FINALLY I got to try something I've been hankering after since learning of its existence several months ago ... drum roll, please ... yes, it's Pigs' Tail Soup!

Prior to going to stay with Andrew's Uncle Ronnie earlier on this trip, I had never heard of such a thing. When Ronnie extolled its virtues one morning, listing it as one of the things he hankers after when he's away from Singapore, I was sold: this item was going to be hunted down and tried, whether the pigs involved liked it or not.

The soup itself turned out to be strangely similar to Bonox ... a dark, thin, salty liquid that resembles what you get if you decide to make a 'hot beverage' from Vegemite.

In my mind's eye, I had been rather hoping for a bowl filled with curly, springy pink spirals that would look like pigs' tails taken from a cartoon - or a larger, bright pink version of the curly cord on a household phone, at any rate.

The tails however, are very phallic; essentially the kind of mixture you suspect Lorena Bobbit might have cooked up (had she not flung the appendage from a car window instead!) Filled with these floating, penis-like bits of pig, the soup is actually surprisingly tasty ... the tail is kind of reminiscent of eating pig's trotter or pig's ear. A bit flabby-tasting, but with shreds of tasty pork under the skin. The tail's centre is, of course, taken up with bone, so you have to chew around that and spit it out onto the plate.

Where did we go to sample this delicacy? A simple set of food vendor stalls tucked away in the cool undercroft of one of Singapore's plethora of apartment buildings. The surroundings at these places are nothing flash; in fact, they all have a slightly grubby, seamy air. Little light and an age of accumulated cooking grease and daily grime.

I like them. They're the kin of the sorts of roadside stalls you can find anywhere in Asia, and yet they lie just a stone's throw from Singapore's glamourous clutch of air-con Body Shops, McDonald's, Coffee Beans and the like.

The more laidback, grungy dives seem in fact to cluster round the backs of trendy shopping malls the way barnacles cling tenaciously to the hulls of even the fanciest ships.

It was at another such joint that we got to try 'Pisang Goreng' - deep-fried bananas. That may sound horrible, or it may sound great, depending on where you personally stand on the question of Potato Scallops and Pineapple Fritters. I myself tend to be vociferously damning of them in the abstract, but will gobble them up in an unseemly fashion when they're handed to me.

And so it was with the fried banana - they're given to you by the vendor still-warm from their oil bath, and the banana inside is unfairly sweet and gooey. We were fortunate enough to have been taken to a foodstall famed for its product, as they refuse to skimp on the type of bananas they use. Only the best 'Pisang Raja' or 'King of Bananas' is used at this stall. 'Could this get any better?' I wondered idly as I wolfed it down: the food was comically phallic, deliciously bad for us, and it was called 'King of Bananas' to boot ...