The working days between Christmas and New Year’s is either called ‘Nothing Week’, or ‘Nonsense Week’ by some of my more unfortunate friends. Those who have to work, that is.
(Those who are on vacation – Nabeh, fark orf!)
If you haven’t already experienced it, you’d have discovered these past days that work has been really, like, you know, a lot, you know? And like, you know, wah lao, come from everywhere, like, you know?
You’d also have known that if you didn’t plan every hour of these types of days, you’d forget to eat and sleep. So it was a very good thing the past couple of days that I had the good sense to plan (to buy) dinner.
At the Zion Road Food Centre tonight, I had a craving for soup noodles, so I looked around for a stall that sold the stuff. Then I was reminded that there was that Famous Prawn Noodle (Hay Mee) Stall there, at Zion Riverside Food Centre, where there’s also the Famous Char Kuay Teow Stall, the Famous Wonton Mee Stall, and the Famous Rojak Stall.
As I stood in front of the stall, the Hay Mee Man looked up from behind the glass pane and asked what I wanted. I said in Mandarin, ‘Big Prawn Noodles‘.
I swear, he sighed when he asked again, ‘Those are $15. You still want?‘
I asked for the ‘Not So Big Noodles’, which were $10. And as he halved the (still rather) large prawns and boiled them in the pot of stock, he muttered something about ‘business no good these days’.
That probably meant I wasn’t gonna be able to ask for an extra prawn.
He went on to talk about how he had wasted money on advertising, and that it didn’t help his business any. Good thing at this point, the soup noodles were done, and I had to take my dinner, which was very yummy, by the way.
After I was done, I popped by Hay Mee Man’s stall again and asked if I could take a picture of him standing in front of the stall, for you know, to put online on the internet so that my friends can see it and they can come by and eat his Famous Hay Mee?
Hay Mee Man declined, saying he wasn’t ‘used to it’, so I just took a picture of the stall.
‘Ask your friends to come and try lah’, he went on.
‘Yah, that’s why I’m putting this up on the web’, I said.
‘Aiyah, no use one lah, I try before’, he sighed, again.
Stall 13, Zion Riverside Food Centre – Ignore the prices on the board, thems are for the midget prawns
iTunes is playing an illegal copy of Frosty The Snowman from the album “The Very Best Of Christmas Favourites” by Roy Hargrove/Christian McBride of which I have the original CD.
Technorati Tags: Christmas, food, singapore
Leave a Reply