One If By Land

0830 hours and we’ve mapped out our initial strategy at Tokyo Disneyland. Park opens at 0900 hours. We’ve already got our tickets. Once we’re in, it’s straight to Cinderella’s castle, back of the park, second land to the right, and straight on ’til morning! Our competitive intelligence (Jenn) says Pooh’s Hunny Hunt is mobbed from the start, so our only chance is to out-hustle everyone else. But we are seasoned Disney fans, and we’re living in kiasu Singapore to boot, so we’re confident of our chances. Until we see this:


And that’s 30 minutes before the gates even open.

Dutifully, we queue, our hopes somewhat lower. About 96% of park guests are Japanese, so they have the home field advantage. As the gates open, the orderly line becomes an orderly . . . scrum. It’s Japan, so there’s no pushing or shoving - just a kind of intense strategizing. Fortunately, we reach the attraction early enough that the wait is only 15 minutes. Success!

We leave quite amazed by technology we haven’t seen on any ride in the States. Picture hunny honey pots that are individually guided by GPS. There is no track, and each honey pot traverses it own course. We whirl and do-si-do around the other pots (including one containing Heffalump “tourists” taking photos of us). It’s a bit like being immersed in a ballroom dance competition.

As we leave, we gleefully note that our strategy has worked: the wait for the ride is now 130 minutes. Later, we lunch at a gorgeously themed (and slightly trippy) Alice in Wonderland café called Queen of Hearts Banquet Hall, whose roof is covered in a hedge maze and whose doorway is a doorknob with a keyhole taller than we are. We eat unbirthday cake for dessert.



Unfortunately, our flawless strategizing begins to unravel when we try for a parade and a show. The best spot we can snag is far, far away from the parade floats (which have fun Asian touches like a dragon dance with the crocodile from Peter Pan). And we’re shut out of two shows before we figure things out. Being from the States, we just didn’t anticipate anyone sitting on the ground for three hours for a parade - or a full hour for a show.

But the Japanese are very patient, and not only patient but prepared. Each family has brought a ground covering to sit on as they wait. They look at us sadly when they see we have none. One elderly Japanese couple squeezes to one side of their mat and motions for us to share it with them. (Eventually, we buy our own as a souvenir, and it’s a big hit with our cat.)

Later, we adapt enough to score a perfect spot for the Electrical Parade, which Jenn has been missing for years (it was cruelly moved here from Orlando’s Magic Kingdom). It’s all worthwhile as we see the sunset behind the castle and the musical arrival of the “thousands of sparkling lights.”

But by 2200 hours, we’re bushed. And we’ll have an early start tomorrow: Day Two is by Sea.

In the Mail

I spent most of yesterday grappling with the dreaded arrival of . . . the mail pouch. In a nod to the double life we’re leading, Joey’s company has provided us with a PO box back in New Jersey at which we can receive mail. And as they put it, they “pouch” the contents to us every few weeks.

We’re not clear on how it actually gets here: Do they pitch it onto the next boat out of New York harbor? Do they use some secret-agent interoffice mail service? Do they stick it in the suitcase of a hapless executive traveling from HQ to Singapore? However they do it, they thoughtfully transport the contents of our PO box halfway around the world to Joey’s desk.

And what, you may ask, is so valuable that it gets ferried to us across continents and oceans? Good question. Our friends and family use our address in Singapore if they write to us, and our US banking and bills we do online. So usually our haul looks something like this:

a few issues of BusinessWeek from last month (there’s nothing like reading the weekly market tips a few weeks late)

several alumni communications (our Ivy League alma mater and top-20 b-school are, naturally, desperate for funds)

and, mostly, tons of the same junk mail we’ve been patiently shredding for years.

Yes, the company thoughtfully ships us those credit card offers, personal loan ads, and sweepstakes entries so that we can personally evaluate them. Surely we wouldn’t want to miss that chance to refinance at a low, low rate! And of course we’d want to know we’ve been personally selected for an exclusive card membership!

Lesson learned: you can leave the junk mail, but the junk mail won’t leave you. I suppose I should appreciate the little touch of home: sitting in Singapore, as I slowly feed the pile of junk mail through the shredder, it almost feels as if I never left New Jersey.

More Ads That Make You Go Hmm...

What comes to mind when you hear an advert for a cash line of credit? In the US, the ads usually suggest that your line of credit can help you pay for a dream vacation, start that huge home renovation, solve a financial emergency. But here in Singapore, I recently heard a radio segment advertising a line of credit for the cash payment by a young couple for their wedding banquet!

You would think that the wedding itself would be stressful enough for the couple, but the bride and groom are often responsible for the traditional wedding banquet, too. And Asian wedding banquets typically put Western receptions to shame, with huge guest lists and course after course of the most expensive foods available. Sometimes, if a large number of parental friends and colleagues are attending, then the parents will help out. Otherwise, the young couple are on their own.

And of course, in this cash-based society, it would never do to put the whole thing on a credit card (as we suspect most couples in the US would do these days). No wonder etiquette requires wedding guests to bring a substantial little red packet as a gift: you wouldn’t want your hosts to go broke just as they are starting out.

Fruit of the Month Club XII

This month’s fruit is quite a world traveler. The one we ate was from Vietnam, though some we see in the markets have been grown locally on Pulau Ubin. Apparently, the fruit is native to Mexico and may have been introduced to Asia via the Philippines. Here it’s called chiku; in Mexico, sapodilla. It’s reminiscent of a peach, or maybe a plum. But I think we cut into it before it was fully ripe, because although the taste was quite sweet, it dried out our mouths (the way a dry tea or wine might do).

48 Hours in Bangkok

Historic Bangkok is a visually overwhelming place; intriguing glimpses of everyday life mingle with the ostentation of the temples, whose spires are visible from miles away. The profusion of color, the detail of the mosaics, the exotic architecture, and the friendliness of the Thais we met there (not to mention the delicious food) left an indelible impression on us - and that was in just a short trip, 48 hours from start to finish!

We stayed in a fantastic renovated residence down a local alley along the river, so we could spend some time where local families live as well as tour the historic temples and canals.

The temples we saw were Buddhist - appropriately enough, I guess, for a trip during the Vesak Day weekend. Thai etiquette requires “respectful dress” for visitors to these sites, and thus arose our major packing problem: finding shoes that weren’t flip-flops. (After living in Singapore for a year and a half, we’d gone from having one pair of flip-flops apiece to having nothing but flip-flops in our wardrobes.)

But, dress code aside, we marveled at the detailed and gleaming mosaics on every inch of each temple building, the intricate carvings in gold, and the beautiful stonework. (We marveled at the massive Asian tour groups, too, but mostly we managed to stay one step ahead of them so as to view the temples in the peaceful atmosphere they’re meant to evoke.)


A highlight was our trip through the local canals on a long-tail boat, watching local life and lunching at a floating market along the water. We saw homes built on stilts over the water and some pretty sizeable monitor lizards - “Godzilla!” said our boat operator gleefully - along the way.

Long-tails are essentially slim boats fitted with whatever motor is at hand, so it’s not a quiet experience, but they are the usual method of transport in the area. Local merchants have smaller dugouts that can be paddled by one person - even when loaded with vegetables or goods to be sold down the canal at the floating market.


We were lucky not to be taken to the main (read: very touristy) floating market, which sounded like a floating souvenir shop. Instead, we visited a floating market where Thais often go for meals - in fact, it felt very much like an outdoor hawker center along the water. We were right at home, and some of our most enjoyable interactions in Bangkok were with the wonderful vendors - from the shyly smiling papaya-salad lady to the elderly man at the wok who handed me a tasty bite of prawn cake, fresh from the pan, to sample as we waited for our order.

Best of all were the evenings at the hotel, where from the loft in our room or the deck of the restaurant, we could look straight across the river at our favorite architectural icon of Bangkok: the stunning Wat Arun, temple of the dawn.

Peel Me Some Noodles

As you may know, my regular lunchtime repast is a noodle bowl, a deal at S$2.80. I love all the different types of noodles available at your average food stall - ban mian, bee hoon, u mian, and la mian, among others.

When we went to Beijing last year, we visited Mian Ku (Noodle Loft) and witnessed some divine noodle making. Chefs in the open kitchen were flinging long strands of noodles, pinching off identically sized lumps, or shaving strips off mounds of dough, so that each piece landed neatly in one of the pots of boiling water.


Until last week, I had no idea I could catch a glimpse of equally inspiring noodle making right here - in a food court at Tampines that serves dao xiao mian, literally “knife-shaved noodles.” These are strips of noodles cut from a loaf of dough straight into the boiling water. It's as if he were peeling a huge cucumber. The fellow graciously allowed me to take a quick video, which you can watch here.

Mystery Drinks

Heading back to the “town” area of Pulau Ubin, we grabbed a drink at one of the makeshift cafes along the water. “Wow,” said one of our friends, “We’re really not in Singapore anymore! Is that trash along the beach?” But soon the conversation turned, as it often does, to what people around us were eating and drinking.

My favorite was a day-glo green can of something called “Joy Juice,” with an excessively happy-looking guy doing something, we couldn’t quite tell what – falling into a barrel? floating above a barrel? – you gotta wonder what’s in that. Unfortunately, when we actually bought one, it turned out to be some variant of Mello Yello.

And then there was the one, apparently brought from home by a Singaporean and fellow tourist, that we couldn’t even hazard a guess at. Does anyone have any idea what this is? Or, more specifically, what those things are at the bottom?

We’ve seen lychees, rambutans, and pineapple pieces at the bottom of drinks like this, but we’ve never seen these before. They look a bit more like flowers than fruit, but you never know; we just might have a new candidate for our now sadly out-of-date Fruit of the Month.