Another year, more hip-skip-hopping around the globe (previously, 2010, 2009). Go team carbon pollution:

Aachen
Auckland
Ban Khao Yai
Ban Ko Tao
Bangkok*
Berlin*
Blenheim
Canberra*
Cologne
Colombo
Frankfurt*
Fussen
Hamburg
Kandy
Ko Phi Phi
Laem Ngop
Melbourne
Munich
Singapore *
Sydney
Weimar
Wellington

22 in total. One or more days were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

Posted in Travel on Sat Dec 17, 04:13 pm.

you no longer believe in anything
movement of train, mauve waves
grammar’s anomie
gets you down or
war at the back and crown of head
PsyOps, o chicken little the sky! the sky!
o the fallen sky an edge of blue
hanging but
still breathing those colors?
a garden broken & restored many times
how often trying to leave it, bend away
words from that beautiful throat
listen or break or oscillate or
clamor as opposed to “read about”
could you be my model human being
up there on the dais?
o you, she…maybe he’s the one
& we came back from the cinema
glow behind our tears
and you saying a woman, a woman!
how tragic to be such slender thread of a woman
where was I being led?
more people thick in space
in constant motion
twisted around a clock
solar wind, solar heat, sociable matrix
it’s an atavistic mixed-up dream
and stirs the branches
high in Freedom Park
it was the voice of a desultory fragment
of speech now, talking about “state” and “union”
how darkness turns at the wrist

- Anne Waldman

Posted in Textism on Fri Oct 28, 07:29 pm.

I am unsure whether it is the wind, or the spray being kicked up by the boat, or whether it is conceivable that I am cold. This seems impossible, in Bangkok, at this time of year. Nevertheless, the driver has donned an impressive looking ski-jacket and is using the hand not on the tiller to fiddle with the zipper. I notice that the North Face logo appears to be sewn on backward, and that the stitching doesn’t quite seem to match the pattern, but he certainly looks warm. Overkill for sixteen degrees, maybe, but there is no doubt the wind is cutting. He’s mastered the zipper and reaches his now free hand up to his neck and tucks the amulet there inside the jacket and out of sight.

More throttle. More noise. The wind is cold.

.

There is a tiny hut, a ramshackle collection of planks held together with rusty nails, that sits at half way down my soi. In it are housed a desk, an angle grinder, and a concrete plinth upon which sits a hand-drawn checkers board and enough bottle-tops for two teams of draughts. Singha for red, Heineken for green. The kings have inscrutable Thai symbols scrawled on them with thick blue paint.

This is where the drivers of the motorcycle taxis that ply their services from soi spend their days when they are not running people to work, or weaving wildly down alleys while kids in school uniform ride side-saddle, or doing lackadaisical, effortless, chin-ups on the parts of the street lights that are supposed to hold flowers but instead simply outline smudges on the sky.

They share the space with an old man who makes amulets, and a carefully maintained cage containing the old man’s tame bird. This is a vicious black and yellow thing who is let out on weekends to terrorise the local dogs and will scuttle and swoop back to the cage at the sound of metal on the grindstone, or from the slightest whistle from the old man.

On Sundays, the motorcyclists sit in a circle around the checkers, still flaunting jaunty orange vests, and pass around a glass bottle of coke that has been judiciously topped up with Sang Som. The bottle stays full, but I notice the colour of the liquid inside gets lighter and lighter as the sky darkens.

..

“Can you hold it?” she says.
“Hold what?”
“The bottle. Hold the bottle.”
“What in god’s name are you doing?”
“Mixing them. There’s enough space in the bottle now.”
“You’ve never done this before, have you?”
“What, why?”
“You pour the spirit into the can. That way it just looks like a normal can. It’s actually quite hard to look inconspicuous when you are standing in an airport taking slugs from a bottle of imitation vodka”
“Oh, yeah. Okay.”
“That man over there is laughing at you. Hell, I’m laughing at you.”
“Give me the can.”

And I do.

.

We dip to the right to avoid one of the idling barges and an arc of spray slaps the oily water beside the longtail. The engine cuts and we roll forward as our wake overtakes us.

“It’s because of China,” the man sitting opposite me says, as the driver opens the throttle again, sliding us back over the wake and onward.
“What’s because of China?” I ask.
“The weather. A low pressure system up there and it throws the whole thing out of whack. It’ll be another two weeks at least.”
“And then?”
“Hopefully some bloody heat. This isn’t right, not for March.”
“It’s nice though, right? A break from it.”
“Sure, if it was a break, day or two, right. But it’s been a week. Close to. Upsets the locals. Don’t like that,” and he stubs the butt roughly against the hull and flicks it into the river. “You saw the paper today?”
“The Post?”
“Yeah, that idiot with the earthquake predictions. Tsunamis. Wipe out half the fuckin’ coast down there . Just like oh-seven.”
“I didn’t see that,” and I’m thinking about 2007. Really? It was then. Earlier, surely?
“Some nutjob from up in the provinces. Reckons they’ve predicted every major disaster in the past twenty years. Flawless record. Blah blah blah. Well now my wife is too scared to travel down that way and half the bloody office are acting like it’s Armageddon rather than a holiday. Reckon if he’s that bloody good he should’ve had a go against Paul,” he says as he glares at another oncoming barge.
“I’m sorry, who’s Paul?” I ask.
“The octopus, mate” and now I am utterly baffled.
“The octopus? What octopus?”

..

The two sisters are identical but, dressed as they are, you have to look closely to see it. One has donned a bright pink apron, pockets overflowing with notes of small denominations. She works the cleaver rhythmically against a rubbery octopus, clinically separating limbs from body. Thump, thump, thump, swipe. The other wears a simple black polo shirt and a silver charm, and rolls tiny bags of lurid vermilion chilli-sauce between her fingers. They move in harmony, the cleaver and the fingers working taut rubber bands over the lip of tiny bags. Two bodies as one. She’s created a small pyramid of the bags, and it glistens like a tiny shrine to some god of fire, or fertility, or clay-red dirt. A shrine with an offering of tentacled limbs piled below it.

.

“Soccer person? Football, whatever” he says, and looks ruefully at the cigarette packet that’s been soaked by the river water.
“I guess. To play. A bit.”
“You didn’t watch the World Cup? -” and then I remember Paul, the octopus who chose winners from a box and who was now, if I recalled correctly, stone-cold dead.
“- picked the winners for ages. Magic run. I’d trust him over some bloke with a fold-up table, tarot cards and a couple of plastic chairs. Thieves, the lot of them.” This makes me think of an article I read the other day stating that Australia now holds the ignoble honour of having the highest per capita rate of gambling in the world.
“I think he’s dead,” I say.
“What? The article was just today.”
“No, the octopus. After the World Cup. I think,” although I am less certain now than I was a few minutes ago.
“Someone probably had a flutter that went the wrong way, eh. Not a good job to have, octopus.”

.

The river is the colour of freshly-poured miso, and the sediment swirls behind us in ever diminishing loops. Fibonacci is at the tiller, and I’m watching the angle of the sun as it tips behind Rama 9.

..

At the mouth of the soi, near where the motorbikes are parked, I notice the bird pecking at something curled on the ground. It is the skeleton of a frog, and the tiny fingers are splayed wide, clutching at air.

…

On the way to the river today, I saw a girl coming out of Seven Eleven, letters on her shirt in a sharp abrupt sans, “I’d rather die terrified than live forever.” And I would.

Or at least that’s what I said in the hypothetical.

Posted in Mwah on Sun May 29, 11:18 pm.

Back then, what did I know?
The names of subway lines, buses.
How long it took to walk twenty blocks.

Uptown and downtown.
Not north, not south, not you.

When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,
you were gray-green, incomprehensible, old.
What you clung to, hung from: old.
Trees looking half dead, stones.

Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving
unseen, unread, unremembered.
Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,
ash-of-the-woods.
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.

- Jane Hirshfield

Posted in Textism on Mon Apr 25, 10:29 pm.

On slow weekend mornings, I like to collect photographs that others, much better at photography than I, have taken. I hope you enjoy exploring these photos of people, deserts, words and oceans as much as I enjoyed finding them.

Posted in Shutterbug on Sat Apr 16, 03:21 pm.

1. No more chopped up Lonely Planets

Most travelers seem to have a love/hate relationship with the Lonely Planet. The flexibility it allows for spontaneous changes to itineraries is wonderful but when you make that trek up the mountain in the snow to the highly-recommended ‘authentic’ beer hall, only to discover twenty other tables of tourists, each with a LP resting on the edge of the table, it lessens the experience somewhat.

When I lived in Japan, I trekked around with a hand-me-down 1994 edition LP, margins crowded with ten years of scribbled notes, highlights and post-its. The accommodation and food sections were roundly out of date but, unsurprisingly, details on two-thousand year old temples don’t change that often. This aligns with my preferred method for using the LP: to rely on it for historic summaries and the ‘what to see’ sections and outsource getting there and finding the best places to eat and stay to either the wonderful internet, or locals in the know. The Kindle is great at connecting these pieces.

For longer trips, particularly ones where you’ll be hitting a bunch of different countries in a short time: continental Europe and South East Asia being two classic examples, your options used to be limited to:

• buying detailed guides for each of the countries you were going to, and then pre-booking a session at the physio for your return, to sort out those back pains you’d acquired from lugging four kilograms of guide books around. Maximum flexibly, maximum weight.
• acquiring a compiled “best of” LP that scrimps on detail but has good overall coverage, usually the “on a shoestring” guides. Less detail, but less back problems.
• making like MacGuyver and rolling your own, by chopping up and clipping together the bits of the books you needed. Great coverage, but limited flexibility.

None of these are ideal solutions.

The Kindle allows you to mash up all the above options into a single flow. Just grab the guide to countries or regions you’re traveling in and use the bookmarks feature to create a summary of the cities you’ll be visiting. You should also bookmark the relevant map pages, language chapters and specific transit information you need. If anything in your itinerary changes, just change up your bookmarks.

If you’re working from a couple of books, make yourself a new collection for travel. This also works for adding related books like language guides or recommended reading. Simple, searchable and super fast, it’s like having a customised travel guide that can be remixed on the fly. Supplement this with information from the internet (point 2) and some clever snippets (point 5) and use all the extra time you save chatting with locals at your destination, and you’ll be trailblazing in no time.

2. Free Internet, Anywhere

If you’ve got the 3g version of the kindle you can access the Kindle web browser from the experimental menu on the home menu which lets you interact with basic text webpages over local mobile networks. Not only does it free you from the tyranny of hotel internet, chasing wifi passwords and the traditional traveler’s ritual, ‘the midnight hunting of the internet cafe’ but it also gives you the option to switch up your itinerary on the fly, knowing that you can always keep in touch if you need to. This is brilliant.

It’s worked most places I’ve tried it, including remote Thailand, bits of China, and all over Europe. Obviously the further off the beaten track you are, the likelihood of a lack of coverage increases, but it’s still valuable for hub cities and airport layovers.

A good trick is to work out which of the services you use have a mobile or text-based version of their site and how to access it. In many cases prefixing the address with an ‘m.’ will do the trick as for Gmail (m.gmail.com), Twitter (m.twitter.com) and Facebook (m.facebook.com). All work well on the Kindle, and Gmail will also help by converting Word Docs and PDFs to a format that is readable on the device. Google maps isn’t wonderful, but works in a pinch, although you’re often better off going for the optimised maps in the LP if you’ve got it. Google translate and Babelfish both offer mobile-optimised versions of their translation tools, although text entry can be tricky for non roman character sets.

A fantastic site to remember is the mobile version of Wikitravel (m.wikitravel.org) which is essentially the world’s biggest travel guide to everywhere, available all the time. Like its older brother Wikipedia, it’s consistently improving, and finally seems to be getting quality information for most large and medium sized destinations, particularly for things to do and places to stay. How’s that for a freedom creator?

3. Break the Juice Addiction

These days the best seat in the hostel isn’t the one with the view or the comfy couch but rather the one in cable’s reach of the one power outlet. That would be the one with the people pacing up and down in front, eying it greedily, laptops clutched to their chests, like junkies in search of a fix. Everyone needs their juice.

The battery on the Kindle lasts forever comparative to other power-hungry mobile devices. I should probably caveat this point with “when the wireless is off the battery lasts forever” but even if you’re bashing away at GMail and Wikitravel at every opportunity, you’ll still get a good couple of days out of a full charge and, without wireless, you’re looking at weeks. So break the juice addiction and do your emailing from the top of a mountain, just because you can.

4. It Weighs Nothing

How is it that every single day you travel your backpack somehow seems to mysteriously acquire another couple of kilograms. For me, the culprit is usually books. When I’m on the road I plow through a couple of novels a week, and when you can only afford to carry a couple of them you become selective, hoarding the good ones until you find a hostel that has worthy replacements to swap. Loading the Kindle before I left and breaking free of the enforced crappy holiday reading cycle was a revelation, as was losing the extra baggage.

A couple of good things to remember is that tools like Calibre can bulk convert PDFs and load them onto to Kindle, in case you’ve got some academic reading you want to get through, and that there’s a tonne of free and out of copyright eBooks that I are in most cases going to be better reading than what’s on offer on the hostel shelf. Now we just need to work out what the hostels of the world are going to do with seven million unwanted copies of Stieg Larsson books.

If you need to lose even more weight from your pack, you can also load music (or audiobooks) into the music folder and play them, even when the Kindle itself is off. This works particularly well for language podcasts or lessons, such as Pimsleur. Leave the iPod at home.

5. Travel Snippets

I like to remember what I’ve done while I’m on the road, but I’m not a fan of the overwrought travel journal. I’ve found the Kindle version of the LP, in conjunction with the highlights feature, to be an amazing way of taking notes and finding a balance between the two. Once you’ve marked up the places where you’re going (see point 1) just drag a highlight over the place or thing you did, or over the city name for general things in that city, and type a few words against the highlight. You have begun to note your way to glory.

Now, when you stumble in the door after your global adventure, just plug the Kindle into your computer and find the My Clippings.txt file in the documents folder. You’ve got a play by play summary of your trip away sorted by date and city visited. You can then expand these at your leisure. Just promise you won’t email it to anyone. Okay?

Posted in Tech on Sun Mar 27, 02:09 pm.

The motorcycles swarm and huddle in the shade under the bridge, like so many angry bees, waiting for the green disc up ahead to light up, so they can soar back into the sunshine. Summer is like that, here. I see us jumping from pocket of shade to pocket of shade, using the accusatory fingers of high rise apartment buildings to block the sun. These are our gnomons, writ large, as we scurry across the dial plate of our world, tracing the hours with our harried, sweaty feet.

They have made the telephone boxes bombproof. Over the past six months the men in dark blue shirts have worked, disassembling glass boxes and replacing them with dull grey plinths. The metal is cool to the touch, even in the hot sun, and several inches thick. I note the notches at the edge and wonder if they can be used as firing positions. Whether they would be used as firing positions. What they would look like with a dozen burning tyres rolled up against them, thick oily smoke blotting out the sun just as effectively as the high rises.

In one of these new metal boxes stands a lady wearing a full motorcycle helmet, visor pulled down, clasping two full bags of cooking oil. She is wearing a bright pink apron, with a portrait of His Royal Highness. Waiting for her own buzzing velocipede to scoop her up and transport her to the cooking stove. Nearby, out in the fierce sun, is the woman who cleans the two hundred metres of road between the lamp posts and the bridge. She is emptying a mug of coffee over the stained patch where the garbage piles up every night. She is smiling, as she reaches for her broom. She is always smiling, always says hello.

I wonder what you would say of all this, if you were here. There are seven space invaders, pinned up on bridges and under overpasses in Bangkok, their tiny mosaic tiles smeared with dirt and grime. The closest is on Surawong, on the crumbling facade at the entrance to a Chinese cemetery, and it is blue and red.

Mach’ es wie die Sonnenuhr: zähl’ die heitren Stunden nur!

Posted in Mwah on Sun Feb 13, 02:28 pm.

I have trouble with old pics
their sweet bitterness
their cutting edge
their tricks

—a daughter’s mittens
hung from cuffs
laid out in kodachrome
a taunt of time. Enough.

I’d rather mine old nuggets
upturn what’s scattered
in my skull —the gold

stick with what
my head will hold

I do not take nostalgic risks
The photobox stays
beneath the bed
with jewel cases of bygones
in code on disks

When my memory goes
it will not matter
I may not even know the aliens
who peer from three by fours
or are splashed on screens
in pixel splatters

Love is best as it occurs
life too;

Now is breath’s agency
Love and life are only inside time

not frozen
not shot with poignancy
not both a blur

- Jim Culleny (via. 3qD)

Posted in Textism on Mon Jan 31, 10:23 pm.

He will win the next hand. I know this because from where I stand, under the soft blue glow of three enormous Chinese characters, set in neon, I can see his cards, both of their cards. There are two others here, standing in this crisp Shanghai evening, and they are watching too. They stand apart from me, in avocado-green uniforms, leaning against identical mops, and stare as the players reveal their hands.

From the outside, it is hard to get a sense of the interior’s scale. The room, benches pressed against the windows, is a cavernous excavation at the centre of the red-ochre castle that is the Australia pavilion here. The ceiling is draped in huge ribbons of lime, aqua and hot pink: streaks of painted colour suspended in the air. I take a final slug from the long-neck, and reach up to loosen my tie. It has been a long day.

He wins the next hand.

I toss my empty beer, leave my green-suited companions to their furtive cigarettes, and walk back inside. In the corner, atop a tiny stage, the Sneaky Sound System are playing to crowd of a hundred Chinese, who stand and look confused, clutching souvenir bags, stuffed toy koalas and assorted ephemera. Connie Mitchell is dressed in an outfit that approximates a space suit designed in consultation with David Bowie, and dances in short, abrupt movements as she plunges into the next song.

There is a neat division, then, between the Australians, most kitted out in Australia Pavilion staff gear, going nuts, and the Chinese crowd, grinning nervously and snapping photos of the flailing white people. The pavilion staff do their best: wheeling and spinning through the spectators, as they try to get people on their feet, but the crowd are having none of it. They form a neat semicircle in front of the dancing Australians, and hold their cameras aloft.

The guy next to me, tall, with a wild mop of reddish brown hair, leans in, “We’re playing outside, after this. Tell the bar you’re staff, and they’ll kick a couple of bucks off the beers.”

.

So we do, and an hour later are nursing a small collection of empty Coopers bottles, as the house band launch into an acoustic cover of Land Down Under, the flute part energetically recreated, but noticeably lacking men from Brussels, sandwiches, or ever a Koala on a leash. We can see the pavilion’s freight exit, tucked neatly behind a stall, now closed, advertising meat pies and ‘authentic’ cookies. A trickle of staff begin to emerge from the door behind the loading dock, in groups of twos and threes, and then the Sneakys appear, and Tim jogs over to grab a photo, and I hold the fort.

Today has been the quietest day of the entire expo, but there’s still a decent crowd here, sat in the rapidly cooling Shanghai evening, as floodlights begin to be switched off and people crowd into huge pedestrian snakes that wind their way toward the subway. “So, apparently there’s a party at the Latvian pavilion,” Tim announces as he returns, “Shall we wander over?”

I lean back and look at the pillars supporting the huge bridge directly behind me. The sound of the flute seems oddly out of place here, in this concrete playground where just a few years ago there was nothing but mud, and grass, and the lapping wakes from the steel ships headed upriver.

“Thanks all, we’ll be here all month.”

..

The citizens of Latvia seem to have decided that their national identity can be represented by two elements, notable above all others. These are extreme sport, and also flowers. To this end, the room’s walls are covered in huge murals showcasing the floral biodiversity of the country, and in the middle of the space is a giant glass tube, enclosing an enormous fan.

This on-demand wind tunnel is the centrepiece of Latvia’s themed self-expression. As we enter, a man in a white jumpsuit and helmet is doing lazy back flips, floating in apparent zero-gravity. He extends his arms and is tugged upwards, soaring toward the roof some twenty metres above. At the base of the tunnel, away from the push of the whirling turbines, two men struggle into person-size hot-dog suits, and then sprint in opposite directions around the glass.

As they reach the same point on the far side of the room they careen into each other and the smaller one crashes to the floor, legs kicking frantically against the plush red sausage, as he attempts to regain his balance and stand up. Above, the white suited gentleman in the wind tunnel is fist pumping to the thumping euro-house, suspended six metres above the ground, perfectly upside down.

It is a moment of such utter surrealism that I am, for a moment, struck dumb. I stand at the entrance and gape. Tim stops beside me, “Cor. That’s cool,” and he pushes forward toward the beer tap in the corner. A crew of five Chinese split from the crowd members who are staring transfixed at the man inside the tunnel and break into a synchronised dance to the song that is blaring from the speakers. Everything is lit in a light pastel green, shot through with red lasers that pick up details on the flower-covered walls.

I feel like a mediaeval peasant who’s been catapulted through time, to land in the middle of Times Square. A bearded and bedraggled wastrel, taking in the gleaming neon with a horrified, open-eyed stare, before he sinks to his knees, head in hands, and weeps. There is too much happening here, too much newness, and nothing to anchor it against. I turn around and step outside.

…

On the stairs that curl downward and out of sight, are a collection of beautiful twenty-somethings, all with matching lanyards announcing that they are staff. A group of girls are parked on the steps, passing a cigarette lazily to each other. I collapse next to them, and turn to look behind me, at the massed crowd.

“What is that?” I ask, “What was Latvia thinking?”
“You should see Spain. There is a giant baby. Like a car, some small car, that big. It has eyes and they are dead,” says the one closest to me, as she passes the cigarette back to her friend.
“Dead?”
“I do not know if this is how you say in English, but it is like real, but not. Because it looks real, but not so real to be the exact, it is more, uh, dead.”
“Right, uncanny valley.”
“Valley?”
“When something is almost real, but not quite real enough. And because it’s almost real, it makes you feel uncomfortable. Like, I don’t know. Like robots that move like people do or, or movies. Like animated movies where the characters look almost real.”
“This is a valley? Like a space between hill?” and she makes a gesture with her hands approximating a vee.
“It’s called uncanny valley. I don’t know why.”
“Well, the baby is in the valley, and the Latvia is crazy.”
“That is the most sense anyone has made to me tonight.”

It turns out that they are the staff from the Estonian pavilion, and they have just found out that there is a competing party at the Angolan pavilion, at the other end of the expo grounds. They are debating whether it is worth walking the significant distance required to go and check it out. Apparently party stands-offs like this are common, and it is a mark of status if you can throw the party that manages to attract everyone, all the staff from the rapidly assembled tower apartment blocks that surround the grounds here, sucking the punters from the far reaches until it is dawn and the army of cleaners shuffle in to hit the reset switch.

We are going to Angola.

…

Distance is screwy here. As with so much in China, what is represented as adjacent squares of colour on a neatly labelled map turns out to be a thirty minute slog through the darkness, the hulking polygonal shapes of unlit modern architecture looming like fragments of a half-remembered nightmare.

We forge past the still traditional shapes of the Asian and Pacific pavilions, which recall temples and monuments, gaudy and ostentatious, and head toward the more theoretical geometry of the European pavilions. Further still, and the African buildings are smaller, squarer and considerably less refined. It is quite clear that there is a party happening at the Angolan building.

Tall, well-dressed, Africans cluster around the entrance, and an impossibly skinny model, microphone in hand, interviews a man that appears to be wearing a barely contained bag of railway spikes, wrapped in a tea towel on his head. Inside, it is madness. A black, barely-lit square, people everywhere and the Chinese dancers from Latvia in a corner, having taken up residency.

I talk to someone who claims to be royalty, and someone else who claims he is full of shit. I dance. I sweat. I realise that my quota for the bizarre has long been exceeded and that all the strangeness is beginning to press at the seams, threatening to spill out in a stream of brightly-lit capsules, rendered on architect’s foolscap and then made massive. I push my way back into the cold and begin the walk home.

Outside, away from the huddled crowds, I pause for a moment to get my bearings. I feel a hand on my back, and a smiling Filipino introduces himself and points me in the right direction. He’s a musician, playing in the stage show, but wants to be an architect. He talks about Gehry, and the tensile strength of steel plating, and the place of deconstructivism in these temporary structures, and this all seems very relevant as we stride through the darkened architectural canyons of this pre-dawn space.

The final building I remember seeing is that of Finland, and it looks like an iceberg, shining and adrift on a sea of concrete, alone in the dark.

Posted in Mwah on Sun Jan 23, 07:13 pm.

‘Chee cheong fan, one please,’ I ask the lady who is stooped, scowling, behind the counter.
‘Pork. You can, ah?’ she retorts.
‘No problem’
‘Chilli? Dai, ah. Dai dai.’
‘Please, and a coffee. Kopi o. Siew dai, okay?’
‘Can. You sit, ah. I bring’ and she smiles as she takes the plastic note and inspects the tiny transparent pattern in the corner.

The two aunties that run this hole-in-the-wall coffee house at the arse end of Chinatown have a polished double act that indicates many years together. They yell to each other from opposite ends of the shophouse, and create a bubble of bustle and bluster as they stomp up and down, slapping the tables with sodden rags. The woman at the register grabs a plate, piles it high with food, and then passes it back to the other auntie without a glace, confident in the knowledge that a hand with be there, ready to receive it and relay it to its destination.

It is the first Sunday after New Year, and even the flies seem lazy. They buzz in slow circles, not bothering to land. The streets are near deserted, shops shuttered and barred, and the only traffic an open-backed truck full of laborers in matching blue shirts. It does a slow lap of the block, looking for shade, and then parks under an overhanging awning and turns on its hazard lights. No one in the back moves.

At the front of the shop, perched on the myriad burners, beneath contraptions girdled with frayed wires and caked-on fat, are an array of pots, steaming. I can smell the rich anise tang of bah ku teh, and the fatty note of pork hock, until the ancient grinder is cursed at, hit, and forced into service. The aroma of coffee floods through the shop. At the table next to me three people in business shirts, a heaped plate of kaya-toast in front of them, talk of the year ahead.

From the street comes the sound of the Indian temple up the road and, if I crane my head, I can just make out the heaped piles of shoes sitting on the pavement, beneath the watchful eyes of a porcelain cow, liquid eyes glossy in dead painted perfection. “This year, I get fit,” the eldest of the group says, as he grabs a piece of toast, smeared with butter and smothered in sticky kaya, “start to run, lah.”

When it arrives, clunked onto the table with a nod, the coffee is black, viscous and strong, exactly as a cup Hock Chew’s finest should be. My eyes water as I take the first sip, and I concentrate on the chopstick dexterity required to pick up the slippery cylinders of rice flour that are my breakfast. At the neighbouring table, the final piece of toast is snapped up and fingers wiped on greasy napkins. “It’s 2011. A good year. Heng, ah.”

It is, and it will be. I can feel it.

Posted in Mwah on Mon Jan 3, 11:25 am.