"It's the Tropics..." V

Now that everyone has had a proper opportunity to have a look at my kids, I'll go back to Singapore and continue what is now turning into an epic. On the Wednesday, I managed to avoid the morning completely again, (hurrah) and found myself being escorted round some art galleries. Obviously in said art galleries, I liked everything Sunsook hated but now wise to the whole "Art" thing (ha!) of course I was not terribly surprised by this and didn't much care about being an ignoramus. I have since decided that there is absolute truth in the saying "One person's meat is another's poison." After all, if we all liked the same "Art", life would be very dull indeed and I came to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter if it's "Good" or not as long as one likes it. I mean honestly, if it mattered whether it was "Good" or not, The Spice Girls would never have had a career, would they?! Anyway, the afternoon had two highlights - one was getting to see a DVD of two of Sunsook's installations. I am not going to even pretend I understood them but I will say this- they were amazing; especially one of them which was a room with a table and like 6 million different bowls, dishes, cut up bottles and that sort of thing and then it had tubes and stuff coming from the ceiling - I am not presenting the best possible description of this, I know - and then there was water dripping through all the different stuff and she had rigged up these little mics so you could hear the sound of the water hitting the bowls and stuff. It was called "Pulse." So this is the thing, right? I have not been able to get that thing out of my head. It keeps coming back to me at really weird times and then I can hear the Pulse in my head. I wonder if in fact it isn't a pulse at all and it's my internal clock I can hear but anyway, I can well imagine how much work that took and even though I didn't really get it, it seems to have had an impact anyway... most interesting. The second highlight was sitting in a darkened cafe (I don't know) with Sunsook, talking, drinking sparkling wine (I'm lucky I didn't come back from Singapore an alcoholic) and listening to "S Pop" which seemed to be "Golden Oldies" rewritten and sung in Chinese with muzak rhythms... we heard "You don't have to say you love me" "Always on my mind" and something by Elton I think, I was quite amused by this especially after the "V Pop" episode in Vietnam which was basically the same thing but in Vietnamese and featured Robbie Williams rather than Dusty but you can't have everything.

In the evening we went to Raffles Dining Club - yeah!- where we ate with some other TUCites, Premoj and Sajeeve who also moved to Singapore, it was nice to catch up with them, I had met Premoj when I bunked off choir for a term after being horribly ill with a respiratory tract infection and couldn't sing for toffee so I went to Premoj's Sunday School class about hymns through the ages. We were in the Chinese Restaurant at the club and I was pathetically excited to find myself in a restaurant that actually had a dress-code for the first time in my life! It brings a whole new meaning to living the high life - I am convinced I only just scraped through the door in my extra-ordinarily scruffy jeans and hoodie, but there you go. We also had the pleasure of Bill and Sunsook's estate agent and her husband who were jolly good sorts and we ate Peking Duck (how I have come to love that stuff!) and mushrooms and some other unidentifiable items that I did not care to try - I also had the option of trying shark fin soup for the first time but I couldn't bring myself to do it... There are just some things I can't get over, horse is another... but anyway, we had a very pleasant time and then went home and Sunsook valiantly tried to explain to me why Damien (the sheep pickler) Hurst is extremely talented. I still don't get it and maintain that I would prefer to see art that depicts life as it should be, not how it is... call me cheesy, I really don't care. I suspect that's why God gave me a singing voice and no artistic talent whatsoever! More from the tropics later...