From Helsinki to Singapore

I was supposed to get to New Zealand in just over a day, but the journey from Helsinki to Auckland ended up taking 53 hours. Things began to slide in Frankfurt, where at zero degrees the planes had to be sprayed with de-icing fluid.

Before the flight I still got into the Lufthansa Senator lounge, as in the old days, and the food there had clearly been worked on. There used to be only sausages and biscuits to go with the free drinks. Now there were also "poultry meat balls" that looked like beef patties, German onion tart, chillies stuffed with cream cheese and other nibbles I had no time to try. Blissfully unaware of any delay, I slipped a bottle of San Pellegrino into my rucksack, since it is nice to be self-sufficient in water on a long flight. The half-hour delay that was then announced stretched to three hours. That was annoying, because my laptop had only half charged in the terminal, and the lounge would have been a far better place to wait than a cramped economy seat.

The food on Singapore Airlines was much the same as on the other big carriers, but trouble had been taken over the small things: the drinks list naturally included a Singapore Sling, and pudding could have been a Magnum ice cream. By the time we landed in Singapore my connecting flight had of course left, but the service was so good that I did not even mind. The hotel, the taxis and the meals were all paid for without my asking, and as I set off for the city centre the agent reminded me: "Don't pay a penny yourself, everything has been taken care of." So it was, and I had a pleasant day's shopping. From my last visit I remembered appalling crowds, but this time the place was downright deserted in parts.

Singaporeans are proud of their seafood, and of chili crab above all. There are a couple of versions of this spicy crab dish: the most popular is Sri Lankan crab cooked in a sauce of chilli and egg, the other a drier one with black pepper. I tried the chili crab and was not entirely sold. The crab had been chopped up shell and all into a great deal of sauce, so it had to be eaten with the fingers, and it showed. The spicy crab I once had in Hong Kong, cooked in a great mass of small chillies, is tastier to my mind and a good deal easier to eat.

I tasted sugar cane juice for the first time in Singapore. I came across it by chance one morning, when I was waiting for a shopping centre to open and wandering past the breakfast places, one of which sold freshly pressed juices. After a moment's hesitation I ordered a glass with lemon, and to my surprise the drink really was pressed out of sugar cane. Two peeled lengths of cane, each about an arm long, gave a big cupful. The juice was sweet, naturally, but not at all sickly, whatever one might imagine. It was good, quite mild, and wonderfully refreshing with the lemon to sharpen it. I was hooked at once, and ordered more when I found a similar stall at a metro station.

At the same station there was a fast-food counter selling Japanese octopus balls. The cute octopus logo and the chain's funny name, "Japanese Octopus Balls", made it an impulse buy, and soon I was sitting contentedly in a metro carriage with my box and my juice. They came filled with octopus, shrimp or bacon. They were like small Finnish pancakes or crêpes fried into balls, with fish flakes on top. The taste was nice enough, but nothing to remember. I shall go on eating my octopus marinated, boiled or simply raw.