Day 36

sitting in the riker room, lulled by the interminable policy lecture, i begin to think about food that i miss. for a number of days now, i've been hankering after zhu2 chao3, or else those silly stalls that call their ware "scissors curry rice", and imagining what i would order if i were going for lunch at one of those - hainanese porkchop, sambal brinjal, kang kong, fried eggs with their insides so runny one wonders if they have been cooked at all. rice is one of the worst things to miss; whenever i get rice in the states it's never quite the same, and one is left with the annoyance of having something a shade off verisimilitude, like an itch you just can't get at no matter where you scratch. i know the exact stall i want to go to. it's the one that i used to eat at on the days when mike had his violoin lessons, and when i had to wait at jurong east, after school, for the rest of the family to arrive. wait, with book and homemade barley and steaming food, happy as a child, sated.