Day Three: August 28th, 2015
Okay. Going to come out and say this just once (I might be lying): Jetlag sucks. Sure there’s the fatigue and exhaustion and bleeerrrrggghedness associated with jetlag, but there’s also the ‘hi! It’s 4:30 am! Time to get up because it’s middle of the day on the other side of the world!’ feeling that goes along with it. Now something about me: my normal time of awakening in the morning is between 5am and 5:30am. So 4:30 isn’t that bad. I mean, I’m on vacation, so I’d have preferred to sleep in a pinch, but… whatever, body does what it wants.
Nicole, on the other hand, has to be dragged kicking and screaming out of bed before 6am, and even at the late hour of ‘barely sunrise,’ she’s slow to get moving.
She was up at 5am. On her own. I didn’t do a damned thing.
The bright side to this predicament is that we were both up and well ready for meeting up with my sister and the kids. We showered (cold showers are awesome when you’re desperate for one or terribly sunburnt… but no other occasion, mental note: turn the waterheater on every time), had a snack of pretzels and almonds, and set out for Ruth’s apartment.
We arrived and watched the chaos that was wrangling two children for school, then accompanied her right out the door and towards the MRT.
A note about Singapore at this point: the public transportation system is thorough and efficient. Unlike America’s where everything is built around owning a car unless you live in a handful of select metropolises. Singapore’s MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) is a system comprised of buses and subway lines. We haven’t hit a bus just yet, but the subway is easy to use and board and whee. I’ve already figured out how to navigate it after just a couple of times aboard the system. Of course, it took me only a day or so to figure out London’s Underground as well, so the learning curve was already tackled for me. Needless to say, the system is efficient and easy to use. America should adopt it and get all the asshats off the roads. 😀
We boarded the MRT and rode it for nearly half an hour to the kids’ school. During the ride, Nicole and I decided that the best way to make use of an otherwise slightly awkward situation (Winnie’s frequent and sometimes entirely unwarranted crying) was to make a game of it. We’re still working out the details of a daily pool for ‘how many times will she cry today,’ but we should have something figured out and a spread good to go by the time we leave. Maybe we’ll give Ruth and Norm a written copy to add to the entertainment of the family.
We debarked from the train and cruised through the crowded terminal and up to a mall where the kids’ school was located. We dropped them off to further their educations for a few hours and hit the town. By hit the town I, of course, mean we went off to find breakfast and do a little sightseeing. During our brief excursion, Ruth received a call from her friend Jacq (short for Jacqueline I believe) who offered to come pick us up in her car.
A note at this point about cars. They’re excessively expensive here in Singapore, to the tone of, at minimum, twice the price of what they’d be wherever they were before being imported to Singapore as there is a 100% tax on them. According to Norm, Jacq’s mid-range SUV ran something close to 200,000 Singapore dollars. On top of that, every 10 years you must pay a tremendous fee to acquire what is essentially a license in the U.S. Something to the note of $10,000 SGD.
If I lived here, I think I could forgo driving as well. Just a small thought there.
Anyways, Jacq offered to pick us up and we graciously accepted. She is a native Singaporean and very friendly. While we rode with her she gave us some history about Singapore and how it has grown in the last 50 years of being an independent country. We rode to another food court, open air market thingy and Ruth and Jacq sat Nicole and I in the middle to hold our table while they scampered off to acquire goodies for breakfast.
After a few minutes of waiting, both Jacq and Ruth had acquired a mountain of food for us to the tone of, four bowls of rice porridge, two bowls of prawn noodles, a bowl of fruit (dragon fruit, rock melon, honey dew melon, papaya, watermelon), almond milk bean curd, chicken drumstick and rice. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much for all of us to eat.

Seriously. Look at all of that food.

We’re included in the photo to show the size of the feast.
We feasted upon the glorious mound of food before us and talked with a couple of ‘aunties’ (aunt is a term used for any elder woman in Chinese culture just as an elder man would be referred to as uncle) about where we were from and how long we’d been in Singapore. One of whom was kind enough to gift us with one of the new $10 Singapore bills (in exchange for one of our old ones) and a story of how she’d waited 2 hours at the bank to exchange another bill for it. All-in-all it was a very pleasant morning meal, even if I felt bad at how much we left behind on the table.
Our next destination was Bukit Chandu, a tropical park with a little museum about the Japanese invasion during WWII. We enjoyed the quick walk to an overlook point that we could see the harbor from and meandered down onto a treetop boardwalk that overlooked Singapore’s government arboretum.

Here we are near the museum.

On the path through Bukit Chandu

Shiny NEW $10

Overlooking the Singapore harbour
We continued along the path to the museum where we watched a brief presentation (put on early just for us by one of the elderly museum attendants) of the Japanese invasion as recalled by survivors of the Malayan defense force who were here at the time. We retreated back downstairs and observed an oral timeline of the invasion that began with a diversion mortar attack on February 7th and concluded on February 14th with the defeat of the last line of troops.
We called our trip to Bukit Chandu to a close as we needed to go pick the kids up from school. We trekked back to the mall and acquired the various screaming little ones and played a game of freeze capture on an open area. Freeze capture is just like freeze tag except the kids are never ‘it.’ That consistently falls solely to the adult (me in this case) who is playing with them.
After we parted ways with Jacq and her brood, we stopped to get bubble tea (I got chocolate milk tea with golden bubbles, Nicole got chocolate milk tea with ice cream) and returned to Ruth and Norm’s home. The train ride was uneventful though we had to spend some extra time outside of the apartment avoiding the pesticide sprayer. Once back at the apartment, I crashed hard due to jet lag (did I mention it sucks?) after lunch while Nicole and, I assume, Jasper and Norm went swimming. Sometime in the distant future I woke from the dead coma of jet lag and we headed out for the Celebrating Singapore’s 50th anniversary festival.
We boarded the MRT and stopped by Norm’s office at the University of Singapore first to have a look at one of the four college campuses in Singapore. While not what I pictured a college campus to be (my mind’s eye is more traditional with open space and greenery), it was still neat to behold a campus of concrete and stone. A fair amount of it was even underground.
…
Maybe they secretly cater to vampires.
…
Anyways, after visiting his office we grabbed a quick dinner (salad for Nicole and I, pizza for them) and made our way over to the Museum of Art and snagged fancy front row seats for ‘The Anooki Celebrate Singapore.’ It was an animated short (7 minutes) that was projected against the building’s front. It made use of the building’s irregular shape as a projection surface in that the Anooki (small, cute, Eskimo critters) crawled out of the windows, used the upper terrace as a spring board, and other adorable hijinx.
We watched the presentation three times before getting up, meeting up with Jacq and her brood, and made our way into the museum for some live music being played upon traditional Chinese instruments. We listened to the presentation, took a few photos with Jacq as the camerawoman and bid her fair well. After departing the museum we walked back toward the MRT and fought the crowd all the way to the Singapore University building that also houses the station. Norm and Jasper decided then would be a good time to get some snacks and at some point whilst that was occurring, it was decided that we’d see what new presentation was going on in front of the Art Museum, as the Anooki short film had, finally, ceased to be played on repeat.
There were costumes, music, and I assume vocal components to whatever was being presented across the street, but as the crowd was thick and there was a cover band and/or DJ just behind us, after fighting the crowd for a while, we decided to give into the other critical option in a fight/flight situation and fled the crowds for fairer fields.
Before long we were back on the MRT, and parting ways for our respective domiciles with Norm guiding Nicole and I to the new room.
It took us a little bit to figure out which dark and gloomy stairwell was the one we wanted, and longer to climb the (seemingly) endless stair to a door to nowhere…erm…apartment with our new room. The room was smaller. The bed bigger. The headache of getting said room not worth the cost. But whatever.
We unloaded our belongings and crashed the night away, ready for the next day. Below I’ll leave you with a picture of the fruit bowl from breakfast.

Look at the fruit. Doesn’t Dragon Fruit (the purple one) look awesome? It tastes pretty awesome too.
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