ASIA NEWS

Hong Kong was low comedy; forty-eight hours of fantastic filth. I woke up Sunday afternoon in my friend Joe’s flat on Hollywood Road. He had got back together with girlfriend Dewi the night before; her friend Venus was sprawled out on his sofa, looking more hungover than anyone I have ever seen. At around three we set off on a little double date.


Joe tucks in

Joe took us to a dim sum joint down the street. It ran a bizarre special offer: half price food all weekend. Because of course, no one ever wants to eat out on the weekend, so you have to cut prices. These days I pretty much refuse to eat in Chinese restaurants unless I have a Cantonese person to order for me, so having Venus there was a total result (Dewi is Indonesian – close but no cigar.) After a lengthy consultation with the waitress, we got stuck into a banquet of steamed leaves, prawn parcels and god-knows-what: divine.

Venus is an eccentric girl with a limited grasp of English. We made slow, leisurely small talk, both amused by our hangovers, and not too concerned when the thread of conversation was intermittently lost. I asked her where she worked - she replied, excellently, “In an office,” before adding, “it’s small potatoes.” I was just about able to communicate that I worked in the London office of Joe’s company.

The food and conversation were just fine, but by the end of the meal I was in a little trouble. By this point I was operating firmly on British Businessman Time, a time zone inhabited by those who travel around a third of the globe eastwards and then stay up all night drinking. The heat of the restaurant and the clatter of the plates were playing on my nerves, and I needed to get out. I picked up the bill (less than £12 for four) and we hit the street in search of a fruit juice stand.


Dewi buys some juice

I had about two hours to kill before I needed to head off to catch my return flight to Singapore, so we visited the Mann Mo Temple on Hollywood Road. Mann Mo is a Taoist temple dedicated jointly to the gods of literature and war.

There are two types of Taoism, broadly speaking: Daojiao, or religious Taoism; and Daojia, or philosophical Taoism. Adherents of the former have gods and temples and prayers and ancestor worship; the whole nine yards. It’s basically the standard Chinese folk religion. Adherents of the latter don’t go in for any of the supernatural stuff, but just read Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and silently contemplate the Tao all day. I’m a Daojia Taoist, but I was interested to see what my Daojiao brothers and sisters get up to.



I must admit I like their style. The temple was cool and dark inside, which calmed my nerves. Coils of incense hung from the ceiling, and visitors burnt incense sticks in front of the shrines. People also struck a large iron bell with a wooden stick – as Venus showed me, first three times gently, then three times hard. I was in no condition to start asking what all this represented, so I just made a donation and soaked it in.

At one point I lost sight of her, and then found her again, praying on her knees in front of a shrine near the door, presumably for some deity to cure her hangover.

Joe and Dewi got bored and went to wait outside, but I stayed in there for forty or so minutes, listening to bells and staring at the statues until my nerves were totally gone. I floated onto the plane on Hong Kong Airport, as cool as a cucumber.


Venus checks out her Chinese Zodiac sign

BUSINESS NEWS

The commodity futures contract with the highest turnover last year was the West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil contract. 59 million lots were traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The commodity futures contract with the second highest turnover last year was the No.1 Soybeans contract. 40 million lots were traded on the Dalian Commodity Exchange in China; a lot of soy sauce in anyone's book.

ASIA NEWS

Food is cheap in Asia and I ate like a king. I’m adventurous in this regard: I generally don’t mind shoving random foreign foodstuffs into my mouth, and Singapore is good for this. The only thing I literally couldn’t eat was a “Snow Fungus” dessert in Changi Airport in SG – it had the texture of cartlidge.

Anyway one of my favourite places to eat in the whole world is Lau Pa Sat festival market in the financial district of Singapore (if there can be such a thing). Three rows of stalls representing the three main Singaporean cuisines - Chinese, Malay and Indian – stretch out from the centre. I ate some Indian food, I really can’t go into any more detail than that, I have no idea what it was. It was great though, and cost about a quid.

Despite foodie renown, Singapore doesn’t really have a cuisine of its own, other than a dish called congee, which is fine.

Outside, the market is ringed by satay stalls selling chicken and beef satay by the stick. Satay hawkers grab tourists and shove a simple menu in front of them – it feels rude not to get stuck in. One evening I sat there with a cold beer and some chicken sticks: life does not get any better than this, I thought.

ASIA NEWS

Good enough for Conrad Hilton / Not good enough for my eyes


(apologies to The Uncertainty Principle)


TUPNews recommends the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Singapore.

Last time I was in SG, I stayed in the Hilton on Orchard Road. Excellent cheesecake notwithstanding, it was a cramped and soulless experience. By day, I sat in a small Travelodge-like room filling out civil service applications. By night, I strolled past row after row of empty shopping malls, crowded Starbucks and forlorn hookers. Not great.

The Mandarin, however, is fantastic – modern, breezy décor in the spacious rooms, with serious marble and mahogany going on in the lobby. They seem to have taken the General Assembly hall of the United Nations building in New York as their style guide – superb. The restaurants are excellent and affordable, enough to forgive the dress codes.

Best of all, the staff all say good morning / good evening to you as you walk out – all of them. There are some staff who apparently are hired just to say good morning / good evening to guests. As a result, every time you enter or leave the hotel, you are obliged to say good morning / good evening to at least ten staff. At first I found this a chore, a little intrusive even. But by the end, it made me feel like the Fonz. I would glide out of the lift and sweep through the lobby as bellhops bowed and smiled on either side of me – I felt that I should burst out into song.

I was genuinely sorry to leave.

ASIA NEWS

TUPNews has just paid a visit to The Oz Bar in Tanjin Street, Singapore. I was looking up an old friend, Wei Ling.

The Oz Bar is a shitty dive bar the size of a shoebox, but it has live music, which is important to the solo business traveller. I ate dinner tonight in the Marriott restaurant, surrounded by pasty whites with escort girls – one year ago I would have found this pathetic, but after many nights alone in restaurants on business trips I get their angle. I’m too young to cross that line, so live music is my thing when I’m an Englishman in God-knows-where.

I last visited The Oz Bar two years ago, when I came to Singapore in search of the Asian credit market. It doesn’t exist, don’t bother looking. I was staying at the Hilton round the corner, and dropped in for a few beers. The place was packed, in a delightfully seedy way.

There I met Wei Ling, the bar manager. An elderly Aussie woman owned it, but Wei Ling took care of the day-to-day. She saw I was on my own and came over for a chat. I must say I liked her style. The black sheep of an Indonesian family – brother a government flunky, sister married to a doctor – she rebelled and ran this dive bar in SG. We chatted for hours, and I came back the next two nights, and we chatted some more. When she found out I was staying at the Hilton, she started raving about the blueberry cheesecake they served in the café there. I’m not a sweets man, but I gave it a crack, it was excellent. In the single most romantic gesture of my life, I had the concierge box up a slice and send it round the corner to her when I checked out.

She’s not there anymore, the place has been refurbished and is under new management. It was empty – just me and a handful of locals. But there was still some half-decent live music from Bernard and Jeff.

ASIA NEWS

Hyori Lee: running things


TUPNews can report that, when in comes to Asian music, Korea runs things.

Thankfully, I flew Singapore Airlines to Singapore, rather than Virgin, which I fucking hate. I can’t recommend Singapore Airlines highly enough: good food, good inflight entertainment, friendly service. The flight attendants all wear those patterned dress things, making them look much more dignified than Western “trolley dollies.” The male attendants wear snazzy light blue sports coats, making them look like game show hosts. Excellent. And I got to sit next to a couple from Bristol, although of course that’s not part of the service.

Best of all, however, was the audio, which featured a wide selection of Asian popular music. Here’s the deal:

Canto-Pop is over: it has become very thin and plasticky.

J-Pop is also feeling flat: very ballad-y and tame.

K-Pop is fucking heavy. I give you Hyori Lee, former leader of girl-power pop group Fine Killing Liberty, whose second album “Dark Angel” kept me amused at 30,000ft. The Neptunes have clearly been the latest victims of Asia’s relaxed attitude to intellectual property: in fact, Hyori stopped promoting the album (launched in February) after Britney Spears sued her. I really hope this doesn’t end her career, as she is basically better than Britney. Contemporary sound, local flavour: all good.

Not that Hong Kong doesn’t represent. If there is one Asian track you need to download immediately, it’s “One Person” by Sandy Lam, which is a Chinese-language cover version of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” It was playing every time I got into a taxi in Hong Kong, it is phenomenal.

ASIA NEWS

TUPNews endorses Jetstar, a subsidiary of Qantas and the Ryanair of Asia.

Faced with a work-mandated week in Singapore, I pulled some strings and got myself sent out four days early, and looked for a cheap return flight from SG to Hong Kong. Jetstar sorted me out with one for £120.

The seats are comfortable, the décor soothing, the staff uniforms are sleek black dresses and the inflight food and drink surprisingly inexpensive. But best of all, there was a flight attendant on the outbound flight named Jolene. And on the return flight, one called Tammy. Excellent.

Jetstar: they're a little bit country, I'm a little bit rock and roll