Photo Dump

We were without internet for a period while we were moving, but that has been rectified!  Enjoy some random photos from various outings.

 

Family selfie!  Resting our feet at Istana Park, a narrow wedge of dense vegetation near the Dhoby Ghaut MRT stop in between errands.

 

View of a scampering Danger Monkey across the pond at Istana Park.  In Singapore pond ecologies it appears that turtles take the place of ducks, and koi take the place of turtles.  When Maxwell and I were at Har Paw Villa the fountains were sort of disconcertingly full of turtles.

 

Key hand-off for our condo took longer than anticipated, and by the time we were done the primary goal was to add calories to kids, so McDonalds it was.  Elizabeth and I both got the local menu item: The Nasi Lemak Burger.  Nasi Lemak is itself sort of a fast food experience, and consists of a serving of coconut rice with your choice of re-fried/re-heated additions chosen from a wide variety of options like cuttlefish balls, fried eggs, steamed vegetables, spicy fish cakes, and many other local delights.  The McDonalds version was a coconut chicken thigh, spicy sambal, fried egg, sauteed onions, and cucumber.  Delicious.  While looking up what was actually on it for this blog post I discovered that they've actually sold out, island-wide!  Glad we jumped on that crazy opportunity when we did.

 

Date night!  Hired a sitter with the help of our managed apartment and had drinks at the highest open-air bar in the world, at 1-Altitude at the top of Raffles Place.  62 stories up!

 

Another angle, looking out over the bay.

 

A giant Singapore flag being flown on it's way to do a helicopter formation fly-by as part of the National Day Celebration rehearsal that was going on at the floating stadium.  Yes, they were below us.  Roughly 30 seconds later the F-16 fly-by came back the other way and buzzed the building, roughly 100 feet over our heads.  Turns out fighter jets are very loud.  Probably louder than what you're currently imagining.

 

Hazy sunset.

 

The place gets pretty hip after the sun goes down. The live music had just started up, but we had to bail to find less ridiculously overpriced food.

 

Like Dry Soup!  This was actually from our farewell visit to our local hawker center the next day.  Elizabeth had spotted the Dry Soup sign and we had to know how that worked.  It was pretty astoundingly good.  Ther's fried anchovies and porkbelly in the noodles, and an absurdly savory pork-and-shellfish-based-broth with short ribs, prawns and some sort of crunchy rubbery thing. 

 

Children playing in moving boxes before the rental furniture arrived.

 

View from the large window in the previous picture, obviously several hours later.  This is about as much "view" as we have, which was a little disappointing compared to some of the units I looked at, however this was definitely the best space-to-value ratio that had a pool.  Singapore is not built for families of 5, and I'm just glad we were able to find something that worked for our family and our budget within walking distance of the kids school and convenient to the MRT.

New digs

We've moved!

We're now living at Kovan Melody, a condo complex in the Singapore heartland - as evidenced by the Heartland Mall across the street from us. This is to be our home for the next two years!

Once here, we got our air shipment - with much joy from the kids at being reunited with precious Legos, books, blankets, and dolls - as well as a delivery of some essential rental furniture (i.e. beds, dining set, couch) while we await our surface shipment.

And then, to the terror of Amelia and Maxwell, I cooked Michael and my traditional meal to celebrate our first night in a new home: lobster. I guess you can take the girl out of New England, but  you can't take the New England out of the girl.

Culture - Old and New

Subtitle: So many videos today!

It was another chock-full weekend spent on a combination of exploration, swimming pools, screen time, and attempting to assemble the facsimile of an adult existence (which is to say, I finally have an SG phone number and data plan).  We succumbed to the siren call of the local food center on Friday for dinner and got what has become our kid-friendly standard (satay, the best chicken wings I've ever had, and several varieties of dumplings) plus one new thing for the adults to try (a relatively tame roast pork dish this time).

Saturday was errands (acquiring footwear and mobile plans) in the morning, followed by our lunchtime/naptime/screentime/dinner routine, after which Amelia and I went out to explore the baybeats music festival, a free 3-evening line-up of Singapore-based musicians in the Rock/Metal/Punk genres.  It was pushed over the top by being adjacent to the floating stadium where they were holding the dress rehearsal for the Singaporean National Day celebration, complete with light shows, fireworks all across the bay, and the most insane coordinated drone display I have ever seen:

This was by far the most successful local music hunt I've been on thus far, and ended up with us bringing home a CD and a t-shirt for Amelia's new favorite band, SUPERSECT, which I choose to describe as "Shaolin Funk", and meant we had to have a conversation on the busride home about how I am trusting her to know the appropriate places to use, and not use, words that she learns listening to rock music.

By comparison, Maxwell and I had a much tamer Sunday morning when we explored Haw Par Villa, which is a sort of Dollywood-esque Buddhist/Confucian morality theme park built by one of the brothers that founded the Tiger Balm financial empire in the 1930's.  In addition to enormous concrete dioramas depicting various legendary battles, folklore, and fables, there is a long cavernous area that contains "The Ten Courts Of Hell" that illustrate with a surprising amount of detail the punishments meted out by King Qinguang based on each deceased sinner's misdeeds in life before they pass through the Wheel of Reincarnation to one of the six paths of Samsara.  The punishments are creatively horrible and painstakingly rendered.  Elizabeth warned me to maybe avoid it with Maxwell.  Maxwell insisted on going through it three times.  Here are some other pictures I snapped during our visit:

Not pictured: ponds thick with turtles and koi, underground pools and caverns, and various shrines and monuments to the Tiger Balm fortune.

Independence Day

Happy belated independence day!  We failed to make it to any of the expat celebrations (which were all weirdly on Saturday and also way out in the boonies), so we made our own fun.  Elizabeth and the kids met me downtown for our appointment at the Ministry of Manpower to complete our immigration processing, and afterwards we tromped through downtown towards Gardens By The Bay for a light show.  First, however, we had to stop for the traditional 4th of July sushi dinner:

 

We found a living wall that was also a map of the world and a pretty great reflective sculpture:

Followed by some scrambling on an artistically minimalist public play structure:

And then made it to Gardens By The Bay just as dusk was falling.  The SuperTree Grove is a collection of 8-16 storey dynamically illuminated sculptures covered in a variety of exotic (to Singapore) plant species that can grow without soil along the steel "trunk".  Every night there's a light show set to music, with a rotating theme that changes every few months.

The light show lasts about 15 minutes, and makes a surprisingly fine stand-in for fireworks.  The whole thing reminds me of something I'd expect to see at Burning Man, though the musical accompaniment would probably be something other than the showtunes medley we got.

Weekend Fun

We've gotten through the worst of the jet-lag and so decided to spend the weekend having social adventures!

We caught a dance performance at the outdoor theater at the Esplanade and Amelia has declared that Hokkaido Melon Ice Cream is now her favorite flavor ever.  Here's a photo of us walking back to the bus, where you can make out Amelia's new short haircut.

We also had a cookout with a co-worker and his wife (Adonis and Maria, from Cyprus by way of Dublin) at East Coast Park.  It was probably the most beautiful day I've seen yet in Singapore,  especially when we were hanging out in the shade with a breeze blowing in off the water.  The coastal scenery is a little surreal, as Singapore is the #2 busiest container ship port in the world (the rest of the top 5 are all in China), and the seascape looks more like an industrial city with all of the ships between us and some Indonesian islands.

After the cookout we went home for naps, and then met up with another family of Minnesota ex-pats .  We strolled around Bishan-Ang Mo Kio park and let all of our kids splash around in a water play area and eat cheeseburgers at a restaurant in the park, while the adults compared notes and tips about thriving in this part of the world.  Sunday we went back to the hawker center and experimented with family-style dining (more-or-less successful!) while the kids made friends with dogs and adults and ogled at the military aircraft fly-bys that were part of the National Day Parade rehearsal.