Ok, we didn’t really go to a circus tonight, but when you look at a map, the Newton Food Center appears on Newton Circus (think Britain and road circles, like Picadilly, and you’ll get the idea). Dan Grayson — my ex-Tufts representative, who found me the job at SAS — is in town and staying with us, and he’s showing us some of his famous Singapore haunts (he’s spent a lot of time here over the past five or more years, including staying in town for a long consulting stint for SAS). So he took us to the Newton hawker center for dinner.

We ate a lot: oyster-sauce braised greens, chicken satay, mee goreng (a spicy noodle dish), fried prawns, and barbecued sting ray. For drinks we had soursop juice, dragonfruit& mango juice, and sour plum sugarcane juice. Eating here is fascinating. But we didn’t eat pepper pig’s stomach soup, though it was an option…

Dan then took us to a section of Chinatown that has really great cocktail bars.  They make some lovely cocktails here, but at $22 apiece (in Singapore dollars — that’s about $16.50 US), you stay pretty sober. We were glad that this bar made drinks that were both tasty and fun to look at (and, in Prescott’s case, also on fire).