Life Is Full Of Ups And Downs

The above National Archives Of Singapore's photo of an old lift and the description of how it operated in my last post reminded Dr Tan Wee Kiat of one of his short grandfather stories.* (Note that the watermark on the photo is now right side up. NAS has proven to be an organisation which will not hesitate to turn things around, literally.)

I have modified the story a little. I hope Dr Tan won't mind:

Scenario - VIP visitor, who is a prominent lawyer, enters the old lift operated by an old man.

VIP: WOW! This old lift is manually-operated.

Old Man: Yes, it is an antique.

VIP: How do you like your job?

Old Man: Okay lah. Like every job, it has got its ups and downs.

VIP: It looks like a simple open-and-shut case to me.

Notes:

Dr Tan is a doting grandfather, retired NIE lecturer, avid stamp collector, author and more, all rolled into one. He is the reason why I am one of the co-authors of this book.

* - Dr Tan leaves it to the interpretation of readers as to whether the word "short" refers to the grandfather, the stories, or both.

You can read more of Dr Tan's very interesting anecdotes here.

Mooncakes And An Old Hotel That Sold Them

My younger son's school celebrated Mooncake Festival (also known as Mid-autumn Festival or Zhong Qiu Jie 中秋节) last Saturday night. The turnout was very good.

As usual, cute lanterns made by pupils were on display.


So were mooncakes.


And of course games too.


For this game, We were given riddles. We were required to guess a Chinese character from the clues given. There was this one (column 4, row 4, on grey-coloured paper in the above photo):

多说多错, 少说少错

Can you guess what's the Chinese character? Well, I couldn't. (The answer will be revealed on Sunday in comments to this post.)

As a kid, I played with traditional lanterns bought from the neighbourhood provision shop. A collapsible one like the one below cost about 10 cents only. It would come with a bamboo stick for you to hang the lantern from. To light up the lantern, you have to buy a box of 20 candles which cost maybe another 20 cents.


My mum sometimes rewarded me by buying a more expensive and beautiful lantern such as these:


These traditional lanterns are still available in some shops today. They are made of cellophane paper, mostly of red, blue, green and yellow colours which are glued onto wire frames bent into shapes of goldfishes, dragons, aeroplanes, rugby balls, etc. They are then hand-painted to make them look very attractive.

Talking about mooncake festival, I remember an old hotel which sold mooncakes under its name in the 1960s. This could very well be the first local hotel that started selling mooncakes using a hotel's name. The hotel was called Queens Hotel or Huang Hou Jiu Lou (皇后酒楼). The hotel was probably demolished in the late 1980s.

The hotel was situated in a very good location, only a stone's throw away from the famous Raffles Hotel. It was located at the junction of Middle Road and Victoria Street, i.e. the new National Library site. I could see it from the balcony of my 4th-storey SIT flat in Cheng Yan Place.

Every year when Mooncake Festival approached, the facade of the hotel would be decked up with blinking lights. The front facade of the hotel had a panel for hotel advertisements. Just before Mooncake festival, the photo on the panel would be changed to one of a Chinese queen complete with traditional dress and headgear, holding a vertical banner proclaiming "Queens Mooncakes" or Huang Hou Yue Bing (皇后月饼)．

Too bad, I don't have a photo of the front facade to show you. However, I can show you what the inside of the hotel looked like with photos by courtesy of the National Archives Of Singapore (NAS):


The reception. (Doesn't it look uncannily similar to the one in the British comedy, Fawlty Towers?) On the left of the photo is the cage lift. It actually looks more like a dog cage.


The cage lift. (It looks similar upside down. That is probably why NAS made the error in the watermark, haha.) It had a collapsible gate and was operated by a lift attendant. There were two sets of gates that needed to be opened and closed manually by the attendant before the lift could be operated. The outer set was fixed and is the one that you see in the above photo. The inner set was attached to the cage itself and moved up and down together with it. You had to be careful not to stick your hand through the gate when the lift was in motion or you could suffer grievous injury.

Air View Hotel in Peck Seah Street used to have a cage lift too. So did Public Service Commission's old office in the now Supreme Court building.


The so-called "night club and restaurant". Countless couples held their wedding dinners in this restaurant and shouted "yam seng" from this stage. (Note the formica table and chairs as well as the empty wooden crates on the stage which were used to hold beer and soft drink bottles.)

If throwing in a free hotel room was a common practice for couples who booked wedding banquets at the hotel then, the newly-wed couple would probably be given a room like this one:


Fortunately, it was not a common practice then. Otherwise, I don't think that a honeymoon night in a non-airconditioned room would have been very memorable for a newly-wed couple. Well, at least it had a wash basin, a functional dressing table and a ceiling fan.

Today is the Mooncake Festival. Have a fun mid-autumn, everyone.

Notes:

1. In the last photo, you can see Bras Basah Complex in the left window.

2. Read Laokokok's very informative article on the Mooncake Festival.

Corrections:

As correctly pointed out by Anonymous today, the correct English name of the hotel should be Empress Hotel and not Queens Hotel. I have forgotten its English name and thought it was the latter. The surprising thing is that when I used "Queens Hotel" as a search string on NAS' Picture Archives, it threw up the 4 correct photos but classified under the wrong name "Queens Hotel". You can call that a comedy of errors. Obviously, it is another case of something lost in translation. Thanks to Anonymous for pointing out the mistake.

Using "Empress Hotel" as a search string, I found the following two NAS photos of the exterior of the building:

View from Victoria Street. Empress Hotel was a 5-storey building.

View from the opposite corner of the junction - the words "Empress Hotel" can be seen below the Chinese characters on the signboard. Just above the signboard was where the large mooncake advertisement of about 2-storey height would be displayed.

First Time On A Cruise Ship (2)

At check-in, each passenger was issued with a personal access card. It was used as a "passport", room key and credit card, all rolled into one.


Our room was on the port (left) side. The carpet and doors in the long corridor leading to our room were red.


In contrast, the carpet and doors in the corridor on the starboard side were blue. Hence you were unlikely to make a wrong turn even when your were returning to your room drunk like a sailor.


Our room was not very spacious. Yet there were 4 single beds in it - 2 were along the walls opposite each other, 1 was mounted on the wall (can be folded against the wall), another was a sofa bed. I slept on the sofa bed which was not very comfortable. Had we taken a room with balcony, it would have been much more luxurious. However, there was no such option for us.


The toilet-cum-bathroom was only slightly bigger than those you see in an aircraft.


In fact, the feeling on board was quite like flying on an aircraft. Why, they even had a route map on one of the TV channels!


And just like on an aircraft, safety procedure was demonstrated separately by pretty crew members in different parts of the ships.


Dinner was served not long after boarding. We had a choice of 3 "inclusive" (meaning we didn't have to pay anything extra) restaurants - Pavilion Room (Chinese), Mediterranean Buffet (International) and Bella Vista (Chinese/Western). We had our first dinner at Bella Vista. It was a sumptuous 6-course meal - braised sea cucumber, steamed prawns, half-a-fish, kai lan vegetable, roasted pork with jellyfish and soup. (Since it was not a whole fish, we flipped it over and indeed the ship didn't capsize.)



The restaurants had very good ambience. You could get a seat by the window from where you could get a good view of the sea.


And if that is not romantic enough for you and you don't mind paying a little extra, you can even have serenading musicians to set the dining mood just right.


The ship set sail at about 9 pm. We were having supper at the Mediterranean Buffet on Deck 12 when we felt some tremor-like vibrations when the ship started sailing. We could see ripples in our glasses of water. However, we couldn't hear any engine noise. Other than the slight vibrations, the ship was very steady - we didn't feel any rolling of the ship in the waves at all. Even the vibrations went away after a while. We knew we were in the good hands of the captain and his crew.


A few hours after sailing, our handphones were no longer connected to our usual service providers. Sometimes, we were connected to Indonesian service providers while at other times, we got connected to Malaysian service providers.


At one point, we even thought that we had reached Great Britain!


Most of the time, we were connected to Navitas 1 network. (Navitas is a subsidiary brand of UK's Jersey Telecom Group Limited. That probably explains the "Welcome to G Britain" sms. Read this document about the installation of Navitas GSM-based services on board the SuperStar Virgo.) However, communication on the Navitas 1 network was not cheap. I made a 1-minute call to Singapore and was charged $2.39 while each outgoing SMS cost me $0.96.


We saw some celebrities on board the ship. Moses Lim was probably on board to review some of the restaurants' food.


You Ya (尤雅), the Taiwanese songstress who was as famous as the late Teresa Teng (邓丽君 or Deng Li Jun) in the late 70s and the 80s, performed two 45-minute concerts in the Lido auditorium. My wife and I watched the show. At $40 per head for the cheapest seats, the tickets were quite reasonably priced. Anyway, my wife I saved us some money by not watching the topless show which was priced at $20-$25 per ticket. Hmm... it's good that You Ya's concert was still worth more than the topless show. And she didn't have to show anything more than her voice which was still as good as ever.


The facilities on board the SuperStar Virgo were indeed very comprehensive. If the ship was a star in the Asian movie industry instead of the Asian cruise business, it would definitely have won multiple Golden Horse awards.


My third and final entry on the cruise will cover the facilities on board the ship.

(To be continued.)