Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

This was imported from my old Tumblr blog posts.

I just returned from dinner. And I’m all alone in the apartment unit.

My housemates have returned to their respective homes for the holidays – J went home to PH (it’s his arrangement with SC) and M went home to Myanmar. My official excuse for not going home myself is that it’s too costly. And it is. Last I looked at SkyScanner, it will cost me more than SGD 500 for a few days’ worth of Philippine vacation time. And as far as home goes, it’s only my sister V who’s in the house right now. My parents and my youngest sister A is in Hawaii. SGD 500 is around PHP 20K, give or take a few hundred. That is already Japan fare right there. I still plan to save a few so I can go to Japan. So, a little sacrifice is in order. A little bit of pining for home in exchange for a week-long Japan joytime.

My Christmas dinner last night is mushroom mac and cheese I cooked myself, 3 pieces of spicy Chickenjoy (from the Jollibee in Jurong East MRT) and two lemon cheese filled bread. Downed with cold oolong tea. Well, there was also a Filipino food stall near Jollibee that I strongly considered buying from, but I held off it until New Year. 

I’m going off a tangent here. Last year, same date and time. I didn’t feel any better. I was counting the days until I was officially unemployed from my former employer. I was eating delicious food for the holidays, but my mind is somewhere else. I was looking at the company uniform with a bit of sorrow – it was a nice uniform I didn’t mind wearing, but I was sorry that I can’t wear them again, except if a very specific event called for it, like a sleeveless barong formal event. My other feelings during that time were conflicting to me – I resigned because I felt it was the right time for me to leave, I wasn’t growing anymore career-wise, and the skills I felt were more valuable were being neglected in favor of skills I was never comfortable with. I felt that project management skills weren’t the right fit for me at that time. 

But I felt a more nagging realization – my skills in project management sucked. I never had a passion for it in the first place – it was a thing I had to do, but not a thing I enjoyed doing. And back then, it dawned on me – I was in quicksand. I had to get out before it swallows me whole. Had I stayed with my former employer, I admit, I could’ve been fired for incompetence. The projects assigned to me were rarely successful. Some launched, many haven’t yet. If I left and the projects were assigned to more competent PMs, those would at least have a better chance at success. I was not a good PM, I freely admit. But the more pressing issue for me – I was not close to happy, even at Christmas. January 1 was at least my first chance to be happy again, career-wise. And now, facing a new year, 2019, I feel normal. Much better than last year’s, mentally.

OK, tangent out. Now back to SG matters.

Food topic, first off. It’s not an issue for me – I love it, even. Heck, I feel it’s more of a reason for me to stay employed here more than my salary. But I admit a bit of shame – when I first visited SG as a tourist, my very first meal here… is Burger King. Out of all the very good food here in SG, I went first for The King’s burger set meal. I was hungry from the plane ride, and the very first food stall I spied on was that, so goes.

Number 1 for me is Indian food. I love Indian food. If I was forced to be a vegetarian, I’d rather keep opting for Indian vegetarian dishes instead of western ones. When I go to new hawker centers, I always keep an eye out for stalls serving Indian food. And SG, being a multicultural country, has a rich Indian food culture. My go-to place is always Tekka Centre in Little India. There are a LOT of Indian food stalls there, and I am not out of options to choose from. Biryani is a favorite – I always order mutton (I’m lazy, but sometimes I go for chicken). Naan bread is also a very nice meal, cooked to-order with some curry dipping sauce. Prata made by hand. I always keep an eye out for other things to eat there. I have been to Tekka Centre more than ten times, either Saturdays or Sundays. And I always leave satisfied. But if I didn’t have the option (either I was lazy or I need something to do), there is one Indian food stall near my unit that serves mutton biryani – and as he noticed me as a new frequent customer, he sometimes gives me a bit of extra rice or a few bits of meat with fat in it for free.

Number 2 for me is spicy food. Here, spicy is a legit option. Mala chicken bowl, yes please. There’s pickled green chillies at many stalls. There’s chicken cooked with dried red long chillies. Maggi noodles here have a legit spicy noodle at least as spicy as the entry-level one from Samyang, but costs less. Pork curry rice here has a good kick. McDonald’s spicy chicken burger is a guilty comfort food for me. Tom yum noodles here are also spicy. Thai wok-fried rice also have a liberal amount of chillies in it. Mee pok, I always go for some extra spice if the owner asks. It’s nice when I feel the craving for a hit of spicy food. Like when it’s raining, or there’s a bit of stress from work that I need to quickly blow off with spicy food.

Number 3 for me are noodles. Any dish with noodles, I will give an amount of preference to it. Because of that, it became less and less often for me to eat plain white rice (biryani is rice). Laksa is always my safe choice. I never had bad laksa yet. There’s also tom yum, mee pok, mee goreng, ban mian, wanton noodles, soya sauce chicken and noodles, and lots more. Rice here is an option, but it’s not the dominant option, unlike in Philippines – I once saw a foreigner go to my workplace canteen and order food without rice and the lady cashier looked at him as if he was crazy.

Number 4 for me is western food. Specifically, chicken cutlets, steak and pork chop. Somehow, Singapore takes western food and mixes it up with either local preferences or other cuisines. There’s a stall in the Tanglin Halt hawker center that sells chicken cutlet with pasta, and as I’m a creature of habit, 90% of the food I ate there was always from the same stall – chicken cutlet with either chicken bolognese or pomodoro pasta. The other 10% was from a stall selling mee pok but with braised pork and hardboiled-in-tea quail eggs with a good runny center. When it comes to steak, it is nice I can ask for medium rare steaks and I actually get what I ordered. iSteaks is always my go-to for steaks, it’s a bit pricey but I felt I got what I paid for there every time – I order medium rare for takeout and I get a proper rested steak with legit medium rare in the middle. And a stall at the Commonwealth Crescent market sells a great seared pork chop dish with fries and greens. It’s my favorite stall there. If they don’t have pork chop available, either their chicken chop or fish and chips are great as well. For restaurants – I love Popeye’s here. For some reason, I liked Popeye’s chicken and burger here. And their mashed potatoes are on the chunky side but still hearty.

There are also good Filipino food options here. I haven’t been to Gerry’s here yet. Jollibee, yes, lots of times. The only hawker stall I’ve seen that closely resembles a real Filipino food stall here is in Tanjong Pagar. But if I am on a hankering for kilawin and papaitan, and desserts like turon and kakanin, the only place to be is at Lucky Plaza in Orchard. It’s basically Filipino-Town in one building. It houses lots and lots of Filipino food stalls, money remittance shops, Philippine real estate brokers, hair salons (where some even curse in Tagalog), balikbayan box packers, and tourist traps at the lower floors. It’s basically full of OFWs in any given weekend. I always go straight to the top floors, where some sell uniquely Filipino dishes and items. There’s a joke I heard that the higher you go up Lucky Plaza, the more you hear the chattering of OFWs in pure Tagalog. Well, that’s true. The place is really a slice of PH, and the place looks like a better version of Ever Gotesco Commonwealth. But the desserts are always pricey. I mean, a dollar for turon? In Manila, that costs PHP 7-10, 15 max in Makati. So when I buy turon, I make sure I want it first. It’s conveniently close to Books Kinokuniya as well, so two birds.

Drinks here? Well… shall we say I always look at the label. Their canned and/or bottled drinks here are mostly too sweet for my liking. I always look for either unsweetened oolong tea, Jia Jia (the yellow/green one, but the white one works too), jasmine tea, Coke Zero, or just plain ol’ water. For Coke Zero… well, the food court at Block 6 sells it. And the table ladies there already know my preference well – they always spot me and ask “Kok Shii-roh?” even before I go order food. Heck, I think just by looking around the place after a while, I maybe account for at least 90% of their monthly Coke Zero sales. For the non-manufactured drinks, I love “Michael Jackson” – the drink named after him. It’s a mix of grass jelly and soy milk. And I noticed that every stall owner selling it has their own recipe for it. Generally it’s grass jelly and soy milk. Some sell it with just soy milk with grass jelly floating on top. Some sell soy milk mixed with grass jelly juice – some 60-40, others 50-50. Some sell thick grass jelly juice then pour in soy milk to make it look like floating. No consistent method, but I like it.

Another drink I prefer is longan juice. Many sell it with whole bits of longan at the bottom of the drink, with a nifty pointed stick to snatch them from below. It’s a drink with dessert. But for this drink, I am extra picky – some sell excessively sweet versions – and I have two stalls that I know will sell acceptably sweet ones.

For coffee, oh yes. There’s a whole lingo for kopi (someone half-jokingly warned me not to use “coffee”) that I had to master quickly. My preference is kopi siew dai (coffee with less condensed milk), but sometimes I am lazy and just order kopi. I always order it with ice, but if early morning, I go for hot. And their coffee is so good, I never had the hankering to go to Starbucks. In Manila, I always go to Starbucks if I wanted real coffee. Now, I just walk down to Block 6 and order recently-brewed hot kopi and it’s always good and strong enough for a pick-me-up.

And not I’m parched. Time to get myself a refreshment.