Elephant in the room

I just emerged from a domestic. Thankfully it wasn't my domestic, otherwise some people might get the wrong idea. Like as if I was seeing someone, or somehow family moved over to Singapore too. Actually it was a domestic of a friends'. Notice how the apostrophe is behind the s? Yeah. Well I guess in a country where you don't have any family, friends are the only family you've got, and somehow you get dragged into it.

The harsh part of me just wants to tell people to take their drama back into their own corner of the world. Its not my business and I shouldn't have to deal with it. But then the realistic part of me knows that these kind of things aren't always the ones you can bottle up, and nobody can stay in theor own little corner of the world for very long without going insane. They have to share their misery. I guess its inevitable.

As uncomfortable as being in the middle of a domestic is when you're there in the middle of the day, I think its probably worse when its about 3am in the morning and you haven't slept in a while. Add on a few more points when you're playing Scrabble, theres only four people and the guy who normally talks a lot isn't talking very much. Did anyone say awkward silence? I think we made it worse for ourselves because we actually said we wanted to play. Not that we knew it was a domestic in the first place though. That only came out during the ride back...

I was actually quite lucky. If I'd gotten the letters to make 'domestic' or 'lovers tiff' or maybe 'awkward silence', I wouldn't have been able to think of any anagrams afterwards. The good news would have been that I would get the extra 50 points for using all 7 of my letters - well, for some of them anyway.

Now that I look back on it, its funny that nobody actually said anything about it. Everyone kind of tip toeing around the subject like it doesn't exist. The elephant in the room scenario. Reminds me a bit of work, where we have those meetings where we get told some people are being laid off, but management puts a positive spin on it even though everyone knows they're just talking crap. The ones who've gone through it before just yawn and move on - its the same old stuff over again. The newbies just kinda sit there and listen. The brighter ones read between the lines, the not so bright ask stupid questions.

Theres also the possibility that I'm reading into it a bit too much. Maybe everyone was just a bit too tired. Maybe my perceptions of social interation were off that night. Maybe we were concentrating on Scrabble a lot more than we have previously.

Though to tell you the truth, sometimes its nice to have a bit of drama in your life. I guess that all the drama I got away from when I left Australia isn't just there. People are more or less the same the world over. We all have things to deal with, and people we don't always get along with. Its nice to know we're all still human even we do speak with a little different.

Singapore Pizza

I had a craving for pizza tonight, so I ordered some. I really wasn't very satisfied. Theres something about the pizza here which makes it a bit NQR. Now I realise why, when I went to Italy with a couple of friends from this country, they LOVED the pizza. Of course, after a couple of weeks of nothing but pizza and pasta, they got sick of it, but the standard is so much different over there. Its a bit like flying from Antarctica to the middle of Botswana and discovering the difference in temperature difference. Thats if you can equate the weather to the taste of pizza. If in some sick way you can't, join the club. I don't understand what I write most of the time either.

I've actually had a couple of pizzas here, and neither of them are any good at all. I thought that maybe the first was just an abnormal sample, but as I'm now doubling the sample size, my significance level is getting just that much better.

So I think I figured out what it is. A couple of things actually:

The Cheese

The first thing is the cheese. Its really not er.. cheesy enough. I don't actually know much about cheese, but normally the cheese I eat on pizzas is melted and stretches when you pull the next piece off the pizza. The cheese here just breaks. Thats just wrong. Theres no slippery slide of cheese between you and the rest of the pizza. It also spoils the whole pizza eating experience.

I don't know if its the same thing that makes cheese stretchy as well as taste better, but its the best that I can come up with.

The Meat

All the Aussies I talk to here all agree that the meat in this country is two things: bad and expensive. The only American I'm on speaking terms here also agrees. I guess it only makes sense. Apart from chicken, all the other types of land animal meat on sale here has to float halfway around the world before it actually gets here. The beef, lamb and pork comes from either Brazil, Australia or New Zealand.

The meat on this particular pizza I had tonight looked like spam. I ordered a super supreme, so I was guessing it was either ham or salami. It tasted like neither, which is a bit scary. If I wake up sick tomorrow, then I'll know why.

So point to note: If you ever come to Singapore, don't eat the pizza, even if you have a REALLY big craving for it. Its also very expensive ($25~ SGD). Try the chilli crab instead.