Mahjong Fingernails, Red Wine

Just called my mum today, and boy, so much has been happening back home.....

Lady Luck must be smiling at my mum cos she struck lottery last week. There is this unique lottery system in Singapore called 4 D, which is basically 4 digits. You think of 4 digits and buy either a large or small bet for it. Every Saturday and Sunday, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize are drawn followed by 10 starter and consolation prizes. I remember when I was younger, the adults would force us to copy down the numbers being read out through a radio service called Rediffusion. No internet checks then...... I don't play it a lot but I think if you buy a large bet, you are eligible for the starter and consolation prizes, but if you had just placed a small bet, you can only claim for top three prizes. I've never had much luck with them, but Mum actually placed a $10 bet last week and got back $1500. Apparently she bought my brother's apartment's door number, but she made a mistake and put in the wrong number, and luckily that was the number that came out!!! So lucky....

Speaking of gambling, I got pretty lucky myself 2 weeks back. I put in $2 into a poker machine and got $20 out of it! Apparently, I had selected 10 credits per line instead of 1, and because of that, my win was multiplied by 10, so I would have won $2 if I didn't make that mistake! HAha!!

Never been a fan of pokies, don't understand how some people can sit in front of the machine and feed it money for 2 to 3 hours. Must be because of the free coffee and spring rolls.......

Anyway, back to my mum. She was telling me today how much classier her mahjong sessions have become. Now for the uninitiated, mahjong is an Asian gambling game involving a big set of ivory tiles printed with pictures of birds, circles, sticks and other assorted animals. The rules are quite complicated, but once you master it, it is a very enjoyable game with a fair amount of skill involved, compared to something really simple, like BlackJack. Its a pity that that there are a lot of chinese characters on it, otherwise I would be able to get my Aussie friends to learn it....Mahjong also brings back a lot of childhood memories for me. I remembered when the kiddies used to build houses and pyramids with the tiles while our aunties and uncles had a break for their meals.

So recently mum started bringing wine to her mahjong sessions, and in the process, introducing a touch of class to the event.Singapore does not have a social history of drinking wine, firstly because it was not accessible to the general public i.e. fucking expensive and reserved only for people with money to burn, and secondly, it has an acquired taste (to most Singaporeans who are used to Tiger beer and whiskeys). That was why I was so obsessed with wine when I first got here, and I couldn't believe you could get a nice bottle of wine for about $15. An equivalent bottle would cost 3 times as much in Singapore. However, the last few years has seen an influx of wine imports into Singapore and many have been distributed to the NTUCs (Singapore's equivalent of Coles/Woolies) so people in the suburbs can buy them easily. Still expensive though. Anyway, Mum brought a Lindemann's Cab Merlot to the session and her friends all sat around to taste and discuss the wine!!! Damn! My mum's starting her own wine appreciation club! She'll probably know more about wine than me in a couple of years time.

I wonder if she's trying to get her friends all tipsy so she can win money....good game plan Mum!