Melanin halloween

Date: 31 Oct 2008
Time: 2230 hrs
Place: The Bencoolen / Outside Sim Lim Square

I had finished my job up to Little India and was walking back, plugged in to a podcast on my ipod shuffle, when an old man with a large face and grey hair came up to me and asked if I were local. I said yes, and he asked me where the South East Asia hotel was. It sounded really familiar and it took me a while to remember exactly where it was as it is quite a hole in the wall hotel. But I pointed in the general direction across the road towards OG and he said that that's where they came from and that the taxi driver had dropped him and his friends off there. So we waited for the light to change so we could cross the road, me and four old men with trolley suitcases with a Johore-type accent. Of course, they ignored the light once the traffic thinned out a bit, so we ended up dashing across the rather wide road. As I was walking them over to the hotel the man asked me why I was exercising so late (it's cooler) and he told me that actually sunlight was good for Asians as it broke down bad cholesterol and that skin cancer only affected fair skinned people. He then told me that he was here to do some selling for his Cellfood MLM business and he passed me his name card with some Brunei address. We reached the hotel with its large cheesy neon sign and I wished him good luck.