Street Signs

The trip to Chinatown was smoother than I had anticipated. I had printed off driving directions from maps google and spent Ryan's golf lesson hour in the car pouring over the street directory to make sure I knew the way well. And except for a little bit of confusion over finding the public car park because while I had researched the car parks and rates, I had just looked for one of the public car parks and neglected to have a backup. Complicated, isn't it? Almost like planning for disaster recovery in the IT world.

The first restaurant we saw as we walked away from the car park to Grant Street was - a Singapore restaurant. In a fit of nostalgia, we went in and ordered Hainanese chicken rice for Ryan, char kway teow for Bert and prawn noodle soup for moi. Not quite what you get in the hawker centers and definitely a lot more costly, but we were satisfied. Rather pathetic on hindsight.

So we picked up some ingredients for me to bring for a potluck event in the office on Nov 16 (date sounds familiar?!) but we could not find good curry powder, lime leaves or blue ginger. We toyed with the idea of cooking bubu cha cha but it was hard finding yam and sago - except today, we found sago at a Chinese grocery store near Stoneridge Mall and found it to be tapioca pearls which were so plentiful in Chinatown. Bert thought sago was made from some kind of palm! So even the best cook can make mistakes :D.

So here are some shots of us in Chinatown. One of them is obviously of someone in shock :).

After Chinatown, it was off to the party but guess what. Although I had planned the exit from Chinatown to the bd boy's house, navigating the way I had planned was not done well courtesy of passenger seat driver. Circled round Chinatown couple of times before we found Market Street and was on our way. Driving on Market Street is challenging as well because the road is also used by the muni whose tracks use one of the two lanes. Plus there were hordes of people, especially at and around Union Square where the tourists congregate. Hard to see the traffic lights too.

There were tonnes of people at the party. To my immense relief, the one and a half men were not bored or uncomfortable mixing with people they don't know in a culture so different from our own. The smaller man found amusement playing with Rufus, the dog. Whether Rufus found him amusing is another matter. I think the expressions on Rufus' long snouted face tended to portray long suffering and tolerance of a pesky little fella. There were some colleagues at the party and they were quite willing to engage Bert in conversation so the party turned out to be enjoyable for him. We had always been critical of our expats in Singapore who kept to the American club and their own society and I did not want us to be like that. We should take the opportunity to immense in local culture and society to get the most out of the time here.

When we first arrived at the house, I would not let anyone out of the car until we knew how to go home. Well, the best planning can always go wrong. So while we were clever about hitting Highway 280, we got confused by the road signs on reaching San Francisco downtown looking for Bay Bridge. So round and round again we go, till we finally figured out how to read the street signs.

And this is why I had always dreaded going into town.