11/10/2013 - Last MBA Party

We should have seen it coming this time.  The last MBA get together we had attended snuck up on us and somehow we were walking into our apartment when the sun was coming up.  Not quite the case this time, but we still found ourselves bouncing all over the town until later in the evening.  School is officially over at the end of this week and since a lot of students are travelling right away, the end of the semester party was this weekend.  The party planners had come through again and rented out the 'Wine Mansion' for the evening.  It seemed like Keong Saik road, the street it was on, should be renamed 'Wine Street.'  While waiting to get in we noticed there were wine bars and shops surrounding the Wine Mansion on both sides of the road. Not sure how we had not made this discovery ourselves in the past year and a half, we seriously must be slipping. As the night progressed, we really felt like we should have known about this place already as the waiters made sure to refill your glass every time it seemed like you were getting low. That type of services is definitely not the norm here.  The food spread of pizza, bruschetta, spring rolls and french fries was a little eclectic, but hey, it was an international group and as previously mentioned too many times to count, spring rolls go great with anything.

We were supposed to leave at 10, but they were nice enough to let people start sampling other bottles of wine and stay until midnight.  Now of course, is when we start to veer off topic a bit.  People wanted to head to Holland Village which was perfect, close to home for the two of us.  First though, we needed a snack to complement the previous assortment consumed.  No food carts sitting around here so the local advice was to hop into two taxis to get some prata and curry at Spize. Unfortunately, after leaving the friendly confines of the mansion, the service ground to a halt again and what my buddies at the Prata Hut in Empress Market can crank out in 30 seconds took about 20 minutes.  The food finally arrived and while tasty, didn't totally cut it..... we needed more.

Luckily we had somehow landed on late night food row and our Singaporean guide walked us 100 meters down the street.  Aha, one of the most famous chicken rice restaurants on the island.  This was turning into a late night taste of Singapore.  All we had ever had was chicken rice at the hawker centers so we were pretty excited.  He asked us how hungry we were and everyone kind of nodded, so the full chicken order went in.  Turns out when he said full chicken he actually meant, 1 whole chicken. Our eyes had of course been bigger than our stomachs, the pork and prawns didn't help either, but we gave it a pretty valiant effort and polished off most of the food.  It was hard not to, the rice was sweeter and the chicken a little more flavorful.  Hopefully our local Farrer Road Chicken Rice stand won't take offense to us branching out in other directions.  Totally stuffed, and feeling like we were in training for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, we threw in the towel.  We even made it home this time with significant hours to spare before the neighborhood rooster started crowing.  Its probably a good thing these MBA excursions don't happen that frequently and are coming to a close, at some point we may have found ourselves in Indonesia or Malaysia before the evening was over.

11/3/2013 - First Official Durian Experience

I have a vivid memory of sitting on a bench in the Wisconsin Business School about ten years ago, reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about a fruit I had never heard of before.  I can still envision the little black and white dot matrix photo that the Journal was so well known for, this time not of a titan of industry, but of a spiky fruit that looked like it should be on the end of a medieval weapon.  The article was on the front page and spilled into the middle of the newspaper, discussing the varying prices, types, where to get it, etc.  Of course it centered around a tiny island nation in Southeast Asia that I knew next to nothing about, but lo and behold, 10 years later, here we are.

The signs for durian in Singapore are everywhere.  Not trying to sell it, but saying don't bring it in here. Instead of no smoking signs, the hotels have no durian signs with the circle and a line drawn through it.  Same on the MRT, same on airplanes.  The reason, of course, is the smell is simply overpowering.  You get a wide range of descriptions from people, but my favorite and what I consider to be most accurate, is a pair of used gym socks that have been hidden in the locker room for a few weeks.  The taste of course, is supposed to be way better than the smell, but why anyone would have tried something that smells like that in the first place is beyond me.

A few months ago, one of the $1 ice cream vendors had gotten a smear of durian ice cream on my chocolate ice cream and the taste of that was more than enough to make me wary of ever trying it before we moved home. However, recently visitors from the US were here and were bound and determined to have this distinctly Southeast Asian experience.  Given I had first read about them in the Wall Street Journal, it was fitting that a work outing had us split into two taxis, close to midnight, hoping the durian stalls on Balestier Road were still open.  If nothing else, our taxi drivers had a good laugh about what we were trying to accomplish.

We were in luck, I guess, and within a few seconds the hawker had taken his machete and cracked the fruit open.  The point of no return crossed, I gingerly reached out and grabbed a piece the size of a mandarin orange.  The smell wasn't as strong as some of the other times we had caught a whiff and trying to forget about the ice cream I had previously had, down the hatch it went.  The final verdict, a cross between a sweet onion and garlic with the consistency of a ripe avocado.  I had one more bite and decided I didn't need to smell like this for the next 48 hours and stopped.  On the way home, our taxi driver was nice enough to not make any comments, but others had them roll down the windows and I think we could all still taste it the following afternoon.  Until the next batch of tourists rolls through town......