Fusion

Fusion food is the new big thing in Singapore. Thai crossed with Indian so that glass noodle spring rolls now precede Tandoori chicken. Italian crossed with Chinese, so that linguine now comes with fish head curry. But sure didn’t we Irish invent this years ago when we took our national dish, the humble spud, and fused it with foreign dishes. We took 9,000 years of Chinese culture and reduced it to pouring curry sauce over chips. We insisted that Lasagne had to be served with potatoes of the chipped or gratin variety. And we trained every eastern European that entered our catering industry to say at the end of each order, “do you want chips with that?”
 
It’s difficult to find chips in Singapore. I thought of this on Friday night as I tucked into some fast food after a night of decadent consumption of outrageously priced alcohol products. The hawker market on  Panang Road is pretty famous I believe. But at 1am you’re just looking for a high cholesterol fix. Unfortunately I had to make do with some steamed chicken and spicy noodles. I know this because I found most of it down the front of my shirt the next morning. You just can’t get junk food here.
 
Fusion was also the theme on Saturday when we went to Fort Canning for the Womad concert, or world of music art and dancd as I now know it. I always thought that Womad  was a 70’s reggae band. So imagine my surprise when the first act was a Japanese Ainu band that mixed traditional Japanese instruments with something that sounded like Led Zeppelin. This was followed by an Israeli guy who did a passing imitation of Pavorotti crossed with Little Richard. All of this was done the way Singapore does things. Everybody brought a little plastic bag to bring home their rubbish, the queue for soft drinks was longer than the one for beer and the toilets had paper and soap. Oh, and everybody stood up, sat down, clapped or held hands when they were told to.
 
You could say it was anti-septic but the searing heat and 90% humidity was hardly conducive to healthy living. Most people here live in air-conditioned buildings, travel in air-conditioned cars and trains and if they do go outside, they keep it to a minimum and walk at a pace that would make Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army look nifty. Bu we decided to spend the weekend outdoors. This meant that by the time Youssou N’Dour came on at 11.30pm, we were solely testing the old cliché that horses sweat, men perspire and ladies simply glow.
 
Let’s just say that by the time we all got up to bop to Seven Seconds (the only song I recognised the whole night to be honest) there was a lot of glowing going on. Once it was all over, we made our way down to the hundreds of taxis waiting at the main entrance. Because that’s the way they do things in Singapore.
 
The way things are set up here, you’d swear that the City had been designed by a teenager who spent hours on City Planning games on their PC, when they should have been out playing football.  Or perhaps this is Second Life for real people. They neatly package all the clothes shops into Orchard Towers, all the electronics into Simlin Square and all the prostitutes into Orchard Towers, known to every taxi driver as the four floor of whores. No matter where you want to go on a Friday night, if you're a Westerner (or Caucasian as they call us when they are trying not to offend) this is where the taxis will want to take you. That’s about as rude as they get here.
 
But it’s like the City planner forgot that the thousands of tourists who pass through here might want more than shopping and the immoral pleasures that the four floors may offer. So they decided to build a resort but stuck it on an island off the coast called Sentosa, so as not to interfere with the relentless pursuit of capitalism that goes on everywhere else here. They stuck in a load of sand and made the flimsiest beach I’ve seen since I lived in Luxembourg. A couple of bars of the Phuket variety and some funky little trains to keep the kids happy.  But walking around it on a Sunday afternoon is like walking along the floor of a swimming pool filled with very warm water.
 
But life is not supposed to be about order, The centre cannot hold and all that. So I’m heading back to a climate that is unpredictable, where trams don’t always run on time and where the beaches have been created by the sea, rocks and time. Fusion, in other words, as it should be.