I'm Singaporean lahh

I was on the tube back home when I heard that short but oh-so-familiar phrase, from a guy a couple of seats in front of me (the tube was stationary and there weren't many pple, hence my "super-hearing").

His friend, in front of him, laughed and nodded as though she heard that before too. and then she started asking, "so, what's lahh"

I think he gave the standard answer, that its just a matter of expression, that its part of Singlish, a wildly mutilated version of the Queen's Engrish.

But I beg to differ. its a Sentence Ending Particle.

I learnt this in Cantonese about a year ago, while in Stanford. I was given this handout listing all the different sentence ending particles in Cantonese. About 5 of them were the same letter "a" (ah), pronounced differently, another 3/4 were "la" and there were a couple more that I can't recall now. They came with several descriptions of what they were meant for, like "a" with a rising tone meant a question, "lor" with a falling tone meant something like "already" and so on.

I remember the "Ang Mohs" (literally redheads, or whites) would have so much difficulty with that. Why would anyone want to end a sentence with a sentence ending particle? But, ahh, it came all so naturally to me. Once, for an assignment, we had to record a 3 minute speech in Cantonese. For my speech, I was commended by my Canto teacher for the use of the sentence ending particles, even though I used them unconsciously. It wasn't difficult for me, after all, we use that in Singlish.

Because I realised that these sentence ending particles ARE part of Cantonese, I dare say that all the "lahs" and "hor" and other sentence ending particles in Singlish are derivatives of the Chinese dialects spoken in Singapore. They have the same status of verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. hor.

I won't go through the details of all the different sentence ending particles in Singlish - there are enough websites about it already. For more information, please refer to the talkingcock.com - it even contains a comprehensive "Singapore Coxford Dictionary".

But I digress again...

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Jan 6th - Tower of London

L met up with her old long-lost primary school friend in London. She so happened to be touring London, and will be leaving soon, so they had to meet. She wanted to go around London, and L and I haven't been to Tower of London yet, so we decided to go there.

We spent about 4 hours there. For the first hour we joined a tour (free, or more like its included in the price of the ticket) and the tour guide gave us a pretty comprehensive coverage about the history of the Tower of London. Its really quite interesting. And then after the tour we went to look at the various exhibits. I think we spent the most time in the armory, looking at all the kings' armour and weapons. We were also quite fascinated with torture equipment, though I must say, it isn't the largest collection I've seen (there were like only 4/5 different apparatus, not very imaginative, I would think).

There was also this "Crown Jewels" exhibition. Its absolutely fantastic, seeing those HUGE diamonds, sapphires, rubys etc stuck to the different crowns. man, they were HUGE... like the biggest I've ever seen.

Finally we got too hungry (didn't have lunch) and decided to leave for dim sum at Chinatown. So happened that the restaurant we wanted to go to had a happy hour (cheaper dimsum) after 2.30, and we arrived close to 3. So we had a lot of dimsum for only 7 quid a person. Cheap already larh... usually expect to spend 15 per head. It was all pretty nice, except for the xiao long bao (small dragon dumpling) which didn't have a drop of soup in it. Disappointing. That was also when I wanted the "lei sha tang yuan" but didn't know what it was called. I couldn't find it on the menu, and it'll probably be too much of a hassle to describe it as "glutinous rice flour dumpling with sesame seed filling coated with sweetened peanut powder".

After that we headed to spitalfields market. I popped into office because there was apparently some urgent request, while the girls went shopping. and then I met them an hour later and they continued shopping.

Some time later, L's friend had to meet her friend for dinner/play, so we walked her to the tube station and I showed her around Liverpool st station - not like there's much to see..... and then we had dinner at this asian fusion noodle restaurant - but we shared a bowl of noodles cus we were still very full from the late lunch.

*** till the next day ***