The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

The guidebooks all say that if you visit Singapore, you have to go to the Raffles Hotel for a Singapore Sling. The venerable colonial-era hotel copes with this onslaught by charging S$27 a pop ($18 US) for the famous cocktail. If this is supposed to keep out the riff-raff,  it doesn't seem to be working. When we visited the hotel's stately Long Bar last week, where the drink was invented, the place was packed with tourists, dressed in the casual blue jeans and short sleeves that Sir Stamford Raffles would have found inappropriate in such a stately Victorian setting.

Yippee! We're headed for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia this morning. Temperature is gonna be around 89 degrees in Singapore on Sunday, with a 50 percent chance of rain, but we can live with that. Singapore is supposed to be one of great food cities of the world, so stay tuned for a few gastronomic reports from en route.

Yusheng means raw fish, but it's pronounced the same as another word that means increasing abundance, which is why raw fish salad is eaten on Chinese New Years, when it is traditional to dine on foods whose names or shapes may augur good fortune in the year ahead. Yusheng, however, isn't an ancient Chinese tradition - it was invented in a Chinese restaurant in Singapore in 1964, and it isn't widely eaten in China proper, though its popularity has spread to Malaysia and Hong Kong.