Monday, October 27th
It was nice to wake up like a normal person again. Waking up in a clean room with no cocoon, no additional pillow case, no money belt on the waist, and no need to get changed right away was really nice. Every now and then it is good to feel like a normal person. Fortunately, the next week or so we would be staying at friends' places. It will be our last stretch of homey accommodations before a month and half of roughing it again.
I did some more planning for Australia. I'm loving using Jeremy's mac. I'm addicted and miss my mac at home. I love how you can customize every button to your liking. Eventually Steph and I gathered our dirty clothes together for Anita and May to wash for us. They also sliced up mangoes, plums, and another Asian fruit for breakfast. I love the Indonesian mangoes here. It is very sweet with a lot of meat. The seed is very thin. Yummy in my tummy! We also met Sandy the playful golden retriever. He loved to hump us though! It was especially funny on Steph because he was the size of Steph.
At roughly 11ish, Linda picked us up for lunch. She actually bumped into Auntie Young while she was waiting for us. We still hadn't met her yet at that stage, but we were invited to have dinner with her that night. We met Linda's sister and her friend at Din Tai Fung for some Taiwanese dumplings. It's the same chain as the one we loved in Beijing. The core essentials were the same, however the menu is a bit smaller. Nevertheless, it was still yummy yummy yummy! It was especially fun with good company and chat. The most important part of a meal.
Steph and I were feeling quite lucky with private escorts touring us around Singapore. It is always nice to experience the life of a local. Linda, her sister and friend brought Steph and I to Chinatown to do some cheap clothes shopping and for mahjong blocks. There's mahjong blocks that actually have letters and numbers on them so that people that don't know Chinese can play also. How cool!
On our stroll through Chinatown we visited two temples, an Indian one and a Chinese one that were right next to each other. There were tons of people everywhere since it was a holiday. The Indian temple was nothing like the other temples we've seen. It was very colorful with porcelain-like figures and candles burning... Very different from the Chinese temple where everything was gold and smelled like incense. Even the noises inside were different. Inside the Indian temple they sang hymns, meanwhile in the Chinese temple you hear wooden sticks shaking in a wooden holder and plastic pieces for fortune telling breaking apart as they drop on the ground. I continue to be amaze by how some Asians have such strong spiritual ties to their religion. I would hope one day my faith becomes strong also.
The Chinatown market was interesting. It looks like many stores inside a parking lot. Surprisingly the clothing inside was not particularly cheap and they wouldn't really bargain, even when we used our Chinese! Singaporeans speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and English interchangeably. It's amazing. All three are very different languages. Anyhow, Steph ended up getting a dress that needed some tailoring so that it fit her properly. We felt bad dragging our new buddies around shopping, so we decided it was better to do something else. Linda's sister insisted on us checking out the food court on the third floor, so we did. Too bad we were too full because everything looked delicious. We have yet to try chicken and rice.
Linda then drove us to Sentosa island where all the rice and famous people live. It's a newly built area with a lot of modern open looking houses...something you would imagine seeing in a movie. After checking out the houses we went to the hotel for some afternoon coffee and sweets. We shared a sandwich, french fries, tiramisu and hazel nut cake. All very delicious with our coffees. By the time we were done, it was time for us to go back to Jeremy's place to have dinner with Auntie Young. We have yet to met her, so we were excited.
Anita made us a delicious 5 course meal - spicy grilled shrimp, stuffed zucchini, xo meat and shrimp sauce with spaghetti, traditional shanghai soup, and fruits and coconut sorbet. What a treat to have restaurant quality and presentation of food at the pleasant atmosphere of home. We were really grateful.
Auntie Young was amazing. She has lived an incredible life. She is one of the best oncologists in Singapore and graduated top of her class. She became the chief resident of a hospital in Houston, despite all the racial discrimination she felt moving up the ranks. Besides being very intelligent and insightful on sharing her life experiences, she was a great story teller, speaking of everything from travelling to food to ghost stories. We had a great time chatting with her. She was a lot of fun.
She informed us they actually had two parrots, Sammy and Chevy. Sammy is a beautiful whitish pink macaw that has been in captivity so long that he doesn't know he can fly. Parrots can live for 70-80 yrs and Sammy is in his 30's. Chevy is green and only 7 years old and used to talk a lot before Sammy joined the family. Auntie Young's sister thinks Chevy is suffering from depression because Sammy is so overpowering. Too funny.
Steph and I were so eased into the Singaporean homey lifestyle that we didn't take up Auntie Young's offer to check out the bar street on Dempsey Road. Instead we decided to stay in and surf the net until odd hours of the evening.
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