Musing on Sam Tay's World

Mother Ship Asia isn’t completely lost. When Tay muses about the Mustang, while driving around with his co-star from  The Girl in The Window, he argues if he gets a car, where’s he going to drive it. Singapore wasn’t big enough and could be crossed, ten times in a day, so he suggests to himself, maybe Indonesia.

The folly  of age spared no one, he realized, not even him.

IHOP, they are everywhere. The menu looks superb but the follow up will come with a triple bypass or a few stents. IHOP is killing America. They are mushrooming all over the place. If you want a high cholesterol reading on your next checkup, go for the 'Triple Bypass Burger' made from grain fed beef.

I kept on looking for the IHOP  ( don't even ask me what it means) in Arlington and Virginia. I found one in a Target parking lot. It had to be the one, right down to the blue awnings outside the windows looking out on the carpark. But I was plagued. It said I was in Texas, in a place north of Houston. What the hell is going on here? I know the author is from Texas, so I left this coincidence to serendipity. 

Chance?

Hell yeah, and what were the chances of this happening, after two Google Map searches? 

A very good chance apparently. 

Just maybe I should have been looking for the one in Alexander. You see one IHOP, you’ve seen them all, right down to the Formica covered tables and dining booths.  Ask Tay, he’ll tell you that one carpark in Cleveland is the same as in Alexander. 

Homogenized America. There, I said it. And to think that Singapore was going that way, and Thailand, same same but not different. At least Pontianak in West Kalimantan could still boast originality. It was so grungy, tourists didn’t go to the place. 

Here’s to progress. Lonely Planet has a lot to answer for. 

I'm hedging bets that this is the IHOP that Mr. Needham was writing about. We'll let him give the verdict.

Why? For crying out loud, he's given you enough clues you dingbat. 

Was that you August?