Along Orchard Road Pt 1: Tourists from Hell

So the other day my wife and I were walking down Orchard road close to Forum when we spied a middle aged woman and her two sons (roughly ten and twelve if I had to guess). The mother was wearing a sweater, and her two sons were wearing those kinds of jackets that are quilted inside and rain proof outside. It was probably 33 degrees that day. I pointed and laughed (subtly). My wife shushed me and said they were probably tourists. I said 'tourists from where? Hell?'. My wife hit me. She hits me a lot.

Look, I 'm used to heat. I'm from south Texas, where we like to say there are two seasons; summer and February. The heat can be brutal there, I can't remember when temperatures didn't reach 40, and sometimes they spike to 45. Every year charitable organizations have fan drives, because the elderly who cannot afford air conditioning start dying from the heat around the middle of June, and this continues into October depending on the weather. I have literally fried an egg on my sidewalk.So me and heat, we're acquainted.

But when I saw this trio who felt chilly in Singapore, I began to suspect that heat and I weren't as close as heat had led me to believe. That heat had, in effect, been faking an intimacy with me. Why? Who knows why the elements do what they do.

Who were these people? I wanted badly to know, but Mrs Machine forbade me to go up to them and enquire, on pain of pain. So I can only assume that they were indeed tourists from hell. Or New Orleans, because compared to New Orleans, Singapore's heat is a dry heat. And besides, most people can't tell the difference between hell and New Orleans anyway.