I finally made it down to Singapore and met up with the girls that I'd met on that bus ride in southern Thailand. After a fun night drinking in Clarke Quay we were famished the next day. Singapore is the international hub of South-East Asia, renowned for its sky scrapers, central business district, shopping centers and gourmet eateries from around the world!!!
So we went to fuckin' "Hooters." While I did feel slightly guilty about this we were so starved by the time we got to the Quay that we ate at the first place we saw. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get a taxi in Singapore, I've never seen anything like it!!! Even the cabs that are empty won't pick you up. Twice I had to get my hotel to call and order me a cab for an additional $2.50 charge and when the cabby got there he asked where I was going, shook his head and just drove off!!!!! Last night I wanted to go to the zoo and see one of the animal night shows and when this cabby heard that he just said "no take." I asked the guy at the front desk of my hotel what this was all about and this is the conversation that followed.
Front Desk: "They're waiting until midnight so they can charge more."
Me: "It's 10:30pm."
Front Desk: "No, it's 10:25pm."
Me: (Biting my tongue.) "How far is it to the zoo? More specifically, how much money could they charge me right now to get there?"
Front Desk: "Sixteen dollars."
Me: And how much can they bump the rates up at midnight?"
Front Desk: "Two dollars extra."
Me:"...........let's figure this out together. It costs about four dollars to get anywhere in the city. You're telling me that a cabby would rather run around trying to find four fares in under an hour and a half when he could make the same amount of money just picking me up, save on gas, and he'd still be done before midnight?" Front Desk: (Blank Stare.)......."You wait outside?"
RRRRRRrrrrrrr!!!!!!What the hell is wrong with these people?
My mind hurt from all the thinking I'd been doing so we decided to hop on the ferry cruise around Singapore.
Singapore is full of weird architecture.......weird, multi-colored architecture.
It sort of looks like Miami Beach in the new Playdough colors.
The cruises coup-de-gras is that the "captain" didn't speak English. He just drove the boat around and played a pre-recorded message at certain points. The voice on the recorder sounded like The Crocodile Hunter on speed and coupled with the fact that this little twenty minute cruise was costing us fifteen bucks we felt like we'd been had.
Singapore means "Lion City." Apparently the guy who founded the city saw a lion on the shore and took this as a good omen. How this could be interpreted as a good omen I have no idea. The founder of the city then went on to form a city-wide taxi company who's corporate logic is considered by some to be a historic throw-back to the past. Westerners on the other hand, might refer to their business logic as "retarded."
That night the girls, (Kelly and Sam,) and I headed out to the Raffle's Hotel, Inventor of the famous drink entitled the, "Singapore Sling."
While the drinks were good, the two Asian men on either side of us and their "dates" for the night proceeded to paw at each other like a couple of junior-high school kids in the back of an auditorium. The men actually got so aggressive with these prostitutes that one of them had to physically remove the guys hands from her thighs. I contempleted throwing peanuts at them but I would have felt guilty if the girls scooped them up off the floor and put them in their purse to feed their children later that night.
Cheers!
Now here's a story. Earlier that day when I was walking back to my hotel I was accosted at the front desk by two woman. They were pleasant enough I guess but they kept asking me questions and wouldn't leave me alone. They asked me where I'd been, what clubs I'd been to in Singapore etc. etc. I was pretty tired and finally I started to lose my patience. I was done with this idiotic chit-chat and as I tried to get by one of the girls she asked me for my room number. I thought I'd given her the wrong room number but apparently not. An hour later my phone rung and here was this Asian woman's voice cooing on the other end. I politely told her that I had a girlfriend staying in a nearby hostel and that I didn't want to be disturbed. Later that evening I was walking down the stairs when I ran into the front desk guy going the same way. "Look," I told him. "I think there was a bit of a language barrier a while ago. I'm sorry if I offended you with that scene earlier today. Let me explain. I DON'T want prostitutes coming up to my room, it was all a huge misunderstanding! If you see that woman again can you tell her not to bother me?" (Not only did I not want some skank scratching around the hallway near my room in the middle of the night but I didn't exactly want to get thrown out of the hotel either!)
The front desk man looked at me and laughed. "That no lady.......he gay!!!.......he gay!!!!!!.....he want to make business with you....ha ha ah ha!!! Woops. I tried to keep my composure. "Look I don't want any prostitutes, dick or no dick, busting down my door in the middle of the night!!! Understand!?! He laughed and told me not to worry. We walked down to the front desk and I hung out with him for a bit until Kelly and Sam arrived to pick me up. While we were waiting, the guy showed me the surveillance monitor behind the desk that was linked to a camera in the hallway. This camera had a view of everyone walking down the steps towards the lobby. A group of women all primed for the night appeared in one of the monitor's. The front desk man leaned forward and smiled, "ladyboy.......ladyboy........ladyboy!" Boom. The door opened and three "women" walked out. I started to think this old guy was pretty funny. We waited a few more minutes before three more women came down. Again the night clerk cleared his throat and pointed at the screen "Lady boy......ladyboy.......(I took over at this point,) "LADYBOY!!" I screamed. We both laughed our heads off as three more "its" came through the door. This entertained us for a good 15 minutes as we debated who had and had not been under the knife. At one point I suggested that perhaps he should changed the name of the hotel to something more appropriate. He replied, "yah.........the Ladyboy Hotel.....conduct your business elsewhere!" This could have gone on all night but Same and Kelly showed up so we left the lobby and went out to Raffle's.
Now something you should know about Kelly and Sam. The two of them have fallen into the habit of attracting an odd breed of people. Take for example their room at their hostel. On one side of their room, a nun continued to pray for what they told me was somewhere in the neighbourhood of eighteen hours a day. Then there was this hooker named "Rosa" (pictured above) that showed them around town their first night in and after that night she never came back to the room for more than a few minutes at a time and usually slept in her clothes. Rosa also started to hit on Kelly pretty hard, whispering in her ear, asking her if she was attracted to bisexual women yada yada yada.We ran into Rosa on the street one night and she came into a bar with us. We attracted quite a few stares and when the four of us sat down. It was at this point that my trained ladyboy eye happened to notice Rosa's Adam's apple and the fact that her hands were as big as my feet. Rosa then proceeded to tell us that because it was our last night in Singapore she didn't feel ashamed to tell us that she was in fact a transgendered lady-boy who had "the chop" (shudder) six years ago.To which Kelly replied straight-faced, "I really would never have guessed." Sam and I had to hold back the laughter. To top it all off, Rosa was constantly taking hormone tablets that were reacting badly with her immune system and were causing her tongue to turn black and fall out. She was also obviously was still attracted to women but had high hopes that Mr. Right would swoop into town one day and take her away to England to get married one day........Yeah.......... Right....... Keep reaching for that rainbow darlin'!
There were so many questions I wanted to ask:
"When you're really drunk do you ever forget which bathroom is the one your supposed to go in?"
"Do you ever have a dream that its grown back?"
"When someone tells you to go fuck yourself do you just stand there looking confused?"
"At this point in your life, is suicide sort of redundant?"
But I chickened out. I just sat there and mumbled something about being so full from dinner. And then Kelly and Sam responded in turn with comments like......"Yeah.....lots of rice....." and "yeah.......rice with chicken." After about half an hour of conversation the four of us hopped into a cap and headed back to the hostel we were staying at which was in the Little India district.
At the end of the night, I had Sam and Kelly huddled in my bed, too scared to return to their room for fear that they would get molested by a six foot tall Asian transgendered prostitute thing with a complex that would make Oedipus Rex look normal. I need to get out of here.
