Popagandhi

‘Impossible is nothing’ is a tagline that suits that country better than Adidas.

I’m in the midst of starting a collection of funny Singapore signs, mostly of the civic-minded type. No shortage of those around. I want to run out to collect pictures of the large banners that say “please overturn your pails” and “please cover your bamboo pole holders when not in use” (complete with step by step pictorial tutorial and text in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil — in that order, and all on a banner). A sampling so far. They just keep outdoing themselves! You’d think they were all in some kind of competition to win the best gratuitous use of the word ‘cum’ (or members of the Cum Conjunctions Club), or.. best Microsoft Office ClipArt/WordArt designer.

For our numerous international readers: yes, this entire country has a crush on acronyms. ISD is the Internal Security Department, and (Singaporeans may be shocked as well) HIP apparently stands for… Home Improvement Program. Which is what they try to call upgrading these days.

While sleeping one afternoon, as I usually do these days, my bank called to check if I received a new credit card they’d issued me — the one they upgrade all university debit card accounts to when we leave university. She did the customary checks: did I also get the letter with my PIN, have I activated it, et cetera.

Quite stunningly, she decided she would try to ‘interest’ me in a new product.

“We have this insurance plan, only $28 a month…”

“Yes… I’m not…”

“WHEN YOU DIE AH YOU GET TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.“

Though I was in the stupor of sleep, every alarm in my head went off. What kind of sales pitch is this? Before I could say anything to reflect my staunch disinterest, she continued.

“Excuse me may I know what is your preoccupation.”

I guess she meant occupation. I told her a couple of half truths, but was generally truthful in how… I… work as a photographer and journalist in… you know, places like India. Bangladesh. That sort of place lah.

“THEN SORRY AH I CANNOT OFFER YOU THIS INSURANCE SORRY BYE BYE.“

Who said anything about wanting it? You lost a customer starting a sales pitch like that anyway, though I did wonder whether she disqualified me immediately from the program because of how I’m not… employed (yet), in the regular Singaporean understanding of employed, or because I claim to spend most of my time in those countries. Guess I’ll never find out because I was thinking of closing that bank account anyway, and this hasn’t helped at all.

While walking to the Bar and Billards Room to meet my future employers, who were in town for the Asian Publishing Conference, my sandals broke in the corridors of the Raffles Hotel. Hobbling around madly to a casual job interview/meeting, someone working at the hotel noticed my broken sandals and… offered to mend it for me. And mend it he did, with a fairly ingenious contraption (a pin bent into shape to keep the straps of my sandals together). Although I wasn’t a guest of the rooms at the Raffles, it didn’t stop him from carrying out the exceptionally high levels of service one expects from a legendary hotel like that.

A little gesture like that goes a long, long way.

I had the good pleasure to read at ContraDiction again this year. After a two year absence from it (was always abroad every time they came calling), it was a pleasant surprise to see the event play to a packed venue with plenty of talented performers. We do have great talent in the queer community, and there are tons of events at this year’s Indignation. From the introductions and some conversations it seems there are several books in the making from this very young, very prolific group, so that’s plenty to look out for in the Singapore literary space. For the record, I am also working on a book. Fiction.

I read an oldie-but-goodie, the 2006 piece posted here, entitled Why I Am Still A Feminist. Lainie rolled her eyes and drank her chai quietly when she heard the title earlier in the afternoon — she said it was “soooooooooooooo dyke”. I know. New readers of this site probably would have missed it unless you’ve trawled through my sucky archives, it’s worth a look. It felt different reading something I wrote at age 21, but the general message remains.

I’d also written a small piece as a surprise for someone who’d flown in as she says she is my “number one biggezt fan” (though Vicnan protests this isn’t possible). I haven’t written any serious poetry in years so it makes no pretensions towards it — it was first written in a little boat while getting out of the dense interiors of Borneo after an amazing week there, and completed almost entirely in the Notes function of my Nokia N95 while poking at fantastic Basque pintxos at Taktika Berri. Since this was written in (and read out of a mobile phone) it has zero poetic structure. Each stanza was even deliberately vetted to be… Twitter-length. The plan was to surprise the special person in my life with a reading at ContraDiction, but if she could not appear it would fit nicely into five text messages, real time. Through some miracle, the beautiful girl for whom it was written managed to touch down and come speeding from the airport about five seconds before I started on this one. (coughs)

Entalau

1.
What they have in days
are weeks for us. Weeks with you,
mostly apart. Like our Borneo we are jungles, weeds.
Ferocity. Or waters still beneath
and quiet stars.

2.
Sometimes the silence, the jungles, the rivers we don’t know.
It is all wrong, all of it.
We escape five to a boat, and hope.
The winds, the waves, the misery,
Everything. In the unbroken darkness,
in this narrow boat, even if
it is only your fingertips pressed against my own —
you point the way home.

3.
We crash into rocks on the way home,
like it happens everyday. Life is elsewhere;
this morning it’s here, you said. Last night
I leaned back on the boat and you were there
wet hair around my neck.
Crickets. Silence. Stars.
A life form beneath us turning.
The jungle burns
but not as much as how I burn for you.

Notes: Entalau is a longhouse in Sarawak, in Skrang district. This is the first in the series. Others to follow in the series have yet to be written, but their titles have already been decided. #2: Babi Mati, #3: Jamban, #4: Pochor-Pochor #5 Joget Ekonomi. Haha!

“You Asians,” the breathless voice behind me said, with its mangled English, “have some of the world’s most beautiful seafood. Big, beautiful, perfect-looking. But, I tell you, it is all tasteless.”

If this wasn’t Salvatore, the Barcelonian journalist that I’d befriended while choosing cans of pristine Spanish clams to take home with me, I might have put up a tough fight to such opinions. Yet I could not. He had a point; the seafood I knew back in Asia, whether it was Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand; India, Bangladesh, or South Korea, had all been wonderful specimens, yet I could never really taste them. Whether it’s because of differences in cooking style, or even if Salvatore was right and it came down to sheer freshness and taste, I only knew the seafood I had known so far only tasted of what it was cooked with. Black pepper, curry, garlic, herbed. It all masked the taste of seafood and you could never taste seafood on its own, only what it was cooked with.

Two weeks before I would have fought tooth and nail for my Asian pride on this one point, and yet, I could not. For I had been awed, shocked, and pleasantly bowled over by the famed seafood of the region at Rafa’s, about two hours north of Barcelona in the little Costa Brava town of Roses.

Rafa should have his TV show one day, but it’d be entirely in Spanish: gruff Catalonian man chomping on his cigarette, cooking, and singing Spanish songs at the same time. Olive oil and sea salt. That’s all he cooks with. To say he cooks simply is understating it. Everything is naked. Everything is a la plancha — just simply grilled, on that metal top. I did not expect to have yet another culinary revelation so shortly after El Bulli (the night before), but I did want to eat at Rafa’s as much as I wanted to eat at El Bulli. I’d read of how difficult it was to find the little restaurant with just five tables — it’s located in a tiny alley in the middle of Roses. I booked a hotel right opposite it (it helped that said hotel, the Hotel La Cala, was also the cheapest deal in town, a bed and breakfast at just 25 euros per person; decent digs). His opening hours seemed suspect: closed Sundays, Mondays, and most of December. Closed whenever the fish that day isn’t any good. He won’t have anything to do with seafood that isn’t of the absolute best quality, and goes everyday to his fisherman friends for the best catch from the bay of Roses.

Rafa and his wife run the eponymous Rafa’s, which in recent years has exploded in popularity as the must go restaurant if you ever find yourself in Roses, particularly together with an El Bulli meal. It’s said the El Bulli guys, including Ferran Adria, frequent the joint: in the Bourdain documentary about El Bulli, towards the end of it the unavoidable question is popped — if Ferran Adria is the hottest chef in the world, what then, does he eat? Adria took them to Rafa’s, but the script kills it with a Spanish-to-English rant about memories, and memories of seafood, the taste of the sea. When I got there, I knew what they meant.

But where do I begin?

With the appetizers, perhaps, as is usually the case. Anchovas; when one is in Spain, there’s no getting away from anchovies. I hated the very word anchovies before I went, slowly grew to like it — but here at Rafa’s, they asked if I’d like two types of anchovies, and I was glad I said yes. Anchovies with oil, anchovies with salt. That’s it. The menu, in his wife’s head. No complicated menu in Spanish or French, just anchovies with oil, and anchovies with salt. Both forms of anchovies were exactly the way I like my anchovies to be, if I like them at all: fresh. Punchy. Salty. Savoury. Perfect. Anchovies with oil came on two pieces of toasted bread. It was the right amount of warm. My friend Chermain and I were… impressed. Neither of us were fans of anchovies, but we loved this.

Neither of us were big fans of shellfish either, but Rafa’s gave me the very rare sort of feeling, the sort that said everything coming from his kitchen had to be eaten. I heeded, threw all my bias aside, and said: feed me. Feed me he did. Sea snails with vinaigrette. Were they sea snails or were they whelks? I have no idea. It tasted good. And then the Clams. My God, those clams. I still think about them — I’ve had many clams in my life, but these were by far the tastiest, and the freshest. By a long, long shot. I could not get enough of them, and went for seconds. (I described them to someone that same night, “The clams were so fresh they were still squirting in the box!” She told me I should never think about going into food writing.)

I had no way of knowing then it was only the beginning.

The squids. The squids deserve a paragraph on their own. I’m no fan of squids, generally — I grew up detesting the taste of squids. I hate food with rubbery texture, and for that reason, abhorred all sotong, and at best only had a passing tolerance for squid in its fried, calamari form. But the baby squids here. Just olive oil, and the taste of something heavenly: a little charred, a little oil. Crispy little baby squids with wonderful texture, and a taste of squid that I could not place. When we were done Chermain and I were slurping up the remnants of olive oil, a little delirious. I think one of us (probably me) called it “perfect olive oil, beautifully infused with squids”. We went for seconds, too. Next up, the prawn family. One expected nothing less of Rafa’s by this point, and did he deliver. Scampi. Langoustines. Succulent, fresh, even the… ‘brainjuice’. We lapped it all up, like hungry children. One thing you’ll notice is how Rafa’s fish are all ugly. There are no exceptions. Some serpentine, some monster-like. We picked the San Pedro, out of the possibilities that night. It was a good choice, though I think I might have preferred monkfish or turbot. Dessert: a home-made ‘black and white’ chocolate tart to close the night of perfection. It’s a meal that’ll stay with me for a long time.

And dare I say it — I think I preferred it to El Bulli. I would go back to Spain just to eat here. And you should, too. More photos at Flickr.

Rafa’s
C. Sant Sebastia, 56
Tel: +34 972 254003

Roses Travel Guide (Public Transport)
Access via Barcelona:
Bus Take a bus from Barcelona Nord station (metro: Arc de Triomphe), run by the SARFA company. There are two buses I think, one at about 11am gets you there by 1pm. The other bus runs in the evening. In June 2008 the one way bus fare for Barcelona-Roses was 18.10 euros. For up to date bus schedules and prices, check Movelia.

Train For departures throughout the day, buy a ticket from Barcelona Sants station to Figueres (in the direction of Girona). Get out of Figueres, and walk out of the Figueres train station to the bus station several metres away, from where there are frequent SARFA bus departures for Figueres-Roses (about 2-3 euros). Buses to Roses too from all parts of the Costa Brava and from Girona.

Access via France:
Bus and Train Trains from southern France (particularly Perpignan) run to Cerberes, from where they continue to Girona or Figueres. Check train schedules. Some Eurolines buses from France (especially Perpignan, Marseille and Aix en Provence) run through to Girona, from where you can either take the bus to Roses, or the train to Figueres and then the bus to Roses.