Wind In My Head: Accidental Tourist
Wind In My Head
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Accidental Tourist
I found myself in Chinatown today. Normally, I'd never go to Chinatown. The number of times I've been there in the last ten years can be counted on one hand.It was a somewhat surreal experience. We were on our way to a spa in the middle of Chinatown. Ok, it isn't as dodge as it sounds. Anyhow, KW were an hour early. This meant a great deal of time for us to wander.
For someone whose nearest shopping mall is indeed Orchard Road, this couldn't be further from my definition of a likely shopping spot. Instead of seeing a coffee/cafe place every ten steps, there was a medicinal hall, selling herbs that frankly, to me, just looked like dried weeds. And a cafe was not a good thing to not be able to find because we had walked into Chinatown from our lunch at Brewerkz, and it was hot.
The solution? A wise man once said, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. So, I walked into a chinese medicinal hall and bought a bottle of something. If you walk past any of these medicinal halls, you will notice that not only do they sell dried weeds, they sell essence of dried weed in bottles. They are meant to quench thirst, 'cool' your body (in both eastern and western terms), reduce coughs and a whole host of other minor ailments. They range from the awful tasting to the-laced with so much rock sugar- ants from Malaysia would find you- types. The bottle of something I bought was chrysanthemum and ginseng. KW, the expert with herbs thought it was a concoction that couldn't go wrong and was ideal for a hot day.
Yes it was. But it was also very genuine and very good for me. Read: Really really bitter!
Only in Chinatown.
KW opted for the more conventional thirst quencher that I'm desperately trying to stay away from. So we sat al fresco at the McDonalds. Which in itself was once again bizarre. The music blaring was Chinese music. And most of the men sitting outside McDs were old men, weather worn, gnarly old men. Even they seemed to have globalised a little. Of course, the majority of them were still hanging out drinking kopi at the coffeeshop, but there was this group that drank coffee at Macs. To make it even more strange, there was an old man, sitting inside, enjoying the airconditioning by virtue of not smoking. And this man was sitting on his own, reading. Totally oblivious of the two girls gawking at him and trying to get the title of his book. All we could gather was he was old, he drank coffee, he read English novels and he got them from the library. Not of CSI standard but good enough.
If the day ended there, I could already claim it to be strange as blue ice-cream (not including artificial colouring). It didn't. At some point, I turned around and there was a cab, illegally parked with a little girl in the front seat. She had attached a note onto the window. " Daddy, baby sit me. Welcome!". Most unusual and slightly disturbing. We were a little concerned that the girl had been left there to bake in the car and were about to call the cops when the dad came back with many bags of junk food from the big M.
Perhaps I had seen too much C.S.I, but I seriously thought that the father had left her there to die. Obviously untrue, but my mind's been made susceptible to subliminal and liminal messages sent across the the airwaves. T'was a good thing I hadn't called the cops yet. But then again, we don't live in the Nevada desert with scorching temperatures.
One thing I realised, there were VERY few young people who were just hanging out in Chinatown. The ones that looked relatively young, they were tourists, doing the touristy things like taking photographs of the gaudy pagoda that stood in the middle of the street like a road divider.
KW and I tried to be as native as possible and decided to try to buy some stuff from the medicinal halls claiming very loudly, perhaps more for our sake than anyone elses, that we needed to stock up. Stock up for what? I really don't know . Unfortunately, our education never extended that far and we were clearly, perhaps, one rung, only one rung above the tourists whose only knowledge of these shops were they sold bizarre things like tiger penises.
Thank goodness our hour was up and we had to make our way to the spa. Territory that was infinitely more familiar. Hello, scent of lemongrass and ylang ylang! Goodbye scent of dried mushrooms and ginseng!
Ondine tossed this thought in at 23:37
1 thoughts...
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At 6:14 pm
Tym said... I love Chinatown in all its pastiched glory, and it's not just because I'm a closet auntie during Chinese New Year, either. Cafes are scarce, yes, but that's because there's places like Jing Jing Desserts (somewhere along Temple Street, Stellou's recommendation) and dim sum (also along Temple Street) and I recall a cafe-like place along Food Street (in one of the shophouses, not on the street itself).
You're right, though, there's a dearth of young people in Chinatown. I bet our cultural theory lecturer would have something enlightening to say about that.