April 2011

April was SUCH a busy month! In fact, I was a good 9 days into May before I really felt recovered from April!

Erin left for a meeting in Texas on April 1. So the kids and I made some decisions. First of all, if Dad was going to get to eat all that good American Junk Food, we wanted to do something, too. We declared it "Pizza Week". We ate pizza at least once every day. We made our own and we ordered out. None of it was as good as Papa John's, but oh well. You can get Domino's pizza here, but the tomatoes aren't the same, and so it doesn't taste quite right. But it's the closest we can get, so we get it. Also, we haven't found real pepperoni to put on the ones we make at home. Cheese is very expensive too, so it's not a whole lot cheaper to make them at home. In case you were wondering, none of us got tired of pizza. I almost canceled it one night though. We were at Univeral Studios and I'd told the kids that we'd eat at the Italian restaurant "buffateria". But when we walked in, the pizza was $8.50 per slice!!! Fortunately, the slices were huge - about the size of 3 normal pieces of pizza. Everybody got one slice.

So, yes, we also went to Universal Studios one day after school was finished. Bwa ha ha.

After spending too much time on the bus and MRT taking the boys to various scouting events, I decided to work up my courage to try driving. It was just silly to spend 40-60 min. more taking the bus/mrt when our car was sitting unused in the basement. I started by driving over to the YMCA where our church meets. It's a pretty simple drive and I didn't have to concentrate on directions. After that, I told the kids that if they promised not to talk to me or each other in the car, I'd drive them to the Night Safari. I needed them to be quiet so I could chant to myself, "keep left, keep left" or "turn wide, turn wide" when turning right etc. They agreed, and off we went. When we bought our season pass to the Singapore Zoo, we paid a little extra and got the Night Safari and Bird Park included. The Night Safari is really cool. It's basically a zoo for nocturnal animals. You know, the ones that are completely boring in a normal zoo. It doesn't open 'till dark. By then, the lions are actually awake and playing or walking around at the Night Safari. The bats are flying around, etc. They have a good "creatures of the night" show that opens with a white wolf coming out, jumping up on this big rock and howling. Cool. Then the hyenas come out and walk around a bit. The show also features some creatures I'd never heard of like Civets and a Binturong as well as a clouded leopard (I think) that they get to show off how high he can jump. We'll skip the part about the giant python being under someone's chair (not mine!).

After the show, you can ride the tram through the place and get off and explore on your own. We walked down a trail and saw the leopards. The people that work there have a constant mantra of "no flash photography". You hear it over and over and over. But of course, not everyone complies. The guy next to us took a flash picture of the leopard. She stood up, looked right at him and made this scary barking/growling noise at him for about 30 seconds and then walked off and laid down further away. Everyone there got the message. I now know what leopard cussing sounds like.

As we were leaving the Night Safari we stopped in the gift shop (of course) and O. being his natural self, started talking to a random stranger. I kept my eye on the situation but didn't interfere because said stranger looked like he wasn't annoyed. I walked past after a minute or two and offered the guy a chance to break it off by saying, "He'll talk your ears off if you let him." But he said he didn't mind and turned back to O. and asked him a question. So I walked off. He was so nice to O. that after awhile, I went over and stood with them thinking he might be wanting to go, but he asked me if we were living in Singapore and why, etc. I told him and asked him the same and he said he was in the entertainment industry, doing a stunt show at Universal Studios. I asked if it was Water World. He said yes. Turns out he plays the bad guy in the show. The one my kids were quoting for a week after they saw it. This was like O. meeting Robert Redford or something. This guy was so nice. Clearly he was there with his girlfriend (both 20 something), but he took quite a bit of time to talk to O. and eventually the other 2 as well. He told O. to come find him at the next show and he'd let O. be the kid in the pre-show that gets to squirt the actor in the face. He's really looking forward to that!

The Saturday after that was the Merit Badge Marathon for the Boy Scouts. A. had signed up to take swimming and reading. I signed up to help wherever they needed me. They put me as an assistant on the swimming. She said, "I just need a warm body there, so that we have the required adult to scout ratio." But I wore my swimming things anyway, just in case. 10 min. into the class, the organizer came and said, "Beth, we need you to go teach First Aid because our teacher didn't show and you're the only other one here that can do it. Sheri, you can teach swimming, right?" Uhhhh.... I had done it for the cub scouts once. But I didn't even know the names of most of these boys! As we're walking down to the pool, I'm thinking, "What if they sink like stones? What if someone gets hurt? Am I insured? I'm not an official merit badge instructor, so I'm thinking not. etc." But it turned out o.k. One boy was not so much of a swimmer, but the rest did fine.

The next day we went bowling with some friends after church. I offered one a ride home and we got sooo lost. Thankfully we had the gps! We turned it on and got back on track. But I got in an extra hour of driving practice. By the time we got home, I didn't really feel like I needed any more practice.

Erin got home from Texas early on the 14th. He brought back wonderful things like Magic cards, candy and Kool-aid packets, and some things we'd ordered - like new suitcases. The ones we had were not holding up like we thought they should.

The next day, his parents arrived for a visit. Their plane landed at 2:30 or so in the morning, but their taxi driver got "lost"? or maybe just lost and they arrived to our apt. around 4 a.m. We planned a lot of things to do with them. Starting with a walk through the Botanic Gardens to keep them awake that first day. :-) We also walked through Bukit Batok nature reserve and saw a Durian Tree. We went to the Old Ford Factory where the British surrendered to the Japanese in WWII. We hiked across the Henderson Waves bridge, where O. did a hilarious imitation of Grandpa sliding. (Artificially deep voice saying, "Wheeee" a la Eeyore.") We took them to eat at our favorite Chinese restaurant on Orchard Rd. I think they enjoyed trying the local foods. Especially the fruits. We did buy a durian while they were here. We all tried it. Now we can mark that off our lists. None of us is volunteering to buy another one. It took a couple of days to get the smell out of the house. :-P

We hiked up to the highest (natural) point in Singapore, Bukit Timah. We went on the tourist boat ride on the Singapore River and the tourist bus ride around the historic areas and shopping areas. We walked down Arab Street and learned something about the oriental rugs for sale there, and saw all the beautiful material for sale. Wow! I really wanted to have a dress made for my nephew's wedding in July, but the cost was prohibitive. We discovered that there is now a "Merlion Hotel" built around the Merlion downtown so that you can't even see the Merlion anymore!! What?!?! This is like building a hotel that covers up the Statue of Liberty! It's just wrong!
We also went to the Bird Park for the first time. It's pretty good. They have several different kinds of owls in a darkened tunnel. Very cool. The shows were good, and A. got picked to participate by holding his arms out for 2 toucans to fly to. We also enjoyed the Lorie Loft where we fed the Lories. It was fun to have birds voluntarily land on you and hop out your arm to the food cup. One complaint - the map of the park is not very helpful. They had small paths on the map as though they were major roads. Very confusing.

After Erin's sister, Alicia, arrived on the 22nd, we were invited to eat at Jumbo's Seafood restaurant. Some folks from church invited us. Our friends ordered all kinds of food. You wouldn't believe what all there was to eat! Poor Alicia was so tired from her trip, I hated to make her stay out after dark, but the rest of us really wanted to go. Anyway, we tried chili crab and black pepper crab and fried squid, rice, noodles, satay, scallops fried with yams, and probably something else that I'm forgetting! I'm not a big seafood eater, and neither is anyone else in my family. For me it's that 'fishy' taste that I don't like. None of this food had that taste, so I ate my fill of the crab and scallops especially.

Sunday night, a group of us went to the Singapore Flyer. It's like the London Eye, but taller.

We planned to go to Sentosa on Monday. I knew that Alicia would enjoy the thrill rides at Universal, but I didn't really think Erin's parents were into roller coasters, so we went to do other things on Sentosa instead. Turns out I may have been wrong about them and roller coasters, because the first thing we did was the Mega Zip! I tried to film them coming down the Mega Zip, but I kept turning involuntarily as I slid down. The video is terrible, but funny. After the Mega Zip, Alicia and the kids went to Universal and we went to do the Luge! Gordon and Wyveta enjoyed that enough to want to do it again, so we did. Then we went to Images of Singapore, which was better than I anticipated. It's a pretty good overview/introduction of Singapore. We also did the butterfly garden, which was o.k. There was really only one room of live butterflies. There was another room with free-flying birds that was nice. Then there was a huge collection of dead insects (lots and lots of Rhino Beetles). Lastly we rode the Sky Tower. It has a very good view of Sentosa and the coast of Singapore.

The Percells were all here over "Easter" weekend. We had the traditional Owenby family egg-cracking with O.'s cub scout pack. Hannah won. :-) We also attended the "Caring for Cambodia" egg hunt. A. was volunteering in the dunking booth. So of course Erin and I each paid $5 for 3 throws. Erin dunked him twice, and I got him once. He had a lot of fun. O. did the egg hunt and got confused looking for the "golden egg" and thought his yellow one should qualify. It didn't. I did the "whacky hair" booth - which means a 11 year old girl spray painted my hair with the colored hair spray. She tried to get it to stand up, but it's just too thick. In fact, it's also quite dark and I didn't think you could see the color too well. It all washed out before church the next morning except one little red spot on my scalp. A couple of folks noticed it. Oh well. It was funny.

We planned a trip to Thailand to correspond with the Percell's visit. Originally we were going for 5 days or so, but it got shortened to 3 days because of Erin's work commitments and H's Girl Scout meeting. (Long story, but she just could NOT miss it.) We had a lot of fun, and I plan to do a separate blog entry for that trip. We came back absolutely exhausted. Some of us also had some "Delhi Belly" aka "Montezuma's revenge" or maybe it was just a stomach virus. But with only 3 days left in their visit, we wanted to make sure we did/bought everything they were looking to do/buy. So Saturday we went out to Chinatown and shopped 'till we nearly dropped. :-) Then we relaxed on the tourist bus for an hour. Sunday we went bowling after church and then used up the final hour we had left on the tourist bus 24 hour pass. I was wrong about where to catch the tourist bus at the Botanic Gardens, and we ended up walking quite a ways before we found the right stop. Monday we went rug shopping. Wyveta wanted a small rug for her entryway, and we needed some rugs to spruce up our bare floors. We walked quite a bit, including a stop to pick up some Bak Kwa for Alicia to take home. (It got confiscated at the U.S. customs. GRRRR!) But we finally ended up back at Arab St. It took us a while, but we eventually picked out what we wanted. Wyveta bought the rug she wanted, and we bought her a much less valuable smaller one as a Birthday/Mother's Day present. We bought a large rug for our den, 2 'runners', a blue rug that I just loved for our bedroom, and a purple shaggy rug for Hannah's room. The funny thing about my rugs is that I'm normally drawn to the most expensive thing in the room - even before I know the price. But as it turns out, I like the feel of the cotton rugs better than the silk or wool. Go figure.

So basically, after we got back from Thailand we walked for 3 days! At least it felt like it. It was worth it, but very tiring! I know the Percells were ready to sit down (on the plane) for awhile! Probably not 30 hours worth, but still....

I'm soooo glad they got to come, though! We really enjoyed having them. I told them they were 'breaking me in' as a tour guide. Now we know that hiking up Bukit Timah isn't worth it. (No view, and the only wildlife we saw was the monkeys in the parking lot.) We also know not to go to the Night Safari on a public holiday (insanely crowded!). And we know where the tourist bus stops at Botanic Gardens! :) And don't waste your money on the Bak Kwa unless you plan to eat it here. Fortunately, Alicia did get to eat some here.

So now that I'm all "broken in", it's time for the next round of visitors. Any volunteers?!?

(p.s. There are photos/videos on my facebook page. I didn't want to upload them twice.)