We're raising readers! They used their Christmas money on new books.
When I was little my uncles would often by me gift certificates to the bookstore for Christmas. It has become one of my favorite traditions to buy a large stack of books and spend early January reading.
I asked the big girls if they would like to try a visit to the huge bookstore on Orchard Road and they were game. We left MsI heading to the wading pool for a splashy morning with our Helper, and took a Grab there.
The mall was deserted. We were there shortly after 11 when it opened. After our temperature reading and check-in for social tracing, we headed straight up the escalators to the bookstore. I tried to tempt them with baked treats or new clothes, but they were focused in on books.
They dragged me along straight to the kids section at the far end of the store. It's quite a walk. Everything you can see in the picture below is the children's section, and that's about 1/2 the children's section. MsE knew exactly what she wanted: books 4 and 5 of the Minecraft Woodsword Chronicles. The series has been Dad's and her's bedtime reading lately. She also found another series of early reader chapter books she likes and picked 2 of those for our basket. Eventually she settled for 5 books and was like "O.K., Now we can go." But MsC and I still needed to fill our basket.
We were in the bookstore for 90 minutes, so needless to say we have a lot of books to read. MsC even found the Music and Film section on our way to my Historical Fiction shelves. She found a book on BlackPink, the Korean girl band she like. Looks like we will be studying K-Pop (Korean Pop music) this month. After this, we also started watching BlackPink's documentary on Netflix. MsC found how some people start training for this industry as young as 11, very exciting.
When I come by myself I usually browse for 90 minutes just for myself, but I knew the girls would not be interested in that. We spent most of our time here this day in the Children's section. I grabbed books as quickly as possible and ended up with 4 books from 4 very different places in the world: the Pacific North West; India; the Almalfi Coast; and Russia. Yes, I'll be traveling through early this 2021. The girls were told "No sitting on the floor" when a store employee came by. I showed the girls how they could lean against a shelf to rest as they browsed through one of the books they were about to buy.
Being a weekday, there was thankfully no line to pay.
Jonathan and I have seen the socially distanced line stretch almost to the end of the store (and it's a huge store). That was on a weekend. There were about 50 people in line at the time. The thing about Singapore is that no one seems to hustle when the line gets long, even really long. The clerks just go at the same slow, but steady pace as before, and people just settle down to wait in the lone queue. We didn't; we came back another day.
It took us a while to pay anyhow. We were all using our Christmas money so there were separate stacks for books each of us and the counting of cash by small children. Of course, everyone needed their own bag.
We headed down to the food court for lunch. MsC found a number of vendors that looked yummy to her immediately. MsE found it a lot harder. There was no McDonald's near this Food Centre.
One stall was making some sort of pancake. There were pink ones that looked like fish, so MsE tried that. It was Chocolate Cherry "Taitaki" - a Japanese pancake cooked in a fish shaped double sided mold filled with various filling. MsE declared it "Delicious" at first bite, but when I came back to our table with my own food, she said it was too squishy and couldn't eat it. I just was glad she tried it.
MsC had eat a Mexican Burrito, with mayonnaise in it. At the make your own burrito place, the guy insisted that she needed sauce in her burrito. We asked for salsa. He told us, yes, there was already salsa in it, but that it still needed sauce. None of the sauces looked right for a ground beef burrito. He was certain, we were doing it wrong. MsC bowed to his insistence and asked for mayonnaise. She said it tasted fine.
I got Yong Tau Foo, which made me a little nervous on 2 counts.
- You use tongs to pick out what fresh vegetables and meats you want in your soup/noodle bowl. There's no sneeze guard, so hopefully those ingredient haven't been out too long. They also don't wash the tongs in between users. They just move the tongs back to the beginning of the line where you pick up your bowl and tong without washing them. Who knows how many people touched those tongs today. Lets just all share that new super catchy strain of Covid-19 emerging right now. This process is totally standard for Yong Tau Foo stalls; I basically stopped eating this a year ago.
- All the ingredients are cooked in the same giant pot of broth for all the customers. This means that if any of their ingredients have wheat in them, which includes yellow noodles and many of the meat products like fish balls, etc., I get gluten cross contamination. It was fairly early in the day, so I figured it was worth the risk, and I did feel fine after eating this.
MsE patiently waited until MsC and I had finished eating, before we set off on another search around the takeaway booths to see if we could find her something. She eventually found Pigs in a Blanket (although I don't think they call it that here) at a Bakery Stall. Here the "hot dogs" are wrapped in soft milk bread, instead of a pastry crust. MsE rubbed every bit of bread off the hot dog and then ate both the meat and the bun separately, but at least we didn't have to resort to feeding her Mermaid Cupcakes.
