Painful Friday Night


I got home this evening with stiff, sore shoulders and I thought the remedy for this would be to go and have a relaxing massage. Instead, I went and had a massage.

I went to the Imperial Apple Spa, which is just a few streets away from our flat, and seems to have been named by a poor computerised translation. Perhaps the owner thought the name was redolent with majesty and also the health benefits of fruit. Or perhaps they were just absolutely flipping mental.

I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t had a foot massage in six months, or because I was particularly stiff and sore, but the whole thing was agony, whether it was the masseuse trying to separate my metacarpals, or the masseuse trying to grind away my shins, or the masseuse trying to pull my head off. None of it was relaxing, but that may have been because they had an enormous projection TV playing the boxing movie Southpaw, as if watching two men beat each other up was a suitable accompaniment to a massage.

Well, actually, it might be. Whereas in the West we sometimes view massages as soft, gentle ways to get relaxed, every time I’ve had one in Asia it seems to be some all-over assault on your body, where somebody experiments to find just the most painful way of inserting their elbow into your joints. I think my neck is a bit looser as a result, but the laugh may be on me later when it turns out they’ve detached a few vertebrae and my head falls off when I try to get out of bed.

Anyway, next week I will try somewhere else, like the Hegemonic Banana Recreation Centre, or the People’s Democratic Potato Rest Home, or any other strange-named place near our flat. Apart from Sexy Sensual Massage in Chinatown, where I imagine the power of false advertising is such that a toothless ninety-year old in a crop top rasps his toenails across your eyelids.

Yeah, that’s what people come to Singapore for.


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