Arrival

I am in Singapore.  The flight was not too bad.  I was able to get aisle seats for both flights.  Virgin Airlines was quite good.  The plane was new and the seats were great.  I was able to use my Bose ear phones and was able to hear easily. 

Singapore Airlines which I took from LA to Japan (11 hours) to Singapore (7 hours) was very nice.  I had brought sleeping pills to help me rest.  They worked great.  I slept mostly.  When I could not sleep, I had access to several movies that I had not seen.  On the flight from Japan to Singapore, the flight was mostly empty, so I was able to stretch out over several seats.  I arrived in Singapore wired.  I unpacked when I arrived at the hotel. 

The hotel caters to an international group.  They serve breakfast from 6 to 10.  I of course are down there by 6:15 and sample many foods that I would never eat at home.  I have had different vegetables each morning with sea weed and mushroom that I don’t recognize.  I like the expresso machine which I visit several times in the morning.   Some dishes I have resisted sampling such as eel and cod.  I may get braver later.

The hotel sits near the Singapore River which carries a lot of mud out to sea.  I wonder if they know they are allowing their wealth to wash away. It poured rain during the morning of the first day and dripped much of the afternoon.  The air is soupy and mildly warm.  I am told that it is cooler than it has been.  Most of the population is away in July and starts to pick up in August; therefore, it is easy to get a cab.  Later, it will become more challenging and I will need to get the bus to get around. 

I have walked some along the river, but today I begin to look for apartments.  Liron who works at the school is advising myself and another new employee in find housing.  She is a charming Israeli with extraordinary competence.  It is fun to watch her handle technology.  She calls the agents for the apartments that we are looking at.  She is great at providing exactly what kind of information the agent needs to consider renting to us.  Best of all, she knows the areas that are most accessible to buses.  She said that with the rain, it was important to be near the busses because you could get drenched before you even made it to work. 

July 11

Today another school employee and I began the search for apartments.  The first one I looked at was great.  It is furnished and right in the center of the expat area.  It is expensive by our standards, $3200 per month.  The school will subsidize part of the money and it is within my means.  I am looking at a couple of other places as well. 

Most places in this area have strong security.  This building has a pass for each floor and no one can go to a different floor without permission.  I who have often not locked my doors am finding this a bit challenging to imagine. 

The other teacher is worried about finding a place within her range so she is looking at other sections of the city.  I went with her to China Town to look at two different places.  The first was similar to the poorest of tenements for $2300.  The agent who showed it drove a fancy Lexus and carried two separate phones.  He kept telling my Jewish friend that he had always wanted to go to Israel.  He would pat me on the shoulder and purr, “And how about you, Sara?  Are you looking for a place?”

He showed us two studios that were hardly bigger than my office at my last school.  One of the studios was in a large apartment that had been broken up into tiny, tiny studio apartments.  When we first walked in, we were taken with the huge central room.  It had a couch and granite floors.  The purring agent gently explained that, the only space the 3 studio tenants were allowed to use were their baby studio that was less than 200 square feet.   Later, my friend and I laughed about it.  Can you believe that they were charging over $2000 for a closet!

The hotel where we are staying has a buffet for breakfast and for dinner.  It is a great excuse to try all the new and different ways to eat.  Twice though I found the food too hot.  I am sampling things I would not have imagined eating.  While trying to avoid deep fried foods, I have had noodles, squid and many things that I could not pronounce.  I try to remember the ones that I liked so that I can ask for them in the future.  The foods have a very unique smell.  I will look for words to describe it.  Mostly, it just looks and smells different. 

I don’t know what the temperature is, but the humidity is very heavy.  You sweat just walking a short distance.  I plan on becoming accustomed to it because I will not have a car and will need to be out and about.  

July 13, 2014

Yesterday was an interesting day.  I visited the Arab Market in the morning after breakfast.   The market opens at 10 and all the shops are right on the edge of the very narrow pedestrian street.   Arab Street is famous for their fabrics.  There is a wide range of fabrics available.  Eventually I will probably need to get some linen and have some clothes made for me.  I am a big girl and there is little in this city that would fit me.

I am told that it is assumed that you will bargain for the price.  It is not my style to do that, but I am sure that I will learn from others.  There are great scarves and Malayian art that I am excited about.  All will wait until I am settled.

Food is, as often the case for people, is an essential part of the culture.  It has been a bit challenging for me. I have tried all kinds of foods since I arrived.  Chicken is the primary meat.  Beef cuts are often the poorer cuts of meat and are very chewy.  They have pork, but it is served less often.  Most dishes have a sauce on them.  I could do without the sauce.  I have figure out how to get my vegetables.  It is not a major part of the dishes.  I long for the vegetables.  My friend and I had a special toast from this area.  It is lightly toasted bread with coconut butter in between 2 slices.  It was tasty.

I rode the train/subway system yesterday.  It is very clean and fast, but it is also quite crowded.  I came out of the station on my return trip.  I was planning to catch a bus back to my hotel.  I got completely turned around and ending up in a very fancy, massive shopping mall.  I did not know where I was and it took me a while to find my way out.  I needed to take a taxi back to the hotel because I had no clue where I was.  When you take a taxi, you have to line up in a queue (pronounced kū).  Many people are out of the city this month because it is hot, but during the winter, the queue can have 15 people in it.  People are generally polite and wait in the queue, but not always. 

I miss you all. 

July 14, 2014

I am chafing under this period of waiting.   Not being a person who sits still without a clear agenda or purpose, I was having trouble pulling myself together to decide how to use my time. 

So I have been sitting in my room reading about the places to see in Singapore, the places to study tai chi, and the social networking for women.  The more I know, the better I can use the time here.  I found a section of the city that was once the ocean front where many of the houses and store fronts have been preserved.  It is fascinating that it is located miles from the shore now.  It is indicative of how much land has been reclaimed from the sea along the southern edge. 

I went to the Singapore Quaker Meeting yesterday.  The group is quite small.  There are two couples that regularly attend and a young Brit.   We had lunch at the center after meeting.  I was so conscious that I was of a different generation.  The others spent their lunch time staring at their phones and Ipads. 

The meeting was held at the Overseas Mission Institute.  It was explained that this is a starting point for missionaries going into China.  It serves all kinds of Christians coming in to be oriented to working in Asia.  The facility is beautiful and generally very quiet, but not this time because there were over 30 little kids with their families there.

Afterwards, I stopped at The Great City, a local shopping mall.  I wanted to price sheets and other items that I would need to buy.  I was amazed to realize that this mall had no department stores.  The stores that were not restaurants were mostly clothing stores.  There were a few specialty shops for phones and interior design.  I finally found a shop for just sheets, but they were over $200 for two sheets!  Ain’t going to happen.  As I looked around, I realized that this mall is like a social center much like the town center was when I was a child or how the King of Prussia mall is today.   It was in sharp contrast to the little shops on Arab Street that were still specialty stores, but shop owners run and less expensive.     

I was told by other expats that if I wanted sheets and other household items at a reasonable price, I would need to go to Ikea or to a giant crazy department story in China town.  More adventures.

The other day I saw a dish on the buffet that I could not believe.  It was steamed chicken feet in a special chef’s sauce.  At first, I just turned up my nose and went on, but before I left, my curiosity got the best of me.  I got a chicken foot out of the dish and put it on my plate and took a picture of it. 

My brother tells me that he remembers my mother cooking the feet of chicken that she killed for dinner.  I don’t remember that.  I do remember Thanksgivings at Grandmother Lisenby’s when all her son’s gathered to slaughter hogs. 

I remember that not a piece of those hogs went to waste.  The head was boiled and mashed for hoghead cheese.  The skin was boiled to make lard and skins, and the brains were cooked with the eggs (I didn’t eat them).   The pig’s feet were pickled. 

When I was in France, friends of mine ate pig’s feet at a very nice restaurant and loved them.  So my prejudice about eating an animal’s feet is based on the fact that it is out of my realm of experience, and it will remain so.  However, I am reminded that in many regions of the world that people do not have the luxury of just eating the prime parts of meat or more accurately, they have learned to enjoy them like my rural family in SC.  My tender stomach and I will decline this opportunity.