Turning into a tai-tai*

Nothing like a relaxing 1¾ hours on a massage and ear candling to make me come home and surf the web for local spa packages.

Of course, spas being what they are and my measly non-five-figure-salary-a-month self being not exactly their prime target audience, I found very little useful information. So far:

• Spa Esprit has the best website;


• Earth Sanctuary sounds neat, because of its Club Street location, and expensive, because of its website and aforementioned location;


• Along the way, I got sidetracked into seeing what nail salons had websites, and found only one, Daisy's Nails, which strikes me as a particularly bad example of marketing hype gone way, way overboard. I mean, when you're trying to convince a bride that on her wedding day, her nails are the most important thing everyone's going to look at, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel (ha ha, pun not intended, but now I'll just leave it there).

None of these websites actually tell you how much anything costs, unless they have "current" promotions advertised, which give you an inkling of what their real prices are (and I say "current" because a certain nail salon website hadn't been updated since at least October). Not that I'm about to sign up online for a spa package or whatever, but shouldn't websites at least provide enough information to get someone out of their ergonomically incorrect chair in front of the computer and over to the spa location?

Clearly, the age of the internet still has some ways to go.

Water consumption update: Absymal. Not a drop since the morning's intake of 700 ml. Had Coke over lunch, plenty of tea at the spa, and I'm having more tea now in front of the computer.

* A tai-tai is a local colloquialism (originating from Cantonese, I believe) that refers to an ostentatious woman, usually Chinese and Chinese-speaking, who doesn't work, spends her massive free time living it up on her husband's income, and wears lots of gold jewellery. Also has extra-long fingernails, well-honed mahjong skills, and can tell you all about the best spas and high teas in town. Oddly enough, a definition of this term is missing from Talking Cock's otherwise excellent Coxford Singlish Dictionary.