2/10/13 - Singapore Delivery (The Good The Bad & The Ugly)

Foiled again!  I woke up on Friday excited for some burgers and beer on the patio on campus that evening and some afternoon pool time on Saturday.  Work is about to get extremely busy so one final fun weekend would be necessary.  Unfortunately, the anti-rain dance I did was unsuccessful and combined with my snarky cold weather post from earlier in the week, a good deal of the precipitation from above made its presence known this weekend.  The flight back on Friday was delayed an hour due to weather and when I finally found myself in a car headed home the sign on the expressway was flashing yellow with the words 'Massive Jam.'  Personally, I didn't even know that you could use the adjective massive to describe an official traffic incident like that.  Needless to say, Friday's plan at this point was toast.

We are resourceful people though, possibly from re-scheduling all those events in the winter back home (take that Mother Nature) and met up with some friends at their place.  This is where the good, bad and ugly side of Singapore food delivery comes in.  They had ordered pizza from Dominoes about an hour before we arrived.  We all realized this was a mistake, but the Canadian Pizza (eternal 2 for 1) had stopped taking orders for their neighborhood already.  After a few phone calls and another hour of waiting, the two pizzas finally arrived.  Due to the massive delay (see, I can use it too) Dominoes agreed to give them the pizza for free.  This would be the 'good' part of the story except that the two pizzas they gave us were not the two they had ordered, both had meat on them (our host is vegetarian) and they forgot the breadsticks.  Yikes.  We'll call this the 'bad' part of the story, at least the food was free.

While a few of us started eating and playing Mario Kart it was back to waiting on hold for our friend.  Once he finally got through and explained what had happened (again) they eventually agreed to send a cheese pizza over, still for free at least.  At this point we all started placing side bets on what time it was going to arrive with 'not at all' being the most popular.  Ultimately, about 90 minutes later it did arrive looking like a taco pizza.  No, not a delicious taco pizza with lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, etc.  Literally, a cheese pizza that had practically been folded in half.  Kevin from Home Alone would not have been amused.  4 hours of waiting for 3 wrong pizzas, yes we have officially reached the 'ugly' zone.

Sunday yet again has brought more rain, which after being out later on Friday and Saturday (combination of good friends both nights + inefficient pizza delivery system Friday) was a good thing and let us sleep a little later.  We were in a food predicament though.  Most of the market is shut down for the next few days due to Chinese New Year.  We had stocked up on some lunch/dinner food, but were a little short on breakfast options.  It was time to dig into the bag of tricks that had not been used since our move in weekend - McDonalds Breakfast Delivery!  I still think this is one of the five greatest food concepts of all time and that the US is behind the times on this one.  Plus, on the weekends they take orders until 11:45 AM.  This would have totally ruined one of the funniest scenes from Big Daddy, but is great news for us.  I'm just happy we haven't gotten to the point where we are using it regularly.

I pulled up the McDelivery ap (what else would it be called?) and within 30 seconds had two egg mcmuffins and hash browns getting cooked up and thrown on a scooter for us.  The crazy part is, 10 minutes later the door bell was ringing and our food was here.  I didn't even get to use the tracking function on their ap, it came that fast.  I guess it shouldn't surprise me (or anyone that noticed the opening photo) but the golden arches came out as the 'good' part of this story.  OK, 'massively good.'

Time to top it off with the Badger basketball replay win over Michigan on the BTN to go ap!  Just another piece of technology that needs to go in your expat survival kit.