Sa-nook

I'm starting to dig into the backlog, so some of the next few posts may be confusing.  Think of it as a movie flashback....

[Insert flashback visual and sound effects here]

Sunday, January 11th

After a long walk and lots of picture taking around the Civic Historical area, I went and collected David from yoga.  We wandered around the Raffles City Shopping Centre.  I was curious to see what stores they had, and found out they pretty much had what we do back in the states.  Tommy Hilfinger, Kate Spade, The Body Shop, etc.  But here, there are two big differences.  First of all, the size of these places.  Four floors are the minimum, and we've even been to one with more than eight.  Since it's a small country and space is at a premium, all the malls go up, not out.  There are a lot of escalators.

Second, the floors of shopping tend to have a theme.  No, I don't mean theme like Seasons, Holidays, Color schemes.  I mean, all the stores of a certain type are usually grouped together.  At home, all the similar stores will be spread out - you will not have a Body Shop right next to Bath and Body Works, or an ALDO shoe store right next to Nine West right next to Payless.  Here, you will have all the cell phone stores on one level, all the salons on the next, all the restraunts on the next, and so forth.  It's not a hard and fast rule though, occasionally the Nike store will be up by the Food Court, or the Persian Rug place with be with all the Kid's clothing shops.  It's sort of a good thing if you can't find the map though, you can say, "Oh, we're by all the tailor's shops, we are not going to find the Birkenstock store here...".

And as for the dozens and dozens of restraunts in the malls, they all have their menu's on a stand out front, so you can sort of browse before deciding where to eat.  Most people eat out at least once a day, so there's brisk business around meal times.  Here's our usual pre-meal conversation:

"What do you want to eat?" 

"I don't care, what do you want?"  

"I'm not really hungry, so you pick."  

"No, you pick this time, I picked last time."  

"Fine, how about the Dim Sum place?"  

"No, it's too complicated to order."

 - Insert exasperated sigh here - 

"Well, how about the Korean BBQ place?"

"No, I had that for lunch."

"You said you didn't care!!"

"I don't, you're just picking bad places!"

And we finally end up somewhere that has lots of pictures on the menu so we can tell what we're actually ordering.  Here's another conversation that also often takes place when the food comes:

"What did you order?"

"I'm not really sure."

"What kind of meat is in there?"

"I have no idea."

For the first couple of weeks we had every meal at a different place, but we've started going to this place fairly often:

It's close enough to Noodles or Chin's Asia Fresh that ordering isn't stressful, but far enough away that we still need pictures to tell what we're ordering.  And it's Thai, which mean they have spicy food.  As David said the first time I asked him if he really wanted extra spicy:  "I'm trying to test my limits.  I need to know where my threshold is."  As far as I can tell, he hasn't reached it yet.

P.S.  Sa-nook means "have fun" in Thai....