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Fight Crub | May 10, 2003 07:46
GUEST Greg Wood in Singapore
Dammit - a guy just shambled in and puked on the floor of the bar, rudely interrupting yet another blog about taxis and how crap they are (let alone their drivers - sheesh!).
I dunno where he came from, because there aren't any other bars within cooee; it's possible he's just been spat out of the 80s, dropped off at the kerb by a Back To The Future-type De Lorean time machine, dressed like that, all salmon shorts and Keith Haring-print short-sleeved rayon shirt and Huey Lewis hair - and, after all, the 80s was famous for drinking till you spew. I should know, I was there.
Anyway. He's tottered in to our unassuming after-work watering hole like the self-soiling octogenarian he'll become in a few years if he keeps drinking like this, looked sadly at the bar staff like a toddler who's just cut teddy's head off with mum's best scissors, and eructated liquidly all down his best tropical gear. And you know what? He's not old and doddery and Asian. He's young, he's a whitey, and he's way outta line. It's only 8.30. People in Singapore don't start vomiting in bars until well after 11 (it's called 'doing a Merlion'), and then at least they do it into the plastic bags supplied by the staff. Oh, wait, yes, instead of throwing things at him and kicking him out the door, they're bringing him a plastic bag. And yes, he's filled it... and yes, he's offering it back to them. How polite.
And how odd. Funny thing is, Pete and Huw and I were sitting here just moments ago comparing fight-in-bar-in-Singapore stories. Pete's got one, Huw's got none, and mine isn't set in a bar, but at a kind of Opera in the Park thing. Now, we've been here three years each, and we drink a lot. And being the tropics, where people get hot and bothered and, well, go 'troppo', you might expect more in the way of shit hitting the innumerable fans that dot our wee Lion City's bars and pubs, especially considering the drink-all-you-can't promos ("Ladies Free All Night!"). But no.
Apart from the aforementioned erstwhile altercation one balmy evening in Fort Canning Park between a drunk fat American and his giant imaginary adversary, I did once see three guys sprinting down the road to see who sideswiped their car, on an alley behind Boat Quay that reminds me of somewhere near Fort Street; I was all excited by the energy for a minute, until the sideswiper came back around the block and turned himself in.
Another blog I've written (but am still mulling over) discusses the same thing, couched in terms of music and censorship, rebellion and creativity. Fact of the matter is, there's not a lot of passion in this place. My ranty blogs are always interrupted by me thinking "jeez, Greg, you're working hard to make this sound interesting - you might even be making some of this up". I wonder what it is: the heat, the simplistic lifestyle (shop, talk about mobile phone, shop), or the stories about how the Gurkhas deal with urban unrest. Whatever it is, sometimes I feel like I live in Disneyland, and writing a blog a week about a place like that would be pretty damn tough: "Goofy accidentally bumped into Mickey in Fantasyland the other day. The papers went off their nuts!" William Gibson summed it up pretty damn well - but only once (and Wired was banned for years as a result). Come and have another go, you Sci Fi wuss; I'm sure you can sneak a reference to how groovy and weird Singapore is into your next book about media manipulation...
Perhaps I'm being a little unfair. Although I am genially confused that the poor old incompetent, epileptic taxi drivers aren't removed from the gene pool at a higher rate - lord only knows how many times I've made that throttling-lunge motion from the back seat, only to be thrown off balance by my oblivious chauffeur having yet another improbably brutal stab at the gas pedal - I must admit there are some genuine horror stories, many of which can be ogled here. This morning's newspaper had two stories about parang attacks and one murder at the delightful Four Floors of Whores. An Australian was knifed for being a drunken bastard at Newton Circus, a genuine microcosm and popular late-night venue for fringe dwellers (hence the sobriquet Mutant Circus). And then there was the very vicious and altogether urban myth-worthy Michael MacRae double homicide last year. Ick. But apart from the ones that were always going to happen, no matter where the protagonists protagonised, I'd come to believe that around here if you don't go looking for it, you'd never ever ever find it.
Until tonight. 80s Neon Vomit Guy has left, but Angry Fighty Pool Table Guy is still here. The discussion about bar fights was kicked off by an encounter with this sad old wanker and his empty life a bit earlier: he accused me and Pete of indulging in girly conversation instead of banging balls with sticks - at 8.15pm, no less. We'd been out of the office for ten minutes after a fairly intense day and I wanted nothing more than to pull out my effector beam gun and erase him for annoying me into rolling my eyes until I sprained one of them, but Pete stepped in and informed him graciously that we were, clearly, humans and that he, Mr Angry, could talk to us about the situation if he felt there was a situation developing in the first place. Mr Angry really wanted to discuss something with somebody; it was a tense little moment (although the tension was on Mr Angry's side; we were just politely confused) and as I stood there, beer in hand, seconds from a bar fight for the first time in years, I thought to myself that at moments like these, perhaps I don't miss silly old Auckland at all. Now that's fighting talk...
Anzac Day | Apr 29, 2003 07:40
GUEST Greg Wood in Singapore
Sorry I'm late. I got most of the way through a long, involved and actually very funny blog about Singapore taxis and how they suck, before I realised it sounded really rather spoilt and vacuous. I'm sure it'll be fine for next week, but for now, here I am, six hours from dawn parade, wondering how the world works.
I've just returned from Boys' Night, the weekly sanatorium of like-minded antipodean and not-so-antipodean blokes gathering round a couple of beers and a stick of satay. And while we were sitting there bemoaning the social skills of Singaporeans, US foreign policy, the boy-racer wheels on Graeme's new BMW, Wayne's lack of dog-avoidance skills while riding on Batam last weekend and whether the pope still has his goolies fondled by a cardinal before taking the pontifical throne, I had a vaguely epiphanic feeling that I really really liked these guys.
I put it down to my overly emotional nature (I'm one of those creative types), the proximity to Anzac Day, and the fact that one of the topics of conversation was how the Cricket Club was handling the dispensation of money raised following the bomb in Bali, which killed eight of 17 SCC rugby players. (Apparently it's being handled badly; a sad fact of life for much post-anguish fundraising).
So there I was, sitting with this crew of adventurers, all of us far from what used to be home, all of us having become friends while in a country other than our own, talking about how to handle proceedings following the death of a friend, and I came over all very Band of Brothers. I felt protective of and protected by this motley bunch of kiwis and poms. And I wondered, if it really came down to it, just how far I'd go (and how far I'd have to go) to protect a way of life that involves this much laughter and consideration and discovery and intelligent debate, and self-deprecating humour of such high quality.
I'm wondering, because tomorrow is Anzac Day. Apart from the people killed during the abortive battle for Singapore, nearly 20,000 Allied men died in captivity here during WWII. And yet here I am, free as I want to be, sweating under a jackfruit tree, drinking San Miguel, and as I look around the table and wonder, as someone who feels bad and sad even just killing a fish, what level of sacrifice would be required should the shit ever really hit the fan, I feel very confused.
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Anzac Day. I go to Dawn Parade with Chuck and Simon. We follow the Australian High Commissioner up the Bukit Timah expressway past the site of the fight that killed the founder of the Hash House Harriers. He's late so we're flying and when we get there it's warm and still and the Malay pipers sound much further away than they are. I'm wearing a suit for the first time in six months, and Simon hasn't been to bed yet. Small sacrifices compared to those of the guys who are buried under our feet.
There's a small gathering of Australasians and representatives. Someone's invited the Turks, but not the Japanese. Perhaps the Turks are good old blokes who were just doing a job, like our guys, while the Japanese are mad. My Nana used to think so; Mum says she kept an axe behind the door in case the buggers ever turned up while Pa was knee-deep in leeches in the Solomons. Still, she seemed to accept our whole bunch of grandkids studying Japanese and even moving to Tokyo for a while. (While there, Vanessa and I stayed with an elderly couple who were unimpressed when I came home one day and announced I'd eaten a fried cricket for lunch; old Mitsuo remembered the war and how poor Japan was – they had to eat bugs to survive, and I was just thinking it was wacky. Later that evening he broke down in tears while talking about Pearl Harbor, asserting that Japan would "never, never, never" attack unannounced: "We are honourable warriors! We expect to die!").
The light slowly arrives, as do my senses. I take in the white-suited sailors laying wreaths, and plain-suited others do too. And here's where the confusion really gets me: there's a Defence Secretary, a couple of Defence Advisors, even a Minister for Defence. Where are the Offence people? The ones who start all this shit that kills all these brothers and friends and lovers and sons and cousins and husbands and neighbours and workmates? I'd like to talk to them. Perhaps they could help me understand.
Crash | Apr 15, 2003 03:34
GUEST Greg Wood in Singapore
Apart from the weekly motorbike lying in the middle of an intersection like a brave but dead horse, its rider standing over it in tears, you almost never see a crash in Singapore. In nearly three years, I've only seen four big ones: two Porsches turned into parallelograms, and two taxis turned turtle. The Porsches were late at night; the taxis at 8.30 in the morning. None of them was a pretty sight.
While I can kind of see the teutonic missiles finding their target, initially I couldn't understand how the taxis got that way. But right now I'm trying to figure out why there aren't hundreds of them tipping over all the time. You see, almost all of Singapore's roads have median barriers. The chances of having a head-on are minimal so, in that quirk of logic that Ralph Nader used to love, people drive faster because they feel safer - or in the case of the taxi I'm in right now, invincible. It has 400,000 ks on the clock, 500,000 figurines on the dash, we're doing 95 in a 60 zone, and it's raining that hilarious rain you see in the tropics, like the sky is filled with hundreds of giant water balloons that explode, dropping their load, every time the thunder claps. Which is often. There's even a fatefully apocalyptic sky like the one at the start of The Terminator - all turmoil shot through with real horror-movie lightning. It's helping to scare the crap out of me, anyway. I'm expecting the driver to turn to me and find out he's a grinning skeleton. Or wearing a Sars mask.
Take me back to Bali!
In Bali taxis go just as fast as you want, but never more than 50. In Bali, the beer is cold enough to drink, but warms up just quick enough that you have to drink it fast. In Bali, the people are suffering, but they're happy.
What a great, amazing place. A thought, though: I wonder if I would've enjoyed it so much with five times the tourists bunging up the place? Yes folks, after the bomb in Kuta and the war, numbers are less than a quarter of what they were - and they've been that way for six months. For a place that exists on rice and tourists, that's a hell of a drop - and that's without Sars ripping nearly two-thirds of the people off flights around Asia. One result is luxury hotels, usually 80% full, struggling for 15% occupancy. Other results: one temple guide reporting, with a very puzzled look as if trying to understand who built a fence around his world while he was asleep, just ten visitors in a day at what Lonely Planet calls Bali's most outstanding sight. Lines of fifty hawker shops outside the temples, simply closed, ghost-town style. Kuta feels like Takapuna at 7am on a Sunday. And metered-taxi drivers will wait TWO HOURS for you to finish dinner, not expect a tip, and still laugh at your jokes.
That kind of behaviour is the most beautiful, and the saddest bit: the Balinese seem resigned to the situation, believing it's punishment for greed. Yet they're still super friendly and super helpful, and the shops that are still open haven't slashed their prices. There's still honour and pride - it's just that they everyone wears an expression that's half grin, half chagrin.
Apart from that slight haze of puzzled resignation, the place is fabulous. Ubud is like heaven. Magical. Nothing is as it seems, yet nothing seems dangerous. The roads are narrow and steep and lined with stone walls and steps and temples and houses and paths so jumbled together that you can't tell what's holy and what's not, leaving you feeling like Crash Bandicoot without any baddies or traps. Shopping is serendipitous, there's beer everywhere and some of it is even cold. Right in the middle of town is a soccer pitch where nine teams play at once, "just for sweat" according to Wayan the driver (every boy is called Wayan or Madé - One or Two - depending on their position in the family). And like I said, nobody drives over 50k - not even the taxis.
Speaking of drivers, we were invited to stay at the Four Seasons Resorts to, well, try them out. We misheard the instructions and proceeded to, well, freak them out. I've never seen faces like the ones on the security guards at the top gate, the porters, the front-of-house person, the drivers, the gardener and the concierge when we turned up in the Suzuki Jimny we'd hired for NZ$16 a day. Shock and Awe. We figured it wasn't so much the car; it was the fact we were driving it. I suppose they expected better from people paying US$575 for the night (US$575? Now that's Shock and Awe indeed). And that was nothing to what happened when we got our big bottles of Bintang Beer out of the back. Bloody kiwis.
It is a magical place, and everyone should go. It's the crazy full sound of the four guys on the beach - double bass, two guitars and a Heath Robinson drumkit - playing a swing version of Summertime for us on our anniversary, while we tucked into 5-minute-old crayfish and barracuda and endless icy cold giant beers for all of forty bucks. It's coming back to our bungalow time and again during the day, just to see what the room-pixies had done in our absence: mood lighting, slippers arranged, an avalanche of fresh white towels, more cold water in big glass bottles. It's standing in a waterfall behind a temple in the paddyfields, feeling just right.
And it's returning to base the day the war started, to find the guards at the gate checking our car with a convex mirror on wheels and a torch, looking for bombs. I woke in a cold sweat that night, dreaming of Kuta, and walking outside to hear nothing but bugs and see nothing but stars - the way it should be in paradise.
Something in the air | Apr 10, 2003 12:35
GUEST Greg Wood in Singapore
So I'm in a taxi and the driver's not wearing a mask and I think this is unusual. I don't mean a Godzilla mask or a Zorro mask, but rather one of those flimsy hospital masks that look like they'd keep out more farts than bugs, or the industrially disposable 3M home-handyman types designed to keep chunky dust out of your lungs. It's odd that this guy is not wearing one, because taxi drivers are the canaries of public attitude here in Singapore. When there's something in the air, they're the first to show it: September 11th, they wouldn't go to Changi airport or anywhere near a tall building. Anthrax scares? They'd crack open the window and ask what's in your bag before taking you as a fare. And now, that something in the air is SARS.
I just realised, however, that the lack of mask doesn't mean he's not freaking out. Quite the contrary: masks are probably sold out, and drivers are (this is true) chucking people out of the cab at the first sneeze. Fair enough, too: it's scary living close to the breeding ground of an unidentified killer virus, albeit a not-hyper-contagious, not-very-fatal one. Luckily, we're taking precautions in our building. All staff are required to have their temperature taken every two days (prompting very primary-school jokes about rectal examinations, and stories about how to temporarily raise your temperature in order to get ten days off, using onions). We've even specially employed people to mop the walls. The walls for goodness' sake. What I want to know is this: who's mopping the mops?
Really. I'm a fairly easygoing guy, but this is getting to me. It's germ warfare, only this time the germs are waging war on us – psychologically. They're delivering their own little Shock and Awe. As a result of the constant media barrage about the spreading of Sars and its symptoms, from sources like the allegedly impartial MediaCorp, I'm developing a crook neck from craning to check the people bringing me my noodles for signs of coughs and fevers. I've been trying to open doors with my elbows like a total spaz, pressing elevator buttons with the corner of my bag like a spy, and washing my hands like Pilate.
Apparently washing one's hands is a good idea. We were at the pub last night, and the corner telly was broadcasting a pre-recorded Sars Special, none of which we could hear. We could, however, tell that the personal hygiene advice was sponsored by Lion Shokobutsu. But clearly this evening's online grocery delivery man must've been too busy to watch the telly (or out of his tree on Old Man's Favourite ABC Stout in the local hawker stall). He came around, crusty old bugger, dirty hands, fresh veges, half-frozen minced chicken, box of water – and a nice new mask. Perhaps he thought we were two of the 1500 people currently not allowed to go down to the shops. Trust me, you don't want to come down with this thing; not because it'll kill you, but being quarantined for ten days with only Singapore TV to keep you company surely would. We're still waiting to hear how Hemi, a kiwi teacher at the French school here, who's stuck at home with Mrs Hemi and Baby Hemi, survived the week.
Ah, me. Scary stuff... I came home tonight to find a note from our condo management slipped under the door. Expecting the worst, as you do when the scariest thing around here is the way the taxi drivers, er, 'drive' (put it this way: Tokyo inspired Bladerunner, while Singapore inspired a yet-to-be-filmed version of Teletubbies meets Logan's Run – without the culling at 21), I put my socks on my hands and my heart in my mouth and opened the letter. It said the condo shop was to reopen next week, hooray – and that it would sell air filter hoods like those worn at the Official Sars Outbreak Hospital, Tan Tock Seng. Whee.
But hang on – apart from the masks and the jokes, are there any other signs of sickness? Kinda. There's the general social malaise (David Gray, Moby, the Singapore Sevens, even my girl's Girls' Night – all cancelled). There's also the insidious panic and the pariahs it creates: bus drivers no longer stop outside Tan Tock Seng Hospital, so nurses have to walk to work. And when you're one of the seven heartbreakingly dedicated nurses who's just been diagnosed with Sars, that's gotta suck.
So. Wars and Sars. Any other global afflictions ending in -ars? What about "Bunch of Ars" – plainly those folks in the White House. As an aside that will come to a point, I'd like to tell you about rediscovering Chess. It's so alluring and dangerous and just when you've got it all under control – all mwah-ha-ha-ha-haaarrr, I-have-you-now style – sudden things happen that you never saw coming. One of those silly horsey things pops out from behind the castle thing and tramples your queen. Makes you never ever want to take your eye off anything. Makes me wonder what it would be like to debate against one of the Big Ks - Kasparov, Karpov. But most of all it makes me wish Dubya could've played a couple of games of this before he waded into his clearly and simply one-sided, single-outcome, totally fair pogrom – only to discover it's not happening quite like they thought it would happen when it was only in their heads. What a bunch of eggs: once again the alleged leaders lead the people into something that the people could've told them was a stupid idea if only they'd asked. One word: Vietnam. Sheesh. John Banks? George W? Vote, people, please.
Hm. Bitterness. Obviously the last fortnight of world mayhem has erased the beneficial effects of our dream trip to Bali. Twas lovely, that. Might touch on it in my next missive, if only to remind me of something my little sis said: "the world is a big scary place, but most people in it are nice."
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