do you come here often?

For anyone who's ever been to Singapore and knows about that blotch on the face of glitzy manicured Orchard Rd known as Orchard Towers, you can relate to this a bit. Tuesday afternoon JD arrived in Singapore for the night before heading out to Vietnam the next day, and never having seen Singapore, I decided on a bit of a tour that the tourist bureau won't broadcast.

We started out at Sim Lim Square, the mall that attracts shoppers for electronic bargains like fatties to a Krispy Kreme. We needed a cheap iPod wall charger and walked out $15 down with charger in hand. Next on the list, Little India and its reluctance to seem like a part of tidy clean Singapore. After a bit of a wander we get a bit lost, so time for a $3 curry and beers to help figure out where we're at and need to go. It's about 9 PM and the streets are still filled with shoppers and smells of spices and incense and not one Chinese face. Little India is just that...a small, most likely cleaner pocket of India, helping to desterilise the small city-nation.
Finally choosing a lucky direction and getting out of the hive of curry houses and sari shops, trading them instead for Arab St and its collection of carpet shops and shisha cafes. 'New style' Afgan carpets with AK-47's, Hind helicopters in blankets of flame and stinger missiles woven into the design are at the few open shopfronts.
Since most carpet stores are closed, shisa cafes open up and customers sit around low tables on ornate carpets along the street, in front of the iron lock-up grills of the carpet traders, sucking on water pipes blowing out clouds of strawberry, mango and grape scented smoke giving the area a sweet exotic air. Apparently grape is all the go, so for about an hour we sit and puff on our grape flavoured pipe and decide on the next plan of action. This now is where we decend into brand new territory....
I'd never been to Orchard Towers before, but had heard much about the place. Commonly known as the "Four Floors of Whores" this is a complex on Orchard Rd (strangely opposite Toys'R'Us) that is literally teeming with 'girlfriends for hire' in bars covering four floors. It's now about 11:30 and its just going off. The business spills into the street and as we walk up to the front door of one bar and push through the door we're greeted with a line of 5 girls waiting to be picked out by eager punters. It's like walking into a whorehouse from a wild west film, but a modern version where all the girls are asian, the music is actually pretty good and no one is playing cards. Grab-arseing is rife and any eye contact results in a new ladyfriend asking where you're from, stroking your arm and plying her assets on you. Beers cost more than the two meals we'd already had put together so we sip....very slowly. JD actually asks 'you reckon all the girls here are working?' For real??? ummm YES.
One latches onto him and we find out she's from Vietnam and as soon as I mention that JD is going there tomorrow, its all smiles and "We go now, I go with you." It takes a while but after convincing her we're not interested, and no, we don't want to both have you, she sulks away. After a while of asking "Do you come here often?" the joke (that they don't get) becomes thin and the directness of "We go hotel, I make love for you" isn't funny anymore. The creepy old guy sitting across from us looks like he needs to be back in his German retirement village and it looks like we get blacklisted since all of a sudden no more attention has come our way. Word must've spread, those two over there are not here for $60 love. Time to go.
So now its about 1AM and the hunger strikes and no where on Orchard Rd is open. There is an area on the way home I know of that will definitely be open, but its in the red light area of town. Sweet, from one seedy bar to a suburb full of them. This is a strictly food related mission now and as soon as the first corner stall comes into view, it's roast chicken rice all round please. Orchard Towers is a big expat hangout and Geylang district is more for the locals and this really shows with the ladies of the night ranging from Indians in full Saris, ladyboys mixed in with the usual short skirts and stilettoes. After our fill of dinner number 3, we get in a cab home passing lines of ladies, just waiting for a customer to pull up and pick one and I wonder if it ever feels for them like a kid at an orphanage when everyone else gets picked but one.

There ends the one night in the 'other Singapore' and lunchtime the next day JD is on the way to Vietnam before hopping on a bus to Nanning and gettin us a place to stay for the next few months.