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I like trains. They’re like women; trains are, after all, vessels, and they do carry large swathes of humanity in their, well, wombs each day. So, let me tell you about my mistress.
She is a devoted lover. She keeps her promises, doesn’t give me a bumpy ride and seldom breaks down. When she says she’ll come and see me in five minutes, I see her coming five minutes later. She doesn’t leave me hanging, though we’re technically suspended eight metres from the ground most of the time.
It began as an after-work romp, a nightout to cap a long, hard day at the office. There was Geylang, of course, but it was too far from the office, and it was sort of cliché already to be going there. We weren’t tourists anymore, and we were just looking for a place to unwind without getting too bummed out we wouldn’t know how we got home the morning after and where our hard-earned money went. So, heeding the advice of a Pinoy mate who, for 10 years, had explored every nook and cranny of Singapore, we wound up in this district called Tanjong Pagar.
I can bore you here right now with the many things and trivias the place is known for – like how it used to bridge the docks with the old town, or its historic Jinkricksha station (the old main rickshaw depot that now houses one of Jackie Chan’s restaurants), or that it used to be the district represented in Parliament by the man himself, Lee Kuan Yew – but you can already Google these things up.
What makes Tanjong Pagar unique, I think, is this little, quaint restaurant known as Kamayan, its name a reference to the way we Filipinos like to eat our tuyo, with a small plate of kamatis, itlog na pula and sibuyas as sawsawan – with our hands.
