Singapore Fling

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Singapore fling Now who’s lisping?

We had been on the piss for over a week already. I know that is not very nice, but what the hell do you expect? Just put a Dutch master and a Geordie chief engineer together in a hotel in Singapore with nothing to do and with an almost unlimited expense account and see what you get. That’s asking for trouble, isn’t it?

We had been sent to Singapore to take delivery of a new tug for Saudi, but when we were having our first gin and tonic aboard the 747 of Singapore Airlines, somewhere over Germany, somebody had another look at the fine print of the delivery contract and decided that it needed modification. So there we were in Singapore, waiting.

You may argue that the Lion city is a great place for shopping, the fact remains that you can buy just so much cameras and calculators. If you feel like it, that is. We ordered half a dozen shirts and two pairs of trousers each, but that will only take one fitting and the next day everything is ready. Apart from the fact that Singapore hasn’t much sights to offer, seamen are no great sightseers either. Tiger Balm may be wonderful stuff for colds and sore muscles and even for sex purposes, as I’ve been told, the famous gardens of the same name are a monstrosity. And Singapore may boast the most beautiful zoo in the world, what

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good is a zoo when you can’t see the animals? If you don’t take my word for it, just go and have a look for yourself. A beautiful park, but no animals. True, you can have breakfast with an orang-utan there, but who’s kinky enough to want a thing like that? Which leaves eating and drinking and fooling around.

The agent made a halfhearted attempt to protect us by putting us in a hotel just a little off-center, but that only increased the item ‘taxi fares’ on the old expense account.

As far as work was concerned, we did what we could, which wasn’t very much. In the morning we would go to the shipyard and do our waiting there. The tug was for a well known oil company in the Middle East, Arab owned, but run mainly by Americans, and with a host of other nationalities on their payroll. I’ve always been wondering but never been able to figure out what exactly might be wrong with this company. I know they pay their people terrific wages and care every bit for them, but wherever in the world you meet them, they always look miserable and sulky. Like they have severe cases of haemorrhoids and the company doctor has decided that eating three pounds of lemons a day will cure it. They fight among each other and will grab every opportunity to fight with you. Furthermore they go strictly by the book and in this company ‘the book’ stands for a full-grown library of rules and regulations and no way to go around it.

In this particular shipyard their superintendents and other regulation personnel supervising the project, were working out of two air-conditioned port-a-cabins. There they were drinking cold diet cokes, doing their internal fighting and driving the yard people crazy with their specifications. The assistant project manager was a cockney with a Texas drawl, while the undercover agent from their head office was a Dutchman who refused to speak Dutch.

But the biggest asshole of them all was the project manager himself and I suppose that must have been the main reason why

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they had made him the boss. Who knows. A huge, broad shouldered Texan who walked like he had a .45 strapped low on each hip and always ready to draw, he was a regular son of a bitch and as mean as they come. His name was Boone, a fact you could hardly miss because not only carried his enormous belt buckle this name, he also wore a custom-made silver helmet with an ornamented metal badge screaming: ‘BOONE’.

The only normal and friendly people were the Chinese secretary and the Chinese guy who liaised between the oilmen and the shipyard. They were the ones who would offer us a chair and a cold Coke. The day we took delivery of the tug they were both sacked. Their attitude collided with company policy I suppose.

But that day was still a long time off and so we would hang around in the yard and look at the tug, trying to get some information which we didn’t. They wouldn’t allow us on board, not even for five minutes and they refused to give us any information, not as long as we didn’t have an official contract, which we hadn’t. The yard had strict orders to act in the same way. And all the time we had to treat that no good Boone like he was the Lord Jesus himself and his coke sipping companions the twelve apostles. We finally took delivery of his fine tug on a Friday afternoon at four o’clock, whereupon he had the nerve to ask me if I could go to sea Saturday-morning at eight, because he had to see us off and didn’t like the idea of spending another week-end in Singapore. I didn’t have to treat him politely anymore and therefore I told him where he could go and spend his weekend as far as I was concerned. He didn’t blink an eye so I take it he was either used to such remarks or company regulations called for that reaction. But as I said, that joyful moment was a long way off still.

Singapore was hot and humid and doing nothing, just hanging around is more tiring than a hard days work. At lunchtime we would slip off to a nearby restaurant, not so much for food as for a cold beer, but within the hour we would be back in the

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yard, waiting and hoping for news. Around five in the afternoon our Chinese friend would give us a lift to Upper Bukit Timah Road because getting a taxi from Jurong back to town is more difficult than finding a good lay in a monastery. Back in our hotel we would have a coldie in the bar, take a shower and come back for another coldie. After that the options were various but the result would be the same every night. We would get pissed.

My Geordie engineer had been working in the oilfield and living in Singapore for three years. This was two years back at the time, so neither did he recognize the place, nor could he find his former house anymore. But he knew the watering holes and they were still there. Most of them, anyway.

Oh, mind you we did try other entertainment. For a change we went to the race track but the only thing we found there was a cheering crowd watching the horses running in Penang on a huge television screen. So much for horse racing. I never was a fan anyway.

We had some wonderful food too. At the old British pub annex restaurant on Tanglin Road, just to name a place. Cramped between the Tangling shopping center and the old buildings was a white pub that would be packed from opening to closing time with a happy crowd. The waiters were older than Methuselah himself and the story goes that they were still shuffling around the place, getting things ready and laying the tables when the Japanese walked in in 1942. The headwaiter told them politely that they weren’t open yet, but when the Japanese officer drew his sword and chopped his head off, it dawned on the others that there must be something like a row going on outside. A wonderful place with a unique atmosphere. When I came back a year later it was closed. Maybe all the waiters died, I don’t know.

Another favorite place was - and still is for that matter - the Jockey Pub on the mezzanine floor of Shaw Center. The drinks are good and honest and the waitresses are a sight to see in their Victorian riding costumes. I think it’s supposed to look Victori-

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an, that is, but I’m not an expert. They serve perfect stakes and salads, the music is always live and jazzy and of high standards and you’re sure to get pissed out of your mind there. Okay, you don’t have to of course, but with this Geordie it was real hard to avoid, even when you tried. The Jockey Pub is an oilfield workers hangout and the first night we walked in there my chief was welcomed like the prodigal son, a long lost friend by a whole pack of drunken Geordies and Irishmen, asking where the hell he had been so long and what he was doing here now. He told them he had been taking a leak that took longer than expected and that right now he was having the car serviced in South Shields as far as his wife was concerned. We had a swell evening and I don’t know how and why, but we didn’t spent a nickel.

And not only that night, but neither the following. When I checked my wallet the next morning before leaving the hotel, I found I had two; my own and another one stuffed with American dollars and credit cards and plenty of identification. There even was a picture of the owner on a drivers license. He was an oilmen from Houston and I remembered vaguely I had been telling him all about Boone the Asshole and his no-good henchmen and how he had assured me that it was a company that only hired regular shit-heads and certified motherfuckers and that he felt obliged to buy me several drinks to apologize for his fellow countrymen.

So that night, after the coldie-shower-coldie routine, we returned to the Jockey Pub quite early and there, sitting at the bar, having a double Jack Daniels on the rocks and looking even more miserable than the guys in the shipyard was the owner of the wallet. Well, I bought him two drinks before I put his wallet on the bar and asked if this was the reason for his despair. We had another swell evening. The Jockey pub is a swell place.

A dangerous place too. Not for people with strong characters like you of course, but for the weaklings, because opposite the entrance of Shaw Center is the Tropicana. I’m sure you’ve never

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heard of the place, because you are the type that will only come to Shaw Center to do your shopping and maybe just have a quick Tom Collins in the quiet bar next to and part of the Jockey Pub, only because you don ’t feel like walking another hundred yards to the Holiday Inn, where after you grab a cab and return to the Shangri La to dress for dinner. That’s typical you.

We are different. We come sailing out of the Jockey Pub in a haze of smoke and alcohol fumes and lo and behold: there, just across the street is a place with even more smoke and fumes and music and literally packed with women.

Did I say packed? The place is almost bursting at the seems. Women in all sizes and colors, ages and races. They are laughing and yelling and singing and standing in the street. People are trying to fight their way into the place, while others are fighting their way out. The two parties mingle at the doorstep and I know of a guy who spent an entire evening in that position, like a turd in an eddy. He claims he got drunk right there, which is quite possible. But he also tells a rather tall story about him and a girl there in the melee on the doorstep of the Tropicana, a story that gets more detailed and dirtier over the years and that I don’t believe.

From a distance you can see that their must be a bar inside, because through the haze you will descry a couple of bartenders working frantically, trying to serve the crowd of thirsty pussy hunters. Word has it that somewhere in the place they have real tables and chairs, but I don’t know if anybody ever managed to get that deep into the Tropicana. I never did anyway. If you ever do, be sure to let me know because I wouldn’t be surprised if you would find a bunch of very old drunks sitting there, zombies maybe, or mummies, guys who managed to get in, but never came out again. The best I did was meeting a guy who said he had been in the back of the Tropicana. I met him at the bar, after a long and hard fight, where after I squeezed myself in between

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a fat Philipino lady with enormous tits and a tiny Korean girl who was wearing mittens, believe it or not. Maybe she wanted to give them to somebody, although you would hardly expect a thing like that in the Tropicana. On the other hand nothing surprises me anymore and she also brought back memories of the man with the boxing gloves, a nice story that I’11 tell you someday. In the meantime a word of warning: beware of health freaks and body-builders! It may sound cryptic, but for the time being just keep it in mind.

Anyway, there at the bar, actually sitting on a real bar stool, was a skinny guy with a ragged beard, wearing a kind of faded blue farmers blouse an a pair of metal rimmed National Health-type spectacles. He not only had a glass of tequila in front of him, complete with all the necessary trimmings like the lemon and the salt and do I know what else you need to drink that horrible stuff, but also a small notebook and a pencil. He was looking around with that kind of superior smile on his face that is meant to pass for intelligent but to me it just looked plain stupid.

Whether it was the blue blouse or the stupid smile I don’t know, but I immediately placed him as being Dutch and so I shouted a greeting in Dutch above the music. Well, I was right: he was Dutch and we tried to make some conversation, but that was utterly out of the question. Not only was it the music and the singing and the screaming and the yelling but also the fat Philipino lady standing behind me. She was much bigger than I am and when she heard us talking Dutch, she got all excited.

She pressed herself against my back, hung a tit on each of my shoulders, leaned over me and shouted at the top of her lungs: ‘Godverdomme Skeedamskeedyke!’

It gave a fair idea of her age, because the Schiedamschedijk she was referring to was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in May 1940 and consequently ceased to exist as Rotterdam’s red light district. In the beginning of the 1950’s, when I first went to sea, you would hear this yell here and there from people wishing to make it

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clear that they not only acknowledged the fact that you were Dutch, but also that they knew Holland, Rotterdam and a few words of Dutch.

Anyway, there was this Dutchman, the Philipino lady and me.

‘How do you like this place?’ I asked the Dutch guy.

He smiled even more stupid, tugged at his beard seemed to think for a while and said: ‘Well… it’s not so much a matter of liking the place… I’m here for… other reasons.’

The Philipino must have had a fair understanding of Dutch because she let out an original Philipino war cry and shouted - her tits blubbering over my shoulders and against my cheeks and me hearing her voice coming out of the deep of that enormous body: ‘Aha! You tell mamasan what you’re here for and you got it, lekker pikkee! You pay it, we do it!’

He didn’t pay any attention to her, but looked at me and said: ‘I’m an anthropologist.’

Now what do you think of that one? I mean, I’ve met some very interesting people in very funny places and there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? But this joker was actually using his academic background as an excuse for getting pissed and laid!

And what’s more, it was true. He was an anthropologist and he was in the Far East on a very special study, so special that nobody at the ministry in The Hague quite knew what it was all about but didn’t want to admit it. That made it easier to get state-aid. He was, in fact, getting pissed and laid on my taxmoney and when I told him so, he said he couldn’t agree more.

But let’s get rid of the Philipino lady first. When she heard him say ‘antropoloog’ in Dutch, she never missed a beat but shouted: ‘Never mind! We have very special girl for that! Nice boy too, if you like better! Take your prick!’ She was a great sales lady, a marketing manager for a big Philipino brothel chain.

Back to the anthropologist. When I came back to Singapore three months later, he was still there, studying. I managed to get him out of the Tropicana and across the street into the Jockey

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Pub and helped him to spend some of my tax money on booze and stakes and salads and more booze. On that occasion he told me that he had seen the tables and chairs in the back of the Tropicana. Well, he certainly looked like it.

But, we’re still standing on the other side of the street, just looking at the Tropicana, remember?

You’ll find joints like that all over the world and I’ve never been able to figure out what makes them so popular. I mean, let’s face it, there’s nothing there. It’s a meat market, nothing more, nothing less. It’s so crowded that you can’t even inspect the ladies’ legs. Not that it really matters to me, because I’m a tit man myself and in the Tropicana you’re literally cushioned in tits unless you happen to be surrounded by Chinese girls only. But plenty of guys find legs pretty important and there’s no way to see anybody’s legs in that place. In some parts of the world they could and sure would steal your shoes and socks without you ever noticing it in a joint that crowded.

Speaking about legs: I know a dark brown bar in Hamburg owned by a lady by the name of Hanna Holzbein; Hanna with the wooden leg. She told me that, when she lost that leg ages ago, when she was still young and working Sankt Pauli, it didn’t effect her business at all. On the contrary; plenty of guys are simply crazy about one-legged women, she told me, so instead of getting out of business, she became more or less a specialist, amended her tariff accordingly and was able to buy herself that bar. Believe it or not, but keep in mind that she’s an expert on the subject and there’s no accounting for tastes, is there? Just imagine that you’re a regular common-or-garden two legged-girl guy and you go to the Tropicana and you pick yourself a lady friend and you go back to your hotel and… Forget it.

But why go to the Tropicana in the first place if you’re looking for female company, to put it nicely? There are much nicer places with nicer women. I don’t know what it is. The sound?

The smoke? The smell? Drawn like a moth to a flame, like a bee

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to the flower, yes, like a dog to a bitch in heat, that’s how we felt and we wanted to cross that street and join the crowd. We wanted to fight our way in and have a drink, while sweaty bodies would be pressing against ours from all sides and the most strange offers and promises would be whispered in our ears.

One hell of a place, that’s what it is.

We had just looked at each other and said, ‘Wattahellwhynot’ and were going to cross the street when a fat, short, bald Chinese guy sprang forward and said, wearing a broad, gold-toothed smile: ‘No can do nevel mind. Me know much bettel guls, plitty plitty.

Nice clean factoly guls. Velly cheap, velly nice, velly cleansafe.’

It was some sales-talk and it made us stop in our tracks, so the guy rambled on, afraid to loose us now.

‘Me have taxi. Take you Happy Moon Club. Velly cheap, velly nice, velly clean. Plitty plitty guls.’

My Geordie engineer, a very tall guy, made himself even taller, looked down on the smiling Chinese taxi driver and said: `Are you suggesting, my good man, that we should follow you to a house of ill repute?’

‘Yes yes,’ the guy bowed, ‘Plenty ill, plenty lepute, velly nice. Plitty Happy Moon Club.’

In Holland we say that someone is as strong as wet cigarette paper and that was about as strong as we were and maybe not even that strong. But nevertheless we turned down his kind of fer to take us to the Happy Moon Club and the ‘plitty factoly guls’.

Why? Not because we’re such steady guys, but only because we both have been around and we know cat houses like the Happy Moon or the Red Seven or Number Sixty Nine or whatever they call them. Oh, mind you, there’s nothing wrong with places like that and in most of them you can have a good and honest screw, that’s not the point. No, it’s the procedure that turns me off,

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know what I mean? Oh, you don’t. I see. You’ve never been in a whorehouse and so you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Well, let me explain, so that next time you can act as if you’ve been there, but for good understanding let me explain the ‘Velly cleansafe plitty plitty factoly guls’ first.

In the Far East it’s always factory girls. Don’t ask me why, because the only explanation I have, will make you feel ashamed every time you buy something nice and cheap and made in Hong Kong or Taiwan or Thailand or do I care where. Wages are so low there that the poor girls are forced to sell there skinny, famished bodies in order to support the big family. Six children, father mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, first and second cousins, two pigs and a Buddhist monk, all depending on that poor girls body. Isn’t it terrible? All day she’s slaving in that factory, putting together your calculator or video or pacemaker but the money she gets at the end of the day won’t fill all the rice bowls and so she has to go out and work in the Happy Moon or the Paradise Garden or Heavens Gate or fight her way into the Tropicana. So in a sense, by going to a cat house like that and donating our money to those girls, we are supporting the local industry and making it harder for the western world to compete.

Are you still with me? Good, But purely for the sake of argument let’s just suppose that you take that Chinese taxi driver up on his offer and he takes you to the Happy Moon Club. Don’t worry, he won’t cheat you, because he is an honest Chinese and he has a pride in his work and a name to lose, so he’11 take you there for a fixed price, which you pay, okay? I mean, what the hell do you care about ten or twenty Singapore dollars more or less. Pay now, feel sorry later.

I won’t try and describe the surroundings, but in most cases it will be a big place, a villa, something like that. Why? Because they need space; plenty of rooms, plenty of bathrooms and everything has to look nice and clean and safe or they’11 lose the business, right? It’s as simple as that. Forget your ideas

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about dark alleys, bad smelling, dark rooms and a pimp lurking in the backroom, ready to rob you and throw you out in the street in your bare ass. If you fancy a place like that, you can sure find one but then you’re in a different league.

Here mamasan will meet you at the door, all smiles and bows and please come in, She’ll seat you in a nice, spacious hall on a small white couch and clap her hands or push a button or send a small boy away, it all depends, but the result will be the same.

They should be playing the Entry of the Gladiators but they won’t. Oh, they will if you want them to, but it will cost you and most probably you would have to make arrangements beforehand, No, you’re fresh from Palnacki or Ripon or Strabane or Colchester and now you’re sitting on a small couch in a cat house in Singapore with a bulge in your pants and behold, in march the ‘plitty cleansafe factoly guls’ and holy shit, is this something.

On the way over in the taxi you were all worked up and you still had visions and ideas of what you were going to do right away and would continue doing all night long. It’s all very personal, but anyway you had plans to go ahead and do what you couldn’t do or wouldn’t do somewhere else, right? Absolutely nothing wrong there. We all have fantasies like that, men and woman alike and if there is a way to have them fulfilled, please go right ahead and do it because it will make you feel good. Sorry to disappoint you but you won’t find it with the pretty factory girls.

Why not?

Not because she wouldn’t and certainly not because she couldn’t. Oh, no. You pay, she’11 perform. She will, but you won’t, Not if you’re a normal guy with normal feelings. And why not? Because marching in is the saddest, most miserable, most distressing collection of females you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Philipino and whatever. Big ones, small ones, skinny ones and fat ones, ten, twelve, twenty or more and all wearing

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evening dresses of the most disgusting color and design. The first thing you’ll notice is that they all look either sleepy and tired or bored and disinterested and they form some sort of a police line-up, while you are sitting there on the imitation Louis Quinze couch and feel your crotch crimp and mamasan is standing a little aside, looking at you with an encouraging smile.

I don’t know what mental picture you get when somebody mentions ‘factory girls’, but certainly not this, is it? That’s why I’m at loss to understand why they think that factory angle makes them more desirable or trustworthy or whatever. To me they look like any other bunch of sleepy, overworked whores and that’s what they really are and so you should feel sorry for them.

So now what do you do? Are you really going to choose one of the twenty odd girls or so and sent the rest back to bed or to the stables or wherever they came from? Come on, now. And if you want to go ahead, how are you going to make a choice for that matter? What standards are you going to apply sitting there on that couch in your brand new tailor made slacks? I mean you’re not supposed to touch the merchandise, even if that’s the last thing you want to do right now. All you want is out, out out!

Well, I’ll spare you the sad details, because you know them damn well yourself, isn’t that true? You’re not clever and you’re not sensible and so you don’t get up and just walk out. Instead you point a sweaty finger more or less in the direction of the girl that reminds you of your mother or your schoolteacher or your first girl-friend and end up with the one to the left or to the right and feel sorry and very dirty afterwards. Now do you call that having a good time? No way, man, And don’t you think that I disapprove of factory girls or whores or whorehouses, because that would be the ultimate hypocrisy and an enormous lie at the same time. I’ve had great times in places of ill repute, especially in the reputed ones and I’ve met some great women there and had some fantastic lays, okay? No, I’m only warning you for the guy offering to take you to the

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‘plitty Happy Moon Hotel’ because it will be a very depressing experience. But if you can’t help yourself and go there after all, better take that anthropologist along, although there’s a fat chance he’s in the place already, studying. Let him pick up the tab. It saves you a lot of complicated tampering with your expense account, Anyway, we said thank you but no thank you to the guy and in a way we had to thank him double indeed because all of a sudden we didn’t feel like going anywhere anymore except back to our hotel and straight to bed. Don’t forget that we hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since we left Amsterdam over a week ago. Actually the only sleep we got was in the morning in the taxi going to Jurong, so no wonder we were beginning to feel a little tired.

We must have been because neither of us didn’t even mention the bar and a last one before turning in. No, we rode the elevator up to the fifth floor in silence, walked to our adjoining rooms, said goodnight and went in. I brushed my teeth, had a quick shower, called the operator for my wake-up call, got into bed and switched off the lights, Then all hell broke loose, You’re familiar with that special silence in air conditioned hotels with thick carpeting? Well, it’s very quiet. You’re not supposed to hear anything. So can you imagine what it is like when all of a sudden some madman in the room opposite yours decides it’s a splendid moment to start playing the bagpipes, while another one is accompanying him on the drums? You can’t, because I doubt if you ever had that experience. I did.

I jumped out of bed, ran to the door opened it and saw the head of my Geordie chief sticking out of the door next to me. In the corridor the noise was incredible and therefore I went into my friends room where we closed the door and looked at each other Without saying a word he went to the phone and dialed the number of the room where the madman was just getting into a fresh tantrum. Somebody else there in that room must have

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been pretty close to the phone to hear it and have picked it up, because the Geordie shouted: ‘Excuse me, but do you play any requests?!’ Where after he nodded and put down the phone again and said to me: ‘He says he does, but only if we feel like coming over and bringing them something to drink.’

And that’s exactly what we did, because this was as clearly a case of ‘when you can’t beat them, join them’ if there ever was one.

There in that room it was a fine mess indeed. Full of smoke and Scotsmen in various stages of intoxication and innumerable empty bottles everywhere. The bagpiper was in full uniform, parading up and down the king-size bed, while the drummer was standing in front of the dresser, stark naked except for a busby and with a face that showed complete concentration and seriousness. He must have swallowed a couple of empty scotch bottles, because what other explanation could there be for the fact that he could still stand upright given his state of drunkenness.

The reason that nobody else on the floor complained about this bedlam was quite simple: except for our two rooms, all the others were occupied by the members of the band! They came from a place called Ballachulish and had arrived earlier that evening for a tour of the Far East. After some light refreshments they had come to the conclusion they needed some more practice. And some more refreshments. And some more, whereupon the management instructed room service not to serve the fifth floor any longer. We must have come into the hotel during a short intermission.

Once again you could forget about any conversation of course.

Being a simple Dutch seaman I have trouble already understanding a sober Scotsman in quiet surroundings, so don’t expect me to know what a drunken Highlander is trying to explain to me in Erse amidst a racket like this. The bagpiper would only pause to take a swig from a bottle, in which short time span all the others

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had to applaud, drink and tell us all about it, but it wouldn’t be long before somebody would ask for a very special ayre, the title of which invariable sounding to me like ‘crigh cragh crogh logh’, whereupon the concert would continue.

We had brought two bottles of whisky and all the beer from our mini-bars and some other members of the band came in to join the party, bringing their beer and mini-bottles. We were smoking and singing and drinking strange cocktails and getting more pissed than ever before, but it was great fun.

Especially the next morning.

My head felt like a tortured bagpipe and when I looked in the mirror I was surprised not to see a couple of drones sticking out of it because that was the way it felt.

The Good Lord has a great sense of humor when He punishes us for sins like ours. How else can I explain the strange coincidence that out of the ten thousand or so Singapore taxis the doorman of the hotel flagged down the one driven by a short, fat, bald Chinese guy with a golden grin?

He looked at us, showed even more gold and said: ‘Weyyy! Look velly, velly bad! Velly sick. Now you see? Not go Happy Moon, nevel mind, Not go plitty factoly guls. Go bad place, now velly sick, heya?’

‘Why don’t you go fuck a Peking duck?’ the chief said, ‘Can do,’ he replied, nodding approvingly, ‘Can do, but will cost plenty money!’

We were in for another long, hot and humid day and my only hope was that we would get stuck in the biggest traffic jam ever, so that maybe I could get some sleep. We didn’t, Singapore is a swell place.

Sweltering.

Plitty.