Trying Singapore

Travel “Best Of”

2009-06-21T01:09:00.005+08:00

Looking back on our Singapore experience, I feel very, very lucky. (Which perhaps is ironic, considering how often I’ve complained about the country’s manic obsession with lucky draws, fortune, and the 4-D lottery.) Three years ago, I couldn’t even point out Singapore on a map. But in the last few years, I’ve had the chance to experience some truly amazing places and cultures in the surrounding area. I’d had no idea what I was missing! In hopes of inspiring some future travel for others like me, here’s our “best of” travel list from the region.

Best hotel chain: Shangri-La. Singapore’s has a fabulous multicultural breakfast, Sydney’s has a panoramic view, and Kota Kinabalu’s (in Borneo) has an Ocean Wing with over-the-top beachfront luxury at the price of a standard room in NYC.

Best once-in-a-lifetime: the Maldives, whether at the laid-back Cocoa Island, with its coral reefs just steps from the villas, or the Conrad, with its underwater restaurant.

Best cultural immersion: Ubud, Bali (Indonesia), at the luxe Pita Maha Resort & Spa or on the cheap at Ketut’s Place. Eat dinner at Ketut’s for an authentic introduction to Balinese life, and catch a Kecak performance or shadow puppet play. Runner up: Arun Residence in Bangkok, Thailand, for a local feel, fantastic food, and a waterfront view of the temple Wat Arun from your bed.

Best wildlife: crocodiles, hornbills, monkeys, orangutans, and pygmy elephants spotted while staying at the Kinabatangan Riverside Lodge in Borneo. Runner-up: Singapore’s Night Safari just before closing, when the bats, flying squirrels, wolves, and lions are most awake.

Best “discovery”: the overgrown Cambodian temple ruin of Ta Prohm at dawn, before anyone else has arrived. Runner-up: the lagoons of Phang Nga Bay in Phuket, Thailand, accessible only by kayaking through pitch-black limestone caverns when the tides are right.

Best British Colonial indulgence: High tea at the elegant, soothing Tiffin Room at Singapore’s classic Raffles Hotel (do it soon—I hear it may not be there for long).

Best entertainment: the beautiful and creative Disney Seas park at Tokyo Disney. Worth spending at least a day or two, even if—especially if—you’re not a kid.

Best inexpensive city tours: commuter ferries. In Hong Kong, the best skyline view is from the ferry at night (fare: about 50 cents US). On the Sydney ferries, for just a few dollars you can spend a day exploring each harbor in turn.

Best of nature: Tie. Te Anau, New Zealand, for nearby glowworm grottoes and spectacular morning sea kayaking in the fjord of Milford Sound. Or drive the scenic Great Ocean Road from Melbourne, Australia, and stay at the Ecolodge. Help feed orphaned joeys; watch koalas, kangaroos, and wombats in the wild; and see a dazzling night sky.

Ain’t Walkin’ No More

2009-06-15T23:35:00.002+08:00

We are stateside now. It took a five-week whirlwind of frenetic packing, sorting, redistributing, and moving, but now two adults, one cat, and a dozen bags of assorted personal belongings have arrived in NJ. (The rest of our stuff is in a container ship still floating across the Pacific.) What was our first impression on repatriating? Well . . .

We arrived in Newark on a grey, sunless afternoon. It wasn’t exactly cold—just limp. We had reserved a room at the airport hotel so we wouldn’t endanger fellow motorists by trying to drive after our 19-hour flight. Stepping outside the arrivals terminal, we could see the hotel across the parking lot. There was supposed to be a shuttle every 15 minutes. But it was still light, and we figured, how difficult could it be to get over there? Let’s just wheel our luggage and walk.

Five minutes later, we’d crossed the parking lot and were congratulating ourselves on not being lazy and taking the shuttle. We just had one street left to cross. Actually, it wasn’t exactly a “street.” Main thoroughfare, boulevard, autobahn, would all be more apt, given the way the drivers were careening from one lane to the next. Not wanting to play Frogger with our luggage, we glanced around looking for a pedestrian bridge or even a crosswalk—common enough where we’d come from. But not only was there no footbridge, there was actually a barrier of some sort that made walking across impossible, with luggage or not.

Disgruntled, we walked back across the parking lot and waited for the shuttle. We hauled our dozen pieces of luggage up onto the bus, then waited as it slowly chugged around the airport loop. Fifteen minutes later, it turned onto the street where we’d originally stood and dropped us off at the hotel entrance. Total time: 35 minutes. We could have walked it in 10.

Now that we’re in our temporary apartment (waiting for our stuff to arrive), it’s much the same. Few sidewalks. No footbridges. And when people in our complex need to take their trash to the community dumpster two blocks away, they don’t walk there. They drive.

US car-centered infrastructure: 1
Singaporean pedestrian-friendly lifestyle: 0

Tennis in the Jungle

2009-06-01T06:54:00.010+08:00

We walk onto the tennis court in the darkness, breathing in the heavy, soup-thick night air. Our sweat pools, helpless in the lack of breeze. We are grateful for the absence of the sun, but even without it the temperature matches that of our bodies.

When we were still new to this place, we learned quickly that to play in the daytime, scorched by the sun and slowly steamed by the surrounding air, is simply not possible. Instead, we schedule our games to catch the precious few hours during which Singapore is magical: before 8 a.m. and after the regular sunset at 7 p.m. Often, as we play, a cooling breeze brings blessed relief from the heat of the day future or past, and the clouds drift lazily across the sky in the twilight. Beyond that, we play on into darkness, hidden at last from the equatorial sun.

Yet to be hidden from the sun is not always to be hidden from the heat, and tonight the heat presses down on us inexorably. We heave heavy, damp balls back and forth across the net with labored movements and measured steps, each breath taking in more water than oxygen in the tropical humidity.

A storm must be brewing somewhere off the coast, to bring such density to the air; the moths realize it, too, and suddenly they are out in force around the bright lights of the court. Some venture lower, flying across the court, darting in front of our faces with utter disregard. As one flies across the court on a collision course with my racket, I duck, and the ball goes flying by me. Trudging to the backcourt to retrieve it, I brush away furry wings swarming around my head. We try not to open our mouths.

But relief has arrived: we hear the high-pitched squeaks in the trees, and now the bats are awake and swooping through the courts. Their tiny, dark bodies dive through the air, catching a moth in the bright-lit air of the court before disappearing upward into the darkness to start again. The bats work quickly; minutes later, the moths have disappeared, except for a hardy half-dozen or so still trying to singe themselves on the tall fluorescent lights. The bats have disappeared, too, their job of nightly pest control only just begun.

Slowly we begin to breathe easier in the now-clear air and, finally, the slowly dissipating heat. We gradually settle into our usual pace, relaxing to the regular rhythm of our shots and the bounce of the ball. Later, as we drag our sweat-laden bodies off the court into the shocking cold of air-conditioning, we smile sadly, knowing all of this—the heat, the moths, the bats—will soon be just a memory.

It was our last night of tennis in the jungle.

On Leaving

2009-05-20T23:29:00.000+08:00

So here it is: all good things must come to an end. Our time in Singapore is almost up, and soon we’ll be on to bigger and better things back in New Jersey. People have asked us how we feel about leaving: sad? excited? But truthfully, all we have time to feel is...busy. Two weeks from today, our cat leaves for his first journey across the world. (He’ll fly west, through Amsterdam.) Five days later, we’ll follow him (although we’ll fly east). We’ve taken this 19-hour flight before, but this time our tickets are one-way.

The company tells us movers will pack us, move us, and cause our stuff to appear magically on the other side—so what do we have to worry about? Clearly they don’t know what it’s like to undertake an international move. Sure, there’s the usual closing of accounts and sorting of stuff that accompanies any move. But running interference on logistics with two countries—while trying to say goodbye to our current “home” country, and hello to a home country that no longer feels exactly like home—we’re essentially living two lives at the same time. (Three, if you count our rapidly accelerating work life.)

This pressure cooker has gotten to us in various ways; Joey’s pulling regular all-nighters, and I’ve already had a nasty run-in with a parking pillar. (I swear, it moved.) To be sure, that last one was just waiting to happen, what with Singapore’s narrow and curvy basement car parks. But still.

Among the loose ends to tie up, what will happen to the blog? I’m not sure. If other expats’ reports are to be believed, once we return to the States, our time abroad is socially expected to become a hazy dream we remember only to each other. Once we’re back, we’ve heard, people in our home country won’t want to hear about the amazing people we met in Singapore or our trips to inspiring places. Instead, apparently, we’d do better to confine our conversation to our state, our hometown, preferably our neighborhood. Something everyday. Something “relatable.” Which makes sense, of course.

And yet, having spent the last two years fitting the whole world into our heads, how can we shut it out?

Harborside in Sydney

2009-05-15T08:36:00.003+08:00

We went to Sydney at the height of the swine flu panic. I’d gotten the (regular) flu in Singapore, like everyone else, and though my raging fever had passed, I was still miserably clutching piles of Kleenex and mugs of hot tea. We called Qantas: surely with the flu scare, they’d allow us to cancel? But it seems that even with an international health crisis, nonrefundable tickets are nonrefundable tickets.

So we flew to Sydney, expecting that at any moment some nervous health official would take me off to quarantine, never to be seen again. But apparently I set off neither the infrared sensors in the airports nor the suspicions of the flight attendants (I did run them completely out of herbal tea), and we arrived without incident.

I have only hazy memories of our first day in Sydney, and I didn’t make it out into the streets until dinnertime. But I did sit up in bed and watch the day breaking over the harbor, with the iconic bridge and opera house slowly highlighted by the sun as it crossed the bracing blue sky.

After that I was well enough to do some exploring in the harborside neighborhoods, so we went out to immerse ourselves in life along the water. We wandered in the cobblestone laneways of The Rocks, once home to rowdy sailors’ taverns and now filled with quiet cafes. We took a ferry past marinas filled with huge white sailboats and gorgeous glass-walled lofts. We walked along the wharfs and ducked into the aquarium (where we greeted the dugongs). At the stunning maritime museum, we climbed aboard a replica of Captain Cook’s ship that still plies the same waters as Cook did in his original voyages.

One night we attended a magical performance of (appropriately enough) Debussy’s symphony The Sea at the opera house, which quietly glowed in the darkness. In the music we heard an echo of centuries of life on Sydney’s waterfronts: the longing for the sea, for exploration and adventure, the freedom of being out on the open ocean, and the satisfaction of returning to the safety of the harbor after a journey well sailed.

Second Time Around

2009-05-08T23:44:00.006+08:00

Everything in Singapore is easy - if you’ve already done it once before. That’s how life is here. Like today, when I went to the industrial estate of Ubi to pick up a water filter for the fridge.

The first time I needed a water filter, sometime last year, I had no idea where to start. Rather than end up in a scary Alice-in-Wonderland environment (like that time I bought a sprinkler), I went to a few appliance stores to see if they had the part. But we have an American-brand fridge that’s far from common in Singapore. After several fruitless trips, I finally found a salesperson that would give me the address of a wholesale parts store. They sold only to contractors, she said, and they might or might not have my brand. But it was my only option, and that’s how I found myself heading to Ubi.

Still new to driving in Singapore, I felt like I’d reached the end of the earth. I dropped off the highway at a practically unknown exit, panicking as I glanced at the street directory and found I’d missed a turn. In the pouring rain, the gray buildings seemed hopelessly confusing, each looking exactly like the next. The workers seemed grim and dour, the security guards suspicious and unhelpful. I parked at a coupon lot a block or two away, still unsure if I was in a legal parking lot. Walking along the street, I felt utterly out of place. People stared at me curiously from under their umbrellas; what was an ang moh (and a tai tai, at that) doing here, in the blue-collar industrial park?

Today, though, I casually swung by Ubi on my way home from a pleasant lunch downtown. Now I easily recognized the exit as one of the ways to Joey’s workplace - not exactly the end of the earth! The sun shone in the blue sky as I entered what now seemed a cheerful, bustling neighborhood. Sure, I did miss the street on the first go-round, but in a matter of minutes, I’d found the right building, had a friendly chat with the grinning security guard, and parked my car right outside the door.

The dealer had the part in stock. Only cash accepted? No problem; I followed his directions to the mysterious
“canteen” where the ATM was. Last year, I might have felt out of place, but the Chinese and Malay faces were the type I’m used to seeing every day. A businessman helpfully showed me the canteen, where I’m sure I was the only ang moh for miles around. But all I thought was, “Hey, I should come back someday to try that new mee goreng stall!”

Minutes later, paid-for part in hand, I began to navigate my way out of Ubi. Only one thing hadn’t changed since my previous visit: the cars with a giant L on the back and the painted line, “Please be patient and let me learn!” In Singapore, only certified instructors can give driving lessons, and one of the major driving schools is right in the heart of Ubi. If there’s a worse place to learn to drive, I’d like to see it; parked cars on the side of the road reduce two lanes to one and a half, and orange cones and construction barriers block the rest. The L drivers wobble hesitantly around corners, hoping against hope there’s not a giant bulldozer blocking the path.

But as a driver in Singapore myself, I sympathize. I learned to drive from my dad, in mostly empty parking lots and broad, quiet streets. That’s how it is the US. In Singapore, though, for driving or navigating or finding the part you need, you’re thrown in the deep end. As I said, everything here is easy - except the first time.

Paradise

2009-04-24T14:11:00.002+08:00

We went to the Maldives back in February, but we never got around to posting about it. Why? It’s the sort of place that defies words. And even pictures can’t quite capture this tiny paradise in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We figured it was a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, especially since we’re about 19 hours closer than if we were to fly there from the US. But now all I want to do is go back someday. It was the colors that hooked me. Have you ever seen so many shades of blue?

(Visitors) Trying Singapore

2009-04-13T09:31:00.016+08:00

We love having visitors - though it happens all too infrequently - so we were thrilled when my parents finally announced that they’d racked up enough frequent-flyer miles to make their first trip to this side of the world in March. Nine utterly packed days (and one sick day) ensued. Some highlights:

the first glimpse of our little guest-house in Bali along the river gorge - and the air-conditioned, intricately carved rooms at $50 per night

the surreal kecak chanting during an evening Ramayana dance, followed by an other-worldly trance dance through burning coals (bonus: the realization that, yes, you are on the other side of the world)

the bird’s-eye views, from breezy East Coast Park and the Singapore harbor, of the huge container ships and the complex operations of one of the busiest ports in the world

the memorable first moment my dad gingerly stuck his feet into the tank of very hungry (and very ticklish) fish at the fish spa

the best description of durian’s flavor, courtesy of my mom: “like a cross between peaches...and sardines”

the experience of haggling in the hot, crowded markets of Chinatown - and discovering the cooling powers of lime juice

the massive flying squirrel (“wing” span probably at least four feet) that swooped gracefully right in front of us at the Night Safari

the expressions of utter bafflement at the sheer variety in the carnival-like stalls of the hawker centers

the expressions of utter contentment after a wonderful meal at our favorite Thai place (and our favorite Peranakan place, and our favorite Eurasian place, and...)

For us, having visitors also highlighted how we’ve grown to love our little island home, with its greenery and cleanliness and variety and spectacular weather (now that we’ve acclimated to the heat and humidity). We’re proud that we can now drive on the left side of the road and maneuver a large-ish car backward into the tiniest parking spaces. We’re happy that we’ve learned to navigate a complicated world city and find the hidden treasures in its varied cultural enclaves. It seems normal to us now to live in a city that is very Western in some ways and, in other ways, anything but. And while our visitors do get to experience a quick taste of all that Singapore has to offer, we feel lucky to have stayed here long enough to actually find our niche in this place on the other side of the world.

More on "6 Things I Hate About Singapore"

2009-03-04T15:31:00.005+08:00

Usually, posts on this blog generate maybe five comments, tops, within the week or so they’re posted. Then we never hear about them again. This is why it’s so surprising that this post, from back in April 2007, keeps right on going: we’re up to 19 comments so far - not counting a few unprintable anonymous ones we’ve deleted.

A recent comment finally provided the explanation for such popularity: apparently, if you type “hate Singapore” into Google, our little posting is the very first site on the list. (Don’t all go and test it out, now; you’ll only keep it at the top!)

Why this post “hates Singapore” more than any other website, I can’t imagine. The six reasons listed are simple difficulties we had in making the transition to life in Singapore. And anyone who bothered to read the rest of the blog would find it obvious, I think, that we’re fascinated (in a positive way) with the place we now live as expats. In fact, one reason I chose to write the post in the first place was that I feared the blog was becoming a little rose-tinted in its lush descriptions of the cultural and tropical wonders we saw around us every day.

Joey and I can only hope that people who drop by any entry on the blog will read a few more, for context. No single post could explain the complex, baffling, fun, and fascinating experience of trying Singapore.

New Year's, Take 2

2009-02-26T12:12:00.007+08:00

It was our third Chinese New Year in Singapore, and oh, how we’ve adapted. Last year we tossed yu sheng a number of times, watched the Chingay parade, and immersed ourselves in the colors and crowds and noise of Chinatown at night. This year, apparently, we’ve become so blasé about it that, aside from a leisurely daytime stroll through the Chinatown stalls, we hardly did any outside celebrating at all.
It wasn’t entirely our fault.
We scheduled our vacation around the neighborhood CNY potluck, only to have them change the date at the last minute; and our traditional steamboat (huo guo) celebration with close friends was cancelled when the hostess got the flu. (None of this got us off the hook with our friends’ children, though - they all got their hong bao anyway!)

But as it happened, we did most of our celebrating at home, where we finally succumbed to our friends’ pleas to put more decorations up. With just a short few weeks between Christmas and CNY this year, we went straight from the Christmas tree to the “CNY tree” – a vase full of long pussy-willow branches, decorated with a couple of hanging goldfish ornaments. We bought a cute little kumquat tree, too, which reminded us of the oranges people like to exchange this time of year. And we put a couple of lanterns with the fu character (“blessing, good fortune”) out front.

We took down the lanterns at the official close of the holiday two weeks later, and we threw out the pussy-willow branches when (appropriately enough) the cat got interested in the puffy white blossoms. But we’ve still got our kumquat tree to remind us of the golden glow of the Chinese New Year.

The Luddite and the ATM

2009-02-22T22:08:00.003+08:00

Yes, I know, just because someone is wearing the saffron garb of a monk doesn’t mean he’s a Luddite; we’ve certainly seen our fair share of monks toting cell phones. Still, the flash of bright orange robes in the ATM queue got my attention as one of those things I’d be unlikely to see in the States.

It reminded me, too, of how we’re all impacted by global economics. No matter how much you might try to live a cloistered life – even if you’re a locavore, you’re off the grid, you have someone spinning straw into gold a la Rumpelstilzken – chances are, you have to store some money, somewhere, for later use. Which leaves you standing in line at the local ATM in the hope that your bank is still solvent. Just like everyone else.

Newbie

2009-02-17T18:49:00.013+08:00

We’re behind on blogging, but we have a reasonably good excuse: we’re driven to distraction by the newest (and nuttiest) member of our household: a giant orange kitten named Oliver.

We came across Ollie online about a month ago. He’d been dumped next to a construction site and spent a terrified few weeks out in the open before being rescued by a local cattery, where he was under the name of “No-No.” (I admit I don’t understand Chinese names, but surely in a Chinese/English-speaking community this is not the best name for a pet?)

His tufty feet and long fur reminded us of our late, beloved first cat, though he was maybe a tenth the size. Plus, he seemed calm and quiet at the cattery and his age was listed as “mature” – plenty of people love to adopt zany kittens, but we love adult cats and their quieter, more developed personalities.

But once we got our new kitty well fed and well rested, it was clear that he was anything but “mature.” Though we’d guessed already from his bounding jumps and schizophrenic romps up and down the stairs, the vet confirmed it: we had a barely one-year-old kitten on our hands. True, he was already the same size as most adult cats in Singapore, but apparently he has a long way to go before he grows into his outsize feet and massive fluffy tail.

We tried many names (Linus was an early favorite, due to his habit of wrapping his tail around him like a security blanket), but Oliver was the only one he ever answered to. It’s a fittingly Dickensian name, perhaps in tribute to the large, tranquil cat we still miss.

As Chinese New Year came and went, we were reminded that in Singapore, as anywhere, holidays are much better when shared with pets. Ollie, for his part, helped us celebrate Chinese New Year by investigating the decorative pussy-willow branches and making friends with the lion-dance marionette we bought in Chinatown. Sounds auspicious to us.

To find your own fun and fluffy bit of good fortune, take a look at the pets available for adoption at the Singapore SPCA, Cat Welfare Society, or this blog.

New Year's, Take 1

2009-01-23T14:41:00.007+08:00

Last year, we celebrated our first New Year’s Eve in Singapore by nursing our collective jet lag from the long flight home, so this New Year’s Eve it seemed appropriate to celebrate in somewhat higher style at the Eurasian Association’s black-tie charity ball - thanks once again to the social involvement and charitable instincts of our good friend Monica.

Fortunately, I’d remembered to pick up a dress while in the US, where most people are not a size 0. And back in Singapore, Joey managed to rent a dashing tuxedo from a local tailor, where he was surprised as they immediately started measuring him. Contrary to his fears that they’d try to hard-sell him a suit on the spot, he quickly discovered that they would be altering the tux to fit exactly - none of that “adjustable” nonsense they have in the US.

Suitably turned out, we arrived at the beautiful Marina Mandarin hotel downtown to spend the last hours of the year with some great friends from many cultures and a band from, possibly, America, given the sometimes unique song choices. (You just haven’t lived until you’ve danced with the whole Eurasian Singaporean community to “Sweet Home Alabama.” How, and why, do they know all the words to sing along?)

Midnight came quickly, with the city’s fireworks drowned out by a massive balloon drop. Balloon drops are quiet, you say? Not when the main reason they’re dropped is so people can pop them with their designer stiletto heels. The result dwarfs the sound of a thousand firecrackers.

Sometime after midnight, we slid into our taxi (pre-booked, to send us straight to the head of the queue - we’re the kiasu ones now!) and went home to sleep. Why such an early end to the night, you ask? Because otherwise we never would have woken up by noon the next day, just in time to get to the American Club and watch the ball drop in New York City, at exactly 1 p.m. Singapore time.

On the Island of Borneo

2008-12-31T11:26:00.002+08:00

We couldn’t finish out the year without including a posting about the island of Borneo, which we visited in September. Borneo is one of those places you hear about but never expect to see; it sounded far away to us, too, until we got our car in Singapore and the dealer’s license plate said “Borneo Motors.” Turns out that Borneo is only a couple of hours’ flight away, even if you’re visiting (as we were) the far side, the Malaysian state of Sabah.

Sabah is a strange and fragile place, in which the truly exotic rain-forest flora and fauna are forcibly intermingled with the ever-encroaching roads and palm-oil plantations. The great rain forests of northeastern Borneo have been squeezed up against the muddy Kinabatangan River until only two narrow strips are left. This means you can see a lot of wildlife from the river, since their only habitat is right up against the banks, but there’s an overwhelming feeling (perfectly captured by this article in a recent National Geographic) that the days of this precarious paradise are numbered.

Just beyond the rain forest’s edge, the neat rows of lush green palms look beautiful (and environmentally sound, as the oil they supply often goes into American and European biofuels). But the impact on Borneo’s plants and animals is inescapable. Spend some time watching the monkeys and orangutans swing (or even jump) powerfully through the rainforest foliage, and you begin to understand: with the rows of palm trees, there’s nothing to grab; the monkeys are reduced to crawling slowly along the ground.

We couldn’t visit Borneo without seeing part of the Gomantong Caves we’d seen on Planet Earth, replete with swarms of bats, skittering cockroaches, swallowtails, and workers climbing a hundred feet high on flimsy ladders to harvest empty birds’ nests for soup. David Attenborough never mentioned the happy and enthusiastic stray dogs that serve as self-appointed tour guides, though. They love to meet visitors at the entrance and lead you along the slippery boardwalk inside, making sure you keep up with your group and don’t fall into the massive heaps of bat guano. Perhaps they belong to a breed without a sense of smell...

Call It What It Is

2008-12-24T13:46:00.008+08:00

“Merry Christmas!” said the woman in the hijab.

Having spent much of the holiday season in December in a US work environment, I’m accustomed to the carefully coded holiday greetings there. With Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and secularism competing for the same airspace, I heard lots of “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays.” For the politically correct, “Merry Christmas” is virtually extinct.

Since our return to Singapore, though, I’ve been wished a “Merry Christmas” at least half a dozen times - most recently by my favorite nasi padang lady, who wears a Muslim hijab. I would surmise that we are so glib about the phrase because there are few other competing holidays at this time in Singapore. We’ve already passed the Muslim holidays of Hari Raya Puasa and Hari Raya Haji. Deepavali, the Hindu festival of lights, ended two weeks ago. Chinese New Year isn’t for another six weeks. So now, we say “Merry Christmas” because it is Christmas.

With a festive season that runs from October to February each year, people in Singapore would get pretty tired of saying “Happy Holidays” all the time. So here, we call each celebration what it is. All in all, it’s quite refreshing to hear someone wish me “Merry Christmas!”

How to Prevent Jet Lag

2008-12-20T11:15:00.005+08:00

To prevent jet lag when traveling across 12 time zones:

1. Pull all-nighter the night before (or sleep one at a time, in 4-hour shifts), while trying to redistribute luggage so that all 4 bags are under the 50-pound limit.

2. Nap during 4-hour first leg of flight. (Bonus: Being oblivious to the indignities of domestic US air travel.)

3. Arrive at transit airport in evening with hours to spare and nothing to do. Allow sheer boredom to induce sleepiness. Prepare to sleep on 18 1/2-hour second leg of flight.

4. Board plane at 10:30 p.m. Attempt to sleep in sitting position in between weather updates (“still no change”) every 20 minutes. Give up at 2 a.m. and recline seat despite (remote) possibility of takeoff. Doze fitfully until actual takeoff at 5 a.m.

5. Alternate sleeping and eating for the next 12 1/2 hours. Wake up at 6 a.m. (local time at destination) thinking,
“We were supposed to be getting off the plane right now.” Stay awake by contemplating outrage of 25 straight hours on same airplane.

6. Disembark (gratefully) at noon and return home. Function long enough to find toothbrush and climb into bed. Succumb to jet-lag-induced sleep from 4 p.m. to midnight. Upon waking, medicate self for head cold which has mysteriously sprung up. Sleep until 7 a.m., and resume normal schedule in local time.

Traveling Abroad

2008-12-15T11:41:00.000+08:00

It appears we may have adjusted to life at the equator, after all. On our home leave trip, predictably enough, we nearly froze to death in New Jersey. But this time, we also froze in Florida. And here in Texas, the final stop on our multi-city tour, it ain’t warm either, y’all.

In other ways, too, the America we know (and mostly love) is strange to us now. We’ve read the news about the economic crisis, and the markets in Asia have fallen, too, but we weren’t prepared for the mood of gloom. We didn’t know the standard greeting had changed from “Hi there!” to “You still have your job?”

America looks different to us, too, after our year in a crowded city-state on a tiny, tropical island. It’s a land of squandered space, where the houses are built on tiny postage stamps of grass but the big-box stores get acres and acres of parking lots, most of their spaces empty even during the holiday shopping days. And the flat, sprawling suburban vistas of the South confuse our sense of proportion, accustomed as we are to our vertical cityscape.

In the malls and the theme parks and the grocery stores, there are so few people at any time of day that we keep wondering: where is everyone? In the restaurants and hotels, we squirm when the staff keep up a never-ending stream of conversation and then expect a tip. And it must be said that the food courts disappoint us. In any of Singapore’s neighborhood hawker centers, we could easily eat the mom-and-pop food of a different culture every night. In US malls, the choices range from fake Chinese to fake Italian - all processed by the same conglomerate.

On the upside, we’re now in a country where “salsa” is not the same as marinara sauce. And we did make the switch from driving on the left to driving on the right quite easily. We were happy to find that the roads and buildings in the places where we used to live were still very much the same, in contrast to the perpetual construction and reconstruction in Singapore, where everything seems to change every six months. And we were lucky to be able to see family, friends, and neighbors after being away for so long.

But it does make me wonder what it will be like to move back to the country where we lived all our lives until two years ago. I always thought it would be like coming back home. But now I wonder if it might feel more like our move to Singapore - learning to live in a country that’s foreign to us.

Finding Peace in Cambodia

2008-11-15T09:48:00.003+08:00

We cancelled our October trip to Cambodia to stay at home with our cat in what turned out to be the final weeks of his life. Only a few days after his death, we were sitting at home trying to absorb the shock of living without him, when I remembered we still had to cancel the plane tickets for the trip that weekend.

To make a long story short, the tickets turned out to be nonrefundable. And rather than face the prospect of a long weekend in a house that suddenly seemed silent and empty in the way of an old, bombed-out building, we began to slowly put the pieces of our trip back together. We would take our grief with us to Cambodia.

Cambodia has had more than its share of unspeakable horrors and tragedies, so it may seem a strange place to choose for quiet reflection and peace. But we were going to wander through the ancient temples of the Khmer empire—contemporaries of the great Mesoamerican peoples and rivaling them in the construction of huge stone edifices in the jungle. Somehow it was fitting to spend time in the ruins of a great and beautiful kingdom lost in the passage of time.

We looked at the smiling carved faces of Bayon, the sweeping grounds and carvings of the spectacular Angkor Wat, the delicate pink sandstone of the “women’s temple,” Banteay Srei. Mostly, with our understanding guide, we wandered quietly, avoiding tour groups and midday heat, preferring instead to creep out in the mornings and late afternoons for the cooler, gentler sunlight and the near silence.

One morning just after dawn we walked down a long path, utterly alone, and came upon the ruins of Ta Prohm, left in their jungle state with banyan trees slowly working their roots through the rock and dismantling the structures, bit by bit. We spoke in hushed voices, feeling as if no one had ever discovered this place but us, walking slowly and turning corners to find staggeringly tall trees whose roots on the walls were several times our height. Huge blocks of stone lay in piles where the roofs of long galleries had fallen (the columns still stood in their places).

A scene of destruction? Perhaps. But there was beauty and even peace in the slow but sure transition. Time and the trees were only taking their natural course, slowly but surely, knowing nothing could last forever.

Farewell My Furry Friend

2008-10-18T17:28:00.007+08:00

This is my first, and it’s really hard. I can only hope he was comfortable. It’s difficult to know what to expect – six days ago he was still chasing his favorite string around, still waiting for us at the front door when we came home in the evening, still smacking his lips when he heard the sound of ice clinking in a water glass.

Now he will no longer come bounding down the stairs when he hadn't seen us for half an hour. No more lying on his back like a furry rug with four paws sticking straight up in the air, as if gravity suddenly reversed itself. No more patting of my leg with his left paw when he wanted my attention. And no longer will I have this fuzzy warm animal snuggling against my feet at night, or jumping up and down on my tummy to wake me up in the morning.

But he will no longer be vomiting bile and blood. Nor will he lose 10% of his body weight in two weeks. No more seizures, pills, injections, blood tests. No more shaving just to find a vein or conduct an ultrasound (he was an incredibly placid cat, but electronic shavers and hair dryers really freaked him out). No more x-rays, barium meal, steel sterile cages at the hospital.

Probable diagnosis: non-leukemic feline lymphoma. He was ten; that’s like being 50 in people terms. Inside always so he didn’t have leuk or FIV (we confirmed with bloodwork). Prognosis: median of 60 days, even with chemotherapy. When we visited him today at the hospital, his liver had just completely shut down in the last three hours – despite all the supportive care. He was in no condition for further treatment or diagnostics, so at 3:30PM Singapore time, 18th of October, we let him go.

What’s so weird for me is that I work in the field of medicine, and this isn’t the first time I’ve listened to physicians and patients talk about dire life expectancy. But it’s the first time I’ve had to deal with this personally. And it’s complicated because he’s an animal. That means the notion of trying to live a little longer just to be able to see or participate in some future event is meaningless. Patients will often want to “make it” to the next graduation, wedding, birth, etc. With pets, they’re just miserable and suffering.

So I had no idea when I played with him and brushed him six days ago, it would be the last time I would see him as his former self.

Were it to be the last

How infinite would be

What we did not suspect was marked

Our final interview.

- Emily Dickenson

Can You See the Birdie?

2008-10-11T12:33:00.006+08:00

It’s been awhile since we’ve last put a post up because our beloved animal has not been doing well. And when I’m depressed about something like that, everything you write seems melancholy.

But a few weeks ago, before all of the aforementioned events, we did manage to witness our first live Singapore sports event – for free! A doubles badminton championship was being held at You Chu Kang Sports Complex, and my better half graciously agreed to go with me. So we joined the crowds in an unairconditioned gymnasium.

Clubs and schools from different areas had sent their best, and supporters lined the stands. Raffles Girl’s School seemed to have the loudest, if not the largest cheering group.
I felt a bit out of place, as I had no idea who to root for, but it was amazing just to watch. As with other sports, you have no idea how fast it is until you see it live. The players stalked the court, leaping up for blazingly fast slams, and covering them with fervent tenacity. This was one sporting event I daresay I’ll probably never see in the States.

Feeling Pensive

2008-09-07T14:32:00.003+08:00

It’s early September, the end of school holidays and the beginning of a new season (at least in some parts of the world). It’s a time when many expats are in transition. In the last month, I’ve run into people moving to and from the UK, Denmark, Poland, the US, the Philippines, Ecuador, and others. Most have talked about new beginnings, new cultures, new work challenges. I am reminded of our own first experiences in Singapore - and the adjustments we’ve made.

We’ve learned to live with the transient nature of our situation (and have begun to accept the basic truth that any situation in life is inherently transient, no matter what our plans may be). But we haven’t quite gotten used to having the circumstances of our life more closely tied to my company than I ever thought possible. When sales are rolling and Cristal is flowing from the water coolers, expats may get perks that are unusual by headquarters standards. But the flip side is that during tougher times, the cost-cutters back at HQ may view expats as Hummers among hybrids.

We also haven’t quite adjusted to logistics (taxes, rent, etc.) that are hopelessly muddled, what with company policy and the laws and rules of two vastly different countries. It’s been 18 months now, and I’m still confused by my pay stub. It probably has more lines than a 1040 tax form. All I know is that allowances and adjustments are generally good (read: more money), and obligations and contributions are generally bad (read: less money). If I’m ever on the stand for receiving a few more dollars than I should have, I’m going to look awfully stupid. “Yes, Your Honor, I have an MBA. Yes, I did take accounting (and passed). No, I have no idea exactly how line item 24b on my pay stub was calculated . . . can I just start my prison term now?”

But otherwise we’ve thoroughly adjusted to Singapore’s expat life. We’re used to the way things work here, the way the environment looks and feels. Consequently, many of our blog posts have lost that wide-eyed wonder. It also means our next move, whenever that is, will be filled with its own re-adjustments. With one eye toward our eventual repatriation to the US, I have to admit: we really do like some things better in Singapore.

I’ll miss having US$2 lunches of noodle bowls or nasi padang. The lush greenery and sunshine also come to mind. And international air travel in Asia, especially through Changi Airport (ranked the world’s best for good reason), is so much more tolerable than flights in the US. I’ll also miss the community of expats and permanent residents (some with Singaporean spouses), where our differences serve as our common thread - not just to be tolerated but often to be acknowledged and talked about. Having lived this way for some time, I’ll probably blurt out a few politically incorrect things back in the States.

I’m sure there will be other things that sneak up on me - you never know exactly what you’ll miss until you actually make the transition. But at least I realize that more than a year of trying to adjust to and embrace living in Singapore has changed me. And for better or worse, it means I’ll probably think of life in the US differently than when I left.

Fruit of the Month Club XIV

2008-08-31T14:52:00.006+08:00

This is a mandarin orange - no, they don’t all come in cans - and a Thai honey mandarin orange, at that. If you are lucky enough to come across any fruit in your supermarket that begins with “Thai honey” (we’ve seen mangoes, mandarin oranges, pomelos, etc.) please just buy it. It’ll be the best fruit you’ve ever tasted.

Mandarin oranges are not particularly in season here right now, but I’m still thinking back to our Bangkok trip earlier this summer. One hot, muggy afternoon, we walked off the ferry into the sweetest piquant orange smell you can possibly imagine. A teenage girl at a small stand was juicing piles of ripe mandarin oranges and chilling bottles of the fresh tangerine-colored juice.

Wrapped in the heady smell of the oranges, we were compelled to buy a couple of bottles. A few baht seemed a small price to pay for the one of the most refreshing juices we’ve ever had.

Last on the List

2008-08-29T13:22:00.000+08:00

On the other end of the cultural spectrum (though equally high in quality), last night’s entertainment was opening night of the movie WALL-E. Yes, Pixar’s latest blockbuster began showing in Singapore on August 28, two full months after its opening day in the US.

There’s been a lot of tut-tutting about pirated movies, but picture this: You’re a Singaporean with ready access to American TV and the Internet. For a solid month before WALL-E’s “scheduled opening date,” you see the ads, the media coverage, the ecstatic reviews: WALL-E is fantastic. WALL-E is cute. WALL-E is a must-see. Accidentally or not, you’re a victim of the studio’s no-holds-barred marketing campaign to attach this movie to your brain.

So, naturally, when that promised opening date rolls around, you check your movie theater listings for the first showing. But what do you find? Nothing. Maybe a TBA listing in the “films coming soon,” if you’re lucky.

You’d think in these modern times, someone could just FedEx all the film reels out to theaters on the same day (or close to it). But instead, Singapore is often last on the list, with films opening months after the US and other Western countries have seen and forgotten them.

If that doesn’t create a market for pirated movies, I don’t know what does. While the big studios have been busy self-righteously speaking out against pirating, I wonder if it ever occurs to them that they helped set up the whole system in the first place.

Raffles, Hallucinating

2008-08-27T15:48:00.004+08:00

So much is going on in downtown Singapore: there are museum exhibits, dance performances, symphony concerts in the botanic gardens, hundreds of clubs with music in every style imaginable, and theater events. And that’s just in a typical weekend. But we live in the suburbs, and too often we forget to go into town to for a dose of the arts.

It took a nudge from a French friend to send us to our first Singaporean play: a rather avant-garde rendition of Stamford Raffles’ last hallucinatory hours. Though Raffles has a prominent statue on the bay and is a well-known name here, Singapore has understandably had a somewhat conflicted opinion of the British colonialist.

So rather than a Raffles reflecting on his successes, we watched a Raffles haunted by past memories - and hamstrung between a love for the exotic jungle-ness of Singapore and a rigid desire for progress. (If this sounds similar to present-day Singapore, you got the Singaporean playwright’s point.)

Feverishly imagining the lure of the rainforest, Raffles finds his bedroom invaded by a poetry-spouting, sprite-like rafflesia bloom, which tempts him to return Singapore to its natural state. At least, that’s what we deciphered from the cryptic poetry. Raffles was the discoverer of the beautiful rafflesia (pictured at left), which is not only the world’s largest flower but also a parasitic plant whose open center reportedly smells like a decaying corpse.

The only thing that seems to frighten the rafflesia away, though, is even more upsetting to Raffles: a living copy of the statue that today stands in his memory. “Come to the future with me,” says the statue. “You’ll like it! You have a statue, a hotel, a luxury airline class!”

Living in Singapore, we could fully appreciate the symbolism as the flower and the statue tried to throttle each other, and we could laugh at many of the in-jokes (though we missed a few Bahasa phrases that most of the audience found hilarious). And we enjoyed the international casting, which we hardly ever see in the US: an actor originally from Mumbai was the perfect Raffles, and his statue was played, to great effect, by a Singaporean.

5 Words or Less

2008-08-21T13:14:00.006+08:00

At a recent book-club gathering, one of our compatriots was challenged to summarize in 5 words what he’d learned from living abroad (and specifically in Singapore). He came up with:
        People same, food better, lah!

It’s so true; though we’ve found that people share commonalities across the world, it has to be said: some places just have more exciting food.

But Dennis’s pithy summary reminded me of several unusual notices we’ve seen recently in Singapore, all communicated in 5 words or less. Here’s a sampling:

On a hawker menu (as an enticement or a warning, depending on your tastes):
        Contains octopus - very chewy!

In an ad for a face cream for which I could unfortunately be the spokesmodel:
        Guaranteed pinkness in 1 minute!

And the best, at a mall McDonald’s sometimes overrun by students:
        Please refrain from studying here!

Watching the Games from Singapore

2008-08-11T23:46:00.009+08:00

Several friends from the US have expressed surprise that we didn’t make plans to watch the Olympics in Beijing this year. True, we’re closer to the Olympics than we’d be if we were still in New Jersey. But we’re at the equator, whereas Beijing is up around the latitude of Philadelphia. So it’s not exactly a quick trip.

Plus, by the time we got our visas approved, the Olympics would most likely already be taking place . . . in Vancouver. (The problematic visa restrictions, incidentally, are not just for Beijing; a number of Joey’s colleagues have had trouble even getting into Shanghai for business trips.)

And we’ve seen Beijing already, with its dust and haze and noise and construction and ancient structures and creative new architecture. From what we’ve heard, it’s already much different from what we saw less than a year ago. But would we get a better sense of Beijing’s character by going there during the Olympics? I doubt it. Not with the disappearance of so many hutongs - and, according to all the press, the artificially revamped manners of its residents.

That said, being able to watch the Olympics live, in your own time zone, is a beautiful thing. And while we do miss the ubiquitous trumpet fanfare that accompanied the NBC coverage in the US, here in Singapore we get to see parts of the Olympics we’d never seen before (read: parts in which no Americans are participating). I just don’t remember Bob Costas covering sports like archery, shooting, judo, fencing, or badminton in depth. And yet all of these are surprisingly compelling – and sometimes spectacular – competitions to watch.

It’s also interesting to cheer on two countries instead of one. Of the 204 countries parading through the Bird’s Nest last Friday night, the two we were most interested in could hardly be more different. The US, of course, showed up with hordes of athletes confident of winning piles of medals. Singapore showed up with a couple dozen athletes competing in six sports – and hoping, with a bit of luck, to bring Singapore its second Olympic medal, ever. And what’s Singapore’s best shot at such an honor? Another sport you’re not likely to see too often on your nightly highlight reel: table tennis (that’s ping pong, to you).

Edit: They did it! Singapore squeezed past Korea to make it to the final of the women’s team table-tennis event. They were flattened by China in the end, unsurprisingly, but their efforts secured the silver medal for an ecstatic Singapore.

Fruit of the Month Club XIII

2008-07-30T15:25:00.000+08:00

This is a loquat. I found it, along with about a dozen others, in a fancy package with lots of Japanese writing all over it. The loquat is tiny, not even the size of a lychee; in fact, it may be our first fruit of the month whose photo is basically life sized. Taste-wise, it reminds me of a plum crossed with an apricot (though it’s nothing at all like a pluot). Too sweet for me, almost like honey. It peels very easily, though the skin seems edible as well. The texture is slightly mushy, so while it would work well in a drink (loquat martini anyone?), it’s probably not so great for a salad.

Road Trip to Sentosa

2008-07-29T16:38:00.002+08:00

Last weekend we headed out to Sentosa for what Singaporeans (and the British) call a “minibreak.” It’s cheating, really, to put this on our travel log, as Sentosa is a truly tiny Singaporean island just a bridge away from the city. It was the first trip we’d taken in ages that did not involve passports and immigration officials.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Sentosa feels a world away from life in the rest of Singapore. The food is the same, the people are the same - and just as in the city, there are numerous ongoing construction projects (a casino and a Universal Studios, among others, are planned for the next decade).

But thanks to the parts of the island that are still filled with vegetation and quiet, natural spaces, Sentosa is still an interesting place. Not only is it home to awesome fish reflexology, I’m not sure where else your relaxing spa time would be rudely interrupted by the squawky call of a wild peacock and your sliding glass door would carry this helpful message:

Two If By Sea

2008-07-07T22:41:00.012+08:00

On our second day at Tokyo Disney, we visited the incredible DisneySeas park, which is exclusive to Tokyo. You won’t find many stuffed-animal-type Disney characters here; in a way, it’s similar to Epcot in that it caters more to adults. There’s less “cute” and more detail, proportion, and interest. Apparently the Japanese company that owns Tokyo Disney spared no expense on creating this park, and in return they got impressive creativity from the Imagineers.

For example, here’s Tokyo Disney’s idea of...

There’s a lot to be said for the photogenic scenery, with combinations and elements that made the fantastical feel real, if only for a moment. It started with the classy park entrance through an archway into a Mediterranean-style town, complete with gondoliers who would sing to you (in Japanese) while paddling you through the canals. Among our favorites were the shimmering, underwatery wonders of Mermaid Lagoon and the breathtaking turrets of an Arabian Coast straight out of the pages of Sinbad’s voyages. Close behind was the Lost River Delta area, with its creepy jungle-archaeology feel and near-full-scale Mayan temple.

We enjoyed the luxe details, like the fresh, modern, sea-themed decor of a hotel restaurant bordering the park. We especially enjoyed the simpler details, like the souvenir-seller who painted Disney characters (Donald Duck, the Little Mermaid) on the sidewalk in water (with a squirt gun from his cart) - an unexpected nod to the Chinese tradition of water calligraphy.

But most of all we loved the atmosphere of the park as it faded from day into night, gradually becoming a soothing, dare-I-say-romantic place with glowing lights and fantastic creations. Here’s what it looked like:

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

2008-07-04T08:36:00.001+08:00

Happy Independence Day to those of you in the States. As you celebrate, we’re sure you’ll feel safer knowing that the Department of Homeland Security is watching over you.

They’re watching us, too.

A few days ago, my dad received his birthday present from Singapore: a couple of green-tea cups with Japanese writing and Mickey Mouse logos (from Tokyo Disney, of course), plus a Disney art book and a birthday card.

Apparently, the package arrived wrapped in big strips of yellow tape informing the recipient that his package had been opened by the DHS. I can understand that these days, packages going through customs may be opened and checked.

But did they really have to open and read the birthday card?

Evidently, they did; it was ripped open and carelessly resealed with a strip of the same yellow tape.

So now you can rest secure in the knowledge that you’re protected not only from any gifts from family and friends overseas, but also from any happy birthday wishes.

One If By Land

2008-06-30T19:50:00.006+08:00

0830 hours and we’ve mapped out our initial strategy at Tokyo Disneyland. Park opens at 0900 hours. We’ve already got our tickets. Once we’re in, it’s straight to Cinderella’s castle, back of the park, second land to the right, and straight on ’til morning! Our competitive intelligence (Jenn) says Pooh’s Hunny Hunt is mobbed from the start, so our only chance is to out-hustle everyone else. But we are seasoned Disney fans, and we’re living in kiasu Singapore to boot, so we’re confident of our chances. Until we see this:

And that’s 30 minutes before the gates even open.

Dutifully, we queue, our hopes somewhat lower. About 96% of park guests are Japanese, so they have the home field advantage. As the gates open, the orderly line becomes an orderly . . . scrum. It’s Japan, so there’s no pushing or shoving - just a kind of intense strategizing. Fortunately, we reach the attraction early enough that the wait is only 15 minutes. Success!

We leave quite amazed by technology we haven’t seen on any ride in the States. Picture ~~hunny~~ honey pots that are individually guided by GPS. There is no track, and each honey pot traverses it own course. We whirl and do-si-do around the other pots (including one containing Heffalump “tourists” taking photos of us). It’s a bit like being immersed in a ballroom dance competition.

As we leave, we gleefully note that our strategy has worked: the wait for the ride is now 130 minutes. Later, we lunch at a gorgeously themed (and slightly trippy) Alice in Wonderland café called Queen of Hearts Banquet Hall, whose roof is covered in a hedge maze and whose doorway is a doorknob with a keyhole taller than we are. We eat unbirthday cake for dessert.

Unfortunately, our flawless strategizing begins to unravel when we try for a parade and a show. The best spot we can snag is far, far away from the parade floats (which have fun Asian touches like a dragon dance with the crocodile from Peter Pan). And we’re shut out of two shows before we figure things out. Being from the States, we just didn’t anticipate anyone sitting on the ground for three hours for a parade - or a full hour for a show.

But the Japanese are very patient, and not only patient but prepared. Each family has brought a ground covering to sit on as they wait. They look at us sadly when they see we have none. One elderly Japanese couple squeezes to one side of their mat and motions for us to share it with them. (Eventually, we buy our own as a souvenir, and it’s a big hit with our cat.)

Later, we adapt enough to score a perfect spot for the Electrical Parade, which Jenn has been missing for years (it was cruelly moved here from Orlando’s Magic Kingdom). It’s all worthwhile as we see the sunset behind the castle and the musical arrival of the “thousands of sparkling lights.”

But by 2200 hours, we’re bushed. And we’ll have an early start tomorrow: Day Two is by Sea.

In the Mail

2008-06-26T12:08:00.005+08:00

I spent most of yesterday grappling with the dreaded arrival of . . . the mail pouch. In a nod to the double life we’re leading, Joey’s company has provided us with a PO box back in New Jersey at which we can receive mail. And as they put it, they “pouch” the contents to us every few weeks.

We’re not clear on how it actually gets here: Do they pitch it onto the next boat out of New York harbor? Do they use some secret-agent interoffice mail service? Do they stick it in the suitcase of a hapless executive traveling from HQ to Singapore? However they do it, they thoughtfully transport the contents of our PO box halfway around the world to Joey’s desk.

And what, you may ask, is so valuable that it gets ferried to us across continents and oceans? Good question. Our friends and family use our address in Singapore if they write to us, and our US banking and bills we do online. So usually our haul looks something like this:

a few issues of BusinessWeek from last month (there’s nothing like reading the weekly market tips a few weeks late)

several alumni communications (our Ivy League alma mater and top-20 b-school are, naturally, desperate for funds)

and, mostly, tons of the same junk mail we’ve been patiently shredding for years.

Yes, the company thoughtfully ships us those credit card offers, personal loan ads, and sweepstakes entries so that we can personally evaluate them. Surely we wouldn’t want to miss that chance to refinance at a low, low rate! And of course we’d want to know we’ve been personally selected for an exclusive card membership!

Lesson learned: you can leave the junk mail, but the junk mail won’t leave you. I suppose I should appreciate the little touch of home: sitting in Singapore, as I slowly feed the pile of junk mail through the shredder, it almost feels as if I never left New Jersey.

More Ads That Make You Go Hmm...

2008-06-10T10:35:00.001+08:00

What comes to mind when you hear an advert for a cash line of credit? In the US, the ads usually suggest that your line of credit can help you pay for a dream vacation, start that huge home renovation, solve a financial emergency. But here in Singapore, I recently heard a radio segment advertising a line of credit for the cash payment by a young couple for their wedding banquet!

You would think that the wedding itself would be stressful enough for the couple, but the bride and groom are often responsible for the traditional wedding banquet, too. And Asian wedding banquets typically put Western receptions to shame, with huge guest lists and course after course of the most expensive foods available. Sometimes, if a large number of parental friends and colleagues are attending, then the parents will help out. Otherwise, the young couple are on their own.

And of course, in this cash-based society, it would never do to put the whole thing on a credit card (as we suspect most couples in the US would do these days). No wonder etiquette requires wedding guests to bring a substantial little red packet as a gift: you wouldn’t want your hosts to go broke just as they are starting out.

Fruit of the Month Club XII

2008-05-31T00:07:00.001+08:00

This month’s fruit is quite a world traveler. The one we ate was from Vietnam, though some we see in the markets have been grown locally on Pulau Ubin. Apparently, the fruit is native to Mexico and may have been introduced to Asia via the Philippines. Here it’s called chiku; in Mexico, sapodilla. It’s reminiscent of a peach, or maybe a plum. But I think we cut into it before it was fully ripe, because although the taste was quite sweet, it dried out our mouths (the way a dry tea or wine might do).

48 Hours in Bangkok

2008-05-29T23:04:00.002+08:00

Historic Bangkok is a visually overwhelming place; intriguing glimpses of everyday life mingle with the ostentation of the temples, whose spires are visible from miles away. The profusion of color, the detail of the mosaics, the exotic architecture, and the friendliness of the Thais we met there (not to mention the delicious food) left an indelible impression on us - and that was in just a short trip, 48 hours from start to finish!

We stayed in a fantastic renovated residence down a local alley along the river, so we could spend some time where local families live as well as tour the historic temples and canals.

The temples we saw were Buddhist - appropriately enough, I guess, for a trip during the Vesak Day weekend. Thai etiquette requires “respectful dress” for visitors to these sites, and thus arose our major packing problem: finding shoes that weren’t flip-flops. (After living in Singapore for a year and a half, we’d gone from having one pair of flip-flops apiece to having nothing but flip-flops in our wardrobes.)

But, dress code aside, we marveled at the detailed and gleaming mosaics on every inch of each temple building, the intricate carvings in gold, and the beautiful stonework. (We marveled at the massive Asian tour groups, too, but mostly we managed to stay one step ahead of them so as to view the temples in the peaceful atmosphere they’re meant to evoke.)

A highlight was our trip through the local canals on a long-tail boat, watching local life and lunching at a floating market along the water. We saw homes built on stilts over the water and some pretty sizeable monitor lizards - “Godzilla!” said our boat operator gleefully - along the way.

Long-tails are essentially slim boats fitted with whatever motor is at hand, so it’s not a quiet experience, but they are the usual method of transport in the area. Local merchants have smaller dugouts that can be paddled by one person - even when loaded with vegetables or goods to be sold down the canal at the floating market.

We were lucky not to be taken to the main (read: very touristy) floating market, which sounded like a floating souvenir shop. Instead, we visited a floating market where Thais often go for meals - in fact, it felt very much like an outdoor hawker center along the water. We were right at home, and some of our most enjoyable interactions in Bangkok were with the wonderful vendors - from the shyly smiling papaya-salad lady to the elderly man at the wok who handed me a tasty bite of prawn cake, fresh from the pan, to sample as we waited for our order.

Best of all were the evenings at the hotel, where from the loft in our room or the deck of the restaurant, we could look straight across the river at our favorite architectural icon of Bangkok: the stunning Wat Arun, temple of the dawn.

Peel Me Some Noodles

2008-05-22T11:48:00.001+08:00

As you may know, my regular lunchtime repast is a noodle bowl, a deal at S$2.80. I love all the different types of noodles available at your average food stall - ban mian, bee hoon, u mian, and la mian, among others.

When we went to Beijing last year, we visited Mian Ku (Noodle Loft) and witnessed some divine noodle making. Chefs in the open kitchen were flinging long strands of noodles, pinching off identically sized lumps, or shaving strips off mounds of dough, so that each piece landed neatly in one of the pots of boiling water.

Until last week, I had no idea I could catch a glimpse of equally inspiring noodle making right here - in a food court at Tampines that serves dao xiao mian, literally “knife-shaved noodles.” These are strips of noodles cut from a loaf of dough straight into the boiling water. It's as if he were peeling a huge cucumber. The fellow graciously allowed me to take a quick video, which you can watch here.

Mystery Drinks

2008-05-20T16:45:00.005+08:00

Heading back to the “town” area of Pulau Ubin, we grabbed a drink at one of the makeshift cafes along the water. “Wow,” said one of our friends, “We’re really not in Singapore anymore! Is that trash along the beach?” But soon the conversation turned, as it often does, to what people around us were eating and drinking.

My favorite was a day-glo green can of something called “Joy Juice,” with an excessively happy-looking guy doing something, we couldn’t quite tell what – falling into a barrel? floating above a barrel? – you gotta wonder what’s in that. Unfortunately, when we actually bought one, it turned out to be some variant of Mello Yello.

And then there was the one, apparently brought from home by a Singaporean and fellow tourist, that we couldn’t even hazard a guess at. Does anyone have any idea what this is? Or, more specifically, what those things are at the bottom?

We’ve seen lychees, rambutans, and pineapple pieces at the bottom of drinks like this, but we’ve never seen these before. They look a bit more like flowers than fruit, but you never know; we just might have a new candidate for our now sadly out-of-date Fruit of the Month.

Pulau Ubin

2008-05-16T21:35:00.000+08:00

Pulau Ubin, say the tourist books, is the last bastion of what Singapore used to be: a sleepy fishing village with lazy dogs asleep on the corners, chicken running loose, abundant species of flora and fauna. So one day we planned to wander down to the Changi Ferry Terminal, wait until 12 people arrived (that’s as much of a schedule as the bumboat ferry has), and head across to experience the quiet, rustic, traditional atmosphere of the nearby island.

Unfortunately, we’d chosen to visit on Labour Day (May 1), a public holiday in Singapore. When we arrived in the usually quiet, easygoing hamlet of Changi Village, all the legal parking spaces (and plenty that weren’t) were taken. And, far from waiting idly for a dozen people, the bumboats were chugging hurriedly back and forth, depositing hordes of visitors on the other shore.

On the island, we soon found that the aging zinc-roofed wooden houses and the peeling paint were the only clues that we weren’t on the main island anymore. Everyone we could see looked like they’d just come from downtown; even the bicycle attendants spoke like Orchard Road shop clerks. So we hurriedly escaped down one of the bike paths, in search of the natural beauty of Pulau Ubin.

It was beautiful to cycle beneath the overarching palm trees, sighting the occasional gigantic jackfruit fallen from a tree or a golden-retriever-colored macaque loping through the palms. But even surrounded by nature we were part of a crowd: As we biked, we were constantly pulling over to avoid the ancient vans that trundled by, laden with visitors. The many other bikers often stopped dead in front of us and got off their bikes to walk up a hilly part - just when we’d gotten up enough momentum to pedal through. “City people,” we muttered, climbing awkwardly off our bikes and walking up the hill ourselves.

There were also hordes of walkers, most looking like schoolchildren on a field trip. But they mostly stayed out of the way - until we stopped at a hut to rest and I started to get off my bike. Just as I was swinging my right foot over the top, I was engulfed by a group of them. Suddenly someone’s bag knocked my left shoulder, hard, and in slow motion, the sweaty ang moh and her bicycle fell to the ground in a heap. I wouldn’t have minded so much falling off my bike while riding it. But falling after I’d already gotten off? I found it nearly as ridiculous as the approximately 500 pairs of eyes that blinked curiously at me as I slowly untangled myself. Our friends, I noticed, had moved discreetly down the path.

We’d decided to bike the eastern half of Pulau Ubin for its boardwalk through the natural costal ecosystems rare in this part of Asia, where land reclamation is rampant. (Besides, the western half consists mainly of a temple and about a million prawn farms, which will sell them live to you.) We might not have timed the tides quite right; the water was still a bit too high for us to see some of the coral underneath. Admittedly, one of the informational signs described it as “coral rubble,” so perhaps this area didn’t survive the land reclamation as well as we’d thought. But there were still some hauntingly beautiful - if strangely dry - mangroves, as well as some feisty fiddler crabs defending their turf. And you can’t blame them, really, for staking their claim to what’s left of the quiet, natural world of Pulau Ubin.

Our Evening: A Haiku

2008-05-06T22:37:00.001+08:00

Two night conference calls,
One for each of us, talking
Over kitty yowls.

Tea and Taboo

2008-04-30T18:24:00.003+08:00

Last week, so as not to distract Joey during his Hugely Stressful Looming Deadline, I figured I needed to find a project of my own. So I decided: I would bake. Strangely, though I loved my semi-custom kitchen in New Jersey, I find myself cooking a lot more in the Lilliputian (though, thank God, air-conditioned) kitchen here in Singapore.

True, the oven is only just big enough to fit the smallest baking sheet I could find in the US. But here I also know a lot more women who either work part time or freelance (as I do) or don’t work at all. Which means I can lure them over during the day to eat the excessively caloric things I’ve made, so I don’t have to.

The other reason I bake for them is that my ordinary American staples are new and exciting to my Singaporean and international friends. Never mind that they can make the best mee rebus and rojak imaginable, the most delectable popiah filling from scratch, the perfect crusty Norwegian bread, the most endorphin-inducing Thai salads with piercing heat and delicate blends of spices.

They’ll still mob a plate of my standard chocolate chip cookies as if they were made from a secret gourmet recipe. And the American southern-style biscuits - my specialty, true, but they’re still only about 15 minutes from start to finish - are rhapsodized over as the most melt-in-your-mouth “scones” anyone has ever tasted.

So our mishmash of cultures made for a fairly successful afternoon tea - and, after only crumbs were left, a rather interesting game of Taboo. (We brought this game with us from the US. It consists of cards that each have one word at the top, which you must get your team to say, followed by five seemingly too-obvious words you are not allowed to use as hints.)

I admit I’d already edited the cards somewhat; I did not want to be doing the “Muslim” card or the “George W. Bush” card with this bunch. But I hadn’t anticipated that they’d have no idea what a “heartthrob” was – and I should have known they’d have an easy time with “shag” (the makers of these cards clearly weren’t British).

The “equator” card was pretty easy, too: “A line we live 85 miles away from.” And I’d guess that (Thai) “kickboxing” and “feng shui” were much more top-of-mind than they’d have been at a party in the US. A “bin” was a “thing you put rubbish in.”

And the “cockatoo” card? Easily identified as: “You know, those huge white birds that screech in your back garden at 6 a.m.”

Our Morning: A Haiku

2008-04-17T17:30:00.001+08:00

Car sans umbrella
Cumulonimbus lurking
Which first reaches work?

Fish Food

2008-04-10T20:05:00.010+08:00

As we walked up to the low tank full of fish, the mass of them swirled toward us, just like any other aquarium fish who know someone is approaching with food. But in our case, it was different: this time, we were the fish food.

The spa called it “fish reflexology.” But it was simply this: we were to willingly dangle our feet and calves into a pool full of fish. So they could nibble on us.

It sounds completely insane, but supposedly varieties of spa fish have been eating the dead skin off humans for centuries. We passed up the tank of African spa fish, about an inch or two long, in favor of the larger Turkish spa fish. Neither size seems like such a big deal - until a couple dozen of them are heading for your toes.

Each of us was afraid to put the first foot in (the fish were looking pretty interested, and seemed likely to overwhelm a single foot), so we tried to put our feet in at about the same time. Then, in trepidation, we watched as they swarmed toward us, sizing us up for tasty morsels.

And then came the tickling of puckering fish lips and the tiny flicks of fish tails as they brushed along our feet and legs. And yes, especially at first, it tickled a lot. Much hysterical giggling ensued. Trying desperately to keep still and not twitch away, I kept thinking, “Please, don’t let me kick any of them in the eye.”

But they didn’t seem to mind us at all, and as they got into a routine, we almost got used to the sensation. And so we began to watch them work. It was surreal: “Huh. A fish is cleaning up my cuticles. How nice of him. And look at the little ones nibbling between my toes. They’re doing such a good job.”

Three of us, being female and recently pedicured, were still worked over by our fair share of fish. But Joey was clearly the tasty feature dish. He was, to put it plainly, mobbed.

Once, he tried lifting a foot out of the water, so as to send more fish down to our end of the pool, but they attempted to follow him. Even after he gently shook off the clingier ones, the mouths still hopefully kissed the surface of the water beneath his foot, begging for more.

After twenty minutes of being nibbled, just when we’d begun to get used to the idea, we were led away for a foot massage (this time, by a person) on our newly exfoliated skin.

After the foot rub, we passed the pool again on our way back to our shoes. By this time, it could have been mistaken for any ordinary fish tank; the fish, apparently satisfied with their afternoon meal, had returned to placidly following the current of their pool.

Touring Singapore

2008-04-07T10:19:00.012+08:00

If you’re wondering what happened to the last half of March (and its attendant fruit of the month), I’ll tell you: we were, as Singaporeans put it, “so blur.” We had work, we had travel, we had houseguests. And somehow, before we knew it, it was April.

But I do remember that we spent our last week of March trying to convey to our guests, in just a short time, what Singapore was all about. Singapore has a reputation of being a quick, easy place to visit; most people think they’ll be done in a day or two. Our guests had even scheduled a couple of days in Bali in the middle of their fairly short trip (not that we blame them; who would not want to go to Bali?). But they still wanted to see all Singapore had to offer. So we tried...

We ate a modern, multicultural breakfast at the lush Shangri-La Hotel. We pounded the pavement at Orchard Road and pretended we could afford the merchandise. We ate Thai food at our favorite place (of course).

We packed our guests off to wander in Chinatown and Arab Street, and they returned with handfuls of costume jewelry and stomachs full of dim sum and kebabs. We dropped by the Malay wet market to choose from the endless fruit stalls. We ate a quick sunset dinner of hawker food (fried bananas, noodles, nasi lemak, satay, sugar cane juice). And after dark, we watched the yipping river otters, pouncing fishing cats, and a flying squirrel the size of a housecat frolicking in the dim light of the Night Safari.

Our guests collected sea glass at East Coast Park and got horribly sunburned (it is the equator, after all). With Joey they ate roti prata and laksa by the harbor, dropped by the American club, and dined at a gorgeous place designed to look like a Peranakan nonya’s living room.

We toured the botanical gardens one morning, timing our visit so we could see the stunning orchids, walk through the mist-filled room filled with pitcher plants, and be sitting in the shade sucking down ice-cold lime juice just as the mid-day heat set in.

Then our guests were off to Bali. When they returned, they told us their tales of watching temple dances and the rice harvest (and being climbed on by mischievous macaques), as we eased them back into big-city life at one of Singapore’s colorful riverfront quays.

Their last day, we wandered through the huge British Colonial buildings, the Asian Civilizations Museum, and the legendary Raffles Hotel’s Long Bar, where the Singapore Sling was invented. We did the tourist thing, drinking the pink stuff with fish and chips and throwing our peanut shells on the floor. And then we headed off to a most unusual spa on Sentosa - but that deserves its own post.

A whirlwind tour, and still there were things we missed: Little India, the Chinese and Japanese gardens, the fishing village on Pulau Ubin, and the rainforest, just to name a few. Who knew such a tiny island would have so many things to see?

Me in Melbourne

2008-03-19T20:52:00.004+08:00

As I write this, I’m taking afternoon tea in a large, comfy wing chair angled toward the window and its view of the Melbourne skyline in the waning hours of the afternoon. The red and yellow stripes of old-fashioned Flinders Station stretch out in front of me along the river, blending gradually into Gothic church spires and the contemporary rock-like bulk of Federation Square. Beyond the riverfront, the silver skyline of the central business district gleams in the afternoon sun against a backdrop of a bright blue sky brushed lazily with cirrus clouds.

Last night, on the way in from the airport, Joey’s boss asked me, “What do you plan to do in Melbourne?” I offered some lame excuse, parroting the typical Singaporean response (“shopping”), but the truth is that I came to Melbourne for no definite reason. I like to breathe the bracing cool, dry air, such a contrast to the tropics. I like to wake up in the morning with the real possibility of a good hair day. I like to walk outdoors along the tree-lined river under a blue, sunny sky. I like to browse in department stores designed for Caucasian bodies and listen to buskers singing country music on the street corners. And any time I tire of wandering, I like being able to turn down the first laneway in my path, where there are guaranteed to be at least a dozen hole-in-the-wall coffee shops and cafes. There’s something in the feel of the place that stirs my nostalgia for heady September days in Boston and Cambridge. All that’s missing is a course guide and a couple of crew shells practicing out on the water.

All this, of course, is tempered by the twinge of guilt I feel because my beloved, the reason I’m here in the first place, is stuck all day in a nondescript, windowless office north of the city in bland, suburban Noble Park. And during the evenings, when business meetings in the hotel lobby last until 11 p.m. and the glow of the laptop and the clacking of the keys continue long after I finally fall asleep, I sense that my other half may not be taking full advantage of our river and skyline view. It’s a lovely sight; as I’m gazing out right now, pairs of gulls are swooping gracefully over the river while commuter trains slide languidly in and out of the station. But it seems to me that the view would be even better shared.

Red Light, Green Light

2008-03-12T16:58:00.002+08:00

Living in Singapore every day, I forget sometimes that some seemingly “normal” parts of our lives would once have struck us as pretty strange.

Singapore driving, in particular, has subtly changed our way of life. Partly it’s because of Asian culture’s lack of any need for personal space, as we’ve experienced on the MRT, buses, and elevators. On the roads, we’ve had to get used to people, cars, buses, motorcycles regularly coming within a foot of the car. We often share a single, skinny lane with a motorcycle - or even two, one on each side. And since driving here isn’t all that fast, people tailgate and pass without an inch to spare.

But even with basic skills like parking, we’ve had to make some adjustments. These days, we’d have difficulty just turning into a parking space - forward, that is. Instead, it’s perfectly natural to follow the local custom of backing into the space, flashers on, rear sensors beeping as if we were maneuvering a Mack truck into place for a delivery. Then there’s the essential extra step of pushing the little button (that comes standard on almost every car in Singapore) to pull in our side mirrors. Otherwise, we’d never get the door open in such a tight space.

And of course to get to the parking spaces, we nearly always have to negotiate our way through a “car park,” or parking garage. Who’d have thought that driving to the grocery store would involve two dollars in parking fees and a cautious roll down a dark, spiraling ramp with no room for error, all for the privilege of squeezing into a parking space apparently designed for a Fiat?

On home leave in American suburbia, we were amazed by the huge open-air parking lots at the malls. We felt so exposed, out there in the open: what if it rained? And what a waste of land: surely these were excessively roomy parking spaces, and why were all these spaces spread out over just one level? On the other hand, we’d almost forgotten that “free parking” was anything but a square on the Monopoly board.

The sudden strangeness did make us uncharacteristically sympathetic to other drivers who were experiencing the culture shock of driving American-style, though. Once, during our home leave, we stopped at an intersection just as the light turned red. Across from us, the minute the light turned red, a man confidently drove his minivan (surely a rental) through the intersection to turn left. Cars going the other direction honked, swerved, gestured at the driver. But we shook our heads sympathetically. “That poor guy. He has no idea the left-turn arrow comes after the green light. He thinks it’s normally after the red light - just like in England and Singapore.”

Fruit of the Month Club XI

2008-02-28T11:28:00.003+08:00

We found this sitting in the middle of other, more innocuous looking items and just had to buy it.

Would you guess that it’s
(a) the tentacles of a yellow squid?
(b) Medusa’s new highlights?
(c) a sunlit sea anemone?
(d) Buddha’s hand?

Oddly enough, it’s a fruit called Buddha’s hand. The whole thing looks like this:

What’s inside? Well, we cut it open, and from the look and the smell, we deduced that a Buddha’s hand is . . . a weirdly shaped lemon. With nothing but pith inside. No juice, no seeds, just the white stuff, though there is a nice lemony fragrance.

No one we asked could tell us how to cook or eat it; apparently it’s mostly used as decoration during Chinese New Year along with other “lucky” fruits.

CNY Revisited

2008-02-26T16:58:00.009+08:00

People kept asking us why we were going so far away for the Chinese New Year holiday. “Why not somewhere closer, like Vietnam or China or Taiwan?” they said. There was actually a very good reason: all of Singapore was traveling for CNY, and they’d out-queued us. Again. I talked to plenty of people who revealed that they’d started making plans last August.

We’d figured that since most Singaporeans have extended family in Singapore, they’d want to spend the holiday eating the traditional meals with their relatives and visiting their neighbors to trade symbols of good luck. What we forgot, though, was that Singapore celebrates every moment in the two-week festival, of which the two-day public holiday is just the beginning. Travelers confidently make plans for the four-day weekend, knowing CNY will still be in full swing when they return.

So when we arrived back in town, we celebrated our second CNY weekend at the Chingay parade, Singapore’s version of the parades at Carnaval and Mardi Gras. We splurged on tickets to grandstand seating (though we did get turfed out of our original row B center seats because of a VIP platform), so we could see the full show of dramatic special effects. The best was the opener, with people rappelling through smoke and lights down the imposing British Colonial columns on City Hall.

The parade itself involved some pretty flashy floats and lots and lots of dance performances. There are maybe 4 or 5 million people on the whole island, and we’d bet that at least 1 million of them were involved in the highly choreographed routines (of both the cultural and pop-and-lock variety) that accompanied nearly every float.

Along with the floats from local community groups, there were a number of cultural highlights. In keeping with the CNY theme, there was a nifty psychedelic dragon dance and a float with dozens of lion dancers (some of which climbed high pedestals to perch above the crowd). We watched a ritual dance by a native Taiwanese tribe, a Bangara dance by a troupe from southern India, and even a modern collaboration between the local university and an Irish school of the arts. (There were some odd moments, too; what was with the choreographed siege of a medieval fort with catapults, courtesy of the City Harvest float?)

What was most fun to watch, though, was not so much the ordered choreography but the atmosphere of controlled chaos: acrobats and high-school students and musicians and lion dancers and confetti and fireworks and a yu sheng toss about the size of a small barge. We did, however, skip the all-night street party in the same location. (For all its reputation as a somewhat conservative place, Singapore clearly isn't nearly as stodgy as we are...)

The next evening, we celebrated one last time at a friend’s home, decked out in red and gold. We tossed one final yu sheng salad (Joey’s enthusiasm was starting to wane; it was his fourth of the season) and spent an enjoyable evening hanging out with friends (and doling out piles of red envelopes to their children). For us, that was a perfect conclusion to our CNY festivities.

As usual, though, we were the first to leave the party; the shops continued to stay closed for at least the first half of the week, as families celebrated at home, and many of the decorations will still be up for a few more days, though the holiday for this year has officially come to a close.

Sumatra Earthquake III

2008-02-25T22:47:00.001+08:00

We’ve got to be reasonable; we can’t post a blog entry every time there’s an earthquake nearby, or we’d be up to something like Sumatra Earthquake LVII. So I’ve restrained myself to the times Joey has felt a gentle swaying on the fifth floor of his office building.

Today’s earthquake, a 7.0 off the west coast of Sumatra, was one of those. Joey, who by now can distinguish the difference between vertigo and actual building movement, did not need the radio to tell him there was an earthquake. Our usually lethargic cat spent the whole day trying to climb the rafters. And, typically, I was completely clueless to the geophysical events in my adopted country’s backyard.

At a Loss for Words

2008-02-24T22:31:00.000+08:00

New Zealand defies description, to such an extent that it’s ground our blog-writing to a halt. We keep trying for a neat wrap-up of the trip - from its beginning, when we heard the three sweetest words in the English language (“upgraded to business”), to our last evening watching the sunset across the harbor in Auckland, the world’s City of Sails. But for the New Zealand we experienced in between, we’re at a loss.

It’s hard to explain the range of climates and wildlife, the sharp drama of the landscape, the warmth and generosity of the Maori in the north, the meandering pace of life in the practically unpeopled south. It’s even harder to convey the outsized proportions, the way things seem thrown together in unexpected ways. Huge peaks rise abruptly from deep, still waters in the fiords. Standing on an icy mountaintop glacier, you can see the shimmering blue of the ocean not far away. And of course there are thousands, and thousands, and thousands, of sheep.

We really felt we’d found the true New Zealand while kayaking one morning in the fiord of Milford Sound, now one of our favorite places on the planet. It was quite an experience to be out there first thing in the morning with our small group before anyone else was out on the water. Cormorants plunged out of the sky, fur seals lolled on the rocks, and penguins poked their heads above the surface of the water to eye us curiously. The silence and the sense of space were exhilarating. We loved the feeling of our paddles slicing cleanly through calm water up to 1,000 feet deep as we gazed up at 500-foot-high waterfalls and 5,000-foot-high peaks. Like New Zealand as a whole, it was stunning - and unforgettable.

Eurasian CNY

2008-02-12T12:16:00.004+08:00

February 7 and 8 were the official Chinese New Year public holidays in Singapore, but we celebrated our CNY a week early at a fundraiser for the local Eurasian Association, thanks once again to the urging of our friend Monica.

No, we’re not exactly Eurasian, although I suppose our combined Irish and Chinese heritage might qualify the two of us in a pinch. Here in Singapore, many Eurasians are of mixed Portuguese and Cantonese descent (Portuguese settlers colonized Macao, near Hong Kong), but many other cultures are represented as well. Sitting next to me was a friend of Monica’s whose family was from a part of northern India settled hundreds of years ago by Italians. (Who knew?)

Our CNY-themed lunch began with a classic lion dance by a cadre of adorable lions that turned and leaped on delicately pointed toes as they peeled oranges and spat out chocolate coins and hong bao. We tossed lo hei (yu sheng), just as we’d done the year before.

But there were some new twists. For one thing, the traditional Chinese dishes we ate were cooked in a Eurasian style, influenced by Portuguese spices.

And as we ate, a singer with an elaborately coiffed pompadour belted out not only the usual Cantonese new-year songs but also Latin tunes, including that perpetual favorite, La Bamba. Unfortunately, for some reason we hadn’t thought to brush up on our salsa skills for our stint in Singapore...

And as at any proper fundraiser, the bingo caller soon arrived, and we bought the obligatory card for a good cause.

But we soon discovered that, rather than bingo, this was tombola, the Italian version. Would you have any idea how to play a card that looked like this?

Still, when we left at the end with our pairs of oranges and our hong bao party favors, we were feeling traditional enough to stop by and pick up a CNY decoration to hang on the wall at home. This one seemed singularly appropriate; after all, it is the year of the rat!

Fruit of the Month Club X

2008-01-31T13:05:00.000+08:00

In Singapore, something like 99 percent of produce has to be imported by truck, ship, or plane. We get strawberries from Korea, blueberries from the US, grapes from South Africa, and various fruits from Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Okay, there may be the odd package of fruit labeled “locally grown,” but Singapore being a little short on farmland, we wonder: where is it really grown?

This month’s fruit of the month is therefore unusual; this time we’re absolutely certain it’s local produce. Why? Well, after a full year of battling the bugs and the elements on behalf of our mango tree, finally we have something to show for it: two mangoes of about the same size as the ones we’d usually buy at the wet market. True, we don’t know how they taste yet, and odds are high that they’ll ripen and drop while we’re out of the country. But we still think they look good enough to qualify as January’s fruit of the month.

Respect the Chope

2008-01-28T08:35:00.000+08:00

The other day I was enjoying my regular noodle bowl at a busy food court. I was slurping away, marveling at how wonderful it was to get noodles, ikan bilis (dried anchovies), green vegetables, ground pork, chilis, mushrooms, dried onion, slices of fish, and an egg to boot for $3.50 Sing.

Unfortunately, my reverie was interrupted by strident shouting. I (along with everyone else in the food court) turned to see one Singaporean woman squawking at another, who was an elderly “auntie.” No one else dared to intervene as the younger woman yammered away - everyone was too embarrassed.

“You are so inconsiderate!” the younger woman was shouting.

A few people near me clucked and shook their heads; the younger woman was clearly losing face, as the older woman unsuccessfully tried to deflect the tirade. But it soon became apparent that the younger had choped (reserved) a seat in the traditional, time-honored way - by leaving her stack of tissues on the table. The older woman had committed the almost unheard-of infraction of moving the other's tissues and shopping bags to make room for herself. Now, some of the clucks were directed toward the auntie.

Lesson learned: it doesn't matter if it’s a forlorn umbrella or simply a dilapidated pack of Kleenex on that empty table. You must respect the chope!

“You are rude! How can so rude . . . do you not know, lah?! You cannot see, izzit? Table choped ’ready!”

I decided to slurp the rest of my soup and quickly head back to work.

Back to “Normal”

2008-01-10T11:51:00.000+08:00

It took a surprising amount of time to get back in the swing of things in Singapore after three weeks in the US. True, we lived in Singapore for only ten months before going on home leave, but could it really have taken only three weeks for us to forget everything?

I nearly got lost on the way to pick Joey up from work - though switching back to the right side of the car was no problem. And, horror of horrors, we had trouble remembering the ECP exit for our favorite Thai place! Plus, we found our palates had in fact changed during our somewhat blander food forays in the US; that Thai food had more kick than we’d remembered. Of course, they might have added extra spice to celebrate our return. They were so happy to see us - and you haven’t seen happiness until you’ve seen a Thai person smile - I think they might have feared their best customers had moved.

Still, things are back to normal now.

We know, because when Joey was carrying a newly purchased kitchen gadget through the mall, a nice man walked up and asked him in Chinese, with no preamble at all, “How much did you pay for that?” And when Joey told him, he tut-tutted sympathetically and said that wasn’t cheap.

We know, because we scheduled the nefarious landscapers for today, a rare sunny day at the end of rainy season, and of course they didn’t bother to show up.

We know, because my “social calendar” out East is filling up again with birthday lunches and people who threaten to drop by for tea without warning, just to say hello; apparently I was much missed by the local ladies, a fact which continues to surprise me. (And here I thought they only loved me for my bowling skills...)

We know, because we’re back to the family phone call time-zone crunch, all our quality time packed in between 9 and 10 a.m. and 9 and 10 p.m. so no one has to be awake too late or too early.

And the main reason we know things are back to normal: We’re finally, finally updating the blog.

The Longest Thursday

2007-12-09T21:19:00.000+08:00

Last week we had our longest Thursday ever, courtesy of 23 hours of transit combined with a time-zone change that set us back 13 hours. Our first flight leg was on the longest passenger flight in the world, direct from Singapore to Newark. What do you do for almost 18 hours on a plane? Well, we wondered about that, too...

Hour 1: I am already looking at my watch: are we there yet? But of course we’ve only just started, and we’re not even to Ho Chi Minh City yet. A stewardess comes by and hands us regulation slipper-socks, and we dutifully put them on.

Hour 2: We’re in business class, so the steady parade of food has begun. It’s not so much to feed the hungry as to kill time for the bored; a meal can last almost two hours. They bring Indonesia satay, then salad, then would-you-like-duck-beef-lamb-or-laksa. The seafood laksa is the only Singaporean dish, but we pass it up: we can get these for $3 Sing at a hawker centre when we get back. Plus the combination of spicy shrimp sambal sauce, coconut milk, and noodles just about guarantees day-glo orange spots on my shirt, especially if I’m eating on a plane. They “round out” the meal with bread, cheese, and dessert. I’m hoping they don’t feed us again for another 12 hours or so.

Hour 4: The chipper stewardess informs us that duty-free shopping is now open, in case we missed the 1,000 duty-free shops at Changi Airport (one hazard of an airport where all the flights are international).

Hour 5: It’s always tricky to figure out when to sleep to minimize the inevitable jet lag. But we’re getting in to Newark at 5 p.m. EST, so we’ll try to sleep during the early part of the flight and then stay awake for awhile, so we’re sleepy again when we reach our destination.

Hour 10: We wake up to find that we’ve flown over the sea between Korea and Japan and are still continuing northward. Our path is a giant parabola on the map. We’ve crossed the International Date Line. But the trip is starting to wear on us. Tired and cranky, we spend the next hour dissecting whether moving to Singapore was a colossal mistake or a brilliant idea. We had this same discussion many times during our stressful first months in Singapore. As we really should know by now, it’s a pointless debate, impossible to resolve. The truth is, moving to another country is always a bit of both.

Hour 11: Food again. The crew seems in a hurry, which I’m guessing is because we’ll soon be over land (North America!), with a higher chance of turbulence. After dinner, they turn the lights down to encourage us to sleep again. Joey decides to sleep upside-down to get the blood flowing to his head again. The “lay-flat” seats are indeed flat, but they’re at a slight angle, so your feet are usually pointing toward the floor.

Hour 12: We are flying over Juneau, over the Canadian Rockies and Jasper National Park. I am trying to stay awake, so I decide to watch a movie. There are hundreds to choose from, all on-demand, so I start a very funny Australian faux-documentary about children’s dance studios. Movies on these flights are pretty international: aside from the usual US hits, there’s everything from kung fu to Bollywood.

Hour 16: I can’t help it; I keep dropping off to sleep. In Singapore, it’s the wee hours of the morning. But I am excited by the “Hours to Arrival” number on the flight information screen. After all this time, it’s hard to believe we’re just two hours away from Newark.

Hour 17: Newark provides its usual welcome: an hour-long holding pattern before we even get as close as Elizabeth. The pilot explains that they always show up an hour early to Newark, so the gate arrival “almost” always ends up being on time. In his voice we hear the typical Singaporean’s gentle exasperation at the disorder in other countries. Having lived in Singapore for the better part of a year, we’re inclined to agree with him.

Hour 18: We touch down amid the glow of orange street lights and the mist from a freezing fog. At 5 p.m., it is already cold and dark (we are used to a daily 7 p.m. sunset), but we’ve made it. At last we are back on the eastern coast of the US.

So This Is Christmas...

2007-11-30T19:08:00.000+08:00

The American-style elves-and-Santa setups are in the malls. The swankier stores are decked out in swags of silk greenery, poinsettias, and lights. Outdoors, the five-story-high fake Christmas trees clash horribly with the tropical foliage, though nobody seems to mind. But there’s still one problem: it’s hot.

I’ve largely refrained from complaining about the weather here, mostly because I actually like it. But now we’re experiencing the unbearable stickiness of our first rainy season. I thought all the rain might mean cooler temperatures, but instead, the heavy clouds hold in the damp heat, pressing it down on anyone who dares to venture outdoors. And our fragile air-conditioning system, flummoxed by the change in season, has responded by producing warm, steamy air.

Plus the bugs are coming out of the woodwork, or wherever they’ve been all year. We barely noticed them before, but now they’re launching daily campaigns to breach our doors and windows - anything to get out of the rain. (Clearly, they’re spoiled; we have nothing like the floods and monsoons elsewhere in the region.)

All this I could have ignored, were it not for the necessity of putting up Christmas decorations. Even after all those Christmasses in Florida (which, admittedly, were drier if not much cooler than this), it’s the first time Christmas has seemed like such an act of will. First was the lugging of decorations down from storage on the “air-conditioned” third floor, which had reached about 100 sticky Fahrenheit degrees. Next was the battle with a very large cockroach while in the storage room searching for electrical converters so as to light up the decorations without shorting the power grid.

Then there was the garland. Determined to make it feel “like Christmas” in our Singapore home, I’d rashly planned to wrap a faux pine garland all the way up the stairs to the third floor. (The woman at the garden store was baffled. “I know it’s on sale, but where will you put 64 feet of this stuff?”) Unfortunately, while a pine garland seemed warm and comforting in New Jersey, I quickly discovered that in Singapore’s temperatures I could barely stand to hold on to such scratchy prickliness – the equivalent of hauling a thick wool sweater around Miami in June. The homey, festive experience I’d hoped for quickly gave way to a sweat-drenched struggle to wrangle my 64 feet of garland into place on the stairwell before passing out from the heat.

Just at the top of the second floor, I ran out - not of garland, but of energy. That was the point at which I gave up and went downstairs to watch ice-skating on TV with an enormous glass of ice water. Gradually, I started to feel just a little cooler. But it still took me a long time to feel in the Christmas spirit.

Fruit of the Month Club IX

2007-11-29T23:23:00.000+08:00

It’s themed to Thanksgiving, it’s slightly quirky, and nine out of ten people probably don’t think it’s a fruit. It’s also our second (and perhaps our last) fried fruit of the month. Our fruit of the month for November is . . . pumpkin tempura.

Yes, folks, while you were eating your tasty Thanksgiving leftovers of turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, we were beginning to realize that when you don’t cook your own Thanksgiving lunch, you have an empty fridge at dinnertime, when you just want a bite of something to finish off the day.

So what did we do, resourceful expats in Asia that we are? We went to Sakae Sushi, of course. But I am not a sushi eater myself, and I still had Thanksgiving on my mind, so I ordered my first pumpkin tempura. It’s not made with the “traditional” pumpkin but with a lighter, sweeter Japanese pumpkin, tending more toward the butternut squash camp. Still, it’s yummy, with a buttery, melt-in-your-mouth texture and just a hint of the autumn we were craving.

Remembering Florida

2007-11-26T13:41:00.000+08:00

Recently, I’ve been editing and writing Florida-related passages, and some of them have vividly reminded me of what it was like growing up there. A week or two into the work, I found myself homesick for someplace I haven’t lived in a dozen years or so. True, we have steamy heat and palms and mangroves and shore birds and lizards here in Singapore, too. But there’s much that I miss, at least the way I remember it.

I miss the clack-clack of high-heeled sandals in the tiled, fountain-filled courtyard of the Columbia restaurant in St. Augustine. I miss Ybor City, Tampa’s historical district and home of amazing Cuban food and atmosphere. I miss hearing the rolling syllables of Spanish after every English announcement.

I miss watching the east-coast beaches shimmering during thunderstorms. I miss the beaches at night. I remember getting up in pitch blackness and reaching the beach just in time to see a massive sea turtle crouching over a hole in the sand, dropping dozens of eggs the size of golf balls before shuffling imperturbably back into the sea.

I miss playing one-on-one basketball and shell games with the dolphins just up the road at Marineland - nothing in the world lifts the spirits like delighting a dolphin, especially when no one else is around - before some stupid kid threw something dangerous in and they had to put up fences.

I miss my maternal grandmother’s house, just across the bridge from the ocean, and the way the sand clung to our feet after a day on the beach. I even miss her refusal of air-conditioning. Now I see it was just an extension of her love of the old Florida ways.

I miss Southern sweetened iced tea, more plentiful than water, always the perfect taste, always ice-cold. I love that my paternal grandmother, no matter where she is in the world, just can’t stop herself from asking for “sweet tea.” I feel the same.

I am going back for a week or so in December, to visit and to try to adjust to the inevitable changes. Even so, when I dream of Florida, I think I will still see what I miss, what I remember.

Thanksgiving, Sort Of

2007-11-22T08:00:00.000+08:00

We scheduled our Thanksgiving meal at the American Club for lunchtime, because they were sold out at dinner. I asked Joey, “Are you sure noon would be okay?” He looked at me and shrugged. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Because he didn’t get the day off, that’s why.

So in between meetings, he met me for Thanksgiving lunch. Among our fellow diners were a few American families also celebrating the holiday, but most people there were Singaporeans having everyday business lunches.

There was no Macy’s parade - at least, not until 11 p.m. our time, and then it wasn’t carried on any of our cable channels. There was no kickoff to Christmas; with no Thanksgiving holiday to keep the Singaporean retailers in check, it’s been the “Christmas shopping season” since the beginning of November. And, speaking of kickoffs, there was no American football, either.

Still, as we ate our turkey and trimmings, we counted our blessings. Air conditioning (it’s currently 80 degrees and 75 percent humidity, indoors). Cheap calling cards that make our family sound like they’re next door. Email and snail mail, the source of Thanksgiving cards that made today feel more like a holiday. And, of course, next month’s trip to see many of the people we’re thankful for.

Ads That Make You Go Hmm...

2007-11-21T14:38:00.000+08:00

Found this flyer in our mailbox the other day. At first glance it seems normal enough. Standard aspirational verbiage, the “don’t you want to be like them” approach. What you’d expect from a luxury if perhaps fading brand.

The very last line, what they clearly think is the final kicker, is what gets me. “For less than $119,000*.” I don’t care if that’s in Sing dollars. That’s still $80,000 US. (It might be even more tomorrow, given the dollar’s slide.) And this is for Ford’s entry-class Jaguar.

I have no idea if this includes government tax (import duties are almost as high as the sticker price), the COE (the permit to drive the car, issued in very limited numbers, at auction), and all the other charges. But if not, the total price for the car could set you back more than $160,000 US.

Speedy Delivery

2007-11-05T18:34:00.000+08:00

No, not the Mr. Rogers kind - I'm thinking food delivery. Here, plenty of food can be delivered, usually courtesy of guys on zippy mopeds with large boxes on the back. Sure, there’s the standard stuff like pizza, though it’s from a Pizza Hut rather than a Domino’s as you might expect. But pizza is even less appealing here than in the US. And while McDonalds offers delivery almost 24 hours a day, having limp French fries delivered isn’t my idea of dinner.

There are some unusual ones here, but not all of them are great ideas, either. Do you really want your sushi after it’s been sitting on the back of a motorcycle in 85-degree heat? For my money, the perfect delivery foods are Indian and Malaysian foods.

One of the services that has caught my eye is Dial-a-Curry (actual slogan: “You Curry, We Hurry!”), the delivery arm for Maharajah on Orchard Road. Korma, paneers, vindaloos, you name it, paired with naans, parathas, and dosas. That’s food that will still be fantastic when it arrives at your doorstep.

On my way home the other day, I also spotted this delivery truck for Malaysian nasi lemak, otah, and satay. Granted, this is probably for catering, but it’s worth throwing a party for, right? Pizza guys, you’ve got competition!

Fruit of the Month Club VIII

2007-11-04T17:35:00.000+08:00

I’m a little late in posting this, but here is October’s fruit of the month. We figured, in the month of jack o’ lanterns, what could be more appropriate than a deep-fried jackfruit?

Our friend got some for us to try at the Hari Raya festivities, and we thought, hey, conch fritters! But no, it was a hard jackfruit fried in a thick batter.

The first reaction for both of us on the first bite was, “What is durian doing in this thing?” Trust us, if there is anything you do not want sneaking up on you, it’s durian - a scarier surprise than any Halloween monster.

Once we knew it was there, though, the taste wasn’t all that bad. Jackfruit isn’t quite as punchy as durian, and it’s a smaller dose, so we could mostly enjoy the creaminess of the texture and the crunch of the batter.

Not the healthiest fruit of the month, admittedly. But surely it’s healthier than the large quantities of Halloween candy we have left over after our lone trick-or-treater (a British neighbor) stopped by.

Hong Kong Disneyland

2007-10-29T10:12:00.000+08:00

As long-time Disney fans, during our trip to Hong Kong we couldn’t resist visiting Hong Kong Disneyland. As the newest, and therefore smallest, Disney park (it’s still being expanded), the place has been maligned for not enough activities for hyperactive small children or Asian teenagers raised on video games. But we loved it, partly because of the simple pleasures of walking around a Magic Kingdom, soaking up the atmosphere, and watching how the cultural and language differences played out.

A detailed review, for those particularly interested (and if you are, you’re probably related to me):

When you arrive by subway, Disney has its own train off one of the main lines. The train is plush, with windows and rings shaped like Mickey’s head and gold statues of Disney characters. You exit the train at a gorgeous, old-fashioned train station before walking through manicured grounds past a huge fountain with sculptures of Mickey, Donald, and the rest on your way to the gate.

Hong Kong Disneyland is, visually, a bit on the short side. It’s on Lantau, the same island as the airport, so we’re guessing that a bigger Sleeping Beauty’s Castle or Space Mountain wouldn’t have met height restrictions for flight visibility. But it’s still beautifully done, with all the details you would expect from a Disney park.

Food Surprisingly good. Favorites: Fantastic dim sum in a food court in Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, amid tapestries that told the story, classic Gothic arches, and lighted pedestals with life-sized statues of dancing Disney princes and princesses. British and Cantonese food at the end of Main Street. Ice cream (selection: chocolate-and-vanilla Mickey heads, chocolate and sesame seeds, red bean, and green tea) while staking out seats for the excellent parade.

Entertainment Fascinating, largely because of language differences. For the main show, the songs were in English, but they spoke Cantonese, and the Chinese characters (for the Mandarin speakers) and English were on screens on either side. Imaging hearing Cantonese spoken with the squeakiness of Mickey and Minnie, the aw-yuk of Goofy’s voice, and the quacking of Donald Duck!

Stitch Encounter, a computer-run audience-interaction show, was also interesting. Since it would be impossible to interact with the audience in three languages at once, the day is divided into English shows, Mandarin shows, and Cantonese shows. It only takes them 15 minutes to switch the technology from one language to the next. Impressive, and fun. Stitch immediately picked Joey out of the audience and announced that he was an escaped space pirate, complete with mugshot on screen. Ah, the memories...

Rides Space Mountain is tamer; there’s just no getting around it. Lots of tight spirals at high speed, but no drops at all, perhaps because of the lack of height. The “rockets” in Tomorrowland have been altered to take on more people; now they’re literal flying saucers, an odd contrast to the Mad Hatter’s Teacups not far away.

The Jungle River Cruise is more like Disneyland in California, much more fun and involved than the one in Orlando. Also, here Tom Sawyer’s rafts are called Tarzan’s rafts, and they float across to Tarzan’s Treehouse. Not much to do, but given the location and the beautiful hills that surround the park, it’s a terrific place to take in the views.

Buzz Lightyear, the Carousel, Dumbo, Mickey’s Philharmagic, and Winnie the Pooh are the same as in Orlando. It’s a Small World probably will be, too; it’s still being constructed, but we could see the familiar facade.

Omissions? Yes, there are plenty. No Frontierland at all - and while it doesn’t exactly make sense in Hong Kong, that means no Splash Mountain and no Big Thunder Railway. No Pirates of the Caribbean. No Peter Pan. No Haunted Mansion. (No Hall of Presidents, either, but that’s a bonus.)

Hotels There are two Disney hotels near the park. The Disneyland Hotel looked so much like the Grand Floridian (though it was billed as European) that we couldn’t stay there - it was just too weird. Instead, we stayed at Disney’s Hollywood Hotel, a casual but glamorous hotel decorated in a perfect art deco style.

If you enjoy finding “hidden Mickeys,” this is the hotel for you. Mickeys tucked into the outer wall. Cubist Mickey carpets in the halls. Mod, flat, circular lights in the restaurants in the Mickey shape. Mickey croutons in the salads. Mickey-shaped tops on the travel shampoo.

And when we got tired of looking at Mickeys, we could look out our window onto the hotel grounds and then out to the bay and the mountains beyond, a constant reminder that we might be at Disney, but we were still in the exotic city of Hong Kong.

Culture Shock: Hong Kong

2007-10-25T17:16:00.000+08:00

After our decidely “foreign” experience in Beijing, I have to admit we felt little (if any) culture shock in Hong Kong. It was often in English, easy to navigate, with a great subway. It is true that in casual Singapore, land of the universal flip-flops, I had almost forgotten what it was like to be in the Big City. (Note to self: remember to reintegrate black into wardrobe.) The buildings are taller, the rich are richer, and most people seem to walk with a sense of entitlement, secure in their success.

Plus, in many ways it was exactly what we expected: the truly spectacular skyline of an established financial behemoth, peopled with a global mix of ambitious financieers. And in the background, as we’d secretly hoped, those mysterious, exotic little hole-in-the-wall shops and restaurants crammed to the rafters with carvings and lacquerwork, many lit by the haunting glow of deep-red lanterns.

My favorite part of Hong Kong, though, was a remarkable little piece of architecture generally referred to as “The Escalators.” Part of Hong Kong is built up the side of a steep hill, and it’s quite a climb even to get from one block to the next. So they built a series of escalators (really “travelators,” those flat, moving ramps), to carry pedestrians up the hill. They’re raised about one floor above street level, so we rode along while peering curiously over the edge and down into the lanes on either side. Then, any time we spotted an interesting restaurant or shop (and the lanes were packed with these), we just hopped off to investigate. Going down, you have to take the stairs, unless it’s morning commuting hour; then, they change the direction of the escalators so that everyone who lives up the hill can ride down to the central business district to work.

Like Beijing, Hong Kong was hazy during the day, so we skipped the Peak Tram and its supposedly spectacular views from a foothill just outside the city. But the sky cleared up at night, so we took a gorgeous ferry ride across the bay from Kowloon to central Hong Kong for the best views of the skyline across the water. One of the nice things about the ferry is that it’s not a tourist attraction; it’s just what lots of people take as part of their commute every day, for about 50 cents US per trip. Of course, by now they’re too jaded to notice the view, but we think they’re still lucky to have the chance to see this every day.

Hari Raya Puasa

2007-10-21T22:05:00.000+08:00

Let the celebrations begin! Hari Raya Puasa (Fasting Day of Celebration) marks the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In Singapore it also marks the beginning of a slew of holidays. This year, the Hindu celebration of Deepavali is in early November; then there’s Christmas and New Year’s, and finally Chinese New Year in early February 2008. Needless to say, the retailers are having a field day with sales events (or “promotions” as they say here).

Which makes us especially grateful for local Singaporeans who have welcomed us--or, more often, Jenn--into their circle. From bowling on Fridays to East Coast dinner parties, from cat sitting while we’re traveling to the occasional help from a maid, we’ve been very fortunate. Many of these are women Jenn has become friends with--and I freely admit that Jenn’s cell phone rings more frequently than mine!

Through these acquaintances, we’ve been introduced to wonderful cultures. Our introduction to Hari Raya Puasa came courtesy of the lovely Monica, who took us out to the Malay Village and Geylang area last week after sundown (and after the breaking of the daily fast) to enjoy the festivities. She simply loves all the different celebrations in Singapore (anything that involves putting up decorations is a big hit), but it was great to spend this one with her. Of Malay heritage herself, she could explain the details of all the sights and sounds.

As usual with these festivals of sensory overload, it was hard to capture the true sense of the festival on film. A few photos, anyway:

These ladies certainly know how to wear a hijab...

...but for those who aren't quite as sure, you can always look to the mannequins for inspiration.

Apparently, one simply must buy new curtains at Hari Raya, and the selection is overwhelming. This shop was one of the few I could frame in the camera.

After some “Halal makan” (must celebrate with food, lor!), we took a stroll through the bustling booths stuffed with carpets and stunning embroidered clothing (and yes, the sign says $55 Singapore dollars, or about $35 US).

Finally, we climbed a footbridge for one last look at the lights down the main thoroughfare of Geylang.

Climate Change… What Climate Change?

2007-10-18T21:08:00.000+08:00

Before everyone harpoons me for this title, I should say I believe global warming is real – good enough for a Nobel prize. I’m not sure some climate change wouldn’t have happened without people, but I certainly don’t believe people have no impact.

Having said that, I confess to wishing for seasonal climate change in Singapore. Precipitation doesn’t count. The temperature fluctuations look like an EKG reading at a cemetery. The word "season" has one meaning here, and it involves taste buds.

Yes, I knew this when we moved here, and the lack of temperature shifts doesn’t bother me that much – after all, if I needed a quick fix, I’d just duck into the nearest shopping mall for a/c. But I find the lack of seasons is toying with my sense of calendar. Is it October already? Are Thanksgiving and Christmas really right around the corner? Noticing that Australia is approaching Summer just messes with my head even more.

I’ll have to take my seasonal cues from something else; I hear from a local friend that Christmas decorations will be up in a week or so - maybe that will help.

How Guanxi Killed My Carpet Grass

2007-10-03T14:37:00.000+08:00

(Cue film noir theme music.)

This is a story of unfulfilled promises, dashed expectations, sheer incompetence, and guanxi (the relationship-based way of doing business in Asia).

The characters: an out-of-town landlord, a dastardly landscaper, his bumbling gardening henchmen, and one naïve renter whose contract provides for a certain amount of lawn maintenance.

As our story opens, the renter is watering dutifully, even going so far as to invest in technology to ensure even coverage. The landlord has signed a contract with the landscaper, naturally a friend of a friend. The contract calls for maintenance of the newly installed carpet grass, which apparently requires fertilizing and cutting to just the right length, at just the right time every month, in order to survive at all. The renter has no obligations regarding this contract, except to water dutifully. The landlord heads out of town, confident in guanxi to guarantee all will be well.

Unfortunately, rather like cell phone reception, guanxi tends to break down over long distances. With the landlord out of town, the landscaper has as much affection for this carpet grass as one might have for wilted lettuce - which the grass begins to resemble. Out of desperation, the renter attempts to establish some local guanxi himself. Weeks of sweet-talking the receptionist (Catherine) finally garner the renter first-name recognition status. On one occasion, the landscaper himself even shows up for a consultation. The bumbling henchmen finally do it right. The carpet grass begins to thrive.

Then inexplicably, everything falls into disarray. The landscaper is mysteriously “out of the country.” Catherine is nowhere to be found. The henchmen reschedule a maintenance session for three weeks later, then miss one entirely. And when they do show up, they’ve returned to their previous bumbling ways. Here’s what’s left of the carpet grass.

Fruit of the Month Club VII

2007-09-30T21:51:00.000+08:00

This month’s fruit is the hami melon, pronounced hahm-ee, not hammy (we think, because apparently the Chinese term is ha mi gua).

Joey held up one of these elongated-canteloupe-looking fruits at the market a few days ago: “Do you know what this is?” I had no idea, and he couldn’t remember trying one, so we took it home to experiment.

We prepared to carve it open, ready for our next exotic fruit experience, but...

“Drat,” I said. “It is just a canteloupe.”

Fortunately it didn’t taste like a canteloupe, though, unless you’ve managed to snag a rock-hard canteloupe that turns out to be delectably sweet inside. This was actually crunchy but must have been ripe, given its intense though slightly astringent sweetness, a bit like sugar cane.

Lantern Festival

2007-09-30T01:01:00.000+08:00

The Mid-Autumn Festival isn’t just about mooncakes of dubious flavors. There are glowing lanterns galore. We were fortunate enough to see the festive lantern displays in two major world cities this year.

In Beijing, we wandered through Ditan Park, which had large lanterns representing Olympic cities, obviously in preparation for the 2008 games. From Moscow to Paris, Athens to Sydney, and of course Beijing, the lanterns were quite a sight. And in the cooler, crisper air of Beijing, it finally felt like “Mid-Autumn.”

Singapore hosted its own lantern extravaganza. With sticky humidity and temperatures in the 80s, the weather wasn’t exactly Fall-like, but the thousands of lanterns made up for it. The theme was all things water related (apparently this year’s national theme).

There were some surprising twists, though: the lanterns depicted everything from Chinese myths to penguins, pelicans, and even the Loch Ness monster.

But our favorites, in both Beijing and Singapore, were the simpler, more traditional lanterns hung in the trees. Perhaps it's more because of what we’re longing for around this time of year. Red spheres or red and gold pagodas glowing in the night, they perfectly echo the deep reds and golds of the changing leaves we didn’t get to see during this Mid-Autumn season.

Mooncakes

2007-09-29T15:47:00.000+08:00

If you’ve traveled to any Chinatown around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival, you’ve probably tried a mooncake - a roundish, golden brown pastry filled with red-bean or lotus paste, plus occasionally a single or double egg yolk. In the US, we ate them every fall, learning each other’s preferences: I tend to avoid the salty egg yolks, and Jenn can’t quite talk herself into enjoying red-bean paste (though we both like the lotus). We knew exactly which kinds of mooncakes we liked...or so we thought.

But in Singapore, mooncakes have been liberated, and there are countless variations to choose from. In addition to red bean and lotus, flavors now include green tea (horrible), peanut (not bad), and durian (surprisingly good). Mooncakes have even broken through the typical barrier between traditional Asian dessert flavors and Western tastes. In what appears to be a mooncake arms race among the high-end hotels, some have abandoned beans and durian to embrace chamapagne truffle fillings, custards with “chocolate pearls,” and blueberry cream cheese.

Even the outside varies. The Shanghai style has a crumbly crust more like a biscuit, often with nuts embedded. And we’ve seen many mooncakes made with “snowskin” pastry, pure white and softer than the standard crust. Perhaps it’s meant to appeal to the masses of Singaporeans forever striving to whiten their skin. In my humble culinary opinion, it takes like a slightly soggy, half-baked traditional mooncake crust. Jenn, on the other hand, thinks it’s perfect for the sweeter fillings.

With so much variety, there’s no accounting for taste!

Culture Shock: Beijing

2007-09-28T17:11:00.000+08:00

Beijing seemed so huge to us, after Singapore: the buildings are just as tall, but with a larger footprint; a vast mountain range lurks on the horizon; the massive construction projects (most for the Olympics) add their copious dust to the ever-present city smog. But Beijing is a fascinating city for those patient enough to seek out the hidden treasures: the mazes of alleyways in the local hutongs, the tiny streets lined with calligraphers’ shops, the hole-in-the-wall restaurants with perfect home-cooked noodles.

How people with no knowledge of Chinese manage to navigate this labyrinth, I’ll never know. (On second thought, I probably saw most of them at the more touristy sites, being herded around in giant packs by fast-talking guides with megaphones.)

But, despite my worries beforehand, now I can proudly say that I managed to get around by myself, and mostly in Mandarin: I conversed with the taxi drivers and didn’t get cheated, bantered with the hawkers and avoided buying a hideous Mao wristwatch or taking a rickshaw ride, haggled from 10 times the price a Beijinger would pay down to only 5 times the price. Exhausting, but worth it.

I covered the major historical sites - Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Summer Palace - alongside crowds of tourists. But, as usual, my favorites were the quieter, less-traveled places: Ditan Park, where we saw the Mid-Autumn lanterns with a cross-section of locals. A tiny restaurant where friends took us to eat the fabulous Central Asian food (lamb kebabs, rice pilaf, yogurt) of the Uighyr people who live in the deserts of western China. And Mutianyu, where we had the awe-inspiring Great ~~Stairs~~ Wall of China almost to ourselves as it snaked through the mountains beneath a swirling mist.

Moment of Weakness

2007-09-19T00:37:00.000+08:00

These days, I should be organizing and packing for our trip to Beijing. There are gorgeous travel books to pore over, Mandarin phrases to practice, cool-weather clothes to wash and pack. Instead, I am procrastinating, because thinking about being on my own in China’s capital city fills me with the kind of dull dread I used to get before exams in college courses I hadn’t entirely wrapped my brain around.

It’s not that I don’t want to go; traveling in this part of the world was a major reason I signed on for expat life. It’s just that Beijing is the most “different,” and least English-using, city we’ve traveled to so far, and it’s a daunting place to tour alone.

At first I figured I’d have no problem, with Joey - and his fluent Mandarin - at my side. But then I added up the hours he’d be in conference meetings and found that except for one day, I’d be on my own. So I thought perhaps our American friends in Beijing could accompany me to some of the tourist sites. But their family of four is down with the flu. (“Can I bring you any Western stuff?” I asked today. “Children’s fever reducer,” they croaked.)

So for the first few days, at least, I’ll be navigating Beijing by myself. Joey and our Beijing friends think (perhaps wishfully) that this should be no problem for me, as I’ve had some exposure to Mandarin. But I think my experience has been at the shaky level of the most basic beginner, and my tiny vocabulary just doesn’t seem enough for conversing or haggling or avoiding getting misled or cheated.

And while I wouldn’t have thought the latter would be too much of a problem, many reliable sources - from Frommer’s guides to Joey’s mother - have helpfully pointed out the myriad ways everyone in China will be out to fleece me, the foreigner. There are long lists of advice: Don’t take a taxi from your hotel; they’re there to pick up hapless laowai who don’t know the right way or the right price. Sit in the front, have a map, and act like you know where you’re going, even if you don’t. Assume starting prices of goods will be inflated 10 to 15 times for Caucasian faces. Don’t trust advice from the bellhop or museum staff; they get kickbacks for sending you to places where people will charge you exorbitant prices. Be cautious about breathing the pollution, eating the street food, and drinking bottled water sold on the Great Wall (it could be tap water poured into a bottle reclaimed from the trash, the rumors say).

Sure, I could (and probably should) treat all this as some combination of common sense and urban legend. But it’s a lot easier to maintain perspective when I truly know the language or, better still, when I have a fellow traveler or two by my side. I suppose going it alone is “confidence building” and therefore “character building.” But sometimes, after purposely stretching myself for the past seven months, I wonder: could anything just be “comfortable”?

Sumatra Earthquake II

2007-09-13T12:25:00.000+08:00

This is not my idea of a fun series, but...

Last night, for the second time since our arrival in Singapore seven months ago, an earthquake (magnitude 8.4) shook the Indonesian island of Sumatra next door to us. Then, barely giving the aftershocks time to die down, another quake (7.8) struck this morning in the same region and was followed a few hours later with yet another (7.4). Thursday evening, a fourth earthquake (6.2) struck, this time farther east, near Sulawesi. Edit: Friday saw still more quakes (ranging from 5.0 to 6.4), again off the coast of Sumatra.

The first and strongest was the one most felt in Singapore. Downtown, tall buildings swayed, as they are designed to do to withstand the shockwaves. A few were evacuated. In others, people living on higher floors crowded into the lifts voluntarily after their chandeliers swung back and forth, nearly bumping the ceiling, or they realized their sudden “dizziness” was caused by the real, though very slight, movement of the room.

As for us, we were home at the time, unaware of events until we read about them. While the tall buildings do have a certain glamour and prestige, this was one time we felt fortunate to live in a short one.

What She Wears

2007-09-11T12:25:00.000+08:00

Today in the US, it’s the sixth anniversary of my generation’s Pearl Harbor. Every year, we revisit how it happened, conspiracies abound, and politicians and voters contemplate the significance of the event and the reaction to it. And many of us, myself included, remember our personal experience of that day - each of us with our own story of where we were then and how we sought our nearest and dearest.

This year, though, I’m also thinking about this recent article about a Muslim woman in New Jersey and the unwelcome reception she faced while wearing a hijab there. It’s true that the head covering is not commonly seen in New Jersey, and I am honest enough to admit I would probably notice a group of women wearing hijabs there.

But I’ve also learned that all things are relative. In Singapore, I’ve been granted a chance to attach nothing of “notice” to a hijab. Why? Because it is so common in my everyday life here, where a much higher percentage of the population is Muslim. The friendly cashier at the grocery store wears a hijab. So do the sweet librarians at our local branch. So do the women who make the wonderful nasi lemak at Changi Village and the family that runs my favorite lunchtime stall. So do many of the clerks at Ikea, their hijabs displaying the store’s iconic yellow and blue.

And of course so do scores of other women as they simply go about their daily life, running businesses and tending to their children, the same as other Singaporeans - and other Americans - are doing every day.

Fruit of the Month Club VI

2007-08-31T14:38:00.000+08:00

This month’s fruit of the month is...well...I have no idea what it is. Looking for interesting fruits we’d never tried before, we picked this up at the grocery store recently, but later we realized there was no name on the label.

It seems to be among those fruits and vegetables that exist for hydration, more than flavor, although it did taste a little sweet. Its appearance and texture are a strange combination, perhaps something like a red pepper or an apple. It’s pretty refreshing when served cold on a hot day, though.

But can anyone tell us what it is?

Out of My League?

2007-08-29T13:38:00.000+08:00

It took months, but my local Singaporean friends have finally talked me into it: I have joined a bowling league. And not only have I joined a league, I am now the (proud?) owner of a bowling ball and bowling shoes. The shoes make my feet look enormous, which may be because the Asian women on my team have size 4 feet, but at least I know who’s been wearing them. And I admit that it’s fun to roll my very own ball (blue, with gold flecks) down the lane every Friday.

Lest you get the wrong impression, I am still as lousy a bowler as I ever was. In the US, I subbed in a few times for our team in the company league (with the best team name ever for a publishing group: Helvetica Bowld), and I managed to achieve the dubious distinction of the highest handicap in the league. But with luck and practice, perhaps I’ll improve.

Plus, it’s a chance to spend time with an international group of women I’d be unlikely to meet anywhere else. On my team are three Malay Singaporeans. Last week we played against a Filipina team. I’ve met interesting, accomplished women from England, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Pakistan, China, Thailand, and Indonesia. (Oddly, no other Americans, so far.) But there are also lots and lots of Singaporeans, as bowling is practically the national sport.

Singaporeans are hugely enthusiastic about their bowling. This might be because the lanes are indoors and air-conditioned; playing outdoor sports here involves a revolting quantity of sweat, except if you play at dawn or dusk, which are prime mosquito-feeding times. Or perhaps it’s an extension of the Singaporean love for all things American; the bowling pro who bored the holes in my ball told me all the bowling supplies and equipment were imported from the US. (Thankfully, this meant he had my shoe size.) It’s true that I’m a minor celebrity in the league just for having lived near a town with “Brunswick” in the name.

But whatever the reason, surprising numbers of people here are dedicated bowlers. When Joey’s office recently had a bowling outing, so many of them bowled in leagues that they had to group people into teams very carefully to avoid letting league team members play together. I think Joey was the only one without his own ball. And many Singaporeans start bowling early in life - the real bowling, mind you, not the birthday-party kind with bumpers in the gutters. A local friend of mine in her early 40s (and, it goes without saying, a league bowler) recently showed me her thumbs. The left one was perfectly straight, but the right one had a slight S-curve to it. “See?” she said. “That’s what thirty years of bowling every week will do. But it’s worth it, lah!”

And although I don’t have quite that much devotion to bowling, I do think it’s “worth it” to bowl for a season or two. Because who would’ve thought that American bowling would be a window onto life in Singapore?

Missing National Day

2007-08-22T11:51:00.000+08:00

August 9th was Singapore’s 42nd National Day, and I can’t say it was a banner day for us. Perhaps it’s because we’d already missed our own US Independence Day celebration: the lone American fireworks display was the weekend before July 4th, when we were in Taiwan. But that aside, on National Day we felt more like outsiders than ever, as all the “real” Singaporeans celebrated their belonging.

Not to mention, we hadn’t managed to snag seats for the highly anticipated National Day extravaganza. Singapore recently closed down its 55,000-seat stadium (to make way for a new “sports center” of approximately the same size), so this year the festivities were to be held on a floating platform in the bay, with seating for only about half the usual guests. We didn’t know whether foreigners were allowed to queue for tickets, but we figured even if we were, we’d never out-queue 5 million Singaporeans.

So we decided to celebrate by staying home, watching the show on TV, and enjoying a tradition of our own: making Chinese dumplings. Ever since we met, we’ve been making them together and teaching countless friends how to fold the little circular wrappers around the filling just right, so the dumplings turn out the perfect crinkly shape.

It’s been fairly easy in the US, as we’ve always just bought the wrappers at our local Asian food market. But here in Singapore, where you’d think they’d all be “Asian food markets,” they stock nothing of the kind. We tried wonton wrappers and got chewy, eggy dumplings in completely the wrong shape. We tried paper-thin wrappers used for steaming and ended up eating shreds of burst dumplings after the wrappers stuck to the pan. It just wasn’t the same.

So this time, we rolled out the wrappers ourselves, through many painful hours of trial and error: Dough too stiff, dough too sticky and impossible to remove from rolling pin. Dough I tried to roll out on our old dining table, for more space, that peeled off neat little strips of the table’s wood finish. (Time to make a new batch of dough...) Dough that rolled out square, not circular, no matter what we tried. And, once I finally got it right and had a pile of them, each carefully separated by dustings of flour, it had taken so long that they had congealed into a single, inseparable column. There was nothing to do but start over.

We’d started midmorning, and by sunset we had worked out our technique: Joey rolled one, and I folded it. And if either of us got ahead of the other, we’d dart over to the TV to see what we were missing at National Day. Conversation was odd that evening: “Here’s one to fold.” “Okay. Hey! They’re doing military exercises with an Apache from the US!” And later, “I’m putting this batch in the pan now. What am I missing on TV?” “Well, right now it’s schoolchildren dressed like glow-in-the-dark squid, blowing bubbles in time to the music.” (It was a sea theme this year.)

And by the time the show was finally over, and the citizens of Singapore were saying the pledge and singing the national anthem in English and Bahasa, we were finishing up our own celebration, too: the last pan of perfect dumplings was just about ready to eat.

Tales We Could Tell

2007-08-21T10:34:00.000+08:00

We’re almost through August, with not a single blog entry to show for it. Perhaps it’s that lethargy-inducing summer heat. (No, wait...it’s always this hot here.) But for whatever reason, here we are, with time for only one proper posting to represent the better part of a month. So the question arises: Which tale shall we tell?

There’s the gripping story of “How I Nearly Throttled My Landscaper” (alternate titles: “Death of the Carpet Grass” or “It Almost Ate My Mango Tree”).

Or Joey’s tragic tale, “The Mysterious Disappearance of the Noodle-Bowl Stall” (alternate title: “How I Lost My Lunch”).

Or maybe “A Messy Recovery from Tropical Illness.” No? More information than you wanted? Hmm...Perhaps you’d prefer a (slightly) tamer animal story: “Geckos Gone Wild” or “The Night the Dogs Barked til Dawn.”

For the minimalists, we could relate a tale that’s highly unusual for our life in Singapore: “The Day Nothing Happened.” Or if that’s a little too minimal, what about “Missing National Day”?

The votes are in, and “Missing National Day” has won. (It wasn’t our fault most of you were asleep when we voted. That’s just the way the time-zone cookie crumbles!) Now all that remains is the telling.

Singapore by the Numbers

2007-07-29T13:13:00.000+08:00

Today marks the six-month anniversary of our arrival in Singapore, so we thought we’d compile our Singapore experience by the numbers. Here’s our list:

Number of...

...months in Singapore: 6
...other countries visited during those months: 7

...phone cards used up calling US family and friends: 5
...visits from US family and friends: 1 (in progress!)

...times we’ve smelled durian: 20+
...times we’ve actually tried it: 1

...expat gatherings attended: 10
...local gatherings attended: 11

...Singapore malls visited: 11
...Singapore sights visited: 4

...S$75 buffet brunches we've eaten: 2
...S$3 noodle bowls Joey has eaten for lunch: 60+

...kilometers driven on the left side of the road: 4,900
...parking tickets received: 1 (forgot parking coupon...duh)

Postscript:
Number of weeks we haven’t been in perfect health: 1
Odds that week would coincide with family visit: 1 in 26

Fruit of the Month Club V

2007-07-24T14:28:00.000+08:00

I was out with a few of our American friends, enjoying the visual feast of colors at the Geylang Serai fruit market, when someone said the dreaded words: “You haven’t tried durian yet, have you?”

I’d heard this question a few times before, but so far I’d managed not to be asked it anywhere near the fruit in question. This time, there was no escaping it. The durians were in high season, and the ripe, cantaloupe-sized fruits were piled dangerously on slanting stalls just outside the market. I quailed at the thought of trying one.

Why, you might ask, was I so afraid of a little fruit? Clearly, you’ve never smelled one. From literally a mile away, you know it’s there, by the indescribable scent wafting through the air. Rotting eggs? Nearby sewer? The sweaty feet of a thousand old men after a hard day’s work? No, just a nice, fresh durian someone’s been crazy enough to purchase. Even the signs on the buses and the MRT allude to the stench: No food. No drink. No durian.

The real question, I think, is why people long ago decided that something that smelled like this was worth breaking into as a possible source of food. And breaking into it is difficult indeed, on account of the hard, thick, sharp spines that cover every inch of its dark-green surface. Picking it up requires hands of steel - or possibly protective gloves; cutting through the rind requires nothing less than a machete. And after all that effort, what’s the edible result? Less than a dozen small pods, each filled with a mustard-yellow custardy substance.

Worth it, no?

The truth is, although I’d never have tried it without enormous peer pressure (thanks a lot, book club!!), durian is not that bad. As long as I don’t think of it as a fruit. It has a nutty, garlicky taste and a pleasant, creamy texture, something like you might get with a good avocado. I could see myself enjoying it in sauces or maybe even trying a fresh one again sometime. But I still draw the line at the most popular durian product in Singapore: durian ice cream.

Photo credit: Thanks to Cheryl for the beauty shot!

Character Building

2007-07-16T20:08:00.000+08:00

I’m sitting here doing the giant exhale that usually follows my Chinese tutoring sessions, wherein I realize the stress I felt beforehand was entirely justified (it’s tough) but, at the same time, I can’t shake the feeling of: that wasn’t so bad. Learning a language in class - in fits and starts, rather than by “immersion” - seems to be always like this for me. It’s the repeated experience of being completely in over your head but not quite drowning, then the realization after every month or so that you’ve actually made a tiny bit of headway, although you’d never have known it at the time.

Today’s milestone was the text message my tutor sent me before class. I flipped open my phone expecting to find a version of “Sorry, I’m running late,” but instead I found a screenful of Chinese characters. I instinctively forwarded the whole thing to Joey for help, but then I realized: I can read this stuff. Or most of it, anyway. (And yes, my tutor was in fact stuck on the bus.)

Maybe this doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but without a phonetic alphabet, learning to read and write Chinese is pretty much word-by-word memorization. New alphabets, I can learn (three so far), but this is a different process entirely. Every word is new, so I learn one at a time - first what it means, then what its tones are, then how to read it, then how to write it - slowly chipping away at the giant mountain of characters. (Did you ever stop to think how many words there are in one language?)

And every one I can recognize, outside my textbook and flash cards, feels like a flash of secret code I’m suddenly privy to. In Taiwan, I was like a child: we’d pass a sign on the street, and I’d point to the one (easy) character I could recognize and announce it to the world: “Da!” “Bu!” “Ge!” The taxi drivers, not to mention my husband, probably thought I was crazy.

But I get excited, because I never thought I’d be able to read or write any characters at all. Not having grown up with them, I figured I just wasn’t wired that way, so the seemingly meaningless patterns of lines and boxes would slide right out of my head. But somehow, I think it’s starting to stick. Today I read a text message. And later this week, when we send Joey’s grandmother a thank-you note for hosting us in Taiwan, there will be well-wishes in Chinese characters - some of them in my handwriting.

Frogs of Paradise

2007-07-07T13:09:00.000+08:00

We loved central Bali, with its dramatic thatched roofs and steep gorges laden with greenery all the way down to the rushing rivers below.

It was a study in contrasts: the locals and the tourists crowding the sidewalks in nearly equal numbers, the Mexican restaurant with the traditional Balinese temple out front, the woman carrying her load in the traditional way (arrange towel on head, top with something tremendously heavy, balance with effortless ease) past a Ralph Lauren storefront.

And what we also remember fondly is the abundance of frogs, in all forms and in all shapes and sizes.

Our first night in a Balinese-style hotel with an outdoor bath, we were surprised to find this little guy waiting in our shower, keeping as still as he could and trying his best to blend in with the sand-colored tiles:

After that first surprise, we started to notice the bigger, heavier frogs (carvings of wood and stone) at every turn. Some were decorative statues tucked into nooks and crannies. Some were lamps. Whole families of carved stone frogs, stacked one on top of the other, served as fountains or even doorstops.

Some, hands clasped in the traditional prayerful greeting, were dressed in the black-and-white-checked sarongs we’d seen worn in temple ceremonies designed to balance the “light” and “dark” elements of the world. More often than not, there was a hibiscus, carved or real, perched jauntily behind one ear.

And then there was this happy one, that we couldn’t resist taking home.

Identity Crisis

2007-07-04T11:17:00.000+08:00

Happy July 4th to those who are celebrating Independence Day in the US. I feel very American today, despite the lack of celebrations out where we are. But I will admit to a momentary crisis of identity a few weeks ago in Shanghai.

I was staying at the Hilton, where the guests were a mix of Chinese business people and tourists who seemed unfamiliar with the language and the culture in Shanghai. Everyone on staff went out of their way to speak English with perfect diction to anyone who didn’t look Chinese. I passed that filter (it doesn’t always work that way, but that’s another post). Still, I felt lucky to be able to understand the conversations in both languages.

My crisis occurred at dinner. As I still had some work to do that evening, I opted for a quick “international” buffet at the hotel. And that’s where I got some strange looks. As I placed a few pieces of sushi on my plate, a family from the US walked by. “Can you believe they eat this stuff?” they asked, probably assuming I couldn’t understand their English. “It isn’t even cooked! And it’s just sitting there, out in the open. Ew!”

Then, as I finished serving myself from the cheese board and turned away, I saw a Chinese couple wrinkling their noses at the blues. I caught a snippet of Mandarin: “Is this completely rotten? What a smell! They eat this straight?” As I walked by them, I saw them stare at the stinky cheese and crackers next to the fruit and sushi on my plate.

Now, I’ll admit that sushi and bleu cheese are a strange pairing on a dinner plate. But I couldn’t help but feel really alone. Here I was, able to understand both American English and Mandarin, but I was completely unable to identify with the people speaking either one.

Fruit of the Month Club III-IV

2007-06-28T10:57:00.000+08:00

This month there are actually two fruits of the month: snakefruit and passionfruit. Although they’re common in Singapore, we hadn’t actually seen them up close until we broke into the fruit basket in our room in Bali.

Snakefruit is appropriately named; the reddish outer peel is thin and papery, with a rough, scaly texture on the outside. The piles of peel really do look remarkably like a shed snakeskin. Inside, it’s less interesting - a white, slightly crunchy fruit similar to a lychee, though not as sweet and somehow not quite as refreshing. Oddly, the inside is always divided into one large part and two small parts, like a lychee with two cloves of garlic attached.

The passionfruit looked innocently like an orange or a mangosteen on the outside, but I could tell it was different from the smell, which was oddly familiar though I couldn’t place it - and why was I suddenly thinking of Bath and Body Works? Then I realized: half their products are scented with passionfruit. So, waiting to see what this glamorous fruit would look like, I watched Joey press through the peel and...

Eeuurrggh!!!! The entire inside consisted of a gelatinous, violently green substance I can only describe as goop. Which was filled with dozens of tiny, crunchy seeds. Joey poked it with a spoon, and it wobbled a bit, so he tried to scoop some out. He pulled it, it stretched, he tried again, and it slipped off the spoon and snapped back inside the peel. I called the friendly guy at the front desk: “Can you really eat this stuff?” He laughed and said yes, even the seeds. So we did. And, as long as we didn’t think too much about the gooey texture or the horrible crunching sound from all the seeds, it was pretty tasty.

But I think it will be a long, long time before I buy a passionfruit beauty product again.

Too Expensive...?

2007-06-26T13:17:00.000+08:00

After the events of the past week, I have regretfully scratched “Balinese import/export tycoon” off my list of future careers.

Wandering through a stone-carving village in central Bali, watching all the artisans at work, we couldn’t resist picking up a couple of pieces - and then we realized they were so heavy we couldn’t pick them up. So much for putting them in our luggage! So we decided on cargo shipping (as in, on an actual ship). The distance is, after all, maybe 1 percent of the distance from Indonesia to the US, so we figured it would be relatively cheap.

Unfortunately, what I never calculated for was the haggling - or rather, the multiple hagglings, at each stage in our multinational transaction. First we negotiated for the carvings themselves. (In retrospect, that was the easy part.) Then we bargained over getting the carvings into a crate, then port-to-port freight, then getting the crate off the boat into a warehouse, then customs clearance, then home delivery and unpacking. That last one was the most painful - but we should’ve known that any mover in his right mind would jack up the price once he found out he’d essentially be hauling 400 pounds of rocks!

It was a pretty reasonable process, actually. But the hitch was - I might as well admit it - I am an abysmal haggler. Case in point: toward the end of our Bali trip, I was so tired (or maybe so relaxed) that I somehow managed to bargain the price up. (You try crunching numbers while vacationing in a soothing tropical paradise, and see how you fare!) It was so hard for me to be on my guard with the Balinese, who are kind and sweet and easy-going and completely readjust the numbers - turning a whole transaction on its head - without even blinking.

“One for 50,000 Rp,” said one gently smiling, elderly shopkeeper. “Buy more than one, and I give you better price!” So I offered two for 80,000 Rp total - not a very ambitious bargain, but a slight discount. “Oh, no,” she said, with a show of horror. “I lose money, then! I give you two at 70,000 Rp each. Good price for you.” No, no, I said, feeling that at last I was getting into the swing of things. 60,000 Rp each is my final offer. “Okay,” she said, “you happy, I’m happy,” and we were done.

It was only later, when I found myself forking over 120,000 Rp, that I realized she’d redirected the whole negotiation from “total” price to the price for “each.” So now, instead of one for 50,000 Rp, I was paying 60,000 Rp apiece.

My admirably patient Chinese tutor has been trying to break me of this unfortunate tendency. Just by looking at me, she could tell I was probably overpaying for every vegetable at the Chinese wet market. She was sure that, with the right phrases, she could teach me to haggle doggedly down to rock-bottom prices. So some of the first new Chinese I learned from her was, “Tai gui le!” (Pronounced Thai, gway, luh, it means, “Too expensive!”) And in the name of doing my homework, I have tried it a few times. So far, I’ve gotten it to work almost as effectively as when I say it in English. On the upside, now I can haggle badly in two languages. That’s progress!

Hanging Gardens

2007-06-12T22:03:00.000+08:00

When I’m not frustrated or discouraged or homesick (all natural parts of expat life, I suppose), I realize it’s the simple things in life that keep me going. Regardless of where I am, if the grass in my yard is growing and green and fuzzy - and the leftovers in my refrigerator are not - then what more could you ask for, really?

So I can appreciate living in a place where the plants grow, whether you help them or not. Here, I can pretend my spectacularly brown thumb is edging toward green; I accidentally kill a plant, and it magically resuscitates itself within a day or so. And the consistent year-round sun and humidity encourage rapid plant growth, so the surroundings always seem to be on the verge of becoming again the rain forest that once filled the island.

Taking advantage of this exuberant growth, Singapore’s government long ago decided to make Singapore a “city in a garden” - so in addition to some nice public gardens, a couple of mangrove swamps, and the patch of remaining rain forest, the city streets are lushly landscaped. Elaborate tropical flowers and stunning traveler’s palms burst from between buildings. Even the footbridges are swathed in colorful blooms:

The highways were the biggest surprise for me. After living in the northeastern US, I was used to the concrete tangles of overpasses and divided roads, with nary a plant in sight. So I’m always amazed, driving down Singapore’s ECP on my way into town.

I ease the car onto the green, shady highway beneath arching oak trees so thick I can barely see the sky. At the side of the road, perfectly shaped flowering shrubs of all colors flash by. To my left, I can look through the trees and catch the glint of sunlight on the water; the sea is just moments away. Then the road opens out for a sunny stretch lined by neat, Hollywood-like rows of huge palm trees that sway gently in the breeze. The median is filled with carefully tended tall plants flowering in reds, yellows, pinks, and deep purples.

As I move into the next shady stretch, where the oaks again arch gracefully over the road, I see a flashing road sign that must be unique to Singapore: “Slow. Plant Watering Ahead.” As I coast by, I smile at the sight of a huge water truck and a gardener directing what looks like a fire hose at the trembling shrubs.

My other favorite road sign is “Plant Pruning Ahead,” where I can expect to see a gardener calmly clipping away at the shrubs, as though he were working on a hedge in his own backyard - not on a shoulderless road next to cars passing by at 90 km/h. In this climate it’s not hard to imagine that, without the gardeners pushing them back, the plants would extend slowly into the roadways, covering the concrete and asphalt of civilization with verdant nature. It’s a nice change from the plants I remember, that needed far more skill than I had, and far more painstaking encouragement, to make it through the winter.

Dou Xia

2007-06-11T22:24:00.001+08:00

As if I hadn’t had enough difficulty keeping up with the Malay, Bahasa, Mandarin, Cantonese, and various English pronunciations, recently I found myself face-to-face with someone who was speaking Hokkien to me.

It happened on my way out of a car park. The attendant leaned out of the kiosk window and mumbled something. Whuh? It took me awhile to realize he was asking for the car’s plate number. I don’t speak Hokkien. My parents speak Taiwanese, which is a similar dialect, but I’ve never been taught - I had enough trouble with Mandarin.

So reaching really deep into what little brain I have left, I uttered a garbled “Ji’ bwe xi’ zhap” - more from instinct than anything else. I half expected him to hand me paper to write it out, but he understood enough to type the number in and reply, “Gao koh.” So I handed him a ten and got one back as he lifted the barrier and said, “Dou xia” - many thanks.

The experience highlighted yet again the delightful mystery of language in Singapore. Sometimes when I step up to an unfamiliar hawker stall or hop into a taxi, I find myself playing a game of “old maid” with language. Let’s see...do you speak Mandarin? No? Hmm...Let’s try the old standby: English? Not that either...Pity, I’m running out of options here. No, sorry, I still can’t understand you (is that Bahasa?). Why don’t we try charades? And so it goes.

Test Drive

2007-06-04T21:31:00.001+08:00

Tuition. No, it doesn’t refer to the cost of college. For Singaporeans, tuition is the extra education that almost everyone attends after the regular school day is over. In those additional hours, they learn how to logic their way through tricky questions. They learn to memorize huge amounts of material in a short amount of time. And these were the people who assured us that, “if you study,” the Basic Theory driving test was “easy.”

So we did study, keeping in mind that 15 percent of test takers do fail and a 44/50 was a failing grade. The test actually wasn’t too difficult (though Jenn suffered acute “test anxiety” when she saw the touch-screen computers all arranged for the test), and we both passed. But I’m glad we studied; the Basic Theory test often requires you to choose the best answer, or the answer that is “most correct,” from a set of choices that all seem pretty good.

So, to celebrate our passing grades, here are some related questions we (now) know the answers to. Try them out, and let us know how many you got right!

1. This single jagged yellow line means
(a) no parking 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., except Sundays and holidays.
(b) no parking at any time, except for pickup and dropoff.
(c) no parking at any time, and no stopping for passengers.

2. Except on public holidays, bus lanes are restricted during the following times:
(a) Mon. to Fri., 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. and 4:30 to 7:00 p.m.
(b) Sat., 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
(c) both (A) and (B).

3. ERP stands for
(a) Electronic Road Protocol.
(b) Electronic Road Policing.
(c) Electronic Road Pricing.

4. A sign that states “70 km/h” means you should
(a) maintain 70 km/h.
(b) not exceed 70 km/h.
(c) drive between 60 and 70 km/h.

5. When would a driver be allowed to turn at a red light?
(a) When finishing a right turn to clear a yellow-box junction.
(b) When making a left turn as traffic allows.
(c) Turning at a red light is never permitted.

6. You should park your vehicle at least this far from a bus stop:
(a) 6 m.
(b) 9 m.
(c) 12 m.

7. This sign means
(a) expressway ahead.
(b) bridge ahead.
(c) tunnel ahead.

8. This sign is a
(a) mandatory sign.
(b) prohibitive sign.
(c) restrictive sign.

9. This sign means
(a) one-way traffic ahead.
(b) proceed straight only.
(c) turn only as traffic permits.

10. Overtaking (passing) a bus at a bus stop, you should
(a) stop behind the bus and wait for passengers to alight.
(b) slow down and be ready to stop in case passengers cross the street.
(c) lightly tap your horn to notify the driver.

Bonus Question. To qualify for a driver’s license in Singapore, you must
(a) be 16 years of age or older.
(b) have 20-20 vision with or without corrective lenses.
(c) not be prone to attacks of giddiness.

Answers: 1. b 2. c 3. c 4. b 5. a 6. b 7. c 8. a 9. a 10. b Bonus. c

Fruit of the Month Club II

2007-05-31T12:30:00.000+08:00

Whoops! It’s almost June, so I have just enough time to slip in a fruit of the month for May (missing April was bad enough!). This month, we bring you: the rambutan.

This one, already half open, was given to us by the Thai fishermen who paddled our canoes in Phuket. The fruits can be found not just in Thailand but all across the region. We even had a young rambutan tree in our backyard when we moved in; unfortunately, before we got our first crop, our landlord discovered that the rambutan tree’s sweet, sticky sap is a magnet for bugs of all kinds and had the tree removed.

The inside of a rambutan is moist and refreshing, similar to a lychee. We still find the hairy outside intimidating, though. The fishermen could expertly pop them open with one hand, but we have yet to approach a rambutan on our own without a knife. (Would you?)

4 Things I Hate About Shopping

2007-05-30T12:30:00.000+08:00

Shopaholics in the area have been salivating for weeks in anticipation of Singapore’s big June event: the annual Great Singapore Sale. According to the local paper, people set aside about $300 US per family member ($1200 US for a family of four!) just to shop the sale. Although I’m not much of a shopper, myself, I thought surely I’d catch some of the shopaholic spirit here. But it’s just not working for me. Why? Well, since you asked...

1. Expensive stuff. Coming from the US, I fell prey to the idea that “things are cheaper in Asia.” No doubt they are, in less developed areas like Indonesia and Vietnam. But here, while there’s a vast selection of merchandise, expect to pay for it accordingly. There are still deals to be had on textiles along Arab Street and knicknacks in Chinatown, if you can haggle like a local. But the majority of items - even electronics - are costly. It’s about status. It’s about quality. So, basically, it’s about a lot of dollars. Which does tend to make the Sale less exciting for me: I’m just not motivated to snap up those $400 chef’s knives, even if they are a fabulous Henckels set marked down from $550.

2. Lucky draws (raffles). As in most of Asian culture, “luck” is an integral part of everyday life here, and people tend to be very open about their pursuit of material gain. So I guess it’s natural that the idea of winning something for free is a national obsession. During the Sale, lucky draws are an even bigger attraction than actual discounts on merchandise. People will stand in line for hours at the mall for one of these “Spend $200 and have a chance to win this (fill in the blank).” As for me, once was enough: I’d actually gotten all the way through filling out my first lucky draw entry form when I realized the prize was me, in front of an audience, jumping around in one of those booths with flying dollar bills and grabbing as much as I could. Nope, not for me, never mind.

3. Huge crowds on evenings and weekends. Singapore to the tai tai (“wife” in Mandarin, but here more a society wife, or at least one not working full time) is a soothing and peaceful place. Parking is plentiful, the malls are never crowded, and there’s always a seat on the bus. But that’s because at least half the population is at the office. On evenings and weekends, Singapore morphs into Disney World in the middle of July: everywhere you look, long queues and teeming masses of sweaty parents trying to calm their cranky children. And, country mice that we are, we still forget to plan around the crowds. Case in point: last weekend we rashly decided to spend the evening browsing at the swanky malls of Orchard Road. Too late, it dawned on us that we’d hit a perfect storm: the first weekend of the school holidays and the first weekend of the Great Singapore Sale.

4. No online shopping. Some advice, should you wish to escape the crowds and browse from the comfort of your laptop: You can’t. It’s hopeless. Since online credit card purchases are almost unheard of, most businesses don’t bother selling online. And because of this, many don’t even have helpful websites that reflect the kinds of products they sell. There are maybe 6 or 7 million shops in Singapore, so I keep hoping to go online, look at websites with lots of pictures, and narrow the list to shops I actually want to visit. But as it turns out, the only real way is to go to all of them in person. How people have this much patience, I have no idea. But at least now I’ve figured out why they’re all so thin! Imagine the miles they must log. And, after all, if you don’t go in person, you miss out on the lucky draw! Which is motivation enough in itself.

Pirates of Phang Nga Bay

2007-05-23T11:53:00.000+08:00

The island of Phuket is known for its resort-filled beaches and its nightlife, but we were looking instead for its quiet Thai peacefulness and spectacular nature, so we joined a canoe excursion to the phenomenal limestone caverns and wildlife-filled lagoons of Phang Nga Bay.

Phang Nga Bay is dotted with huge limestone islands, some of which have hidden lagoons, accessible only through caverns in the rock. Entering our first cave was an experience straight out of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” complete with the eerie tlop, tlop of the water dripping off the cavern walls and the squeaking of hordes of tiny bats.

After a short trip - through total darkness (the guides do the paddling here) - our path opened out onto a spectacular lagoon open to the sky. The towering limestone walls were covered with trees, ferns, and orchids, and everywhere we saw the colorful flash of kingfishers in flight. Looking up at the vertical forest surrounding us, we were tiny, floating intruders, tiptoeing quietly through the hugeness of this paradise.

Suddenly, there was a whoosh of wings as the air above us filled with a colony of flying foxes (huge, fruit-eating bats) who lived in the highest trees on the island. We could see the reddish glints of their fur as they soared high over the lagoon.

By the time we traveled to our next cave, the tide had risen, narrowing the openings of the caverns. The guides jokingly reassured us we’d be able to get out again, so we laid back in the canoes and slid through. Staring up at the low ceiling of the cavern, we were dazzled by the brightness: thousands upon thousands of oysters were gleaming in the dim light.

We could have stayed for hours in the lagoons. But the tides were still rising, so the guides carefully paddled out of the low cavern into the open water, and we looked back once more at the now seemingly impenetrable islands of Phang Nga Bay.

Bad Taxi Driver

2007-05-21T22:46:00.000+08:00

Of course, Penang isn’t the only place where the “taxi driver” may be anything but. The other day, I was even surprised by a “taxi driver” in Singapore.

First, he had no idea where I was going. I was heading home, something I’ve done via taxi plenty of times without any complications. While we don’t live on a major street, the area is well known to many taxi drivers. But my driver had no clue where to go. He didn’t even know how to get to the expressway, two blocks from where he picked me up. I had to give him turn by turn directions until we finally arrived at my door.

I said, “I’d like to pay by NETS” (a debit card).

“No can,” said the driver, ignoring the enormous sign that said “NETS accepted.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Don’t know how...system.”

I tried another tack: “Okay, I have cash.”

“Total $18.50.”

“Here’s a $50 bill.”

“No can,” he said again.

“You don’t have enough to make change?” I asked, surprised. $50 bills are commonly used for amounts like these, as Singapore doesn’t have $20 bills (or at least, I’ve never seen one).

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Well,” I said, “your sign says I can also use a credit card, right?”

He thought about this. “Don’t know how...” And he gestured that I was welcome to try to use the system myself, if I knew how.

I tried to think of alternatives. “Do you even have $30 for change?”

“Sorry, lah...no can.”

At this point I’d spent more time trying to pay for the fare than it took me to get home. NETS and credit cards have almost always been accepted by taxis if they are marked. I’ve paid for scores of taxi rides by cash and have never encountered any problems. How is it that this guy had no idea how to get around, no change, and no idea how to process payments? All this despite driving a taxi that is part of the largest taxi fleet in Singapore – clearly, he was covering for someone else.

Not knowing what else to do, I gave up and had to call upon my loving wife to rescue me. “Jenn? Could you come outside? With your wallet? ... Oh. No, really, I’m not being robbed.”

“Taxi Drivers” in Penang

2007-05-20T22:46:00.000+08:00

“Taxi! Taxi!” The calls came from the crush of Penang taxi drivers, descending upon the pier to snag early-rising cruise-goers filing off the tender and blinking confusedly in the bright morning sunlight. Usually, as recognizable “tourists” in this part of Asia, we’d be prime targets. But we successfully pushed through the crowd of taxi drivers at the pier to walk a few blocks to our first stop of the day: Chinese clan houses built out over the sea.

We had been walking for so long that we were beginning to wonder, when a lone man walked up to us. “Do you need a taxi?” he asked. We explained that no, we were just trying to find the clan piers. Surprisingly, he gave us excellent walking directions, without even a hard sell on the taxi ride. So on our way back, when we saw him again, we took him up on his offer of a taxi ride downtown.

Unfortunately, we soon found out that his car had no resemblence to a taxi at all - not even a single marker that said “TAXI.” And we weren’t reassured when the first thing he did was pull into the nearest gas station to refill his completely empty tank. “Just a moment,” he said, smiling. “Sorry for the delay.” So we waited as he went to talk to the gas station attendant. Strangely, no money changed hands, but our driver soon returned and began filling the tank. He waved significantly at the attendant before we left.

An uneventful ride later, he dropped us off, pocketed his 10 baht, and drove happily away in the direction we had come from. “You know,” Joey said, thoughtfully, “from what I learned in Mumbai, I’d say he’s no taxi driver - just a guy with no money for gas. I’ll bet he just promised the station attendant that he’d be right back with 10 baht, just as soon as he got it from these tourists he was driving downtown.”

Having sworn off Penang “taxis,” as we later left a museum we found our way blocked by a trishaw driver determined to have our business - and, unfortunately for us, his buddy the museum guard, who backed him up. “But it’s a trishaw for one,” said Joey, pointing out the obvious flaw in this particular model. But the driver insisted I could sit in the seat, and Joey could perch on the seat back just in front of him. There was really no getting around it, so we settled on the lowest fee we could manage and gingerly arranged ourselves on the cart.

I’d asked the driver just to take us to the Eastern and Oriental Hotel (E&O), since it wasn’t too far and I’d figured there were no major roads on the way. But suddenly we wheeled into a two-way road with two lanes on each side. Our tiny trishaw was moving at maybe a quarter of the speed limit and weaving gently in the exact center of the road. But the cars didn’t seem to mind, and schoolchildren on the curbs waved happily at us, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be creaking down a traffic-filled road while balancing precariously on a tiny cart. Our driver, getting quite a kick out of this, even managed to maneuver us over a speed bump without pitching Joey off onto the street.

And that was how we drove right up to the door of the E&O, sister of the Raffles Hotel, icon of refined British colonialism and decorum. The doormen, in perfectly pressed linen and proper pith helmets, were quite nice about it. But it took us a good half hour in the deserted bar (accompanied by at least a quart of fresh mango juice) to feel we were civilized enough to show our faces in the lobby again.

To-may-to, To-mah-to... II

2007-05-13T21:29:00.000+08:00

A recent conference call, where people with American, Asian, and Australian accents attempted to make themselves understood, reminded me of an experience I had in Australia. After priding myself on understanding all the different accents of English, I was brought down to Earth by a simple Australian system called CityLink.

Central Melbourne doesn’t have any toll plazas. Instead, the city has a rather Singaporean solution. They record the license plates of all vehicles going into and out of the city. You then call into a hotline and pay your toll via credit card, after you’ve finished your driving for the day.

So after our first trip on the tollway, I called the hotline and selected the route I had taken. Everything was going just fine - until I had to supply the license plate number. The system preferred you to say the tag number instead of typing it in.

CityLink: Please say the license tag number.
Me: U, M, H, 1, 2, 6.
CityLink: You said, “U, N, J, 1, 2, 6.” Is this correct?
Me: No.

CityLink: Please say the license tag number. You can also use words starting with the letters.
Me (trying my best Australian accent): U, Mary, H, 1, 2, 6.
CityLink: You said, “U, A, E, 1, 2, 6.” Is this correct?
Me: No.

CityLink: Please say the license tag number.
Me (channeling Crocodile Dundee): U, Mum, ai-tch, 1, 2, 6.
CityLink: You said, “U, M, E, 1, 2, 6.” Is this correct?
Me: No!!

And on and on it went. Eventually, I gave up shouting at the system “in Australian” and resigned myself to pressing 0 to speak to humans, who promptly processed my toll. It occurred to me later that my “h” might have sounded very similar to the way Australians say “each.” It serves me right for trying to use a voice-automated system in Australia! I can only imagine what would happen if I tried this on a Singapore voice-automated system, but actually they don’t use those here at all. Now I think I know why.

Culture Shock: Cruising Southeast Asia

2007-05-12T21:23:00.000+08:00

I have to say, living in Singapore considerably dampened our culture shock in the ports of Penang and Phuket. But what we didn’t expect was a bit of culture shock when we boarded the ship!

Our intrepid compatriots have already racked up weeks of independent travel to such exotic destinations as Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam (like these two, just back from Hanoi). Being somewhat more timid, we decided a cruise would be an easier first foray into regional travel. We’ve taken two cruises off the eastern U.S. and enjoyed them (two narrow escapes from hurricanes nonwithstanding). So we figured, probably more of the same, with some new and interesting ports thrown in.

But once we looked into it, we couldn’t resist booking a cruise not on a Western cruise line but on a local Asian cruise line. We knew right off the bat that there would be some differences, at least in the food. The specialty restaurant on our last cruise was Johnny Rocket’s (burgers and milkshakes), but one on this ship was an Indian restaurant, certified halal for Muslim diners. (“The first Indian restaurant afloat!” they said, as if the others had sunk.) And once we boarded, we started to see differences even at breakfast: an Indian vegetarian dish, a stack of waffles, a vat of scrambled eggs, and a steamer of Chinese pork dumplings, all in a row on the buffet line.

Of course, the differences went beyond the food. Western ships, for one thing, don’t have “fabulous karaoke rooms” - or if they do, they don’t publicize them. And they’re not likely to have anything like the big highlight of our ship’s lobby: a two-story high statue of three horses covered in gold leaf - flanked, inexplicably, by a couple of Greco-Roman-style statues. It was far too gaudy to our Western eyes, but apparently it was an “auspicious” symbol to many Asians, who thought it a perfect photo op.

And whereas on Western ships, we’d just showed up at the scheduled time, on this cruise we had to make good use of our Singaporean training in early queueing (yes, we are now kiasu with the best of them - see if you are, too). Reserving space for the gala dinner at 3 p.m.? Best to queue by 2 p.m. Queues for the tender to shore open at noon, with first departures at 12:30? Better show up by 11, to queue for the queue! It’s not that there aren’t enough spaces for everyone. It’s just that everyone’s in the habit of showing up early - so you should, too.

The other main difference, and a bonus in our view, was the mix of people: noisily happy Indian families, fashionable Chinese Singaporeans, friendly Australian retirees out to see Asia for the first time. Even sitting in the audience during the evening shows, we noticed the variety; at a comedy magic show, for example, the different groups of people laughed at very different things. And I guess we did our part to contribute to the diversity. At dinner one night, they read out the numbers of passengers from each region, by passport. India: 500-something. China: 200-something. Singapore: 200-something. Australia: 100-something. Europe: 100-something. USA: 2.

The Price of Petrol

2007-05-04T22:50:00.000+08:00

Now that we’re starting to drive around Singapore, our eyes are opened to all sorts of “car-related” necessities. For example, where do we park the car? Where do we wash the car? Which way do we drive the car? (And trust me: this last one is important. Almost all the parking is back-in only.)

What caught my eye today was the price of petrol: S$1.60/liter. At first glance, this looks normal, until you convert the units. Let’s see...there are 3.8 liters in a gallon. So that’s S$6.08/gallon. Converting Singapore dollars to US dollars gives us...wow. $4.05/gallon.

That’s about 33% more than the $3/gallon that had me cringing in NJ - and that was with a tiny car which, naturally, got terrific gas mileage. No wonder there are so few SUVs here.

The Spice(s) of Life

2007-05-01T22:45:00.000+08:00

After we returned from our first visit to Singapore last fall, the first thing that struck us was how salty American food is (even Asian food in America). It’s not that food in Asia is tasteless - far from it! But instead of salt, the main flavoring could be any number of things: curries, chilies, or an array of complex spices might permeate a dish. And almost every dish is unique: you can even go to a wet market, find the curry guy, tell him what meat and vegetables you’re planning to cook that night, and he’ll whip you up a custom dried curry perfect for your meal. The sheer variety of tastes is unlike anything we experienced in the US.

And now that we’re here for the longer term, we’re taking full advantage of this culinary adventure. Thai food, in particular, has become a new addiction, especially for my better half. Although we frequented several nice Thai places back in the US, I have to admit that the food there seems a little anemic by comparison. Perhaps they never believed us when we asked them to dial up the spice, or perhaps it’s the inescapable advantage in Singapore of having Thailand itself practically next door.

Regardless, the Thai food here is unsurpassed. Take, for instance, A-Roy Thai - a small but highly recommended establishment tucked into a row of retail stores not far from us on the East Coast. We’ve tried quite a few green curries by now, but none compare with A-Roy’s. Every bite is rife with flavor, and the pungent spiciness of chilies enhances beyond imagination. The complex curry taste, the texture of the unusual Thai eggplants, and the aroma of the basil make it a memorable dish.

We’ve developed a sort of ritual when eating this kind of Thai food. There’s that first whiff of curries and chilies. A reverent spoonful of the mixture placed over the fluffy rice. A small bite of flavor that piques the interest of your taste buds. And then the spice starts to work its way through. Then that crucial sip of cold water (or for some serious cooling, Thai iced tea with milk). A deep breath. Then you’re ready for the second bite.

And so it goes for nearly an hour. Pretty soon, there’s a bit of perspiration on my head, even though the rest of me is quite cool. Given all the steps involved, it takes us forever to finish our small bowl of green curry - but it’s worth it.

Ecolodge Experience

2007-04-25T13:57:00.000+08:00

Last Sunday was Earth Day around the world, and it reminded me to post about an amazing and environmentally friendly place we stayed during our drive along the southern coast of Australia: the Great Ocean Ecolodge at the Cape Otway Centre for Conservation Ecology.

The electricity is from solar panels, the water from rainwater collection tanks, the irrigation from treated wastewater, the insulation largely from the passive-solar design. And all this is more than adequate to run a cozy lodge and a thriving wildlife rehabilitation center for orphaned or injured animals from the national park next door.

We arrived at the lodge just in time to join the daily guided dusk walk through the eucalyptus trees to see the wild koalas snoozing high in the branches. They weren’t very easy to spot from the ground...

...but it was worth it, as we found when we zoomed in for a closer look!

Twenty or so koala spottings later, we walked through a cool, damp fern gully to the edge of the forest. A kangaroo mob and a few swamp wallabies were grazing in the fading light. As we turned back toward the lodge, I was struck by how remote the place felt, and how quiet. That night was clear and perfect for stargazing. With no other lights around, we could see the whole Southern Hemisphere sky, filled to capacity with shining lights and huge swaths of the Milky Way. And while we watched, four shooting stars streaked across the sky.

The next morning, we joined one of the owners, a zoologist and marsupial expert, on her rounds caring for the animals at the Centre. I had just taken this photo when she surprised us by handing us each one of the bottles she was holding. So Joey fed the young kangaroo on the left, and I fed the little wallaby on the right.

Then we moved on to a small group of koalas, who were recovering from injuries from a brushfire a few months before. One of them, the oldest and sweetest of the group, was an unusual color; his outer, gray coat – a koala’s waterproofing for rain – had been burned off in the fire, leaving only the soft, red undercoat. So he will have a home at the Centre (and a place to duck into when it rains) until his gray topcoat regrows.

Last we went to a huge pen, right at the edge of the forest, for young kangaroos in their last stage of preparation for life in the wild. As we entered the pen, three heads perked up out of the tall grasses, and suddenly three chest-high kangaroos were bounding toward us, exactly like dogs excited for suppertime - but bigger, faster, and higher. We fed the joeys (with larger bottles this time), surreptitiously scratching their heads and running our fingers through their fuzzy fur. And afterward they happily followed us back to the gate to say good-bye.

Tax Day

2007-04-16T19:50:00.000+08:00

And you thought you hated taxes...

It’s odd, but of all the US holidays we’ve spent in Singapore, the one we’ve been most cognizant of is Tax Day. We left Singapore just as the tax forms were being mailed out, and we were sure something would go wrong. But one thing after another actually went right. Change of address logged for all 1,458 tax-related accounts? Check. Forms received in Singapore, scanned, PDF’d, sent to CPA? Check. Draft of taxes received and scrutinized? Changes sent back via email on deadline, taking time zones into account? Check, check. We live in an amazing electronic world.

But then the accountant’s new assistant sent an email apologizing: somehow she’d already e-filed our taxes, with none of our changes - no new address, and no direct deposit information for refunds, which will now be sent by mail. And especially since we’re out of the country, everything is now in a bit of a pickle.

Usually, mail sent to our old address is forwarded to a US PO box and periodically couriered to us. But before we moved, our old post office told us they don’t forward government mail. Will they consider our refund checks “government mail”? It’s tough to find out; we can’t call them to clarify, because the new USPS phone system won’t let you get through to actual local staff.

So we had to try to change our address with the IRS - which is only available from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m., our time. When we finally got through, IRS said nothing doing, we have to personally mail them a form first, and we can’t send it overnight mail - but they need it really really soon. Then they suggested we call our old local post office and ask them to watch for the refund check. Obviously they have never tried this themselves.

And even if somehow the check is not lost or returned and does reach us, we’ll be muddling through paperwork in the confusing and fee-laden process of depositing US checks, because of course now they’re “overseas” checks which require huge amounts of paperwork and months to clear.

I suppose on the grand scale of things, it’s a minor inconvenience. But it’s so hard to juggle it all from the other side of the world. I like to believe we live in a global society - a small, navigable world - and sometimes I forget: we’re just not there yet.

Culture Shock: Melbourne

2007-04-13T15:57:00.000+08:00

My first thoughts while walking into downtown Melbourne: Hey, a piece of trash on the ground! ... Is that group of people actually smoking on the sidewalk? ... This is utter chaos, people just crossing the street willy-nilly wherever and whenever they feel like it. Shouldn’t they be using the crosswalk? Clearly I’ve gone a bit soft in Singapore.

But in reality Melbourne is a wonderful city I wish I lived closer to, though perhaps not in, on account of the cost of living and the driving on the left, which is complicated by the tram lines in the center of the street. Melbourne is visually fascinating, with traditional forms of architecture (Gothic stone cathedrals, painted Victorian buildings) right next to spectacular modern wonders in glass and steel.

The central area is small and easily walkable but packed with interesting side streets and a different ambience on every block - galleries of indigenous art, riverfront nature walks, high-end fashion and tearooms, buskers doing magic tricks for gathering crowds, and all of it interspersed with friendly restaurants and pubs. Plus, among other things, it’s nice to be in a city where I don’t immediately stand out as a foreigner, so I can just sit back and observe.

I like to notice the little things, such as that the women, regardless of shape or size or personal style or lack thereof, are all wearing completely fabulous, super-pointy, dragon-lady shoes. Clearly they have their priorities straight. Lots of the men seem to be descended from the same ruddy, slightly snub-nosed outdoorsman with sandy blonde hair and roguish smile. And aside from that, the population is hugely diverse, with immigrant populations from all over the world.

Apparently, for example, there are more Greeks in Melbourne than in any other city except Athens. It’s completely impossible to eat Greek food in Singapore, and even in New Jersey it’s pretty much limited to the annual festival at the local Greek Orthodox church, so of course we jumped at the chance to try their food. Stalactites, a 24-hour Greek eatery with what looked like a “popcorn ceiling” gone horribly wrong (all in the name of themed decor), had phenomenal food matched by the festive atmosphere from the crowds packed into the tiny space.

Unlike Singapore, where shopping is the leisure activity of choice well into the night, Melbourne closes its stores around 6 p.m. so that everyone can go to dinner or hang out with the rest of Melbourne in one of the cozy pubs tucked into the laneways. This general spirit of cameraderie makes Melbourne seem like a small town. Strangers strike up long, friendly conversations with one another - and with me, despite my studied imitation-New-Yorker avoidance posture. I am an introvert among introverts, but even I inadvertently acquired a host of bosom buddies: the department store sales clerk who rang up my small purchase, a lady sitting alone in a tea room (as I was, since Joey was in two days of business meetings), and an elderly couple in my museum tour of Australian Impressionst painters.

Even from a distance, Melbourne is worth observing: the skyline along the calm, tiny Yarra River is spectacular in every direction. And the sky here during the daytime is that classic, deep blue - like September in the Northeast, but more brightly lit. It makes sense that I’m thinking of September, of course, because it’s Fall here. That's one of the greatest and most mind-boggling things about living and traveling in this area: temperature-wise, we moved from Winter to Summer in January, and now that we feel like it should be Spring, it’s still Summer where we live, but we’re on vacation in Autumn. Soon, though, it will all make sense: we will be heading back to Summer, and just a couple of weeks after that, we’ll feel in our bones that it should be Summer anyway, because it will be May.

Off the Map

2007-04-10T12:47:00.000+08:00

Woo hoo! Time to clear the roads, and quick: we’re now tooling around Singapore in our new set of wheels, practicing driving on the left side of the road and pretending we know where we’re going. But we don’t, actually. In fact, we celebrated our inaugural day of driving by getting really, really lost.

Jenn: I took the car out for what I thought would be a quick trip to the grocery store, so that I’d get there and back long before the evening rush-hour traffic began. I did fine getting there (thinking left side of the road, left side of the road, stay in your lane), but somehow on the way back I missed my own exit in the tangle of expressways, all denoted by acronyms. PIE? TPE? ECP? And as I was wondering, I managed to slide past all my choices, and suddenly the only remaining lanes in the road said

AHEAD
AIRPORT
CHANGI

Oops. But there was no way out, so only after a 20-minute white-knuckled tour around all three terminals did I finally manage to get back on the highway. Oh well, I thought, at least when people visit us, I’ll know how to pick them up at the airport! But by then it was uncomfortably close to rush hour, and I resolved to look more carefully at the exits on the way back. Couldn’t be the PIE or the TPE, right? Must be the ECP.

But as I drove down the ECP (thinking reach right for the blinker, not left - that’s the wipers), I still didn’t see my exit, and what I saw made me worry. A sign for Tanah Merah, then Bedok - I was heading straight into the city, and home was now somewhere behind me. There was nothing for it but to get off the highway, so suddenly I was in rush-hour traffic in local streets I barely knew (thinking when did this lane become a turn lane? and this lane? and this lane, too?). I passed Joey’s office; he’d already be on the bus home, though, because I’d told him I just didn’t think I’d be able to drive in to pick him up! Unsure where to go, I finally had a chance to dig out a street directory while waiting at a stoplight. But the light turned green, and all I’d seen was the cover.

Luckily, I eventually wandered onto a local street I knew. I was starting to breathe again when suddenly my phone buzzed in the seat next to me, and my heart skipped a beat: what now? At the next stoplight, I checked it: a text message from Joey.

Got lost am running late sorry

I started to laugh. Lost? How could he get lost on a bus? I was the lost one!

Joey: While that drama was unfolding, I had in fact gotten myself lost on a bus. Mind you, I've commmuted on my two-bus route at least 70 times already. But this time, I decided to take a new, more scenic route for my first leg, before catching my usual homeward #2 bus, albeit at a different stop.

I felt full of confidence as I stepped off the first bus at the correct stop, ready to transfer for an easy trip home. But then self-doubt set in: “Wait. Which direction will get me home? The same as the bus I just got off? Or the opposite direction?” Somehow, I felt sure it was the opposite direction, so I walked up to the intersection, crossed the road, and walked to the bus stop. I got there just as the #2 pulled up. Perfect!

Then I noticed that the MRT subway line, which is always above ground in the suburbs, had mysteriously disappeared underground. And as the sun kept shining in my eyes, I realized...I’m heading west into the city, away from home! Yes, I had picked up the bus on the wrong side of the road.

I gave up. I got off the bus at the next stop, sent Jenn a text message, and hailed a cab. I arrived home just in time to see Jenn park the car at the curb.