Breakfast took the familiar form of a Whopper in the Orchard Road Burger King who advertise “Our WHOPPER® Sandwich is a ¼ lb. (based on pre-cooked patty weight) of savoury flame-grilled beef topped with juicy tomatoes, fresh cut lettuce, creamy mayonnaise, crunchy pickles, and sliced white onions on a soft sesame seed bun”.
The Burger King Restaurant was across the road from the impressive Dynasty Hotel (Now the Marriott Hotel) which, along with Tang Plaza were built in 1982 to expand Tang Choon Keng's business on Orchard Road. Tang Choon Keng, colloquially known as CK Tang, was a Singaporean entrepreneur, who founded the Tangs department store in Singapore. Tang established Orchard Road as a premier retail district in Singapore.
We moved on to MAS Travel and the girl, who now knew us by name, had already booked our Athens flight on Aeroflot via Moscow for Wednesday 11th January 1984. We went down to the bank and converted enough money into Singapore dollars to pay S$700 (£234 Sterling) for each flight. George lent me £250 Sterling so that I could afford it.
We chatted to an elderly couple from Brisbane, Australia in the queue while a clerk modified the rate of exchange to S$2.96 per £1 Sterling. We paid for our tickets at MAS Travel and were told that we could pick the tickets up tomorrow.
On the way back we bought several T-shirts for S$4 each from a smooth-talking old dear, who assured us that we were handsome, and we also purchased some more batteries for our power-hungry Walkman systems.
We also refuelled ourselves with strawberry milkshakes in McDonalds, so thick that when using a straw to try and drink it you risked your head imploding. A serious-looking Singaporean teenager sat opposite cuddling a large pink teddy bear and we were about to start on some “abandoned” chips when the owner returned from the toilet.
Back at the dormitory I did some laundry in a bucket utilising the shower and listening to music on Georges mini-hifi system which appeared to be speeded up. Both of our systems have shown quirks, speeding up, slowing down or reverting from stereo to mono, but then just as suddenly they are working fine again.
We went out for lunch at the stalls behind the cinema on Stamford Road, dining on Mee and sugar cane juice which tasted like stewed grass cuttings. I bought a few more cassettes and we visited the General Post Office so that George could send his photographs home and I could dispatch my negatives. We then went back for a siesta.
I ran through my four new music cassettes, gleaning joy from Madness’s “One Step Beyond” album and “Combat Rock” by the Clash (especially the excellent “Straight to Hell” song). Some Danish birds moved into our dorm, provided more letching for fat Carl, and we moved out to the North Bridge Road McDonalds.
We went on to explore the infamous Bugis Street (Referred to as "Boogie Street" by the hippies and beatniks) which was renowned internationally from the 1950s to the 1980s for its nightly gathering of transvestites and transsexuals, a phenomenon that made it one of Singapore's most notable destinations for foreign visitors during that period.
In the mid-1980s, Bugis Street underwent major urban redevelopment into a retail complex of modern shopping malls, restaurants and nightspots mixed with regulated back-alley roadside vendors. Underground digging to construct the Bugis MRT station prior to that also caused the upheaval and termination of the nightly transgender sex bazaar culture, marking the end of a colourful and unique era in Singapore's history.
No sooner had we turned into this colourful collection of stalls than I had bought a nylon shoulder back for S$11. We went on to an orgy of cheap music cassette buying and I ended up with 7 new additions to my already extensive portable music collection.
George bought some small round-lensed sunglasses that made him look like a psychopath (see Woody Harrelson as Mickey Knox on the "Natural Born Killers" poster) and we walked back to McDonalds consoling ourselves that we didn’t often splash out money in such a reckless fashion on non-essentials. We had managed to live quite frugally until we reached Singapore.
Also, the cassettes would provide valuable entertainment if we got work on a kibbutz in Israel. I tried out the mains lead/adaptor on my mini-hifi and tested the tapes, which on the whole were pretty good quality. A couple of them had sticky reels.
An American sailor was relating his travels tales to and Australian and his vocabulary largely comprised of “cool”, “hang-loose”, “far out”, “man”, “groovy” and drug slang. From here he was going on the Malaysia where he was just going to “hang out, man” and try the opium dens.
George lay back listening to his newly acquired music cassettes, a contented look on his face and his foot tapping. The Chinese owner of our accommodation had nodded off with a half-drunk glass of Guinness in front of him.
We were ushered to bed at the 00:30 hrs. curfew, joining the queue for the bathroom to clean our teeth.
No comments:
Post a Comment