ten minutes to myself

the farewell tour

On Wednesday at breakfast, I sat staring at my empty iced chai latte cup and thought, "I'm going to miss this place." I was sitting with my kids at a Starbucks on Orchard Road in Singapore. There is a very good chance that I'll never be there again. 

I can't remember how many months we were into our life in Bangkok when we first visited Singapore, but I do remember that it felt soooo good! The streets were clean. I spoke a common language. There were familiar things - organized traffic, playgrounds, parks, shops, etc. I took a photo of the view from our hotel window and thought that it reminded me of Vancouver. 

Singapore is easily the place that we traveled to for a family-oriented getaway the most during our six years in SE Asia. It's only about a 90-minute flight from BKK and Saigon, and plenty of the discount airlines in this region fly there. I think that we kept going back to stock up on shopping (baking ingredients! vitamins!) and because there are were more quality things to do with children. 

Usual highlights from our trips:

• The wildlife parks: Singapore Zoo, Jurong Bird Park, and the newly-opened River Safari. There is a zoo in Bangkok and there's also one in Ho Chi Minh City, but the ones in Singapore are modern, spacious, educational, and  conversation-minded, and they do not dress the animals up in costumes for exploitive photo ops. 

• Botanical Gardens, because 1) the flowers in SE Asia are lovely and exotic to my eyes and 2) it has a terrific playground area.

• The Forum: This is a small shopping center that has a lot of retailers focused on children. There's a Mothercare (a UK-company that carries a lot of baby apparel and gear that is hard to come by in SE Asia - things that I bought there include packages of onesies (nicer than Old Navy, actually), See Kai Run shoes, and a SwaddleMe)). There's a shop called Vitakids where I've found other things that were a challenge in BKK and Saigon: children's vitamins, supplements, and safer sunscreen/shampoo (they stock TruKid, among others). My kids are fans of the children's bookstore called Bookaburra, and there's an Early Learning Center toy store next door. On the top level, there's a Stride Rite and also a Toys R Us (though it doesn't stock the same quality of merchandise as the stores in Canada, it's a lot better than the TRU in BKK).

• SEA Aquarium on Sentosa: This is quite new, and is marketing itself as the largest aquarium in the world. Madeline was thrilled to see about a half dozen exhibits on jellyfish, and I was happy to have a (flash-free, of course) photo of a clownfish in an anemone. I have a four year-old, so Finding Nemo still heavily influences our aquatic interests. The aquarium is located in Singapore's maritime museum, and I wish that we'd spent more time looking at the exhibits because the did look really cool (and very hands-on).

• Gelatissimo: Madeline's dearest request for our last trip was that we go for gelato because she really wanted more of the green apple gelato that she had the time when we checked out the Singapore Flyer. The Singapore Flyer was out of the way, but luckily, there was a Gelatissimo outlet on Orchard Road that we could walk to. And they did have green apple on the menu on that day!

I picked up a second-hand "things to do with small kids in Singapore" book before our final trip, and there were more than a couple of museums that earned kid-friendly marks, and a science center that sounded like something my girls would be into, though we didn't have the time to check it out. We've been on the Singapore Night Safari, so we saw a lot of animals sleeping, and we've been to Universal Studios on Sentosa, but it wasn't as interesting to our younger kids as a Disney Park is.

We've sometimes had difficulty finding taxis for return trips back from places like the zoo, so on my last trip, the kids and I  got around using the MRT and the SAEx coaches and it was inexpensive (as far as Singapore goes) and easy to figure out. I also saw one of those double-decker sight-seeing buses, and thought that would have been a practical way to navigate between several of the tourist attractions. Wish I'd known about that before ... 

So, yeah, I was a little sad to have my farewell tour of Singapore come to an end earlier this week. I always felt a little bit more like my old self there, like I was slightly less of a foreigner than I was when in Thailand or Vietnam (and maybe even Newfoundland, you know). I will be glad, however, to never again feel the frustration of trying to search out a hotel that had rooms that could accomodate more than two adults and one child simultaneously. Oh, Asia :)

so many words, so little time (and stuff)

I'm thinking that this blog is heading towards closure. I haven't had much content or interest in a long time; my kids are getting older, becoming their own people, and deserve privacy, and life overseas is taking me by surprise less all the time. 

I've got bigger things to devote my time to, like preparing the inventory for our air and sea shipments. I probably should have started that already, to be honest! I've managed to get my annual photobook project finished and uploaded for printing, but that's only one item crossed over the list. We don't exactly know what Chris's start date for his new job is, and we also don't even know what our post-move address is going to be. There's just lots of stuff that I need to be doing away from sitting in front of a computer. 

And if I was to write more? It would probably be all bitter and angry words on topics such as how insanely hot it is here, how there aren't many houses for sale that would work for us, how darn powerless I feel in this whole process because I have, like, zero agency to decide anything in this relocation. 

I do have a good rant about Madeline's school saved up inside me, so I might post that when the school year is over :)

 

if I were the reviewing type

I'd be raging somewhere against the (fellow foreigner) photographer we had a photo session with two weekend ago.

The crimes:

• Actually telling me that I am a "lady of leisure" without actually inquiring into how I spend my time here in Saigon. There is nothing that I despise more than being stereotyped as a typical ex-pat wife, because I'm really not. 
• Frequent high-pressure emails, like he's trying to sell us a brand-new Prius to make an end-of-the-month sales quota.  We don't want to upgrade the trim line!
• Sending us proofs that look lower-resolution than the images on my child's Fisher Price digicam. Seriously, I can't see my childrens' faces in the proofs well enough to see if their eyes are open or if they're smiling. 
• Quoting me a price for an 5x7-ish  print that is equal to what he'd sell an 11x14-ish for. 

Well, I feel better by typing out my itemized list of complaints, really I do. Now, onto bigger (actual) problems. 

Is it October Yet? Or: Pop culture monsters and me.

I was listening to an old Halloween-oriented episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour this week, and the theme that the panel was discussing was "pop culture that scares you". And while I heartily agree with Glen Wheldon that there is something inexplicably disturbing about Bing Crosby's Sleepy Hollow Song, what I would have discussed if I had been invited to sit in with the gang is my fear of creepy things of the monster/alien/mascot persuasion.

It might have all started when I was five year old and in kindergarten, when my mom asked me if I wanted to "stay up past my bedtime" (of course I did!) and "go see a movie!" (yippee!). So my mom, ever the fan of science fiction, took me not to see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I liked the part with the Reese's Pieces, sure, but after seeing this movie, I was pretty convinced that there had to be E.T. living behind the furnace in our basement (thus, it was dangerous to walk past it to get to the washing machine), or E.T. living behind the chest freezer in the basement (thus, it was dangerous to even go down the stairs to the basement), or the might even be E.T. hiding amongst my toys in the basement. That last one seemed like it was the biggest betrayal of them all. 

Before you laugh, remember that I was only five years-old!

But my fears did not end there. My dreams were largely populated by vampires and invisible ghosts that would lure me away from my family with levitating phantom ice cream cones and chocolate bars, only to snatch me up and ... well, I don't know what come after the "and ..." because that's when I'd wake up from my nightmares. 

The worst offender of all, even worse then E.T., was the A&W Root Bear. I would lay awake for hours after being tucked in for the night, imagining that I could hear the Root Bear coming to kidnap me, each sinister step punctuated with his "ba-dum ba-dum" tuba theme music. I was terrified of this fast-food chain mascot like nothing else. I don't know why. 

I had a healthy distrust of anyone wearing similar mascot costumes like that for many years. Even Mickey. Even Fred Flintstone before Bedrock City in Kelowna closed down. To be honest, I'm still a little suspicious.