Serpent Across the Mekong: Evening of the Soontra Beetroot-Passionfruit Juice

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Opened with great fanfare two years ago, its scraggly palm trees still strapped to their training poles, Suvarnabhumi is already visibly falling apart, dark clouds of murk gathering on the only recently blemishless vast expanses of raw concrete. I navigate past the touts to the SHUTTLE BUS stop on the lower level, its Thai purity unblemished by any other words in heathen languages, and partake of a free tour of catering buildings, customs compounds and parking garages before being dropped off at the Transport Terminal, where lower-class riffraff such as myself can board ordinary public buses or avail themselves of taxis without paying surcharges.

35 bahts’ worth of Bus 551 whisks me to Bangkok, in the sense of an impatient chef attempting to whip up cream that he had forgotten to refrigerate, but the clots of traffic crowding around Rama IX’s fine establishments like the Colonze 4 Massage parlour (SPA SAUNA KARAOKE NO BRA) eventually dissolve and barely two hours later I’m at Paragon.

A Nikon camera show is in progress in one of the atria, with scruffy photojournalist types and even scruffier geek types fondling lenses the size and resolving power of telescopes while teenage models in princess dresses ignore them totally and chatter about makeup. I head up to my regular haunt, the True Cafe on the 4th floor, and position myself and a glass of ice tea under what looks like a giant perming machine, vague washes of color projected onto the wall behind me while an giant dot matrix display on another wall flips through True propaganda.
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Serpent Across the Mekong: Flight of the Thai Airways TG404 Airbus A330 seat 40A

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Haiku time:

Tee gee four oh four
Seat pitch twenty eight inches
No one hears your screams

TG404 from Singapore to Bangkok is scheduled smack dab in the post-meridiem, which means it’s pretty much worthless for business travel. This has two consequences: as fares are cheap and availability is good, I seem to end up on it whenever I’m connecting out of Bangkok to somewhere else; and because the flight’s passengers tend to be the very definition of “low yield”, TG doesn’t hesitate to field its crappiest aircraft on it. Today, at least, they’ve replaced their previously ubiquitous Airbus A300, held together with baling wire, duct tape and chewing gum imported into Singapore with special permission from the Dutiable, Controlled & Prohibited Goods department of Singapore Customs, with a somewhat less antiquated A330. While I kind of miss the A300’s Commodore 64-vintage sickly beige interior and rotary audio channel selector, which always brought back fond memories of childhood flights when my knees were not necessarily jammed into the seat in front of me, in all other respects this plane is a mild improvement.

Despite Thailand’s generally stunning genetics and the same trowelful of makeup as that used to much success by Singapore Girls, Thai Airways flight attendants are generally not very attractive, doubtless because they received their positions through family connections in the vast, corrupt bowels of this state-owned airline. (A phenomenon easily observed elsewhere in the region, compare Garuda vs Lion or Malaysian vs Air Asia.) The plane is packed to the brim, and while waiting for Porn the trolley dolly(*) to fetch me my inevitable coconutty curry — as they say in Japan: Atsumono ni korite, namasu wo fuku, or “Learn from the stew, blow on the raw fish”, and ’tis a foolish man indeed who eats the “Western” meal selection on TG more than once — I hammer away at my Japanese kanji drills on my laptop like a crack-addled chimpanzee.

(*) Yes, really. It’s Thai for “blessing”.
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Serpent Across the Mekong: Day of the Sign Banning Durians on Public Transport

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My molded plastic seat hurtles sideways at 50 miles an hour. What passes for countryside in Singapore — carefully tended simulacra of jungles, housing blocks painted vaguely sinister shades of pastel with posters proclaiming “RACIAL HARMONY FOR TOTAL DEFENSE” (this being Singaporean code for “BE HAPPY OR I’LL KILL YOU“) — pass behind the head of the youngish Chinese office lady tapping away SMSes opposite me on her Hello Kitty-encrusted mobile, perfectly round glasses (but, not, thankfully, the moustache) robbed from General Tojo’s grave, complexion of a peach that ought to have been thrown out a few days ago and bouffant Kimjongilesque haircut enhanced by a constellation of expensive prohibitions, from flammable materials to stinky fruit, plastered on the wall beside her. A hypnotic spray of dots near the ceiling (1 center hole, 4 around it at the compass points, multiply by three to 12, shift and repeat 12, shift and repeat 12, shift and repeat 12, end) audibly advises us in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil to press the Emergency Communication Button if we see anything suspicious.

Imagine Changi Airport as a cluster of fire engine red water-filled balloons, quivering in the tropical heat, pressurized dihydrogen monoxide squirming for release from its plastic confines. Shortly after station CG1 “Expo”, the Kawasaki Heavy Industries/Nippon Sharyo C751B segmented steel bullet punches its way underground with a WHUMPP, first heading due north, then curving 90 degrees to pass under runway 02L/20R and then — we enter Matrix bullet-time here — squarely impacting into Terminal 3, which implodes in slow motion with a PLOOSH, showering rain on all sides, as the train punches a hole on its way in and, within seconds, punches out. The train is now braking for CG2 “Changi Airport” (an eerily distorted “All passengers please disembark” announcement plays in the background), but it still retains enough motive power to poke about one carriage length (23 meters) into Terminal 2, which punctures with a less convincing PHLUMPP like punching a fat kid in the abdomen and, Newton’s laws being in effect, disgorges its load of water towards the offending object.

A last pitter-patter of drops and we return to real time. Only Terminal 1 and the pathetic shrunken little brown lump of the Budget Terminal, hanging from the deflated remains of T2 like a colostomy bag, remain intact, if wet. I have chosen my seat in carriage 5 of 6, which positions me next to the up escalator into T3, where I trek past the orchideous Crowne Plaza and board the Changi Airport Automated People Mover System. A Mitsubishi Crystal Mover on the PMS(*) North route B-C Landside beeps its way to Station B, and I board and take the front seat facing the Emergency Escape Hatch, staring ahead through the plexiglass at three parallel tracks diverging to lurk into and sneak around Terminal 1. (*) Yes, it really is called the “PMS” in bureaucratese.

In the interest of narrative continuity, Terminal 1 fails to implode on arrival at Station C. I obtain a near-rectangular piece of cardboard at check-in desk, insert a rounded piece of plastic and an opposable digit into the appropriate orifices of the Enhanced Immigration Automated Clearance System, take yet another escalator to the Commercially Important Passengers level (always a depressing reminder of why airlines value me) and enter.

Changi’s Thai Airways lounge has undergone a welcome refurbishment since my last visit here. It’s been afternoon for a while now, but they’re still serving breakfast, including specimens labeled “Smoked salmon butter lettuce sandwich” and “Chicken mayonnaise butter lettuce croissant”, and I sample both before realizing that “butter lettuce” is not a meltingly smooth cultivar of Lactuca sativa, but two separate ingredients.

Outside, T1 is being refurbished for the third time since 2003, wiry little Bangladeshis in dusty blue overalls nipping their heads out from partitions covered in meaningless slogans selling an Exciting, Vibrant and Enjoyable Changi Experience(tm). This time, they’re ripping out a perfectly functional ceiling and rebuilding it again a little higher up.

At gate. Boarding starts.
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Serpent Across the Mekong: SIN-BKK-VTE-LXG-CEI-BKK-SIN on TG/QV/FD

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SERPENT ACROSS THE MEKONG
also known as
The State Railway of Thailand is Decadent and Depraved

When there is a floating stone and a giant serpent across the Mekhong, Lao will be at permanent prosperity. 

–anonymous Lao sage

The Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge opened on April 8, 1994.
The inauguration of the first passenger train service across the bridge from Nong Khai, Thailand to Tha Naleng, Laos was on March 5, 2009.
This is the story of what happened on the 6th.
(Plus another week’s worth of dazed wandering around rural Laos and the Golden Triangle after that.)

SIN-BKK-VTE-LXG-CEI-BKK-SIN

Readers are asked to excuse the florid verbosity (or maybe that should be “pleonasmic prolixity”) of the prose — you try writing a trip report while reading Infinite Jest. If it gets unbearable, skip ahead and it’ll get better. Or, quite possibly, worse.

Five Flights in Five Words: SIN-FRA/HHN-TMP/HEL-FRA-MUC-SIN on LH/FR/AY Y

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Wordy trip report? Not this.
Five words in every line.
Map and flight list: http://openflights.org/trip/214

LH 779 SIN-FRA seat 55K

Twelve hours in tin can.
Ancient jumbo, even toilet scuffed.
Man, not flying SQ sucks.

Mainz

Beer. Sausage. Beer. Schnitzel. Beer.

Frankfurt Book Fair

Weekdays all work, weekend play.
Bounteous, mostly underaged, cosplayer bonanza.
Next time, bring better lens.

Deutsche Bahn

Unreserved tickets are a pleasure.
But whence famed German punctuality?

Cologne

The Dom: yes, it’s big.
Lounge in Marriott Cologne rocks.

Wuppertal

Suspended monorail for the win.
Even had to buy T-shirt.

Assmannshausen

Everybody else here is retired.
Good wine though. Where’s Tittenmädchenplatz?

Burg Eltz

It’s a pretty castle alright,
but I preferred the hike.

Luxembourg

Arab oil sheikhdom, only European.
Hearing spoken Lëtzebuergesch scares me.
Judd mat gaardebounen with Diekirch!

FR 1921 HHN-TMP seat ??

Ryanair: it’s not so bad
when expecting rubber glove proctology.
(Well, OK, it’s still bad.)

Tampere

Salsa with five blonde pixies,
plus Finnish mixology until three.
It was worth the hangover.

Helsinki

Michelin starred lunch, elf shopping,
flourescent minigolf, more wild parties.
Even the weather mostly cooperated.

AY829 HEL-FRA E190 seat 20A

First AY flight in years.
Bumpy Embraer, sad snack pack.
I’ll stick with Star Alliance.

HI Frankfurt Airport-Nord

Albanian shuttle-cabbie brought along girlfriend.
Time-warp motel free on PointSavers.
Decent room, chocolate, decaying fruit.

FRA LH Senator Lounge

Healthy German breakfast: beer & sausage.

LH966 FRA-MUC A321 seat 30F

Bigger than the Helsinki plane.
More time waiting than flying.
Take off, snack, circle, land.

MUC LH Senator Lounge

Munchen wrapped in foggy quilt.
Empty terminal is shaded gray.
Only my flight not delayed.

LH790 MUC-SIN A340 seat 55K

So much nicer than jumbo.
AVOD, decent pitch, great service.
But ending soon? Load 20%…

Conclusion

Patronage and praise much appreciated.
Next time, I’ll try haiku. 

Reviews of a Gourmet Snob: Jaan, Singapore

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A friend of mine recently came into possession of a stack of CapitaLand vouchers, and while looking for a place to dispose of them, we realized that the entire Equinox complex perched atop the Swissotel Stamford — not long ago the world’s tallest hotel — accepts them.  What better excuse for a birthday splurge at my near-namesake, the newly renovated Jaan?

Making reservations at Jaan is hard, not because it’s so popular, but because you have to go through the Swissotel’s centralized system and they usually just refuse to answer the phone.  But reserve we did, and I asked if I could bring along a nice bottle of Lebanese wine…  to which I was told that yes, certainly, but a token corkage fee of S$100 (about 5x the cost of the bottle) would be charged.   Yowza!  Scratch that then.

We showed up at 7 PM, along with two other groups of customers, only to find the entrance to the restaurant closed.   After five minutes of drumming our fingers and collectively wondering if we were in the right place, somebody finally showed up and let us in; not, perhaps, the best way to treat your customers.  The view from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the 70th floor is impressive, although I was mildly disappointed to find us facing towards the endless housing block jumble of eastern Singapore, instead of the rather more dramatic Singapore River, banking district and Chinatown area.

Jaan offers 5/8 course tasting/degustation menus for $180/250 (plus around $100 extra for wine pairings), but we decided to go for a la carte.  The a la carte menu was fairly stripped down: half a dozen appetizers, three Poissons et crustaces, three Viandes, and half a dozen desserts, all listed in French and English.

Amuse-bouche

Prawn and mango ceviche with kaffir lime froth, served in a shot glass.  This was just terrible, a pretentious attempt at fusion that didn’t work on any level at all.

Super-skinny breadsticks (crostini?) with squid ink-parmesan puree and butter.  A work of art in appearance — if not for the waitress’s explanation, I would’ve thought what appeared like a bunch of twigs in a glass was a table decoration — and very tasty too, especially the subtle sea flavors of the squid ink dip.

Appetizer

His: Tartar of Hokkaido sea scallop with dabs of oscietra caviar and a spray of random vegetables ($68).  The one whole grilled scallop was mindblowingly tasty; the tartar paste was just generically fishy (and I usually love raw scallop).  The grudgingly dribbled caviar came atop halves of baby potatoes, and the veggie side dishes included artichoke, asparagus and peas, carefully boiled and laid out into a strip not unlike a Japanese garden.  A little uneven, but pretty good.

Hers: Foie gras ice cream (!) and a layeed foie gras pastry of sorts ($5x?).  This was really, really good, especially the pastry-thing: the pureed foie gras with a little crunch from the pastry with a little sweetness and spice from the sauce just hit all the right spots, and while the idea of mixing goose liver and ice cream sounds pretty disgusting, it worked quite nicely.  Best dish of the evening.

Main course

His: “Duo of Pigeon”, two halves grilled in red-wine-type sauce, plus a miniature salad with two pigeon legs served cold in a mild Chinese-style sauce and pats of apple-ginger(?) compote ($68).  The grilled pigeon was quite OK, if no match for the duck at Kafe Warisan; the teeny tiny little legs were very tasty, but, well, teeny tiny.  In all, competent but unextraordinary.

Hers: Pumpkin soup ravioli with popcorn and black cod a la plancha with bacon bits ($5x?).  Yes, bacon bits, and intensely salty ones at that, which pretty much obliterated any taste the cod (already plenty salty in itself) might have had.  I snagged one of the raviolis and kind of liked the intense sweet soup within, but she didn’t, at all.  Quite disappointing.

Dessert

I was somewhat intrigued by the offering of le bar “Snickers” with ice cream ($20), but in the end, we just shared some chocolate mousse with white chocolate vodka sorbet ($22).  The sorbet was quite good, although the vodka was hardly noticeable, but only a single spoonful was served and it melted pretty much immediately.  The mousse came wrapped in a unidentifiable and quite tasteless red jelly wrapper and was quite dense, so much so that it was hardly a mousse anymore, but hey, it was chocolatey.

And finally, the house plied us with little violet-colored lavender pastries (very sweet: I liked ’em, she didn’t), orange peel dipped in chocolate (usually a favorite of mine, but these were kind of blah), and a miniature Madeleine-type pastry flavored with almond (?), all served on a metal plate engraved with “Jaan by Andre”. Ooh.

Drinks

Jaan has an extensive wine menu, spanning the globe (albeit with an emphasis on French) and the gamut from $90 to $17,000 bottles (a Chateau Margaux), but they do not offer wine by the glass.  We (fine, she) opted for a Beni di Batasiolo Barbaresco 2003 ($160), which was a very good choice: a very light and drinkable red, which paired quite nicely with the fish dishes as well.

My eyeballs were set rolling, though, by their other drink menu: this is the first time I’ve seen a water menu in a restaurant, offering everything from artisanal Welsh well waters to bottles from Japanese mountain springs, all (needless to say) at ridiculous prices, some north of $20 for a 0.5L bottle.  Our pick of a very lightly carbonated Saint-Géron ($12.50/750mL) was OK — at least it’s better than Evian.

Overall

The damage done came to just over $500, easily my most expensive dinner in Singapore (or, on second thought, anywhere), and we didn’t even order from the expensive end of the menu, which had things like Kobe beef steak for $125.  The service was very good, the views were nice, the setting was OK, but I couldn’t help but feel that, at these prices, the food was a bit of a letdown.  I doubt I’ll be back.

A Querulous QR Quest to Q8: Kuwait International Airport

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Kuwait, the airport, is just weird. Entry into the terminal is through a bizarre scrum of four gates leading to different check-in areas for different airlines, with cars honking at each other outside and a constant flow of passengers, trolleys and porters trying to squeeze through both in and out. If going to Zones 2 or 3, you first have to trudge through an honest-to-Allah multilevel shopping mall, complete with Debenhams department store and Harley-Davidson outlet; on the other side, finally, lies Check-In Zone 3 for local LCC Jazeera (crammed full of pax) and Qatar (almost queueless). After a brief scare of demanding proof of my Singapore residency, successfully bluffed by flashing my Access Card (which is no such thing, but has enough state seals, embedded photos and IC contacts to make it look terribly convincing), I was checked in and could start wondering how I’d spend the next two hours.

The inside of the airport is old-fashioned but well-maintained. The gates go from number 1 to number 26, which might make you think KWI is pretty big, but unfortunately everything between 7 and 20 appears to be missing. There’s a boozeless but nonetheless amazingly popular dutyfree (why, I know not; an iPod Shuffle 1GB costs nearly twice what it does in Singapore), a McD’s/Pizza Hut, a Costa Coffee, and that was it. Except for a Ghiraoui chocolate boutique, which I inspected in detail, playing a fun game of “spot the chocolate” by comparing the unlabeled pralines with an illustrated brochure, and eventually handing over my last five dinars to the equally bored (but rather cute) Filipina salesgirl in exchange for rather more than 5 KD worth of chocolate.

On the way in it was the ammo boxes, on the way out it was the soldiers: none in full uniform, mind you, but those GI Joe haircuts, desert camo everything and combat boots are a bit of a giveaway. Even some of the Filipina ladies were toting about “US Army Reserve”-branded bags.

And that was that. Boarding was ordered, we were marched into the airline by tube (no buses here), and the Kuwait Towers loomed on the horizon as we did a few turns and then set off to Doha and home.

A Querulous QR Quest to Q8: Kuwait City

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Kuwait was rather more fun than I expected. My arrival wasn’t particularly propitious: it took me over an hour to get my on-arrival visa, I was stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the hotel, the city was wreathed in a persistent slow-motion sandstorm for the first three days, filling the air and even the swimming pool with dust, and at work half the hardware on site was missing and the customer’s idea of reasonable timelines was rather different from ours. But the Courtyard Kuwait City is a mind-bogglingly amazing hotel for a Courtyard, our partner’s technical people were actually competent (such a refreshing change from the usual), and Kuwait had one immense advantage over my previous work site: it’s not Saudi Arabia.

It only slowly sunk into me how different these two “conservative Islamic” countries are. Yes, both ban alcohol and pork and like to execute drug smugglers… but that’s about it, as in almost all other things, Kuwait is infinitely more laissez-faire than the Saudis. Women can, and do, wear pretty much what they want, with a remarkable array of head-turners at the (ultra-expensive) Arraya Centre mall next to the hotel and some even lounging about in bikinis at the hotel pool. Music in public is allowed, which — even subconsciously — just makes a huge difference to how lively a restaurant or shop feels. And while prayer calls were piped into shopping malls and echoed along the streets, nobody cared if you trotted off into the mosque or not. Saudi papers, and streets, and TV shows, are full of effusive paeans to the Guardian of the Two Holy Mosques HH King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and the vast tentacular branches of the al-Sauds; Kuwaiti papers, on the other hand, are full of Parliament debates, squabbles between voting blocks, elections, demonstrations and all the noisy trappings of a democracy; while Kuwait certainly isn’t a real one, it certainly feels like one, and even the occasional paeans to the wisdom and sagacity of HH the Amir were usually tucked away on page C17.

Above all, though, the best thing about Kuwait is just that you could feel at ease: in Saudi, you’re always a little on edge, not even because of the ethereal threat of terrorism but just always being a little unsure if you’re staying within the tightly prescribed boundaries of Allowed behavior…

The downside to visiting Kuwait in late June, though, is the heat. After the dust storm and its momentary (comparative) coolness wore off, the mercury crept closer and closer to 50 degrees, making the daytime feel literally — not figuratively, literally — like a sauna. Metaphoric saunas are usually associated with humidity, but no, the real thing is actually quite dry, and that’s how it’s in Kuwait too: you can walk outside for a few minutes, thinking “gee, now that’s hot”, before you start to sweat. But the evenings were quite tolerable, and even the daytime furnace heat was almost enjoyable if spent at the Courtyard’s breezy rooftop pool, which by afternoon had heated to the point that the jacuzzi next to it was usually cooler.

A Querulous QR Quest to Q8: Doha to Kuwait

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QR132 KWI-DOH Y A321 seat 14F
QR137 DOH-KWI Y A320 seat 18ANear-identical planes, identical service. On the tarmac in DOH before boarding, we stood in the bus and watched box after identical box of what was most probably ammunition for the war in Iraq, all marked with orange “EXPLOSIVE” diamonds, being loaded into the belly of the plane. Eek?The A321 had the same seats as the A330, minus the AVOD (and hence no more metal box stealing half your foot space, yay!), while the A320’s styling was more old-fashioned — I thought I was on a B737 at first — but no different in seat pitch or any other amenities.

The hop from Doha to Kuwait or v.v. is only just over an hour, so inflight entertainment consisted of exactly the same Tom & Jerry cartoons both ways. We were served a “refreshment” consisting of a small sandwich, cookies, a miniature Bounty chocolate bar and tea/coffee/juice/water.

Probably the most memorable thing about the second flight was my seatmate Handy Assmat(*), who showed up wearing a pink polo shirt, shorts, flip-flops and carry-on consisting in toto of a tiny Swarowski gift bag and a mobile phone. Fashion faux pas aside, this alone wasn’t enough to qualify for being an Assmat — in fact, I was initially mildly jealous of such fearsome packing-fu and Zen-like disregard for material things — but he soon started chomping away at those dingleberries: first a loud phone conversation informing not only his girlfriend but everybody in the vicinity that he was only in eco because first class was full (which it wasn’t, I might add), and then he proceeded to delete messages from his phone, one by one, throughout the entire flight, taxi, takeoff, and landing. Clickety clickety clickety. And none of the cabin crew, who passed by half a dozen times and clearly saw it, said a thing. (Was it in flight mode? I’m not sure, but how would the flight crew know?) I was even more surprised to see him board the same connecting flight to Singapore… but once on board I never saw him again. Good riddance.

(*) A guy by this name is actually the manager of a Chili’s in Kuwait, and his first name is correctly spelled Hamdy, but it seemed rather more appropriate this way.

A Querulous QR Quest to Q8: Doha Airport

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Qatar is the world’s only country whose name starts with the letter Q, and they don’t let you forget it: in the five-minute ride from plane to terminal, you pass signs for QAS, QAAC, QNB, QJet and QTel. But DOH is also the closest I’ve seen to an airline monoculture anywhere in the world: both planes on the tarmac and flights on the information boards were 95% Qatar Airways. The DOH-based frequent flyer isn’t going to have much choice.

The airport is amazingly small and unpretentious for what may be the world’s richest country’s main gateway: one runway, one small rectangular main terminal with no jetaways, only buses. On the inside, DOH feels like a recently-built airport in a small city in a rich European country: slick, modern, supremely efficient, yet without the slightest bit of the usual Arabic penchant for ostentation with gold paint, chandeliers, palm trees and whatnot. Even duty free feels downright restrained. Enjoy it while it lasts, they’re already busily building a new DOH which will be umpteen times larger…

I had tight connections both ways — 1:20 on the way in, a scary-sounding 0:50 on the way out — but Doha’s minimum connecting time is 45 minutes and, indeed, everything worked like clockwork. I would even have had time to duty-free shop on the way back, but at midnight the queues at the registers were long and I was scared out of line by snippy “passengers on the flight to Singapore report to gate for IMMEDIATE boarding!” announcements coupled with a boarding pass admonition to show up 20 minutes before departure… which (inevitably) just left me with time to drum my fingers in the bus departure lounge. Gah.