Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Breakfast at Hotel
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| Eggs tossed with boiled potatoes. (Yes, boiled potatoes. No, I don't
know why they didn't saute or stir-fry them.) Accompanied by pineapple
slices and toast. As for the item at left, I took it thinking it was a
large barbecued shrimp. It turned out to be a mild white-fleshed fish
with chunky meat.
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| Lunch at Conference Venue
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Clockwise from upper-right: - al dente pasta with olive oil and
lemon
- squash and eggplant with olive oil
- chicken
(okay/fine)
- lamb (okay/fine)
- rice. The rice was supposedly
seafood paella, but I didn't end up with any seafood.
| Clockwise from upper-left: - "saffron-scented potatoes with
vegetables" - I could actually taste the saffron! That's rare.
- tomato and mozzarella - a decent, standard rendition of the dish. As usual, the tomato wasn't at perfect ripeness and the mozzarella was fairly bland.
- tiramisu - bleh.
- mango mousse - good, light.
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As you can tell from pictures of past lunches at the conference venue,
they generally served us a fairly good meal with dishes from all over the
world, continental Europe to Asia. I think this is a sign of the
international convergence that happens in Singapore.
You might say this day's lunch doesn't reflect Singapore's Asian
heritage. However, the snacks they served did. In addition to "danish
pastries" (i.e., danishes), they had Chinese baked buns (chicken and
veggie) and dim sum (e.g., mini soon kueh). Soon kueh are rice flour
dumplings filled with chopped turnips. I don't think I've ever seen
them before.
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| My New Hotel
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| Singapore's skyline, as seen from my new hotel room at the Pan
Pacific.
| The view from the walkway outside my room down to the lobby.
| The view from the walkway outside my room up toward the ceiling.
| The marble-floored, columnated lobby, along with the elevator that looks
like a futuristic pill.
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| A movie of downtown Singapore's nighttime sights as seen from a
descending elevator in my hotel. If you don't blink, halfway through
the movie you can see another glass-walled elevator shooting upward.
Watch the video to the end and you'll be surprised by where the elevator
lands in the lobby.
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| Makansutra Gluttons Bay
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Makansutra Gluttons
Bay, where I went for dinner, has ten or so stalls.
This food
court, incidentally, is double the price of most: my dinner items cost
$10 and $6 respectively.
| Boon Tat Street, the stand from which I bought the majority of my dinner.
| Barbecued stingray (skate), served on a banana leaf. Skate appears to be
a white fish rich in oil. The meat comes off in long threads. The
accompanying pickles (not pictured) were unnecessary.
| A close-up for the skate's strings of meat, along with the pickle
topping not shown in the previous photo.
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| Kangkong. A spicy, soggy dish tossed with a complex mix of spices,
based principally on fish or oyster sauce and shrimp paste.
| The Gluttons Bar, the food court's drink and dessert stand.
| "Homemade longan with sea coconut." I'd ordered this hoping it was a
drink, but it was a chilled, sweetened liquid dessert with longan
berries and sea coconut floating in it. (Longan berries are similar to
lychee.) I believe the sea coconut were the long clear things (not
really visible in this picture). They required chewing. I'm not going
to attempt to describe the fruit flavors.
| On the way back to my hotel, I spotted this funky bumpy building, the
Esplanade-Theatres on the Bay, which I'd later explore during the
daytime.
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