It's not too shabby having a job that took me to Spain and England one week, then Singapore the next. Or so I told myself as I hopped on my Eva Airlines flight (Eva who?) from San Francisco via Taipei to Singapore. Twenty hours, and two calendar days later, I alight in steamy Singapore, where everything runs efficiently if maybe a little antiseptically.
After a day or so acclimatizing - i.e. sleeping off the buzzing in my ears caused by the crushing flight - I got the subway into downtown Singapore, and wandered for a couple of hours around the Marina. I was looking for one of the Hawker's Markets - the collections of stalls selling local foods. But all I found was a massive mall housing Gucci, Prada, etc, all at the foot of the Marina Bay Sands - topped by what looks like a boat that spans the three towers.
By the time I wandered the mall, the Marina, the Towers, and everything around them, I was exhausted, hungry, and hot.
So I found myself at Boat Quay, a delightful setting to look out over the Singapore River and address all three - my exhaustion, hunger, and temperature.
That can be the only reason I picked Forum Seafood, because it otherwise displayed everything that would normally warn me off a place like this, namely: the name - I don't lust after Seafood; the setting - a line of tourist-centric bars and restaurants, featuring everything from "genuine British fish and chips" to tanks full of revolting looking molluscs and fierce fish. Worst of all, my chosen eaterie had that hated feature of many tourist Chinese restaurants, boards outside featuring photos of each of their dishes.
Despite all of that, hunger won out, so I settled down and chose the beef satay and the crispy chicken. Washed down by a couple of pints of draft Tiger Beer, it made the usually dull experience of eating on my own - even somewhere as agreeable as harbor-side Singapore - to be genuinely relaxing.
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