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.