Singapore Breakfast

I do know better, I really do. I rationalised the $25.00 hotel breakfast yesterday as being necessary since I had a busy day coming up. But it was an “American” breakfast of indifferent tomato’s, cardboard bacon, and rubber eggs. All leaving me with the impression they were cooked up the previous night and run under a grill when I appeared in the dining room. Outside and around the corner for $1.90 was something far more satisfying – at every level. That pittance gets you out of the air-conditioning and into the fresh morning air, with the (manual) street sweepers, shopkeepers rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, single workers drifting around the streets, through all the students heading off to school and a handful of young business types who all look very earnest. Years ago scattered around Singapore were all sorts of splendid dining places marked by their rusty roofs, cats, unhygienic conditions (though I never fell ill at any of them) and the tastiest dishes around. Now they are mainly rounded up and are to be found in more hygienic circumstances as so called Hawker Centres. Or around the grounds of the numerous apartment blocks that distinguish this city.

So, not rationalising any daft motivation as I did yesterday I made my way into the morning and inhaled the warm air, washed clean by a might y storm late last night, and order fresh red bean pastries and deep fried bread and a flavoured cold tea, standing in line with people like this man who were opening up their own stalls. Read a book as I slowly ate breakfast and was reminded that riches have nothing to do with buying an expensive breakfast, or saving by spending so little this morning, but in the engagement with the cook across language barriers, and her quick, connecting laugh, savouring of the slow pace and briefly sharing the dining experience with fellow citizens of earth who were making their various ways this morning.