whatÕsina NOODLE?

SOMETIMES WE NEED TO OPEN OUR MINDS TO ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF DOING THINGS, SNIGGERS DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY

grocery shopping at home,” she said.

But I wouldn’t let her dampen my enthusiasm. This was a journey of discovery! Just that morning I had tried a slice of durian. Have you ever eaten durian? It’s officially a fruit, but it’s really more like a weapon of mass terror. It smells like whale blubber that has been marinated in sorrow and fermented inside a corpse – and they eat it for breakfast.

Locals claim it doesn’t taste as bad it smells, so I took a bite. A laughing crowd gathered to watch me cry and retch. I didn’t mind – this was an adventure. That’s why I insisted on grocery shopping: who knew what further marvels I might encounter?

I told her I was taking home a packet of two-minute noodles to astonish our friends. “We think we in the west know everything, but it just goes to show,” I said, tapping the packet of noodles meaningfully. “We need to open our minds to alternative ways of doing things.”

I saw her roll her eyes. It made me sad that she wasn’t making use of this experience to open her mind.

It was a good month in South-East Asia, but we left on a late-night flight and we hadn’t had dinner. Everyone always says how smoothly things work in Singapore, but I’ll tell you this. They may know how to engineer a miraculous packet of noodles, but they are not infallible, because we queued at the boarding gate and we queued and we queued. There was some problem with the aircraft so they wouldn’t let us board. Late night turned to early morning and we were still there.

“I’m hungry,” said my partner. She never says she’s hungry until she does, and when she does it is wise to feed her fast.

“How long do you take with the noodles at home?” my partner asked me.

“Three minutes,” I confirmed. “Ninety seconds, then stir, then ninety seconds.”

“Don’t you read the instructions?”

What a silly question. Of course I read the instructions. Well, I read them once, back in the 90s when I was a student. You don’t have to read the instruction manual every time you use something. What kind of a fool does she think I am?

I made a bowl out of her hands and opened my souvenir packet and poured out the dried noodles. I tore open the little flavouring sachet and sprinkled it over the noodles like sugar over cereal.

“I can’t eat this,” she said.

“If they eat durian for breakfast round here,” I said, “you can eat that.”

This is why I am proud to be South African, I thought as I watched her crunching through the dry noodle cereal. Asians might have invented the twominute noodle, but when push comes to shove and a boer has to make a plan, we can get it down to no minutes at all. *