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.