Sunday

Despite still being completely sleep deprived, I woke up on Sunday at 4 am. I was STARVING. I went down to the kopitiam downstairs (thank goodness it was 24 hours!) and ordered some bibimbap from one of the stalls. I only ate part of it, but it came with some miso soup that was very soothing to upset tummies.

The kopitiam was mostly full of jetlagged travelers like me, but there was one woman at the table next to me that looked like she was local. She was asleep. I wondered if she might have been homeless. Despite the high rent in Singapore, it's very rare to see homeless and panhandlers.

When Risa woke up, we dressed and took the MRT to Bugis Junction for some kaya toast at Ya Kun Kaya a chain of restaurants that serves nothing but toast and soft boiled eggs. Kaya jam is a dark, thick jam made with coconut, eggs, sugar and pandan leaves. It's really good.

We then went over to the Esplanade. The Esplanade is located right next to the marina and the river. It's where a lot of the touristy things of Singapore are located, like the Merlion. We walked along the waterfront, photographed the Merlion and got some ice cream (it was like 90 degrees despite being 10 am).

There were this sculptures outside the Esplanade Theaters. I think they were supposed to be a band.

The Marina Bay Sands Hotel was built after I left Singapore. I think it's a bit of an eye sore.

The Merlion

Smaller Merlion

After the Waterfront, we jumped back on the MRT and went to Orchard Road. Orchard Road is the largest shopping area of Singapore, and since it was a Sunday, it was CRAZY busy. We walked down part of it, but it was getting too hot, so we went into the Paragon, which is probably the poshest of all the shopping malls along Orchard Road. Seriously, the first and second stores are Prada and Gucci.

After cooling off, we walked down the road a little bit until we got to the Somerset MRT station where we grabbed some lunch at the a teppanyaki restaurant in the food court. Then back to the MRT station to Scotts Road and walked over to the church. This was the location of the first church that we went to in Singapore before we were moved over to Pasir Panjang, but the original meetinghouse was torn down and a huge building was built. And it's really ugly. ORANGE brick.

After church, we hopped on a bus that was packed. We had to stand on the stairs of the bus because it was so full. Risa said that it felt like the Iditarod because she was balanced precariously so close to the front of the bus. We got off a little too early and walked the rest of the way, stopping in a Cold Storage, the largest grocery store chain. I bought some apples and toiletries I'd forgotten and then we walked to the next bus station and caught to the bus to the end of the road that I used to live on:

Arcadia Road

Arcadia Gardens, the apartment complex next to ours. I had a lot of friends that lived there.

The Chinese restaurant next to our apartment complex. It's still there, unchanged.

Our apartment complex

Our apartment, 03-07

The top floor window on the right was my bedroom.

The stairs down to the pool. I spent a lot of time in this pool.

Playground

Another playground in Watten that I used to play at, usually after walking to the corner store to buy sugar cubes.

After walking around my old neighbourhood and feeling very nostalgic, we walked back to the main road and walked back to the MRT. We felt lazy for dinner, so we just went to the kopitiam for kim chi ramyun and mandu (potstickers).

Little India, Bukit Timah, Monkeys, and then how I collapsed into a whiny little ball

Despite landing in Singapore with only about nine hours of sleep, I didn't sleep very well the first night. I woke up at 3:30 am. I grabbed my tablet and hung out in the hallway so I didn't disturb Risa. After she woke up, we dressed and headed into Little India, the area just north of our hotel. Since Singapore is such a hodgepodge of cultures, there's been plenty of mixing of ethnic groups, but one of the lasting legacies of Sir Stamford Raffles is areas that are more ethnically divided. He segregated the various races into districts and those districts later became those known as Chinatown, Little India, the Arab Quarter, etc.

We walked around a little bit, but went into the Mustafa Center (forgot to get a picture), which is a 24-hour, 4 floor shopping center. It's huge and crazy. They sell pretty much everything there- groceries, cloth, electronics, toys, over 150,000 types of items according to Wikipedia. I meant to get a sari before I left, but I forgot. Next time!

We wandered the various floors in search of a money changer. Normally, they're in the basement and have the best rates, but it was too early in the morning and we finally found one in the jewelry department. Afterwards, we walked across the street to a vegetarian restaurant, Ananda Bhavan, a name that amused me because I was obsessed with naming a future child Ananda when I was in high school. It means "bliss" in Sanskrit.

It was too early to order any curries, so we both got a dosa, a crispy crepe made from rice and lentils. It came with a couple of different chutney and a type of yogurt. It was pretty good. 

I don't know what this flower is called, but it's all over the island.

Mosque near Little India

Dosa, also known as a thosai, for breakfast

After breakfast, we grabbed a cab and drove up to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, which is near the center of the island. It's the equivalent of a state park and the tallest point on the island. Bukit Timah is Malay for "tin hill" even though there's no tin in Singapore (plenty in Malaysia). There are some quarries there, but they mined granite. It's full of flowers, trees, monkeys, butterflies and nature in general. There used to be tigers in the area, but they shot the last one sometime in the early 20th century.

We decided to hike up the long way, to go by the jungle fall valley and then take the short way down. What we didn't know was not only the jungle fall valley was the hardest of the trails, it took you near the top of the  hill, then descended down near to the base, and then you either had a climb a million stairs to get back up, or hike up the other side. Fortunately (sort of) we had come down the side with the stairs, we hiked back up the path. So essentially, we climbed the hill twice. The worst part? There's no waterfall. There's a little stream that comes out of a pipe under a bridge. I guess that's the "fall" part of it.

Visitor's center

You can't see how steep it is, but it's majorly steep and it's right at the beginning.

Everyone seems to be facing towards the top, but about half the people were actually going down backwards. It's easier on the knees to walk backwards down the steep hill.

We hiked the yellow trail to the top and then took the red trail down with a small detour to the look out over Hindhede Quarry (blue trail). The outside yellow trail is a bike trail.

Yeah, the monkeys aren't really afraid of people.

The "Waterfall"

Summit: 163.63 m (537 ft)

There was a family of monkeys (2 large ones and probably about 7 smaller ones of various ages) swinging around the trees. While I was watching, the smallest one fell out of the tree trying to get to the next branch. He scrambled back up the tree, looking embarrassed.

Mama and baby climbing a tree

You can see Hindhede Quarry through the trees.

After we got down to the bottom, I was severely dehydrated and not thinking very clearly. I remembered a shopping center near there, so we walked over and got some water, but I had a pretty bad headache and wasn't feeling very well. We also had difficultly getting a cab because we were on a really busy road that wasn't near any stops and neither of us had a phone. We literally chased one down that had let a fare off at a church.

The cabbie was actually a pretty nice guy. Very chatty. He talked about various stuff about Singapore, most of which I already knew. He did say that there was a large Korean population in Singapore which was news to me. Apparently the expansion being done on the MRT was contracted to a Korean company and it brought a lot of Koreans to the area. I did notice later that there were a lot more Korea restaurants than I remembered and it was even possible to get kimchi in the stores. Surprise.

However, somewhere near Little India, I started to get really queasy. And threw up. Risa had handed me a ziploc bag earlier, so fortunately, I didn't mess up the cab. I did however get my hat. We got to the hotel and I proceeded to throw up some more while Risa went in search of painkillers. Thanks to the convenience store in the basement, she found some paracetamol, because this is Singapore and aspirin will get you shot. Only sort of joking. After about three tablets, because the first two wouldn't stay down, I was able to finally get some sleep. 

Unfortunately, it was barely afternoon, so my little episode left Risa to entertain herself for a few hours. I had intended to go to the Arab Quarter. When I finally woke up and took another paracetamol, the caffeine from the medication left me jittery and talkative, so she also had to put up with crazy Miranda a few hours after whiny sick Miranda. She's a really good friend. 

I also had washed out my hat, which is when I found out that the dye in the paper really sucked. It got red dye nearly everywhere, and it just kept coming out. The bathroom looked like a murder scene. By the time I had finally washed it out and it stopped leaking dye, I had washed out all the sizing, so my wide brim hat became very floppy headgear. Sigh.

More proof we're going to hell

After a very long and trying day (thoughts and prayers to Boston), Justin read The Cat and the Hat to the kids at bedtime.

I told him how Alana had come out of speech therapy with a star sticker she had stuck on her tummy. I told her she was a star bellied sneetch, which made her SLP happy because according to her, no one knows that story (?). This led to a conversation about the morals of Dr. Seuss books. The Cat and the Hat is about stranger danger. Horton Hears a Who is apparently about racism.

Me: "But Star Bellied Sneetches is also about racism."

Justin: "No, the moral is find a niche market with a good demand and you can make a ton of money."

Me: "We're so going to burn."

Regular blogging will resume when I finally get more than 3 hours of sleep a night.

A word on hawker stalls

Singapore is notoriously expensive. It's a small island, the population exploded in the 2000s, and nearly everything has to be imported. That being said, it is possible to eat in Singapore for just about $10 a day per person.

The secret of course being hawker stalls. Hawker stalls and centers started out as street food. However, due to congestion they caused as well as the lack of hygiene, the government started to round up the food sellers and move them to partial indoor facilities known as hawker centers. With access to refrigeration and running water, cleanliness because less of an issue. There are now dozens if not hundreds of hawker centers around the island, ranging from a half a dozen stands to over a hundred.

There's a few differences between a food court, a kopitiam, and a hawker center.

A food court is like what you'd find in a mall here in the US. The "restaurants" are bigger, the menu is more varied, and the prices will be higher. You can probably find a few of them have a bar to sit down at while they cook in front of you. Like in the US you can order your entire meal from one vendor.

A kopitiam is also indoors, so the prices are higher than a hawker stall, but usually much lower than a food court. They are usually not made up of stand, but small counters with a kitchen in the back-closer to that of a food court. They usually have a menu of a dozen items. It's not unusual to see people order items from a couple different vendors, and usually only one stand will be selling drinks.

A hawker center is nearly always outdoors. The stalls are small (probably less than 20 sq ft) and they will only specialize in a few dishes. However, the food will be dirt cheap, sometimes as low as a dollar for items, but usually averaging $3-5 for a full plate of food. It's normal to order parts of your meal from several different vendors.

Kopitiams and hawker stalls will have a sign displayed somewhere on the front of their stands. This is a grade given to them by the government on their facility's hygiene. I've never seen less than a "B", as most vendors will be driven out of business by a bad grade.

Do not ever order from anyone who accosts you and tries to drag you to their stall. This is a sign of a not very good stall. It's actually illegal for them to do this as well. The best stalls will have the longest lines. It used to be the norm to grab a table, reserve it with your "cha" (a packet of tissues), and then tell the vendor what your table number was. They'd then bring your dish out to you when it was cooked. This is becoming less common and the only hawker center I saw this at was Newton Circus. Most now say "self service" which means you grab a tray and carry the food back to the table yourself. When you are done however, you leave the dishes on the table for the little old ladies employed to bus them away.

Hawker stalls are my favourite way of eating in Singapore. I could happily plant myself in one of them and stay the entire trip.

Danang to Singapore, catching up with an old friend

Having slept next to nothing the night before I left Seattle, being exhausted because I didn't sleep on the airplane, then add in jet lag, and I was sure to wake up at 3 am in Danang (which was about 3 pm PDT). I eventually gave up on sleep, got up, played on my phone, watched some tv, did some ballet exercise, and walked around the front garden of the house. Risa and Mike got up at a sane time, we breakfasted, got our luggage together, and Risa and I departed for the airport. Our flight was headed for Singapore, but since Silk Air's flight path was a triangle from Danang to Siem Reap to Singapore, we had a 40 minute layover in Cambodia. I though we'd be able to stay on the plane, but apparently everyone had to disembark.

Siem Reap airport is the scariest little airport ever. There's only one runway, and I think I saw three airplanes total. Our layover was long enough to walk from the airplane to the airport, get a transfer slip, go to the restroom, check in at one of the four gates, and walk back to the airplane. Weirdest layover yet. But I guess since we got out of the plane, I can say I've been to Cambodia?

We landed in Singapore, got through immigration, claimed baggage, and got through customs without incident. I'm always nervous about customs in Singapore. The MRT has a line that meets the airport, and our hotel say directly above a MRT station, so luckily we didn't have to catch a taxi into the city. I can't say enough good things about the MRT-it's awesome.

Our hotel was the V Hotel Lavender, which on the whole, I'd recommend. It's very conveniently located on top of the Lavender MRT station. Around the corner is also a 24 hour kopitiam, which translate to coffee house, but in reality is a small food court. There's also a Wendy's, a small convenience store, a fried food stand and a bakery that are open during the day. It's also only a few stops from the downtown core, but far away enough that it's still pretty quiet. It's within walking distance of Little India and the Arab quarter. The room was pretty big by Asian standards. The downsides were the elevators were slow, there was only one outlet (but it did have a international adapter), and it was $10/day for wifi.

After a shower, and unpacking all the items I promised to bring her, we met my school friend, Anne and her husband at the Newton Circus hawker center (I forgot to get a picture). It'd been 17 years since I'd seen Anne, but she looked almost the same (seriously). In the intervening years, we'd both grown up, quit gymnastics (how we'd met), joined dance, gone to college, gotten married and had kids. Her little munchkin in nearly a year old. Her husband is a sweet guy with a soft South Carolina accent, something that surprised me because I thought he was from Asia, but I think he's just really, really tan. I of course forgot to get a picture of the two of them, so here's one from this article.

We let Anne order a variety of food from the various hawker stalls. Here are the pictures. Warning: I'm a terrible photographer and about 50% of the pictures I took on this trip were of food.

I've forgotten the name of this one. I think it was some sort of Mee goreng, a fried Indian noodle dish that's pretty spicy.

Chai tao kway or carrot cake, which is neither carrots nor a cake. It's radish fried with sometimes taro, bean sprouts, and fish sauce.

Hokkien Mee, fried noodles with prawns and chili sauce

Barbecued stingray, which sounds gross, but is actually REALLY good.

Char Kway Teow, stir fried noodles, bean sprouts, egg and meat.

Fried dough balls

I forgot what was in this one. I think it was some sort of grilled shrimp in a banana leaf.

Chicken satay

Seattle to Incheon, Incheon to Danang

My flight to Vietnam wasn't extremely eventful. I got to the airport without any issues, checked my bags without any problems, and then waited for three hours because in my panic, I'd gotten to the airport extremely early.

The flight wasn't too bad except that it was extremely turbulent, and I got air sick (I get air sick at the drop of a hat) and the annoying guy behind me kept kneading his knees into the back of my seat, somewhere in the vicinity of my kidneys. But I was lucky because the seat next to me was empty, so the guy on the aisle and I got both our arm rests and an extra room to stow our stuff.

On the way to Danang, I chatted with an extremely nice, talkative lady who was on her way home from the US. She also had very pointed elbows that made their way into my ribs when she fell asleep. The only other memorable thing was a little girl that looked nothing like Alana, but had the universal grumpy toddler face that  looked oddly familiar.

There was a period of extreme weirdness when I was in the Incheon airport (which is awesome by the way). It had been 20 years since I'd been in Korea and here I was back again, only for an hour. I wasn't even in Seoul. Not only that, I was surrounded by people that looked like me. They probably had bow-leggedness and the same problems finding glasses that I do. But since I don't speak much Korean and act so American, there wasn't any chance any of them would mistake me for one of them. It was a very weird, isolating experience.

When I landed in Danang, I had no problem with my visa (thank goodness, one of the reasons I was sure to get it before I left even though I probably paid twice as much for it), finally claimed my bags, and nearly collapsed with relief when I made it to Risa and her husband.

I only stayed on night in Danang on this leg, but to see pics of their house, go here.

You think he'd learn by now

After spending an evening paying a huge load of medical bills:

Me: "Aaaand that's the health fund and the FSA depleted."

Justin: "Well, if we didn't have to pay for the work on your boob..."

Me: "Oh, that's so going on the blog."

Justin: "Damn it."

Me: "And I'm changing it to 'boob job.'"