Saturday and Sunday, August 1st and 2nd

Saturday Donna walked up to the local grocery store and looked around, Bruce hung out at home. Gita made us chicken bryani--really good and we just chilled the rest of the day.

Sunday we spent with the Tays, attending their ward (Bedok ward, locals, not "expats"). While waiting for them to attend Bishopric Meeting and RS presidency meeting, we chatted with some of the members. It was fast Sunday and in RS one young mother of 3 was thanking ward members for their support while her "helper" (maid) was on her one month holiday. It was the first time she had been left without help. She was embarrased to tell us she had once forgotten to feed the baby and often forgot to get the children water. She had to do all the work herself and was so exhausted she couldn't even breathe correctly and couldn't make it to church the last couple weeks. Hmmm. A very different expectation of life.

After church, we went to the Tays home and spent the rest of the day. They invited the sister missionaries for dinner and included the woman lawyer who rented a room. Jane's mother is now living with them and suffering from dimentia. They have a helper for her since a week ago. That is the first time they have had a helper. The food was fabulous. James is quite a talker and knows about the politics in every country in the world it seems. It was a wonderful day. The missionaries walked with us to the bus and to the MRT. They were being transfered in the morning.

Friday July 31

Friday we went back to Chinatown to look up more souvenirs. Bruce had decided to have a shirt tailor made. He got 2. Not cheap of course but not expensive compared to America. At lunch there, Bruce had dragon fruit juice and that is the only picture we took that day. It was pulpy and sweet and brilliantly colored (no color added.)

Thursday July 30, 2009

Thursday morning we set out to visit Sentosa Island, described as a "recreational playground". It is off the southern tip of the main island and had been used as a British Military base until 1967. Every little thing has an entrance fee so we didn't go in all the attractions, e.g. the old fort or the aquarium. The island is restored to replicate the flora of the old Singapore and it has beaches to play in the ocean. It is protected by reefs, etc. and so there are no waves to speak of which are the main attraction of the ocean for me. We waded a bit but didn't swim. Some of the walks were closed for maintenance or reconstruction, along with about 25% of Singapore. Everywhere, "they are sorry for any inconvenience caused" but you can't go there anyway.

We took the MRT to the Harbor Front station, where Bruce looked closely at the map and determined that the cable cars at Mount Faber were just a little to the west of the MRT. I followed the leader and we walked and walked and walked along the freeway. "I think we should see it pretty soon." Until we ran out of sidewalk and turned back. (Remember how hot it is here.) As we got closer to the MRT I could see the Cable Cars and they indeed were about 150 yards west of the MRT. We had been walking east!

Cable Car to Sentosa

The Cable Car ride was a wonderful view but a short ride. Once there we went to the Butterfly Park which has displays of many insects and butterflies and an outdoor screened in area with many varieties of butterflies and a few birds with the plants they like. They put slices of bananas on leaves or on a feeding station for the butterflies to eat.

Sentosa Thursday July 30, 2009

After that we went on a free bus to the beach area. The trams to different beaches are also free. At one beach there is an observation tower reached by a suspension bridge, which is supposed to be the southernmost tip of Malaysia. (when Sings say "southern" they pronounce it as we say "south" and tack on the ern). One parking lot has a sign warning of peacock attacks to cars. I included a picture but you will have to maximize it to read it.

We ate dinner there and took the monorail Sentosa Express (free) to the MRT and home.

Little India (bwj)

We tend to sleep past 8 am here, sometimes even past 9am, but I think it was the former that morning, and near 8 am we had breakfast [sliced apples, sliced plums, a soy milk shake, toast with peanutbutter and cherry preserves, and scrambled eggs]; Gita makes sure we get lots of antioxidants in our diet here. I swam 1500m in the pool, and by the time I finished D and Gita were ready to go. Gita had put on a smashing sari: white with a gold border and some scattered embroidered flowers in pale blue [I think; these might be visible in one or another picture with her in it]. I thought it looked quite formal; when she left on her off-day, Sunday, to go into Little India, she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. So we were splendidly escorted this day. Gita's lilting speech is a kind of music, maybe more so because I don't always catch the words or the syntax (though well enough for all practical purposes), and she laughs often and readily.

I don't recall a lot of details from our Wednesday excursion to Little India. D says it's because I stood around a lot reading Lord Jim, and it's true I did a fair amount of that while she was shopping for whatever. We caught the bus at the nearest stop on Mt Sinai Rd, and rode it down to the MRT, changed from the green to the purple line, and rode past Chinatown to Little India. When Sir Stamford Raffles first set up the place he partitioned it for Chinese, Indians, Malays, and English, but it all looks pretty mixed wherever we've fone. I understand [I think from Julian on Monday] that there's a quota system in the public housing here, such that all the different ethnic groups are represented in the housing blocks. One of my strongest impressions here is that we fair-skinned, fair- or varicolored-haired, pale-eyed northern hemispheric people are the strange ones on the planet, the ones who don't look quite like the rest of the human species, the darker-skinned, black0haired, dark-eyed people. It's a shift in perspective.

Gita takes us to her world. (bwj)

Soon we had a snack/lunch at a small crowded restaurant where I had a samosa, and D had a sort of donut-like thing (not sweet), called vaida. I had my first samosa here at a stand near the ginger garden in the botanical gardens on Saturday: a palm-sized triangular pocket of something like flatbread filled with a mix of potatoes and herbs and vegetables [I don't know the ingredient list, but it's vegetarian]. With my first one I got some red sauce and some mustard. I infer that mustard here may often mean strong horseradish. I had the samosa in Little India without mustard. We also shared a tomato uthappen, which Gita smilingly called "Indian pizza"; it does sort of look like a small tomato pizza, but the crust is a kind of flatbread, soft and chewy, and you have a choice of three sauces to dip it in, two fairly mild and one hotter. I sipped from a "tender coconut" to cool my tongue; a peeled green coconut cut flat on its bottom and with a little cap cut off its top so you can insert the straw and sip the coconut water. I remember the Polynesian yard crews, when they arrived at our place in Laie to hack the shrubbery, would first take a "Samoan seven-up" break by knocking down some green coconuts and chopping their tops off with a machete to drink the cool water. A note here from Donna: none of the hawkers or small ethnic restaurants offer napkins. You just have to remember to bring some tissues and/or wipes. Most areas have a hand washing area, just a sink, separate from restrooms (if they have a RR).

After lunch we wandered and shopped some more, mostly in a huge place called Mustafa or, I think, One Store: everything you might think of, all in one building with many levels, on a corner or maybe it was the whole block and I didn't really learn its full extent. Here I did indeed, after trailing up and down many aisles, sit down on the corner of some steps and read Lord Jim while D and Gita looked at various tops and skirts. For a while, at Gita's suggestion, I browsed in the book department on the next floor up. It wasn't much of a book dept, but I did learn that two of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books are still on its bestseller shelf; and I skimmed a few random pages of something called "Succubus in the City," narrated by the succubus herself: it seems that if a mortal man can sufficiently please a succubus he may, at least temporarily, stave off being "delivered," whatever that is; I didn't really want to know, though I kind of did wonder if this guy Marten was going to survive his encounter with the succubus. Obviously she survives to tell the tale. But really, J. Conrad is a lot better, so I went back down the stairs and took up my previous post and resumed Marlow's account of his encounter with Jim during the court of inquiry on the Patna incident.

Perumal Temple (bwj)

After One Store, c 5pm or so, we stopped at the Perumal Temple, took off our footwear, and went into the forecourt. My Chacos, when I wore them for all the walking on Monday, had raised blisters on the outer edges of my heels, so the next three days I wore socks and shoes; thus, taking off both, I had also to wash my feet before entering the temple; those wearing sandals washed their bare feet, those keeping their socks on do not have to wash. We didn't stay long inside. I have only a vague sense of how this sort of sacred space is laid out, though it seems the space gets progressively more holy as you approach the central shrine of the god or goddess, where [I believe I understand] only the priests may go. At another temple we'd visited on Monday, as I came to the entry steps, a security officer seeing D's digital camera slung from my wrist had gestured "no pictures" by first holding his hands around his eyes camera-fashion and then crossing them at the wrists, at which I smiled and nodded and put the camera in my pocket. So at the Perumal Temple I kept the camera in my pocket, other than taking a picture of the gopuram [gate] with its sculptures of divinities enjoying their divinity. D took one of me putting my socks and shoes back on.

From there, as I recall, we went back to the MRT, boarded, changed at Outram Park to the green line, and rode back to Buona Vista to walk home. We stopped at the Ghim Moh Gardens market for a soy milk/herbal jelly drink Gita wanted us to try. Our supper was mostly leftovers from yesterday: Gita's fish-head stew with rice, and her excellent puri, which one can dip into any sauce or fill with whatever is on the plate, and which I prefer above all to spread cherry preserves on. Poor people used to eat fish heads, but now they are a delicacy. I admit that although the meat you can pry and probe from the head is, well, fish, I prefer the pieces of more normal-looking fillet. I think I was working with an upper jaw. This was one fish you didn't want to meet while snorkeling: teeth about the size and shape of cat-claws, looking like a cross between cat-claws and shark teeth. Still, this fish did not appear in my dreams.

Night Safari (bwj)

bwj here again

If it was Tuesday, we went to the Night Safari at the Singapore Zoo. Which means that we kind of lazied around Jens's place most of the day [except I did do another 1500m in the pool, which I know is less than a mile but it sort of feels longer because the pool is so long], and then about 3 PM we walked down to catch the MRT at Buona Vista. I think we are---or surely I am---getting better at using urban mass transit. (I should mention that I've occasionally had silly images of Jens riding his bike to work at least partly down the shoulders of narrow two-lane country roads. Ha. There aint none here. I thought I remembered him saying they lived somewhat outside the city; but there is no outside the city to Singapore that I've seen yet. Inside the city are places like the botanical gardens and the zoo, and the map shows nature reserves and some large reservoirs, but these are remnants of what once was either rainforest or perhaps plantations of various kinds--e.g. on Orchard Road there once were orchards.) These areas are owned by the military mostly.

Anyway, looking at a couple maps, I figured out the most likely place to stop on the NS MRT line and take a bus to the zoo, and I was right on: we took the EW Green Line a few stops west, changed to the NS Red Line, got off that a few stops farther north, waited a few minutes for a bus, got on that bus, and, as I guessed we could, and confirmed on the bus route map, landed right at the zoo. I should mention that Singapore transit is orderly and efficient right down to the queues [see pictures of the queue railings in the bus interchange: very smart]. Mass transit here is also very clean: you get fined for eating or drinking in a station or on a train or bus, though you can also ask at any station for accommodation for a small child or a person with a medical condition. I'd describe such laws here as rigorous but also humanly reasonable, especially considering the population density. I read the other day that 309 people had been fined in the past 10 days for eating or drinking on the transit system; but when you consider how many riders there must be every day--surely close to a million if not several million--this is a tiny fraction; people mostly obey these seemingly fussy laws because they make good sense. Plus the fines or penalties are severe and fitting: if you litter, you'll end up on the litter detail, cleaning up the litter on the beaches (I think Julian told us that).

At the zoo, we hung around a while, browsing, having a treat at Ben & Jerry's (yes, they're here too, and all proceeds of that store go toward the zoo's program), admiring some long-horned cattle (we're talking of spreads more than 2m here, formed like curved brackets). Then we queued up for the "Creatures of the Night" show in a small amphitheater. There was a fair amount of waiting in the queues at the zoo, I will say; I was glad I'd brought along my Oxford World's Classics edition of Lord Jim [pocket sized], and I think I read a short chapter or two during some of those waits. Not surprisingly there are constant warnings against camera flashes (and somewhat surprisingly more of them than you'd expect); our camera doesn't do night without flashes very well so there are no pictures. I particularly liked the Asian bearcat who waddled across a heavy rope suspended over our heads; and, at the end, the otters who put recyclable paper cups, soda cans, and plastic bottles into the proper containers. The lesson being: if they can learn that, so can we.

On the Night Safari itself (after more waiting in a queue, though I think I mostly watched the queue and didn't read much more LJ, which I've now read, or re-read for the first time since about 1968, about 40% of), of course the light was pretty subdued, crepuscular, or more properly lunar (some sort of electric lighting that simulated moonlight I think), so it was hard to see as much detail or color of the animals as one might wish. It runs through a series of habitats, from Himalayan foothills to Malayan rainforests to African savannas to South American rainforests. So many kinds of graceful deer or other ungulates, sometimes browsing close to the tram road. Hyenas both spotted and striped; and they're huge. Rhinos. Impressive Indian elephants. I could barely make out the lions. But I did see two huge tigers (not their stripes) pacing among the trees. A tapir is a huge beast too. And capybara are larger than I'd thought. The red dogs I'd never heard of before: they hunt in packs and can take down an animal many times their size. One thing some of us don't learn is not --or how not--to use flashes in the presence of animals at night; the tram ride guide had to interject repeated warnings, getting pretty stern before it finally stopped. Somebody at the back of the tram (3rd car back?) seemed to be using a spotlight, even.

We caught the same bus back (its route just makes a loop at the zoo), and I discovered a limit on my mass-transit savvy: I was expecting we'd go all the way back into the bus interchange, which is right next to the MRT station, but we didn't, we stopped on a street next to the MRT; luckily D saw the MRT and we got off when and where we should. I like the simplicity of the "EZ-link" card you use for the transit system, whether of the MRT or a bus: you just tap its face against a reader as you enter an MRT station or board a bus, and it tells you how much S$ [Singapore dollars or "sings" I think the locals say] you have on it, then tap again when you get off the bus or leave an MRT station, and it tells you again how much you have, subtracting the charge for the distance you've traveled; and the charges seem very modest to me, maybe particularly since the cab fares can add up so fast. We got back to Jens's place c. 10.15 that night, walking from the MRT station, taking a shortcut through the carpark of a housing block to get onto Ghim Moh Road, then another shortcut through the Ghim Moh Gardens market area (a hawker centre), following Ghim Moh through stepwise windings till it becomes Mt Sinai Road, soon coming to Mt Sinai Lane. We nod and smile and wave at the guard in the gatehouse.

I want to mention, too, that not only are transit staff unfailingly courteous, polite, and helpful, but Singaporeans generally seem to be. On Monday night, when we were getting back c 9 pm after our guided outing in Chinatown and other places, and were standing in the Buona Vista MRT station momentarily unsure, a young man passing us said "Escalators that way" and pointed the way to go. A bit later we found ourselves somewhat bewildered after coming out of the station and crossing through some construction and a pedestrian underpass. Gita had walked us down that morning to the station, but my memory of the route was vague at a couple of key points, and it seems always a bit tricky to remember a route in reverse when you've only done it once. Directed by one passerby, we went into a block of highrise housing, and I stopped to ask a young man and woman how to get to Ghim Moh Road; it seemed they didn't speak English, but a middle-aged man was also there, and said to just go through the carpark and we'd be on it and could follow it to Mt Sinai Road; I think he also suggested hailing a cab, but I knew we could walk it. As we came out the other side of the carpark into its entrance onto Ghim Moh, he overtook us and shepherded us across the road. From there, it was easy enough to find our way back. A weary way, I will say; I'm not usually on my feet and or walking so many hours of a day, back ine normal life.

Chinatown

Monday July 27, 2009

Our little red cell phone rang at 10 AM Monday morning. Jens was calling to check how we were doing before going to bed Sunday evening in Chicago. We were already on Mosque Street in Chinatown doing a little exploring. We had arrived on the MRT an hour early to meet Jane Tay and her 18 and 21 year-old sons, Joel and Julian. We would meet them at the Chinatown MRT passenger service boothe at 10:30. We had already walked along Temple Street, New Bridge Street, strolled briefly through the not yet active Chinatown street. The exit from the MRT opens right into Chinatown.

Jens was impressed that Bruce could now text message for cab. Bruce hasn't texted before.

Kaye and Lynn Garner know the Tays because they were in their ward while their 2 sons attended BYU. I contacted them by e-mail for advice about attending church and Jane invited us to spend a day with them exploring Chinatown, various Chinese foods and fruits, and the east end of Singapore.

We met up with the Tays, knowing immediately who they were (and they us) though we had never seen each other before.

Out in Chinatown, we explored shops, stopped to sample something kind of like Chinese jerky, bought a yam cake, sesame ball, barbecue filled dumpling (not wet, but dry and fluffy) and maybe some other stuff. We all shared a sampling of these. Jane wanted us to taste as many examples of Singapore Chinese food as possible. I decided to just explore the shops today and not buy much.

We saw a Buddhist Temple built in the 1800s and a Hindu Temple; you could take pictures of the temples if you bought a "license" for your camera, which we didn't.