We felt the tropical heat seep in through the teeny gap where the plane met the jet bridge, and the mellow air-conditioning in the terminal building lapped gently at it rather than blasting it all away. In a short sleeve T-shirt and jeans, I couldn't do anything more about the heat than I'd already done, but Eliza shrugged off her backpack and handed it to me so she could take off her hoodie. This did not feel like one of the top ten busiest international airports in the world, when some of the glassed-in gates were empty and we could move around without being in danger of bumping into someone any minute. They had little free trolleys, so many of them, so I could relieve Eliza of her backpack, and in consideration of the vastness of the building, they'd lined the pier with travellators, which was a very good thing because we went through at least three of them to get to the centre of the terminal.
"OMG," I said out loud. "This looks like a frickin' palace."
"Yeah, I just died and went to heaven," quipped Eliza.
"Don't," I said, feeling like I'd been brought to the ground with a thud. "Please don't make jokes like that."
"It's not like you're the one who's dying," said Eliza, tossing her head and trying to look cavalier. "So you don't get to tell me what I can or can't joke about." In a smaller voice, she confided, "It makes me less scared if I joke about it, so just let me."
We had to ditch the little trolley, because we were on the second floor of a double-storey atrium and had to go on the down escalator to get to the immigration hall. It was a huge space with a grand-looking marble floor, which seemed to suck the crowds away even more efficiently than how Mom's vacuum cleaner handled the inevitable detritus that built up in a house with two boys living in it. There were automatic gates where the locals could stick their passports in and get through in seconds, which got rid of maybe half the people, and many manned counters to spread the rest of us out. Apparently, they didn't care to advertise the long line of people waiting to enter their country, which was great news for said people who just wanted to get to the other side and start having fun.
Rows and rows of free baggage trolleys were waiting for us when we got through the border, officially setting foot in Singapore territory. Better still, palm trees were growing out of the baggage carousels, and the wall from which the baggage belts emerged was covered in greenery.
"Baggage claim is the Garden of Eden," I remarked. "If only that were true back home."
"Now, whose turn is it to be blasphemous?" chided Eliza. "Thank you for not joking about heaven, in advance."
That trolley was hollow in the middle, so it couldn't possibly be comfortable to ride on, but Eliza insisted on arranging herself in it and clinging to the folding bar at the end while I pushed. I loved the long, low baggage carousels because it meant I could get our bags without jostling other people, even though they were light enough that there was absolutely zero risk I'd pull a muscle. By standing Eliza's bag lengthwise on its side on the trolley and carrying my rucksack, I could still let Eliza ride on the cart, which wasn't a bad thing because we had to go all the way to the other end of the building to get to the subway station. Luckily for us, the transportation signs were all lit up with yellow words and icons; clearly, the local authorities had some idea of what might be most important to a clueless person coming here for the first time.
The subway station was an elevator ride down, and if the clanking, stuffy, stinking whirl that was the New York City subway was 21st century reality, then the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit, or MRT, was 30th century futurism. All the gates were extra wide to accommodate people like us with baggage, the floor was glossy marble tile instead of bare concrete, and the train was actually waiting for us, sheathed behind protective glass panels with sliding doors. Only one thing convinced me we weren't in a sci-fi movie, and that was the fact that everyone who wasn't dressed for work or in school uniform was wearing shorts and flip-flops, making me feel overdressed even in my jeans and sneakers.
It would be really easy for us to pass for 18 and above here, I figured, when I'd never seen that many teenagers in school uniforms before. Most of them were in PT kit, wearing T-shirts with the names and crests of their schools emblazoned on them over short or long pants or skirts. And for an airport, there was a crazy number of them hanging around, as well as families with little kids, some of whom were wearing school uniforms too. When was there ever an airport where the local people hung out for fun, instead of considering them to be places of torture?
A pro tip I learned from vlogs was that the tap cards we used to ride the subway, called EZ-Link, could also be used for shopping at grocery stores and eating at food courts. It meant we didn't have to keep our wallets fat with cash, though I felt a pang at parting with those beautiful plastic bank notes, pristinely clean with a single crisp fold down the middle, a different colour and design for each denomination. But I had to admit, it was really convenient to be able to pay for stuff in a single tap when we weren't old enough to have credit cards of our own yet, and I was trying to avoid disturbing Dad's credit for as long as I could.
Any notion of the subway being paradise was smashed on its head when our train pulled into Tanah Merah Interchange. We'd gone above ground after leaving the airport, and the train reached a dead end on the middle track, forcing us to exit the doors on either side. I spotted the "West" sign on the left (it helped that on maps, East was on the right and West was on the left) and crammed in with all the other people gathering behind the fiberglass panels at the edge of the platform. The lines and arrows on the floor directed us to line up at the sides of each door, making way for people who wanted to get out in the middle. I felt a little clumsy with my big hiking rucksack and Eliza's roller bag, and on the open-air platform, the humidity was starting to get to me. Within seconds, every square inch of my skin felt a little sticky. Eliza leaned on me, throwing me slightly off balance, and I put my free arm protectively around her shoulders. Giant screens overhead told us the next train would be coming in 2 minutes, and sure enough, we were greeted by a white train with black and red stripes on the sides, grinding to a halt with a whoosh. Compared to my admittedly very limited experience with subways, this one was actually pretty quiet, which was another reason why I felt like I'd time-travelled several centuries into the future.
What I had not accounted for, was that the subway was designed to be standing room only. The two neat rows of plastic bucket seats running lengthwise down the train cars had felt sleek when there were enough of them for everyone on the train, but when they were all full of people already and we had to burrow around clumps of standing passengers to make our way into the middle, I felt a little overwhelmed. Turning Eliza towards me and clutching her tight, I wedged the roller bag between my feet and grabbed one of the plastic loops that hung in two parallel rows from the ceiling, trying to take up as little space as was humanly possible. We already were lucky, I realized, when just two stations along, the people getting on were crammed all the way to the doors and had to step out of the train at every station to let other people in and out.
But I couldn't complain much, not when hardly half an hour later, the now-familiar "ding-dong" sounded, announcing our station, Outram Park Interchange. We pushed our way out into an underground mass of tunnels, searching for the platform to the North East line.
"This is like DIA in miniature," I grumbled. "Don't let go of my hand, OK?"
There really wasn't a chance Eliza would let go of me, not when she had relinquished all the tasks of planning, navigation, and logistics to my hands. Not to mention, I was a sucker for punishment on everything regarding Eliza anyway. We must have made a tour of the entire platform, bumbling through every escalator and all the possible passageways and openings, before finding the right tunnel for the North-East Line. By then, I wondered if all that effort was even worthwhile, or if we'd have done better just getting outside and walking a half mile down the street instead of trying to ride the subway for one more stop.
"Did you say these trains are driverless?" said Eliza. "That's freaky. Maybe if we close our eyes and say the name of our hostel, we could just teleport there. We might as well take that sci-fi thing to the limit while we're at it."
"Two minutes," I promised. "It can't get any better than that."
Night had fallen at some point while we were underground, and I blinked in surprise when we emerged from the Chinatown station, greeted by a city full of twinkling lights. Cell phone roaming was expensive so I'd printed out hard copies of all the Google maps I thought might be relevant to our itinerary; but finding the single row of two-storey houses in a sea of skyscrapers was something of a no-brainer. It turned out our hostel was visible right across the street, and I momentarily thought of making a quick dash before convincing myself that Eliza might be more up to walking a couple hundred yards to the intersection and back up again, rather than trying to jaywalk across four lanes of traffic.
Al had booked us beds in dorms, and when I complained about not getting a private room, he'd said, "That's your problem if you won't get fake ID. When you're a kid, you get the kid rooms. Sorry, dude, but the hostels were the only thing I could get that'd let you check in on your own when you're under eighteen."
Oh well, I'd try my luck anyway. "Could you please get us beds in the same dorm?" I asked the skinny Chinese boy at the front desk. He didn't look any older than the freshmen in our high school, but then, practically all the young people I'd seen on the subway were like that. "I'd like for us to stay together, if that's possible."
"Orr, that's your girlfriend, ah?" said the boy in the sing-song tones that everyone seemed to talk in. They were all speaking English, but between the unfamiliar accent, the way they seemed to leave out the last consonant in every word, and all the extra syllables that seemed to function purely as punctuation, I had to process what they were saying in words rather than sentences, almost as if I'd been thrown back into kindergarten again.
"I guess so," I said. Truthfully, I didn't know what Eliza and I were anymore. Once upon a time, eons ago, I would've said "yes" with the confidence we both knew the same truth of it. But ever since she dumped me in ninth grade to go out with Al, she'd skirted carefully around any solid definition of our relationship status, even after she and Al broke up two years later, just before he graduated high school and went to Penn. "Please?"
"Sorry, cannot," he replied. "Our hostel only got male and female dorms. You don't want some other guy sharing a room with your girlfriend at night, right? So, like that, lor."
"OK," I took the locker keys, room security codes, and access cards the front desk boy handed over to me and followed Eliza up the steep, narrow stairs. The hostel was made up of three row houses mashed together, with all the dorms on the second floor.
"Remember to take your medicine before you go to bed, OK?" I said when I dropped Eliza off at her door. "It might be a couple hours early, but you probably won't want to stay up till midnight. And I might bring some food up to you later, so if you hear three quick knocks, it's me."
"Thanks," said Eliza. "I'm not sure I'll feel like eating anything, though. Good night, Chris."
Nothing in the vending machines downstairs interested me, so I consulted my printed map and walked four blocks down the street to what Google Maps called "Lau Pa Sat – Restored Victorian-style food market". The entire market, which looked hexagonal from street level, was a huge portico, supported by slim metal pillars which looked something like the ones on my porch at home. Inside, rows of round marble-topped tables and flat round stools were bolted to the ground, and street food stalls flanked the sides.
The whole place was a cacophony of olfactory and auditory assault. All the stall names had English words on them, or at least, they were supposed to, but what did "Lok Lok 69 BBQ Chicken Wings" or "Qiu Lian Ban Mian" or "Wanton Noodles" actually mean? Still, I remembered our pact, and steered clear of the smattering of Western food stalls even though those were the only things I knew and recognized. I noticed there were stalls where people were ordering food without uttering a word, just pointing to the dishes they wanted, so I just slipped in line behind them and tried my best to do the same.
"I'd like to have that to go, please," I said to the elderly gentleman at the stall.
"Da bao, ah? Chi de hai shi bao de (吃的还是包的 = eating here or take away)?" he said in reply. OK, that couldn't possibly be English, right?
"To go, er, I mean, to take away," I repeated, drawing a box in the air and pantomiming the action of carrying a bag.
"Orr, da bao," said the man, nodding. "OK."
He handed me a plastic bag with my two orders of rice wrapped in brown paper and fastened with rubber bands, accompanied by little plastic bags tied closed with pink plastic string that looked like miniscule water bombs, except one contained a brown liquid and the other a crumbly red paste. Tiny plastic spoons like paper boats with long handles attached to them completed the package.
My three knocks on Eliza's door went unanswered, so I plopped down alone in the common room with the two packets of rice. Unwrapping the two mini water bombs and dumping their contents over the food, I started shovelling rice into my mouth, only to find that everything was drowned in a mix of salt and chili pepper. Oh well, that was a problem for another day; I did have some tips on the food scene, but tonight just happened to be too late to act on them. All I needed was food, a shower, and some sleep, and then we could start the action tomorrow.