Monday, April 30, 2007

I Feel Bad About My Shoulders

Singapore has a reputation for being home to some of the best tailors in Asia. Nikki and I talked about my maybe buying a suit while I was here. I don't wear one to work, but the one I have was bought off the rack 6 years ago. On Sunday we went for a walk to Chinatown, where many of the tailors are concentrated.

This is the view from the Chinatown MRT station back up to the Central District, where we are staying. The MRT is Singapore's underground system, but we walked down this street as it is only about 25 minutes.

Looking into one of the streets of Chinatown. Lots of shops, lots of stalls, everyone wants to sell you something. Clothes, electronics, food, souvenirs...

We spoke to a few tailors before Fierez at Eurobest talked us inside. He's a pretty persuasive salesman and I love to haggle, even if I suspect I never know what a good price is, so we hit it off pretty quickly. In the end we settled on a 120 thread count wool/cashmere suit, with an extra pair of trousers, 6 shirts and two silk ties for about US$800, which I think is a pretty good deal for a made to measure suit. During the negotiations one of his points was that I needed to buy a custom suit because my shoulders are at different heights.

What?

He then got his tape out, turned me towards Nikki, who immediately said "Oh, yeah" and then showed me in the mirror that my right shoulder is way lower than my left. Awesome. So now I can't stop looking at my weird shoulders every time I see my own reflection.

While we were waiting for Fierez's tailor to turn up to take extra measurements Nikki and I took a walk around Chinatown.
Strangley, Chinatown is home to Singapore's oldest Hindu temple, the beautiful Sri Mariamman Temple.

I was also quite astonished with the idea of the Street of the Dead, where the poor came to die. Chinese immigrants mostly lived in overcrowded quarters with barely enough room for the living and believed it was bad luck to have someone die in your home. The death houses were outlawed in 1961.

6 comments:

Jen said...

This is a weirdly-weird coincidental post. . .

A week ago, I was attending a seminar/talk from Blackwell Research (AKA: John Cobb) regarding bike racing (yes, I was with the husband).

How does this relate you ask? Well, you see, I came to learn at this talk that everyone has, what I call, "body quirks". For example, having shoulders at different heights! Just like you. Or that one leg is longer than the other, or their head is not centered over their center (whatever that means), or . . . blah, blah, blah.

Point is, is that you're not abnormal. Every person that walked in front of John Cobb had multiple things different from one another regarding bone structure. I think it's pretty cool that the human eye can see these things!

Embrace your different heighted shoulders!

BTW ~ cool pictures! I also found the Street of the Dead immensely interesting. I did not know things such as this existed.

Waiting for more . . .

Anonymous said...

Let's see a photo of you where we can see the weird shoulders please!

Ian said...

Yeah, well mine aren't quirks, they're flipping miles different from each other. I'll try to take pics and see if I can demonstrate for Vikki.

Anonymous said...

I've known you for a while and I've never noticed the shoulder thing. Throwing like a girl, now that's a problem! :-)

Is the Brit influence still there or has everything been eradicated after the WWII Japanese rout?

Ian said...

Although it's very, very clearly an Asian city there are times when it still feels quite British. There is a future blog entry coming about my visit to The Battle Box at Fort Canning and although I haven't made it out to the Changi prison museum yet I hope to when we get back from Thailand.

Anonymous said...

Yipee I'm not the only one with odd shoulders...ignore your bruv. He's never noticed mine or for that matter listened to me telling him about them....I'm just saying!