major passions of your average Singaporean were food and shops I have been bought back to reality with a thump over the last forty-eight hours. Eat, shop, shop, eat, talk about money, eat and then go shopping. Then after lunch………
If we in New Zealand are worried about an obesity epidemic then we should import some of the water from here. How can an entire country eat so much and remain so cadaverically thin. I have seen ten people I would gauge as overweight in the last five days and I can’t think of anyone I would call morbidly obese. None of the population should emigrate to Wellington as they would all get blown into the Wairarapa at the first narrowing of the isobars. Your average Singapore female would weigh 40kg and the blokes 41kg. Yet they eat like horses. There are opportunities to fill you face at every turn and at all hours of the day or night. Most of the food is terrific stuff but they also consume mountains of KFC and MacDonald’s and still they refuse to put on weight. I wonder if they put tapeworms in the Char Kuay Teow or Giardia in the Mee Goreng. Are there great forced vomiting parties in the depths of the HDB estates? Is most of the food an optical illusion? Not only does your average Singaporean have an ideal BMI despite his/her gustatory habits they drape the best cut clothes imaginable on these frames. Lunchtime at a food centre in the CBD is like watching a fashion parade. All the office workers look like they’ve just walked off a catwalk in Milan and that’s just the blokes.
Which brings us on to where do they get all these top of the line vestments? Shops, that’s where. The shopping here has got worse (or better if you are my daughter) than I recall. I don’t understand it. There has to be an oversupply of anything anyone would want to buy of about 10,000% and an oversupply of things no one would want to buy of double that. Walk down Orchard Road and enter any of the marble fronted shopping centres and there would be a choice of say ten shops in a hundred metres where you could buy a Rolex at $10,000 a pop. I have yet to see anyone buy one. These shops are paying top rent and all employ seemingly innumerable staff who spend there entire day polishing the displays and selling nothing. There are three Levi’s Stores in the shopping centre opposite my billet alone. If you go to cheap and nasty stuff the situation is magnified. How many things costing 45 cents each do you have to sell to turn a profit even if you are not in a top dollar rental establishment? I fail to understand how these people make the money.
At DA’s insistence I went on a techno shop. I didn’t want to go but DA is a good mate and you don’t want to let your mates down. Same thing. There are two main places to get your techo stuff here, Funan Centre and Sim Lim Square. I’ve been to both. Each is a six storey shopping mall selling nothing but computers and attendant bits and pieces. Twelve stories of shops selling the same stuff. Because of the proximity of one business to another the prices are pretty much the same everywhere. Bargaining is still possible but it is not like I remember it. If you have the bargaining skills of a pot plant like me you are OK in the fixed price places and not going to get ripped off – I think. How do all these people make their dosh? I have seen nothing much I hadn’t already heard of (except 3.5G phones – not really sure what the extra 0.5 gets you and don’t care) but it is generally a bit cheaper than in Harvey Norman. Speaking of H-N they have outlets here – why? I have allowed myself a few indulgences in the external hard-disk department but have otherwise been very well behaved.
Another day in the fields of yesteryear observing the latest line of agricultural machinery in action and I’ll then soon be lining up the tin budgie for the next stage of the tour.
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