We arranged, however, for a lunch gathering on Sunday. After a lot of calling (last minute booking is really tough - what to do, with my backache and terrible blocked nose + cough the week earlier, I haven't been feeling 'up to it' going about to make the reservation... sigh), we finally managed to book a table at Xin Cuisine located at the Holiday Inn Atrium. That is the old Glass Hotel.
Here's just a small deviation before we talked about our lunch. This is about The Glass Hotel.... This hotel has changed its name several times. It used to be called The Glass Hotel, then it became the Concorde Hotel and now, it is called the Holiday Inn Atrium.**************
One day, during my varsity holidays (when R was still an army boy), I went alone to shop at CK Tang area. After some shopping and rather aimless walking around, I dropped by at the 4th floor foodcourt at Lucky Plaza to have lunch. This foodcourt was more for the Orchard Road workers type, and shared not a twinkle of the 'glamour' Orchard Road eateries are usually associated with.
As I sat there eating alone, a bespectacled Chinese-looking man in his 50's came by and asked to share the table. After I said ok, he sat down with his plate of cut fruits and started to eat. He kindly gestured and offered his fruits to me, which I politely declined.
Then somehow, this quite fatherly figure and I started a conversation and it turned out that he was a trader from Vietnam who was in Singapore on a business trip. So, I just casually (kaypoh, lah!) asked if he had been to those usual tourist attractions like the Zoo, BirdPark etc. To my surprise, he said he has been to almost all of these already on his previous trips.
Then, when I asked if he had been to Sentosa, he sat up instantly and asked, "那是什么地方？我倒没去过！" And so, being in the kaypoh mood I was in then, I told him about 50% of whatever I knew of Sentosa.
I guess I must have been quite an animated storyteller that afternoon; that Vietnamese man listened so attentively! After a while, I paused and suddenly realised - oops, maybe I had spoken too much? Afterall, this was a stranger, leh!
Then, to my shock, he asked if I could bring him to Sentosa!! Ha?! And I don't know what had gotten into me, I actually said, "OK!"!!!!! (Now that I think back, maybe I had been so foolish, hor! What if he had turned out to be a 'baddie'?! 我真不知天高地厚！)
But I was also smart - I told him that I would gather a few friends and then we could all go on the outing together! He actually said, "那很好啊！太好了！我真得很感谢你啊！那我们哪一天去呢？"
We eventually decided to make it a weekend trip after I called my friends. So he gave me his room number at The Glass Hotel and then we parted ways after we finished our respective foods.
Once I got home that day, I called up a good friend called 小燕 who agreed to get a partner to go too. Then I also got R to go with us after he booked out of camp for that weekend.
On the appointed day itself, 4 of us met up and picked that Vietnamese man up from The Glass Hotel. I remember that 小燕 and I had tugged at each other and whispered with relief that fortunately we had got the 2 guys with us, otherwise it might have been seen to be rather scandalous thing for us young ladies to be going up to a hotel room to meet that Vietnamese man, hor?! (Yah, we called him from the Reception when we got to The Glass Hotel but he said he was just about to be ready and invited us up to his room instead!)
Anyway, after all the introduction, we set off and spent several hours playing host and tour guide to this Vietnamese man, walking him through the various tourist attractions on Sentosa such as The Wax Museum and Fort Siloso. The Underwater World was not ready yet, though.
During our outing, 小燕, her partner, R and I took turns to chitchat with the Vietnamese man. We also brought him to the Rasa Sentosa food centre somewhere near the jetty and introduced to him our local Satay and Popiah. He paid for several of the items, I remember. We all had coconut juice, too, as we rested our feet and listened to him talk about his country a little.
I remember that sometime during the trip, all the others went to buy some ice-cream and I was left alone with this Vietnamese man. Then, interestingly, he said this to me, "你这个朋友 (meaning R, lah!)，既不抽烟，也不喝酒。完全没有不良的嗜好，真的很难得。是个好男生，你有眼光，要好好把握。你的朋友那位男生，就没得比。"
I was speechless for several minutes - er, what was I expected to say?!?!? Anyway, the 3 stooges returned shortly after that, so we continued our 'tour' till it was time to hop onto the ferry back to mainland. Then we parted ways with the Vietnamese man.
Needless to say, the Vietnamese man was very grateful and was full of thanks to the 4 of us. And he gave us his address in Vietnam, inviting us to visit him if we ever went there. (Ha?! I never thought of visiting Vietnam because I grew up thinking of Vietnam as nothing more than a war-torn country - very unsafe! Landmines everywhere, anytime will explode and make people lose their limbs!But of course, I didn't say this to him, lah!)
Well, it's been almost 2 decades now since this 萍水相逢 with this Vietnamese man. I wonder if he still comes to Singapore to trade or if he remembers us....
*******************
And so, ok, our lunch was at Xin Cuisine. For most of us, this is a new restaurant. So we had no clue as to what its specialties were or how the food tasted. I only heard from a colleague that this was where our President Nathan loves to come with his family for some private dim-sum teatime every now and then.R, WY, WF and I arrived the earliest. Then BK, YP, WS and WP came. We adults looked at the various menus presented and couldn't make up our mind at first. Then, I took the chance and placed the orders:
北京烧鸭、麦片虾、时菜拼盘、苏东坡肉加馒头、干炒面线、炸脆小鱼、小菜烧肉、烧卖、虾饺
Shortly afterwards, Father, Mother and CP arrived. Then we took a group photo before the food came. Somehow, the photo cannot be uploaded, leh.....??
Then, the food came s-l-o-w-l-y, dish by dish. Taste and presentation were generally ok, although for some dishes, the serving was rather small even though we had order the large portion. The mixed vegetable platter, in particular, was quite a letdown. (Mother later gave me a earful about it, "这个叫什么菜？！ 都是一些看不起眼的罐头菜！这些罐头，我放在厨房里，连看都不看！有时放旧了都没人要，还得把它们丢掉！叫这种菜来做什么？！" )
Aiyah, like I said, this is our first visit so how would we know, right?!
Mother also criticised a lot about the Peking Duck - we had gotten the restaurant to have the duck cooked separately in another dish (instead of getting it chopped up for 'direct consumption'). She grumbled at me almost non-stop for this because she thinks we ought to have ordered to have the duck chopped. The dish which the duck meat was used for had other ingredients and so we had been 'cheated' of most of the duck meat!
She didn't even know that we had to pay an additional $10 for the duck to be cooked in another dish - to be eaten with leaves of fresh lettuce as wraps. Sigh.
Anyway, here are some of the photos.
R and I concluded: next time, go only Roland. That is probably Mother's benchmark restaurant.
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