This Saturday1) I experienced fine food and entertainment in a very nice way: I was invited to the birthday barbeque of Jian Wei. Read how to celebrate the Singaporean way in this post…
My journey started with an SMS: “Yo tomolo my chalet is at downtown east 2011…” With my Swiss background, I wondered whether chalet meant a traditional wooden house in the mountains, but in the Singaporean context that was rather unlikely. Anyway, Jian Wei politely waited for me at Downtown East bus stop and lead me through a maze of restaurants, attractions and grey conrete barbeque pits to his chalet: a small two-storey bungalow with double-bed, TV, bathroom and a veranda with table and barbeque pit. Although it stood in a row with a dozen other small two-storey bungalows with double-bed, TV, bathroom and barbeque pit, it was really quite cozy.
Since I was the first guest to arrive, I could help to get the food for the BBQ. It was delivered in three big cardboard / styropor boxes to the nearest carpark. All we had to do was to sign a receipt and carry it back to the chalet. Everything else was ready: charcoal, meat, noodles…
At this point I have to make a stop. The title and the story so far suggest that a BBQ in Singapore is a streamlined activity for the masses, carefully standardised and organised with a wave of your contactless credit card. That’s definitely not true. But Singapore is the fourth country in the world with respect to population density, and if Switzerland had 6369 inhabitants per square km instead of 176, Eichholz would be an asphalted place divided into small compartments, each with BBQ pit ;-)
The truth is that I was very impressed by this barbeque. The range of foods was amazing: prawns, chicken, satay with ketupan rice, fish wrapped in pandan leaves, stingray, popiah, noodles, chips with several kinds of sauce, chinese sausages, fish balls… The only drink was lemon green tea, so nobody got drunk. Instead we had very interesting discussions, answered questions about Singapore and Europe. Everybody was amazed by magic tricks of one of the guests. Happy Birthday was sung in Chinese and English… all in all a great evening!
1)Sorry, it has taken a while for this post to finally get published… so it’s not this Saturday anymore, but January 26th.