Even Hay Mee Men get the blues

The work­ing days between Christ­mas and New Year’s is either called ‘Noth­ing Week’, or ‘Non­sense Week’ by some of my more unfor­tu­nate friends. Those who have to work, that is.

(Those who are on vaca­tion — Nabeh, fark orf!)

If you haven’t already expe­ri­enced it, you’d have dis­cov­ered these past days that work has been really, like, you know, a lot, you know? And like, you know, wah lao, come from every­where, like, you know?

You’d also have known that if you didn’t plan every hour of these types of days, you’d for­get to eat and sleep. So it was a very good thing the past cou­ple of days that I had the good sense to plan (to buy) dinner.

At the Zion Road Food Cen­tre tonight, I had a crav­ing for soup noo­dles, so I looked around for a stall that sold the stuff. Then I was reminded that there was that Famous Prawn Noo­dle (Hay Mee) Stall there, at Zion River­side Food Cen­tre, where there’s also the Famous Char Kuay Teow Stall, the Famous Won­ton Mee Stall, and the Famous Rojak Stall.

As I stood in front of the stall, the Hay Mee Man looked up from behind the glass pane and asked what I wanted. I said in Man­darin, ‘Big Prawn Noo­dles’.

I swear, he sighed when he asked again, ‘Those are $15. You still want?’

I asked for the ‘Not So Big Noo­dles’, which were $10. And as he halved the (still rather) large prawns and boiled them in the pot of stock, he mut­tered some­thing about ‘busi­ness no good these days’.

That prob­a­bly meant I wasn’t gonna be able to ask for an extra prawn.

He went on to talk about how he had wasted money on adver­tis­ing, and that it didn’t help his busi­ness any. Good thing at this point, the soup noo­dles were done, and I had to take my din­ner, which was very yummy, by the way.

After I was done, I popped by Hay Mee Man’s stall again and asked if I could take a pic­ture of him stand­ing in front of the stall, for you know, to put online on the inter­net so that my friends can see it and they can come by and eat his Famous Hay Mee?

Hay Mee Man declined, say­ing he wasn’t ‘used to it’, so I just took a pic­ture of the stall.

‘Ask your friends to come and try lah’, he went on.

‘Yah, that’s why I’m putting this up on the web’, I said.

‘Aiyah, no use one lah, I try before’, he sighed, again.

Stall 13, Zion River­side Food Cen­tre — Ignore the prices on the board, thems are for the midget prawns

iTunes is play­ing an ille­gal copy of Frosty The Snow­man from the album “The Very Best Of Christ­mas Favourites” by Roy Hargrove/Christian McBride of which I have the orig­i­nal CD.

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