Fusion Delusion

You know thing have come to a head when someone has made an ice cream out of Chinese claypot rice, lap cheong and all. Pace Heston Blumental and the rest of the liquid nitrogen gang, I’m going to spend the rest of the evening with a copy of Alice Water’s Chez Panisse Cooking but therein lies another kitchen dilemna. Fresh, seasonal produce? Not in Singapore. At least we will have some good wan ton noodles to look forward to in Hong Kong tomorrow.

Wherever I lay my head

A couple of things happened over the weekend. Small things but they made me wonder – Mrs P almost knocked a cyclist over because he was cycling against the traffic on a one way street with no lights at 8 pm. When we got to the restaurant we found none of the wait staff spoke English so our Egyptian friend was struggling a little. Then because of the earlier incident, Mrs P understandably did not want to drive home so I drove – as I pulled out of the car park, two women ran across the drive way. Now the common theme is that all these incidents involved foreign workers and tourists in one way or another – as Emerson once wrote, you can never go home again. Time to emigrate. 

Six, Twelve

2007 Hits – Panorama restaurant (Mount Cook, NZ), Xbox 360, South Africa, The Prestige, Denis Min-Kim, White Shadows.

2007 Misses – After Dark by Haruki Murakami, Supreme Commander, Whampoa Club in Beijing, Long Road out of Eden by the Eagles.  

Wine review – here

2008 Resolutions – none

2008 Wishes – lose 10 lbs, Bouchard Finlayson, Hanami, A380, Tetsuya’s

A tale of many cities

Dickens is a god. Not God but a god. If you wanted describe a year, any year for that matter, in about a hundred or so words you could you could hardly do better than this.

For Porco, this has been a year of change. A year for seeing possibilities. A new job, a new home and a new stage in life. 2007 was also a year in airplanes – of hitherto undiscovered continents, the thrill of adventure  and the unmissable relief at the prospect of returning home.

The inner life has also been stretched and taken further than it has been for a long time. New facets, old friends and re-discovered virtues exercised. Time also for some indulgences to be exorcised – for there is now less time. We are older and no wiser. We are less patient and more easily tired. We now have responsibilities where we had none. We were forty. Now add one.

Home on the range

Fingers crossed. We may have done the last trip abroad for the year – a year which brought us to New Zealand for our honeymoon then Bangkok, Siem Riep, Beijing, Phnom Penh, South Africa and Shanghai. Not to mention my work trips to Hong Kong (four or five times, I think), London, Mumbai and Tokyo. I feel I’ve lived a chunk of the year on a plane – so two whole months before I travel again, I’m looking forward to being at home.

Niemals ohne mein Klopapier

So Porco was tickled to see that the average German soldier in Afghanistan uses 10 rolls of toilet paper a day – Porco loves toilet paper (and in particular the brand with the puppies) and thinks it is one of the seven wonders of the modern world. As an alternative, apparently, the natives in Afghanistan use sand where water is scarce. The Bundeswehr has quickly come out to say it must be a mistake – so much for German efficiency. Which reminds Porco of his recent trip to China.

The old hutongs in Beijing are so old internal plumbing is a bit of a problem so public toilets are built at both ends of each street for the residents. Problem is you have to bring your own paper. Bigger problem is the plumbing is so bad you are not allowed to throw the paper into the loo (there are toilet police people to enforce the law) so you have to bring the used paper out to dispose in the rubbish. Which is shitty but apparently bog standard in Beijing.

Autumn Leaves

The weekend just gone by has been the first one we’ve stayed in Singapore for some time. The three weekends before that, we were in Hong Kong for the Christies’ and Sothebys’ auctions, Beijing for Singapore Season 2007 and Phnom Penh for Denis Min-Kim’s exhibition. It’s good to travel but just as good to be home.

Which is just as well as I have found Singapore Airlines to have fallen short of the high standards we have become used to. The food has become increasingly inedible and more broadly, I think the general experience of flying has become less pleasant. It’s good to travel, if only to appreciate the comforts of home.

Porc in translation

Porco was just having a trawl through the referring pages to this blog (yes, the masala tea searches are still out there) and came across someone who had come through a Google page in French. Imagine Porco’s surprise when he saw an entire archived page of this blog in French. It is a weird experience - but still, and even if Porco says so himself, it has a touch of élan if not a hint of je ne sai quoi.

Porc of Leisure

All too soon, Porco’s week between jobs is coming to an end although today was a really nice day (even if one gets slightly drenched in the way only walking in really heavy rain with an umbrella gets you that way). Lunch with Auntie and XPY at the Chinese restaurant in the American Club followed by an hour on the Xbox 360 with XPY then popping over to see Lewis at the wine shop.

So a week without work makes you think what work is all about. Too many people these days define themselves by what they do. Porco has two things to say about this – on your deathbed, you would not really want to regret that you spent too much time at work and secondly, you are not what you do, you are what you eat, and drink. Nunc est bibendum.

Pig today, Pork tomorrow

Funny how some stories get better with the telling. Last night, Mrs P and I had dinner with some friends who were off to Siem Riep today. Same place, same resort, still the same rainy season. So Porco regaled them with stories of waking up at 4.30 am to watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat, which in the rainy season is a bit of a hit and miss affair. We missed.

One story we forgot to tell was how on the way to the temples, we saw live pigs transported on the back of motorcycles. On their backs over the back seat, legs tied and with their bits to the sky – which led to our guide commenting “Pig today, pork tomorrow”. Er … nice.