Jolly Glee Pizza (from Pizza Hut)

Roast chicken, turkey bacon, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce make the Jolly Glee a festive pizza. Notice the cherry, too.

Pizza Hut has a new gimmick for Singaporean customers. Previous gimmick here. Instead of actually making tasty products, Pizza Hut now offers a Jolly Glee pizza. It has all the ingredients you might expect from a Christmas dinner – poultry, pseudo-pork, potatoes, cranberries – plus some you didn't know you wanted. Click the picture to see a larger image and guess what else lurks beneath the lattice of crust. I can spy red peppers and onions, but I am unable to swear that the yellow items are simply yellow peppers. The website says it's pineapple. Not satisfied? Apparently there is also cheese in the crust... and a glacé cherry! I knew this was missing something.

More Christmas Decor

Thidwick (YouTube link) the fiber-optic reindeer makes spirits bright along Marina Bay in Singapore.

As a complement to an earlier post about tropical Christmas decorations, check out the silver reindeer sculptures downtown in Singapore. These whimsical cervids are just outside the new Marina Bay Financial Centre (already colloquially MBFC), overlooking the same bay as the casino and the streets that host the Singapore Grand Prix.

I can see there is a silvery, tinsel-ly artistic attempt here, but on second glance the reindeer actually looks like a rabbit with an impossibly spindly neck and legs with an even more impossible silver lichen rinceaux spewing from his head.

Also it's been rainy in Singapore this month. Today it rained for more than twelve hours straight. Viewers might notice some damp, shiny streets.

Deck the Malls 2011: Sub-Zero

Welcome to another tropical Christmas.

Last year this blog showcased some of the festive decorations at our local mall, and the festooning this year is again baffling enough to warrant another post. I took some pictures on Saturday at Velocity in Novena, one of the numerous malls stationed atop an MRT (subway/underground/metro) station.

The mall starts Christmas season on 11 November. There is no Thanksgiving to hold back Xmas.

The theme at the mall this year is "Sub-Zero Christmas," an even chillier variation on 2010's "White is the Color of Christmas." I am continually bemused at the winter themes on display for customers in a tropical climate, and I am a still surprised by the pervasiveness of a Christian holiday within a country where the largest religion is Buddhism. Of course, Singapore has many, many Christians, and here we live next door to a church. Either credit the country for being inclusive or blame capitalism for cultivating a retail holiday in unlikely soil. I will opt for the latter given all the non-denominational  bedecking.

Shoppers on Level 2 are just about eye-level with a rather threatening penguin.

Alright, no more musing because once again the highlight of Velocity's decorations are the disturbing white animals. Several of them are perched on top of the main awning in the first photo above. Here are some more sculptures that dangle from the ceiling.

The tiny skating rink is back! In the ad copy this year it's called the Velocity Arctic Village. 

Click the link below left to behold a Photoshop disaster.

Ho Chi Minh City Traffic (Video)

Traffic in Frenetic HCMC, Vietnam from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.

As readers might know, one of the Passengers' favorite discoveries in Southeast Asia has been the walkable, optimistic, fast-changing Ho Chi Minh City. The automotive traffic in the former Saigon – dominated by small motorbikes – is emblematic of the vibrant urban life of modern Vietnam. The above video, as featured on The Dish, captures some of that energy. 

Daylesford Town

Along Raglan Street in Daylesford, Victoria. We saw wrought iron balconies like these all over town and in Melbourne.

As mentioned, part of our Australian trip was spent in Daylesford, a small town only about a ninety-minute drive northwest of Melbourne. It's a popular weekend destination in the hills of the Macedon Range for people in the city so it has plenty of hotels and bed & breakfasts. Mostly it reminds me of sleepy but touristed towns in the American West. With the area's gold-rush history and Daylesford's numerous mineral springs it particularly and pleasantly reminds me of Glenwood Springs in Colorado.

Perfect Drop is a good wine bar attached to a bohemian, living-room restaurant serving lots of locally produced food.

The Passengers sat outside on the patio of the local wine bar in the long shadows of a late spring sunset and watched the architecture turn colors. A very pleasant way to vacation. The scene went well with a Temptress Chocolate Porter from Holgate Brewhouse: highly recommended.

Raglan Street in Daylesford again. Further up the road from the first picture.

Good beer from northern Victoria, Australia

UPDATE (19 December 2011): David Sedaris wrote about a visit to Daylesford in a 2009 essay in the New Yorker.

Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than like an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petit fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like. “The spas are fantastic,” Pat said, and she parked the car in front of a puppet shop…

Kookaburras

Lake Daylesford in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia

The Passengers went to Australia last week – our very first trip Down Under. We had a fabulous time in and around Melbourne, about a seven hour flight from Singapore (Sydney is further. Perth is closer.).

Among the highlights of our trip was staying at a bed and breakfast in the spa town of Daylesford. Every morning, and on some evenings, we walked around the very scenic lake, seen above. At the beginning of one stroll we heard the cackling of kookaburras in the bush, and we were delighted when a pair of them alighted on a low branch just beside our path. Click on the pictures for larger images.

Kookaburras are carnivorous. They even eat poisonous snakes.

On our first morning in Daylesford we definitely heard kookaburras in the bush. This was the second pair we sighted on our trip.

UPDATE (19 December 2011): I found the essay David Sedaris wrote about feeding a kookaburra in Daylesford for the New Yorker in 2009. 

... I was already overstimulated, but how often in life do you get such an offer [to feed a kookaburra]? That’s how I found myself on the deck, holding a bowl of raw duck meat cut into slender strips. At the sight of it, the bird stood up and flew onto my arm, which buckled slightly beneath the weight. 

“Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand. For that’s what this thing’s beak was—a serious weapon. I held a strip of raw duck, and after yanking it from my fingers the bird flew back to the railing. Then he took the meat and began slamming it against his wooden platform. Whap, whap, whap. Over and over, as if he were tenderizing it. 

“This is what he’d do in the wild with snakes and lizards and such,” the waiter said. “He thinks it’s still alive, see. He thinks he’s killing it.”

The kookaburra must have slammed the meat against the wooden platform a good ten times. Only then did he swallow it, and look up, expectantly, for more.

Abercrombie Invasion Inverted: NYC

Having written about the Abercrombie & Fitch store opening soon in Singapore and their less than blameless record as a corporate citizen, this blog will now offer some more humorous, gentle subversion. The outstanding comedy group Improv Everywhere staged a performance inside an A&F store in New York in 2007. Unsurprisingly, management took a rather dim view of Improv's antics. Every major Abercrombie location has a shirtless male "store model" at the front door, and this does not beget a corporate sense of humor?

For more great stunts visit the Improv Everywhere YouTube channel.

USA Soccer: Getting Better

This blog has written previously about soccer/football/sepak bola (that last one in Malay) in the United States. The country's occasionally maligned MLS enjoyed a record 2011. The league continues to improve its stadia, and it found a receptive audience in the Pacific Northwest for new teams in Portland and Vancouver. The league is now third in the USA based on average attendance per game. They pipped the NBA and NHL with a mean 17,180 fans visiting each match. This is good news for development of the game in the USA and also an excuse for some quality highlights.

In other news the well paid LA Galaxy defeated Houston Dynamo for their third MLS cup on Sunday, and a few folks in the UK bothered to watch. Also Kasey Keller at 41 should still be sending his CV to European clubs.

Queuing Up Trouble: Abercrombie & Fitch in Singapore

Abercrombie & Fitch chose a site close to a mosque for its Singapore store, but in the United States the company has faced allegations that it is hostile to observant Muslims.

American retailer Abercrombie & Fitch is about to open its first store in Singapore in the shopping complex Knightsbridge on Orchard Road. Southeast Asians will soon be able to buy classy clothes from a store that has sold thongs and padded bikini tops to eight-year-olds. As an American, I have a longer acquaintance with the company, and I am not looking forward to having A&F return to my neighborhood. Singaporeans without such a history undoubtedly will queue up to breathe in Abercrombie's fiercely scented air, just as they did for H&M's opening in September just across the street (and continue to do shamelessly).

The store was announced in March, expanding A&F's Asian footprint after opening an outlet in Japan in 2009. From a webpage that pretty much reads like a reprint of Abercrombie's press release:

Abercrombie & Fitch, an Ohio-based Casual Luxury themed brand, promises to deliver the same ‘all-American’ experience – including the young, fun and good-looking ‘store models’ and the same merchandise that is found at its any other flagship stores around the world, reflecting their brand’s heritage, youth and sex appeal with a unique emphasis on quality and store experience.

“We think that South East Asia represents a great opportunity for the brand and Singapore makes a great fit,” said an A&F spokesperson. “Our launch in Singapore is answering an established enthusiasm for A&F, and giving our fan-base a place to go and live the brand.”

The "Casual Luxury" (read: overpriced) brand zealously guards and controls its image and store experience, starting with its opaque shop fronts that eschew the usual large window displays of available merchandise. The Knightsbridge outlet is no exception, placing oversized dark-wooden washboard shutters behind its windows. No doubt they will soon erect billboards overhead emblazoned with oversized black-and-white images of washboard abs. Full marks to Abercrombie for selling so much apparel without actually displaying any clothes. However, the "store models" and employees inside rarely match the dark panelling in the windows. Abercrombie unabashedly peddles a pernicious, privileged white-bread version of what they believe is "all-American," and it has repeatedly and unrepentantly given little consideration to any other members of a very diverse world, and they are now exporting that rigorously enforced look. 

Where to start? How about the minimum $40 million settlement the company agreed to pay in 2004 for denying jobs and promotions to blacks, Asians, and Latinos? In 2009 a UK employment tribunal ruled the company had unlawfully harassed a disabled law student born without her left arm and working in the flagship London store. Singaporean Muslims might want to know about the pending lawsuit of a twenty-year-old Muslim woman who allegedly lost her job at Hollister, a beach-themed Abercrombie spin-off, for wearing a hijab headscarf of the style seen throughout Southeast Asia. The suit was filed this year and adds to cases of the same kind already pending. Chinese Singaporeans will surely want to hear about T-shirts sensitively trading in racial stereotypes in 2002 ("Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs Can Make it White"). I want to know if the flagship shop will try to force low-wage shop workers in Singapore to buy and wear very expensive Abercrombie gear. In the US they had to settle yet another lawsuit alleging such practice. Good luck finding out the answers to these questions since in 2010 Abercrombie and Fitch provided "virtually zero" data on its behavior regarding "environment, climate change, human rights, employee relations, finance, governance, and philanthropy."

Some people in Singapore's diverse racial and religious mix end up will want "to go and live the brand," even if the company fails to offer dignified employment here. I am sure that the "brand’s heritage, youth and sex appeal" will attract plenty of business. But I want Singaporeans to know a little bit more about what that heritage is.

The corner location of Abercrombie's Singapore flagship store, soon to be plastered with young, (only?) white flesh. Image site.

Lion Air in the News

"We make people fly," and Lion Air flies the Boeing 747 between Jakarta and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

More than six months ago this blog had a post about the Indonesian airline Lion Air. The company is now a little bit better known in the United States this week after putting in a massive order for 230 Boeing aircraft. The airline was started in 1999 by travel agent Rusdi Kirana and his brother. They are planning to expand their route map all over Southeast and East Asia:

The once little-known Indonesian airline says it is planning to buy 230 planes from Boeing Co. The bill — with a list price of $21.7 billion — is to be paid over 12 years though bank financing.
Dozens of airlines have emerged in Indonesia since it deregulated its aviation industry in the 1990s, making air travel affordable for the first time for many across the sprawling island nation of 240 million, and luring passengers away from ferries and trains.

NY Times edits Singapore

Marina Bay Sands "Integrated Resort" under construction in July 2010.

The New York Times gave Singapore the 36-hours treatment last week. The popular Travel-section feature summarizes tourism opportunities in locations near and far. I have especially liked the paper's write-ups of St Louis, Hong Kong, and Cork. I concur with the choices of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, the Wild Rocket/Wild Oats restaurant and bar atop Mt Emily, and the shopping experience along Haji Lane. Of course, any travel guide would be remiss not to mention the newly opened "integrated resort" (read: casino) Marina Bay Sands overlooking the Central Business District.

However, many of the other choices in the article seem poorly advised. High tea at the Raffles Hotel is an overpriced endeavor, and walking along Robertson Quay on a Sunday morning followed by a cycle tour sounds like a recipe for heat stroke. Also the Maxwell Road Food Centre has little to recommend it over other hawker centers besides it's proximity to Chinatown. Similarly the Ritz-Carlton Millenia doesn't seem like a terribly interesting hotel choice. Also "Orchard Street" needs to be corrected to read "Orchard Road."

The Big Day in the UK

We can only hope the event will be this festive.

There's a wedding happening today at Westminster Abbey. The Passengers will watch a bit of the ceremony from Changi Airport because we are flying to Thailand for a long weekend. Here in Singapore the royal occasion will be less of a morning event and more of a prime-time affair. The service starts at 6pm for us. Rest assured, Channel 5 will start coverage three hours early.

The video above is sponsored by T-Mobile. I was amused. Then, I had to confirm to myself that the setting was St Bartholomew's in Smithfield, a Romanesque Augustinian Abbey.

Of Men and Muppets

The new production of "Upstairs Downstairs" has arrived in the USA. Americans watched the previous version on PBS's "Masterpiece Theater," and it reminds me of a great cross-cultural moment shared in 2004 after Alistair Cooke passed away. Each of us tried to explain to the other what made him an endearing public figure.

Passenger H: Have you heard of him? Alistair Cooke used to always read the "Letter from America" on the BBC.
Passenger J: Alistair Cooke? You mean the "Masterpiece Theater" host?
H: Masterpiece wha--?
J: (in Cookie Monster voice) "Hello and welcome to 'Monsterpiece Theater.' I'm Alistair Cookie."
H: Is THAT why they called him Alistair Cookie?

I was reminded of the "Sesame Street" parody above by this week's New Yorker podcast.

Penang Architecture

Art deco hotel along the market.

Part of the charm of Penang is its architecture. The urban core of Georgetown preserves many more traditional Straits shophouses than can be seen in Singapore. Penang escaped World War II with much less destruction. Today the city is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Courtyard of a Chinese temple in Penang, looking towards the street.

The urban fabric also includes a number of Chinese and Buddhist  temples. We made sure to wander by a few of those on our long Saturday afternoon walk in the broiling sun. Here is a selection of some of the city's architectural gems. There are plenty of pictures after the jump break.