Downtown at lunch hour, the office girls in button-down shirts and slim-cut skirts each carry a wallet and a packet of tissues.

We are girls who will travel for lunch, me and Ren and Jacq, even if two of us don’t know the roads and one of us can’t drive. Ren is picking her Amazing Race companion contestant, and I fear it will be neither me nor Jacq, because Jacq’s idea of directions is, “Smith Street, Smith Street. Food Street lah. Chinatown. Near the multistorey carpark. Chinatown,” while me, I trip down Temple Street in pink heels, hopping on one foot, trying to deal with disobedient insoles.

Look. I don’t normally put up with uncomfortable shoes, I don’t have time for that drama. But this is my sad shoe story. For the last couple of months, I have been living in a pair of pink wedge heels. These are amazing shoes. Girls like them. Boys like them. I put on the shoes the day I got them, and have walked and run and skipped and jumped in them ever since. We’re at the point now where the leather’s scuffed in places, and stretched so that my foot slides forward toward the toe, in effect making the shoe a size or so too big in the back. I got a pair of insoles the other day to save these shoes from the bin, but what eventually happened was that my feet continued to slide forward, and then the insoles made the slide-forward fit tighter, so that then I got blisters from the chafing. If ever there were an instance of kena bang, this is it. Anyway, whatever. As of yesterday’s purchase from the emergency shoe department, I have new shoes. A pair of heels to replace a pair of heels. In the unexpected choice of purple. I’m not sure that I do purple. Only one way to find out...

But,

so.



Yesterday afternoon we found our way to Chinatown, somehow, away from the bankers in grey and black, to the scent of medicinal herbs in the air; to the giant goldfish kite flying red against the blue sky and the jumble of gaily painted shophouses; to the woven bins of round durians and the dollar baskets of mangosteens, of starfruit, of jambu a blushing pink plump; to dim sum and claypot tofu for hungry girls.



Oh but we heart Chinatown, where, down Temple Street, the cool interior of Jing Jing Dessert House offers a hundred and one desserts, including such variations on a theme as black sesame cream, black sesame cream with rice dumplings, and black sesame and walnut cream—and where our post-lunch “coffee” turned into durian pudding, soursop jelly quivering with soursop delight, and the mango ice special, full of refreshing mango goodness.



Outside, on a too-hot afternoon, a girl smiled from just inside the five-foot way, while shopkeepers fanned themselves in the shade of striped awnings.