hotel views

Whitebait should be out strolling the streets of Singapore as he only has a couple more days here. But today is the Sunday after a long Saturday invigilating and listening to student presentations. Which then morphed later into helping Tezza and some newish Singaporean friends finish the former's personally reserved bottle of gin (how excellently decadent) at the always friendly and relaxed Roomful of Blues. Which then led to sitting outside eating roti prata at 3am in Bencoolen Street. A great night. But today the comfort of the hotel room is very appealing within the context of Whitebait's seedy state.

Robert Fripp spends a lot more of his time than Whitebait in hotels (like the one in Seattle) and takes pictures and writes interesting pithy comments.

As part of the teaching deal, Whitebait gets put up in extremely ritzy lodgings here in the lion city. They didn't put this in his initial pointy-head position description so the hotel experience has been a major bonus. Which includes perhaps the best breakfast buffet on earth. Most interesting is the older, presumably American guest, who always sits at the table everyone has to pass to get into the breakfast area. He is dressed like Tom Wolfe's double in an impeccably natty white suit with an star spangled banner tie. On his table yesterday there were six glasses of bright red tropical fruit juice and a plate of assorted cut fruit. Then he got up, hobbled with his cane to the fruit area, and piled up a new plate with only watermelon. He had to push aside his black cap (with 'US Navy' or something similar written on it) in order to make space on the table for his temple of red fruit.

Interesting, but Whitebait is ready to go back to Tokyo.