Cruisin' Canada: Of Coves, Caves and Birthday Cake

This summer, Una Ragazza decided to abandon her long-held beliefs that cruising is for AARP members. A ship was leaving north of the Intrepid here in New York, and she planned a birthday surprise for Un Ragazzo that involved lots of eating, shopping, playing, loving... and eating.

Enjoy her first -- and slightly wonky -- attempt at making a Prezi presentation on her first American cruise.

Oh Canada! Our home and lovely land (for a week)

Una Ragazza on Love: Home is Where the Heart... (Part I)

Growing up in Chinatown in Singapore was a busy, noisy and colorful affair. My life revolved around a fascinating two-block radius in the neighborhood of Telok Ayer, meaning "bay water" in Malay.

Learning to bid at a neighborhood charity auction with Ah Ma

At the front of our shophouse was Ah Gong’s stall of immaculately cut fruit and crates of Coca Cola and Fanta bottles. Beyond that, to the left, the five-foot way (shophouse corridor) led to my favorite hangout, the neighborhood mama shop, where I spent many, many afternoons deciding the best way my 15 cents should be divided among the large array of candy, gum and kiam-sng-tee (“salty, sour and sweet” preserved fruits). 

As a child, I liked my orange peel salty, sour and sweet

If I ventured a little further west, I could lean against the gates of Chongfu Primary School as I unwrapped my sweets and admired the five-storey-high building, the tallest structure known to me at age five.

Chongfu: The big school on the block

Opposite the school was Thian Hock Keng, the oldest Hokkien temple in Singapore that was dedicated to the Taoist goddess of the sea and patron of sailors. I remember the sale of flowers, incense and food offerings outside the temple, and the giant buses carrying tourists in funny hats and giant black boxes slung around their necks. They often stopped by Ah Gong’s shop to buy a soft drink, where they paid his tourist price of “wahn doll-ah.”

Thian Hock Keng was built with donations from Chinese immigrants grateful for safe travels from the motherland

To the right of our shophouse was the focal point of the neighborhood -- a coffee shop fronted by an amazing muslim-food stall that sold fried chicken, lontong (curry rice cakes) and nasi lemak (creamy rice with chicken, chilli and anchovies). The coffee stall was at the back of the shop, where I used to sit and watch the uncle prepare my breakfast of milo, half-boiled eggs and roti kahwin (toasted bread  lathered with egg-jam and butter), which he occasionally  scrapped with a small metal  knife if he’d left the bread on the grill for a little too long.

The cross-generational appeal of half-boiled eggs and coffee-shop coffee

The shop also housed a delicious economy rice stall, which was a local concept of rice heaped with your choice of meat, vegetables, egg and tofu. My sister and I frequently ordered our favorite szechuan vegetables, pork cutlet with a lobster-red sweet sauce and tofu with minced pork, which the proprietor delivered directly to the dining room behind our fruit stall. Lunch before afternoon school was always tasty and satisfying.

Finally, across our shophouse was a mosque -- which I later learned  was our landlord  -- and Telok Ayer Green. The latter may be the tiniest park  in Singapore, but at that time, crossing it felt like an exhilarating excursion that would literally bring me to the edge of my childhood world.

In the 30 years since I'd left, Telok Ayer Green has been spruced up to include bronze statues of coolie immigrant life in colonial times

In the mid 1980s, due to urban renewal plans, our entire family and all our neighbors were uprooted and relocated to other parts of the island. Back then, I was a pre-teen who was growing up fast, and eager to see a new world. I could always come back to visit, I told myself.


Years went by and I would go on to live in many different neighborhoods around Singapore and within Europe and the United States. During this time, Telok Ayer underwent massive transformation to scrub away its grittiness and increase its tourist appeal.


When I last visited in 2011, my beloved shophouse had been turned into a little food court, flanked by a Korean eatery and an espresso cafe. Office workers from the nearby skyscrapers were pouring onto the street during the lunch hour, fighting for space alongside the many tourists seeking proof of the co-existence of a temple and mosque on my narrow little street.


Despite the gentrification, Telok Ayer remains the ‘hood where my heart is, the place that I believe most shaped the person I am today. 


I never thought I’d feel so strongly about anywhere else I’d ever live. Until a recent move to my third neighborhood in New York.

Ah Gong and his giant homemade starfruit juice strainer at the back of our shophouse

Telok Ayer the way I will always remember it

(to be continued)


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[Some pictures taken from the Internet]

Lady J on Shop: Buying second-hand

I’ve always had this belief that “One’s man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. The concept of buying second-hand goods sounded a little foreign to me when I was growing up. If the shelf-life of our household equipment comes to an end, we simply buy new ones to replace. And what do we do with the old ones? We sell them to the neighbourhood Karung guni man. Same goes with our newspapers and magazines. We just bundle them up and pass them on to the Karung guni man who gladly takes them in exchange for a couple of cents.

The resident Karung guni man in the 80's

What’s Karung guni? It’s a modern form of rag-and-bone men that visit residences door-to-door. They used to be pretty common in Singapore in the 80’s and early 90s. These days, there are a little of a rarity but I still spot some of them making their rounds in my neighbourhood.

So what do they do? They make their visits in carts collecting old newspapers and other unwanted items. These items are then resold at specialised markets to be recycled and reused.

The term “Karung guni” came from a Malay phrase for gunny sack, which was used in the past to hold newspapers. The karung guni men would haul these heavy sacks on their backs ringing their hand-bells and shouts of this particular phrase - "karung guni, poh zhua gu sa kor, pai leh-lio, dian si ki..." [meaning “Rag and bone, newspapers, old clothes, spoilt radios, televisions, etc” in Singlish and Hokkien] can be heard from a far.

A common site at my neighborhood when growing up

Mom has sold many things to the local karung guni man and she’s often pleased that she made a couple of bucks from the sale. I guess Dad is just happy that the house is not cluttered with too many unwanted items.

So what happens to these second-hand items? If they are in good condition, they are usually being resold at flea markets or even sold on online auctions. Apparently, there are people who trawl these places in search for a good bargain. Well, Mom has always told me to steer clear of these places preferring that I don’t pick up more junk to mess up the home.

I probably tried my hand at bargain-hunting when I visited Melbourne with my friends after graduation. Armed with really little cash then as a student, we ventured into a thrift-shop just wanting to browse but walked out of the store some hours later with huge sacks of ‘treasures’. We found used clothes, jewellery and handbags for as little as 5 AUD. We were thrilled as we combed through the piles of racks happily in search of cheap bargains.

Off to the local Brocante store for some second-hand shopping

I’ve often griped that some of the things in Geneva are a little more pricey compared to what I could get back in Singapore. Some of my expat friends felt the same way too having relocated from the US. But one of them got round to scoring some really cool furniture and household appliances at the local broccante store. I later learned that Switzerland has an active second-hand (gebraucht, occasion) market, particularly in antiques, motor cars, gold and gem stones. There’s also a local second-hand furniture and junk store (Brockenhaus, broccante) in most towns. These items are usually in really good condition because many expats come and leave Geneva in a couple of years, and prefer to leave these items behind instead of bringing them back to their home-country.

So us girls made the trip to the local broccante store one afternoon. I had wanted to browse and possibly get some vintage cutlery and silverware. My friend S wanted to a raclette grill and/or fondue machine. While she didn’t get the item, I went home a happy gal with the desired plates that will be put to good use when we have guests over.

A gorgeous traditional fondue set up for grabs

There you have it, “One’s man trash can really become another man’s treasure”. You never know what you can get while hitting the thrift-shops, so keep your eyes peeled open for treasure may just lie beneath that layer of dust. Just wipe it off, brush it clean and it may just be a brand new item for you.

[Some images taken off the web]