Hangin’ out at the arcade

Because today’s a pub­lic hol­i­day, Sun­day night was with­out that famil­iar cramp in the neck from think­ing about Monday’s work­load, even though I actu­ally have to work later in the arvo today.

A friend is vis­it­ing from DC, where she’s been work­ing with the World Bank, at a totally unen­vi­able job, where she gets to jet around to such hor­ri­ble places as Vien­tiane, Dili, Nuku’alofa, Apia and every other Third World cap­i­tal you could poke a stick at. No, I don’t envy her job at all.

As you can imag­ine, she gets really bored with Sin­ga­pore really quickly. She arrived Thurs­day evening, and already she’s suf­fer­ing urban island fever. So, it was up to the wife and I to think up some­thing excit­ing for her to do. I sug­gested karaoke, the wife sug­gested arcade games. So, arcade games it was.

Sun­day night at the Super­bowl Super­fun­place or some­such was pretty quiet for a Sun­day night, and we got to play some of the more pop­u­lar games, like the use gun and shoot peo­ple one, and the drive car really fast one. My World Bank friend was very reluc­tant at first, but warmed up after she found her favourite game, the shoot the bub­ble one.

Then as we were skip­ping hap­pily from one machine to another, a very famil­iar voice called out my name, and a hand was laid on my shoul­der. Bug­ger. Gangsta from my gangsta past, I thought. Then I remem­bered I had for­got­ten that my old pla­toon mate actu­ally owned the Super­bowl Super­fun­place. Then I remem­bered this pla­toon mate is the only per­son ever to have beaten the crap outta me.

The wife says my face was white as snow as I excused myself to join my old mate for a cof­fee in his back­room office.

Of course, noth­ing unto­ward hap­pened, else I wouldn’t be here blog­ging. No, actu­ally, if any­thing unto­ward hap­pened, I’d have a lot more to blog. But you know, life’s pretty straight these days, and for that pla­toon mate of mine, pretty depress­ing, it seems. Busi­ness ain’t that great at the Superfunworld.

After we fin­ished $20 worth of coins, we took my World Bank friend out for prata, but couldn’t find a sin­gle prata shop open, so we ate chicken rice instead. There, my World Bank friend con­tin­ued grip­ing about how she thought her brains would melt if she stayed in Sin­ga­pore for an extended period of time. She said it was amaz­ing how parochially sub­ur­ban Sin­ga­pore­ans tended to be. I said, no leh, before chang­ing the sub­ject to what colour my new car’s inte­rior was going to be, and how expen­sive my car repay­ments was going to be, but how it was still cheaper than run­ning my old bomb of a car.

Then every­one got a bit tired, even though we tried our best to ngeh ngeh stay out the whole night. Three police road blocks later, we got home, and here I am, blog­ging about every­thing this evening. Parochial what parochial?!

The most beau­ti­ful hawker cen­tre on the planet. East Coast Lagoon Food Vil­lage. Who cares if no one out­side Sin­ga­pore knows wtf a ‘hawker cen­tre’ is? (Is it a place where peo­ple go play with their hawks?)