Musings at the bay

A friend of mine vowed never to visit this particular MRT station. Just last week, I found myself there - along with 5 others to celebrate the birthday of a fellow bandsmate cum blogger of mine, XinHui. It's weird how her blog still turns up funny on my browser. I figure it has to do with my settings.


Station control, Marina Bay

Marina Bay is one of those stations you would go to for a specific purpose. Either you went there to have a steamboat dinner in the evenings or to fly kites in the large fields. I remember chasing after small colourful kites when I was small with my father. The thing is , I never thought Marina Bay much of a place to hang out with friends.

My friend found that out while munching his breakfast from Breadtalk in the station. Almost immediately, the station master called him over. Peering over his glasses while writing smoothly, he told him that eating was not allowed in the station and that he was to be fined. Suddenly feeling the prospect of being five hundred dollars poorer and nursing his growling stomach, he watched on as the station master wrote the receipt for the fine.

He was fined much less , (in the region of tens) but what made him furious was the announcement that came after the fine.

It was an announcement not to eat or drink in the stations or trains.

I was almost curious to find out what would make us be fined $500 when everyone in the group arrived. We never got to find out as we made our way to a relatively unknown steamboat reataurant in a van not unlike those you see in films when a kidnapping was in progress. Judging from the haphazard way the van skidded about, I was pretty sure the driver was involved in one too.


Too fast, too furious for the birthday girl

Until he deposited us outside a steamboat buffet. Having reached in one piece, we chose a rather well-lit table under the trees, which probably accounts for the better than average photographs you see.

The interesting bit about this place is the way they served the soupbase.First they decanted the soup from a large metal pot into red laundry pails and these in turn to little metal kettles which have largely gone out of fashion.


Up the spout

And what is steamboat without seafood? Unfortunately though, the best seafood we could get our hands on there were the modestly-sized prawns.


They're alive!

Modest they may be, but boy were they fresh. They were so fresh, they were still wriggling when I placed them on the hotplate. Well, some of them anyway. I don't know about you but I feel sorry for them then. That guilt lasted until about the time they entered my digestive system.


Perilous way ahead

And so the polytechnic students talked about their poly attachments, the undergraduates complained about their oncoming exams while the guy in NS(i.e. me) largely sat around pretending not to exist until the opportune time came for telling a lame joke or a particularly delectable morsel came along.

The night culminated in the cutting of the birthday cake.


Picture perfect

But not before a whole load of phototaking and dripping entire candles worth of wax(just for the above photo alone!) into the pure white cake which turned out to be uncommonly good.

I wished that I could say the night had ended as happily as you could see in the above picture but Eeyan , Xinhui and I decided to catch a midnight movie. A movie whose title involved skeletons.Sure, The Sleketon Key was scary and all but what was even more so happened before even the movie started.

The audience were happily watching the advertisements (which were getting funnily by the day) when a loud arguement ensued between two movie-goers behind us. One brought his family along while the other was on his own. Before long, the fight had turned into a lesson involving multifaious expletives. The lone guy suddenly did something which made my heart jump into my mouth.

With a sickening wench, he pulled free a fire extinguisher and raised it above his head. He was a cobra about to strike. As if in slow motion, the fire extinguisher was lowered, closing on its target. I heaved a sigh of relief when a member of the audience intervened and stopped him in time. By now, most of the audience turned back to the screen to mind their business. The movie started with the victim's wife yelling at the violent man for wielding a dangerous weapon.

When we got out about two hours later, the police were outside questioning the two men. A blue fire extinguisher lay on the floor.