Today I met up with Cheam for lunch, before watching Hadi's play, Family Outing. We ate at a place I had found on hungrygowhere.com, because I was craving steak. It was disappointing. In turn, I did a very Singaporean thing: I wrote a bad review about the place. Then, we met Debbie, Mel, Paul and Eliel at the National Library to watch the play. It was by far one of the best plays I've seen in Singapore (which comes to about 5 proper non-school plays). It had a really good script, with good acting, lighting and sound. Quite a change from the usual standard of plays where I ended up feeling like I want to slap someone.
Afterwards the lot of us went to Seah Street to eat crepes (Debbie's suggestion). Pricy, but delicious as hell salted-caramel-butter-crepes. And I'm not even a big fan of excessively sweet stuff. Then Hadi came and the shop was closing, so we went to nearby Mcdonalds for Hadi to grab a bite. Then we all went off to get home, and I took the bus to my grandparent's place for dinner. After a delicious dinner of vinegar pig's trotters (sounds gross but, I try not to think of it as pig legs D: ), I ended spending ages trying to fix up my grandma's newly acquired toy: a voice recorder/mp3 players.
The highlight of the night however was after I had succeeded in fixing the player and had gone upstairs to see my grandfather for a while. The awesomely cold air conditioning (my grandfather likes it vaguely arctic) was a fantastic bonus. Upstairs, he first started off by complaining that I had arrived late for dinner (well they eat dinner at 5:50pm, wtf?). Then he went into his usual round of telling me that 'I have some bad habits that I need to change' (which include anyhow throwing things, and anyhow buying things - directly translated from Mandarin of course), during which I tuned out and made Mandarin Assenting Sounds like 'ORH'. As it happens the TV was turned onto CCTV4 (hello cable), and we're both watching TV as he's talking. It's some Panda breeding programme in Chengdu.
Given that my Mandarin is dismal from a lack of use and general suckiness, I'm not sure how but I remember understanding that they were closely monitoring the urine of the female panda to check for it's ovulation. Shots of pipettes (cool stuff) and vials of acid yellow urine appear on the screen. All the while my grandfather is working down his list of Things I Need To Change. Then suddenly the screen actually shows PANDAS and I'm like AWWWW, but I realise they're separated by cages. I'm still half listening to my grandfather at this point and he blocks out the commentator's audio for a moment with his monologue, and then next thing I see the bars between the two pandas is lifted up and one of the pandas goes into the other panda's cage. At this point I'm thinking "oh come on, no way in hell this is what I think it is".
But it is. Next thing I know I'm watching stunned as one panda (PROBABLY THE MALE ONE) fucks the other panda from behind. No this is not happening I'm thinking, I wonder has yeh yeh noticed it? And for a brief painful few moments I think maybe he hasn't because it's still pandas fucking on the TV. The male panda opens his mouth and makes weird moaning sounds. HOLY SHIT. And then mid panda groan, the channel changes abruptly to some Taiwanese game show. All the while my grandfather is still talking, but he falters slightly during the channel change. Um.
Even though the pandas fucked for maybe 5 seconds maximum on TV that day, I think that memory is forever, disturbingly, seared into my mind.
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