Cane Film Festival


There's some sort of food festival going on in the centre of Ngee Ann City, and I bought a sugar cane drink from one of the stalls. The picture, for my non-Singaporean visitors, is of the machine that compresses the sugar cane till the juice comes out. The only time I saw it in America was in the middle of Corona Park in Queens, when one of the Spanish radio stations was having a festival. I spotted the machine at the back of a van, and I promptly shelled out US$3 to the Guatemalan (if memory serves me right) family operating the machine for a taste of home. Gave me that nice global-village glow to know that people from Central America have something in common with people from Singapore. And just the thing for a wicked hot New York summer day.

"Mother's cane" is hardly the most inspiring of names though - calls to mind corporal punishment and other echoes of strict upbringing (which, fortunately, I didn't have). I could see this name turning off a number of customers. Or maybe turning them on, which would be even more disturbing. Ah, us Singaporeans, we're obsessed with our caning.

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