💾 Archived View for gem.sdf.org › jquah › news › sing2015.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 14:03:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Visiting the family in Singapore for another New Year's holiday
My first day in Singapore since 2005 started with an uneventful passage through customs and immigration, then a swift retrieval of my check-in bag, whose Delta Elite identity card was still looped through the holes for a luggage lock, as if the security personnel had gone to extra lengths to put things back the way they found them, or had simply satisfied themselves with the perfectly harmless nature of my bag's contents as viewed through the X-ray scanner.
Mom was waiting just outside the secured area of the airport, while Papa had stepped away to use the restroom. I greeted Mom and let her watch my rolling bag while I went to the restroom myself. Reunited in the lobby, we distributed the bags and dutifully commented on the weather and the inappropriateness of my long-sleeve traveling wardrobe. A short wait in a taxi queue got us ready for the last leg of this late night journey.
Inside the Kent Vale apartments, I got a quick tour of the rooms that I had so far seen only on Skype. Mom dug up a travel tube of toothpaste for me and then joined Papa in a much-deserved rest. I still needed to unpack and take a shower before the idea of lying down in bed would lose its repulsiveness, but I tried not to wake anyone with the noise of splashing water.
I found it relaxing enough to lie stretched out on the bed, even if I couldn't fall asleep. The cramped position in which I had slept on the planes helped me appreciate the more spacious accommodations of a Kent Vale guest room.
I arose from bed around 5 a.m. and tried to familiarize myself with the light switches in the living room. Just one of the overhead lights was enough to set me up for continued reading of Nathan der Weise, which I had started on UA 803.
Mom and Papa emerged from their bedroom around 7:30, and I followed their lead in preparing a simple breakfast of cold cereal and juice.
Papa set me up with his laptop at the dining room table and then slipped out the door to start his work day while I caught up with emails from my own place of employment halfway around the world. By the time my email activity had come to a close, Uncle Remie and his two sons were awake and enjoying breakfast.
Mom took me on a tour of the amenities that come with university housing, starting with the pool and the fitness center. Then we walked to the West Coast Park and the nearby shopping center, armed with a list that included swimming trunks and a circular tablecloth. We also picked up a fresh supply of milk and cereal from the Cold Storage in that shopping complex.
A poorly indexed contact list on Mom's mobile made it difficult to connect with Papa and arrange to meet for lunch, but somehow the message managed to get through, and we found him waiting for us at the base of the bridge to University Town.
In the food court Papa put on a hard act to follow, by ordering in fluent Malay a plate of wide noodles, okra, and beef with sambal. Mom and I had to settle for pointing at the dishes we wanted and nodding or shaking our heads if the server sought confirmation of our choices.
The spicy lunch would have sat uneasily in our stomachs if we had gone on a lengthy tour of the NUS cultural arts museum, so it was a blessing in disguise to find the museum closed, just for this one day seemingly picked at random from an otherwise ordinary week.
Back in the apartment we changed into swimming trunks and then went down to the pool on the ground level. Mom thoughtfully packed a book for the pool- side lounge chairs, as well as two towels. I didn't last long in the water, having forgotten after ten years on dry land how to coordinate my muscles to move around in the pool. A few laps was about all I could handle, and then I sat in the lounge chair to catch some shut-eye.
Before I could jettison the swimming trunks and wash off the chlorinated pool water, Uncle Remie recruited me to give Daryl some help with his math review. We worked on geometry calculations for about an hour.
By now we had heard back from Katherine that she wouldn't be visiting for dinner tonight, so it fell to me to help Mom bake another batch of gingerbread cookies. Measuring and mixing was the extent of my help, and then I excused myself to take a shower while Mom shaped the balls of dough and sent tray after tray through the oven.
Papa came back from work surprisingly early, intending to take a power nap before dinner. I followed his example and slept a little bit myself, starting around 5:30.
Dinner at 6:30 began for four of us with a salad, but I brok the afternoon fast with a plate of the meat pie because a trip to the bathroom made me miss the opening course. Mom cheerfully rectified the omission by offering a bowl of salad, minus the tomatoes that had just been used up. The meat pie proved big enough to give each of us at least two servings, after which we needed some time to digest before plunging into dessert: a coarse-grained sugi cake baked by Aunt Claire back in Malaysia.
By the end of the meal I had enough energy only for a short session of computer work, so joining Mom and Papa for their scheduled squash game at 9:00 was out of the question. At 8:55 I locked the door behind them and then lay down to enjoy a proper night's sleep.
Segmented sleep made it difficult to give a definitive answer to the question of when I woke up this morning. Suffice it to say that I finished Nathan der Weise some time between 4:00 and 5:30, then napped for a little while before finally starting breakfast at 6:00. I made enough hot water for 2.5 mugs of tea, drinking all but one mug myself and leaving the rest for the first person to emerge from my parents' bedroom. Papa's sore throat this morning justified his receiving the leftover hot tea.
After Papa left for work, Mom and I spent a couple hours on our computer tasks, including sending out invitations to the Christmas open house event. At 10:00 we set out for the West Coast shopping center. To our surprise the sporting goods store hadn't yet opened even by 10:30, so we wandered around the rest of the shopping complex and across the pedestrian overpass to try accomplishing the other shopping tasks first.
A fruit vendor's stand caught my eye, after Papa's comment about tropical vegetation had primed me to look out for exotic shapes and colors of fruit. Disappointed by the lack of variety in the banana offerings, I gravitated toward the three piles of starfruit arranged prominently on the vendor's table. An amusing round of talking past one another ensued as Mom tried to pry out of the vendor the weight or count of each pile he was selling for three dollars.
With a bag of starfruit finally in hand, we continued around the block looking for any place that might sell tablecloths or Christmas decorations. After a few false starts we finally ran into a rack where hung many rows of packages clearly labeled "tablecloths." Finding a package marked "round" with the right dimensions, we then proceeded inside to the cashier and inquired about whether bike locks were to be found in the store as well. Another instance of Mom's question getting misinterpreted played out even here, as "bike lock" transformed into "bye-gone" on its way through the ears of our interlocutor. Meanwhile I had gone into the aisles for a quick visual scan, managing to locate a few models of cable lock while the cross-cultural confusion proceeded in the background.
Now encumbered by two bags from our costal shopping adventure, we made our way back to the indoor mall on the other side of the highway, where the sporting goods store had finally opened for business. This store's proprietor had less difficulty understanding the object of our search (or we had gotten better at making ourselves understood), so the choice of a tyre pump from a rather limited selection wrapped up our morning shopping adventure.
Back in the 9th storey flat, Mom guided me through the menu of leftovers as we decided on lunch. Slices of starfruit provided plenty of moisture to quench our thirst, but not as much sweetness as the denser tropical fruits. Following up this appetizer with leftover spaghetti and crackers with peanut butter, I initiated a shutdown sequence that would soon land me in bed for a solid 3-hour nap.
Also contributing to the need for a nap was the afternoon visit to the fitness center, which for me began with 15 minutes on the rowing machine.
While I slept the afternoon away, Mom went out for some groceries and cooked a soup. We still weren't entirely certain how many mouths would be at the table this evening, so a soup offered more flexibility in terms of distribution and clean-up.
Our last task of the day would involve yet another trek down the hill of Clementi Woods, this time to take two mountain bikes off the hands of Papa's old friend Hoon Eng. The skies had not yet cleared up after the thunderstorms that ended my nap, so we took umbrellas with us as we left the flat. Too lazy to put on rain-appropriate footwear, I gave my toes a bad abrasion against the velcro straps of wet sandals. It felt less painful to pedal the mountain bike in these sandals, so I was grateful for wide, flat, and well-lit footpaths on at least part of the return trip back to Kent Vale.
Still on a slightly erratic sleeping schedule, I found myself wide awake at 2:30 this morning, eager to test out a few of the leads my web browsing had turned up yesterday. While online I also took note of the newly-posted full-time faculty opening in the Montgomery College mathematics department, so I double-checked my backup disc to make sure that recent versions of cover letters and resumes were still readable.
An early morning snack of crackers with peanut butter made more noise than desired. To reduce the noise in future such snacking events, I discarded the stiff plastic inner wrapper that had housed the crackers, transferring the remaining crackers into the cookie tin.
Instead of trying to fall back asleep, I continued working at the computer, passing the hours until Mom and Papa were awake and ready for breakfast.
This morning Mom and I set out with the intention of buying two bike helmets, now that we have Hoon Eng's old mountain bikes at our disposal. Slow learners that we are when it comes to Singapore's retail shopping schedule, we arrived at the bike shop before it opened to customers. At my insistence, Mom pulled out her iPhone map and tried to determine how far it was to Jurong Bird Park. We continued on foot for a while to see how my energy level would hold up, but the drab industrial landscape spoiled for me the prospect of an extensive trek to the west.
Turning around and keeping an eye open for more welcoming footpaths to the waterfront, we made our way back to Clementi Woods. Shortcuts through unfamiliar housing complexes brought us to a curious set of outdoor fitness equipment, which we tried briefly before entering the adjacent Sheng Siong supermarket. In the supermarket aisles it proved hard to find the red wine vinegar on Mom's shopping list, but an extensive selection of snack foods on the second storey managed to fill that pontentially empty space in our shopping bags.
Upstairs in the flat we unpacked our groceries and then put together a simple meal using leftover soup and cold cuts.
In the wake of violent afternoon thunderstorms, I didn't want to do any outdoor exercise, so I convinced Mom to introduce me to the sport of squash. We ended up playing two games, interrupted by a break to fill up our water bottles. On the way back to the flat we were spared from the exercise-negating effects of an ice cream snack by the coincidence that both of us had neglected to pack any money.
Katherine Chinn came over for dinner this evening, marking the first such reunion of our nuclear family since her wedding in 2011. Arriving in Kent Vale without her husband in tow, she was unpressured to voice any protest when stereotypes of Peranakan wives emerged from Papa and Bibiana's conversation.
Sleeping straight through from 9:30 to 3:45 migght be taken as a sign of progress in the fight against jet lag, but without a few more days of data it's too soon to draw any conclusions. At least this morning I managed to delay my breakfast until almost 6:00, thanks in part to the diversion offered by The Lieutenant, a library book Mom had recently finished and recommended.
Another diversion presented itself in the form of a job application, now that the full-time opening in the Montgomery College math department had finally been posted online. I modified some of the materials I had used last summer when applying to the CUA clinical instructor position, but even with this head start there were several hours' worth of revising and reformatting that I could do before getting bored. I interrupted this work shortly before 6:00 for breakfast, unaware that Papa wouldn't emerge from bed until almost an hour later, at which point the extra tea I had made would be getting cold.
After Mom finished a load of laundry this morning, I put my computer work on hold and joined her for a trip using the public transportation. We had a couple library books to return at the Clementi branch, so we caught the 183 bus in that direction.
We dropped off the books in the slot and then looked for Christmas decorations at Japan Home. Put off by the unexpectedly high price of the string of flashing LEDs, we bought tinsel and a fringed banner and then rode the train to City Hall. The rain was coming down more heavily by the time we alighted, but now more shops had opened their doors, giving us plenty to see without needing to step through puddles or wet streets.
We visited another library branch at Esplanade, pausing along the underground walk to observe the art installations and wishing spheres. The Esplanade library branch housed mainly the works pertaining to the performing arts, including DVDs, audio CDs, and sheet music. Mom and I each picked out a DVD about South African history, so we'll have at least two nights of movie watching in store for us this week.
Navigating back through the underground passages, we finally found the City Hall food court, where an abundance of choices made it difficult to settle on a single vendor. From a "tea master" vendor Mom ordered a three treasures meal for herself and a green tea broth with fried brown rice for me. Meanwhile I went to the juice vendor in the center of the food court and got a lemonade and a mango drink.
Following lunch we went outside into what was now a somewhat lighter rain, and with proper footwear the short walk to the Peranakan museum turned out not so unpleasant. Inside the museum we hung up our umbrellas and then worked through the galleries while our savory lunch worked its way through us.
Reversing the route we had taken to get to the museum, we arrived back at Kent Vale shortly before 3:00. Of course on this outing we had packed money in our pockets, so a detour to buy ice cream at the Cold Storage could easily be indulged. Unfortunately this heavy snack had the effect of knocking me out for the rest of the afternoon, and I slept straight through the dinner that Mom had intended for at least three people.
As I would later learn today, I wasn't the only one to have missed out on Mom's lentil soup while it was still hot off the stove. Apparently the sleeping Papa that we found upon returning from the museum yesterday had been in that state since 11 a.m. and wouldn't awake until 9 p.m. That knowledge would only be shared later today. Meanwhile at 1 a.m., fully rested after 11 hours in bed, the pot of soup cooling on the stove left little indication of how many people it had already served. I helped myself to a large bowl, not caring whether I was the second person to taste it or the fourth, fifth, ...
After this late dinner, I stayed up working on my Montgomery College application and the Kate Grenville novel. For a bit of exercise I climbed a chair to hang up the Christmas decorations Mom and I had found yesterday at Japan Home.
A less cloud-covered sky today encouraged us to go out for a bike ride in West Coast Park. There we encountered a few of Mom's Indian friends, including the one who had suggested taking together a class on R but then didn't follow through. The trails in the park passed sometimes under the shade of broad-leafed trees and sometimes under open skies, but at this early hour I wasn't too worried about not having applied any sunblock.
The weight of the mountain bikes made even a ride on flat ground into a strenuous workout, not to mention the task of carrying them uphill through Clementi Woods. Again responding to the absence of thunderclouds, Mom suggested a refeshing swim to help unwind from the sweat-inducing bike ride.
My two swims since starting this vacation must appear little more than an extended bath to the tropical natives, whose familiarity with the water lets them remain in the pool long after I've dried off, taken a shower, and changed into street clothes. Maybe I'll build up the stamina for twenty laps by the end of my month here.
Papa excused himself from a 1-month birthday party out of concern that his illness might spread to the baby. I opted to stay home too, citing the potential for awkwardness since I didn't know any of the hosts. It fell to Mom to represent the family at the luncheon/birthday party.
Shortly after Mom left for a pre-party stop at the library, Uncle Remie started cooking a fish soup. He included brown rice, ginger chunks, diced celery, and raw egg (cracked open into each bowl after a serving was ladled out). The fish bones proved too difficult for the chef to separate completely from the flesh, as Papa and I discovered when chomping down on certain spoonfuls of the delicious soup. Remie apologized and suggested we use a different species of fish for the next soup.
Katherine was planning to come over this afternoon to help bake cookies and angel squares. Now that at least two of the Quahs had stayed home from the luncheon, Katherine was free to show up at any time, even if Mom was still out. But there still remained a few ingredients we needed to purchase, so Papa and I took a walk to Sheng Siong.
Baking Project Shopping List
No energy remained for watching a movie after the four-course dinner. Papa and I retired early, each hoping that the extra sleep would help combat our respective illnesses.
Jet lag continues to afflict me, as my early rising in the 2 o'clock hour illustrates. I spent some time on the computer tagging audio files and then dived deeper into the Daniel Silva spy thriller that I had started last night.
When steeping tea to accompany this morning's breakfast, I opted to make sweetened iced tea out of the leftovers, rather than leaving an extra mug on the counter to become lukewarm by the time Mom or Papa would get to it.
Having recently rewatched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, I recognize in my own responses to my temporary home some of the quirky behaviors so believably portrayed by the characters in the movie:
This afternoon Papa took me shopping at Vivo City, a heavily trafficked mall built out from the World Trade Center. His former employer DuPont still maintains a small tenancy there, but most of the space is rented out to retail shops and restaurants.
We failed to settle on a gift for Aunt Jo, but the comparison shopping for Christmas decorations helped us appreciate better the string of 300 LEDs being offered at discount by Japan Home. That along with two more sashes of tinsel and the extra weight from our ice cream/coffee snack constituted the entirety of our catch from this expedition to the harbour front.
We made it safely to the shelter of the Kent Vale apartment complex just as a heavy downpour began. While the rain continued steadily, Papa took a nap and I visited the fitness center to make worthwhile the shower that this afternoon's sweating necessitated.
An unintended side effect of this trip to the gym was a 7 p.m. bedtime that had me missing dinner. Sharing a movie with Mom and Papa would now have to be postponed yet another day.
Jet lag is almost behind me, if the solid sleep until 4:45 this morning is any indication. Papa, however, continues to suffer from a sore throat and other flu-like symptoms, for which he has scheduled a visit to the university health center this morning.
Mom and I followed Papa's path shortly after he left, but we continued through campus and entered the subway system at Kent Ridge. A quick ride on the circle line brought us to the Botanical Gardens.
From the MRT station we made our way through the park, stopping occasionally to take pictures. The glare from direct sunlight on the iPhone screen made it difficult to navigate the options of the picture-taking app, yet another illustration of the trade-offs that are made for the sake of packing more functionality into smaller devices. Dedicated knobs and buttons, at least, would help our fingers acquire muscle memory for those times when vision is compromised.
One part of the gardens where glare was not an issue nevertheless presented little in the way of photogenic material. The evolution garden, as it was called, offered instead an educational tour of the history of life on Earth, demonstrated by the different species of plants that thrived in various geological eras. Having seen the entire history of our living planet compressed into a walk spanning just a few hundred square meters, we bought ourselves a counterargument to the charge of having missed out on any particular highlight of the park.
Exiting the Botanical Gardens onto Napier Road, we walked to the Ion shopping center on Orchard Road. We found two bike helmets in white and silver, whose bulky packaging made for an unwieldy trek to the food court in the basement of the mall. There we ate beef noodle soup, and I collapsed one of the cardboard baxes in which the bike helmets were packed. With this slightly less bulky load, we made our way to Kinokuniya for more Christmas shopping.
From Orchard Road station we took the MRT to Clementi. Rather than catch the bus back to Kent Vale I insisted on being shown the walking route, which afforded us the chance to pick up some groceries and cold drinks from Sheng Siong.
Two games of squash followed by a cold shower got me cleaned up enough to start making a spinach and split pea curry. Mom and I each washed down the spicy dinner with an ice cream bar, but Papa wisely refrained so as not to further compromise his immune system.
From the perspective of a library patron whose DVD rentals are due back after seven days, letting the last free evening this week pass us by with no movie watched puts more pressure on us to do our movie viewing during the daylight hours. Even though Mom has gotten used to borrowing periods of at least two weeks in the Singapore library system, she received my suggestion of a movie right after lunch with enthusiasm.
It was lucky for us that the movie Cry Freedom lasted nearly two and a half hours, for it kept us indoors while a thunderstorm dumped rain on our locality. When we finally did emerge from the flat to make our way to the Bayfront MRT, the clear skies for the remainder of the day allowed us to keep our umbrellas stowed away throughout the evening adventures.
Gardens by the Bay has a free collection of outdoor gardens and two indoor collections for which you need to buy a ticket. We stayed outdoors for the first hour of our visit, Mom with her head in a book and me with my head on the bench, trying to get some rest in anticipation of a long night ahead.
When I finally arose from the awkward sleeping position, there remained only enough time for one ticketed attraction before our scheduled rendezvous with Katherine and Brian Chinn under the supertrees. We opted to see the Flower Dome, in which thousands of plants from various climates are arranged for easy viewing along either side of a gently sloping walkway that rises and falls like a mountain path. Mom found the plants and the informative placards endlessly fascinating. For my part the people watching provided just as much material for observation, from the variety of language being spoken to the different behaviors involving smartphones and cameras.
Thanks to the convenience of smartphones, Mom and Katherine eventually coordinated our rendezvous on the sidewalk outside the Supertree dining facility. From there we began our walk out of the park, pausing to look up when the music and light show grabbed our attention.
Katherine and Brian led us along the guard-rail-less Dragonfly Walk to the bridge back to the Bayfront MRT. From there we ascended an escalator into the luxury shopping center called Marina Sands. Mozza Pizzeria, where we had a reservation starting at 8:30, was in fact able to accommodate us earlier than that, thanks to Papa's absence under the influence of heavily sedating medicines.
Mom, Katherine and I shared a salami salad, while Brian whetted his appetite with pizza-flavored crackers. Mom, Katherine and Brian each ordered a pizza, while I selected roast duck with lentils (the special dish of the day). After the meal Katherine gave us a box of chocolate truffles, adding a little extra weight to the bag that already carried an unneeded umbrella.
Two baking projects, one on either side of Remie's sausage soup, kept us occupied inside the apartment until mid-afternoon. Interspersed with these kitchen activities were sessions with our books, Mom working through another Kate Grenville novel while I jumped into The Housekeeper + The Professor by Yoko Ogawa.
Once the brownies were out of the oven and cooling, Mom and I walked to the NUS tennis courts to fend off cabin fever. On Christmas Eve most of the courts were empty, so we were able to put a comfortable distance between us and the nearest other players.
If the sky hadn't started to turn black by the time we returned from tennis, we might have gone for a refreshing swim. Instead we spent the rest of the evening at home, using Papa's illness as an excuse not to attend Uncle John's Christmas Eve party.
A much-delayed dinner at 3:00 this morning, followed by the conclusion of the Yoko Ogawa book, satisfied enough of the bodily and spiritual needs to allow me a comfortable second sleep filled with vivid dreams about an underground lair and a party of explorers. Upon waking a second time at 6:30, I had a quick breakfast, leaving plenty of time to dally around before the family would head out to church.
Getting to Saint Teresa's for mass involved two buses starting from the bottom of the Clementi Woods hill. We transferred at Vivo City on the outbound leg of the trip, and I thought another such transfer was in order when Papa ushered us off the bus on the return trip. Instead, we stepped into Vivo City to have lunch at Mos Burger, giving us fuel for a long nature walk along the waterfront. We spotted two monitor lizards, the most that Papa has ever seen in that part of Singapore.
Back in civilization, we caught the 51 bus on Pasir Panjang Road and returned to the bus stop opposite Clementi Woods. A short climb up the hill brought us to the flat, where the Laws were getting ready for lunch and opening Christmas presents.
With Uncle Remie's help we managed to uncork the bottle of sparkling peach drink, which we shared among five people. Remie also pushed on us some of his leftover white wine, now that the wine glasses were already in use.
While the Law boys busied themselves with building a solar-powered model car from the kit they had gotten for Christmas, Mom and I went for a swim in the pool. This time I had enough stamina for seven laps, so maybe the goal of twenty laps by the time I leave is more attainable than I thought.
Once we were dried off and changed into clean clothes, Mom and I started baking a pecan pie using the last of the three bags of pecans I had brought from Maryland. We left it on the dining room table to cool and then started chopping vegetables for a stir-fry that would use up lots of leftovers.
The company of all four Laws helped us polish off what we thought was a rather large volume of food. Less quickly did the clean-up go, however, leading to some tense exchanges in the awkward space between the end of the main meal and the beginning of dessert.
Even watching a movie after dinner got off to a rocky start, as the Pioneer DVD player continued to reject our disc for region incompatibility reasons. Papa ended up moving into the living room the media system that had been hooked up to his bedroom TV.
Heavy rain throughout the day was accompanied by a persistent hiccup that I attributed to a mug of hot chocolate milk taken with breakfast. Even when one of these inconveniences let up for a while (as the rain did when Mom and I walked to the Clementi Mall to return library books), the other one continued to trouble me.
After our visit to the library, Mom and I enjoyed lunch from an Indonesian vendor in the food court. Mom ordered nasi lemak, while I had a bowl of mee rebus. The heavy spices probably didn't help my stomach settle down from this morning's hiccups.
We postponed getting drinks to wash down our lunch until after checking out the Yamaha music store (for a digital piano) and the art supply store opposite. Even this detour wasn't long enough for the rain to pass, so umbrellas proved necessary on the short walk to the FairPrice supermarket.
We took the pedestrian overpass to the side of the street where a bus for the return trip would stop. Buses numbered 185 and 184 passed us first, and then we boarded the 183 bus when it pulled up next.
A half hour of digesting lunch and the pecan pie dessert seemed sufficient pause before a workout in the fitness center. Mom joined me at the weight machines, free weight stations, and the aerobic machines. I went upstairs first, though, hoping to find the bathroom unoccupied so as to take a quick shower.
It turned out that not all of the ingredients Mom thought we had for a spaghetti dinner were actually in the cupboard, so Papa went out for a shopping trip at the nearby Cold Storage. When he got back, though, Uncle Remie had already commandeered the kitchen for a prawn-based spaghetti sauce (which, Daryl claimed, had the flavor and consistency of tom yum soup).
Still not yet recovered from the mental exhaustion of socializing on such a large scale last Saturday, I had little enthusiasm for the prospect of immersing myself in a noisy crowd of tourists on Sentosa Island today. While I ended up just going with the flow, the flow whipped us past the aquarium exhibits at such high speed that we arrived at the ocean dome wondering whether we had gotten our money's worth. (In sharp contrast, touring the Washington DC zoo during the winter months grants you wide, uncrowded footpaths and the full attention of the zookeepers, who have much fewer human guests to contend with.)
The high volume of tourists proved challenging to the gatekeepers at the aquarium entrance, too. I must have appeared invisible at the rear of a clump of people, because my ticket never got scanned even as I held it out to the gatekeeper. All afternoon I would be looking for opportunities to give away the ticket so somebody else could benefit.
Too jaded from the overstimulation of the past week, I had difficulty cultivating the necessary sense of wonder to fully appreciate the displays of teeming marine life. When Mom pointed out the "synchronized swimming" of a school of fish, which changed directions as if following a conductor's baton, I couldn't help but see a parallel in the way our own species coordinated its movements to get through the twists and turns of the aquarium in an efficient manner.
It was around noon when we wrapped up our tour of the aquarium and set our minds to the task of deciding on a venue for lunch. The authenticity of the local interpretation of American cuisine could be best established by visiting a franchise of the Chili's chain, although the nearby South American restaurant also looked appetizing. The apparent price difference drove us to Chili's in the end, where we had tortilla chips, egg rolls, and mango chicken salad. The picture of hot chocolate cake on the dessert menu looked delicious, but we still had plenty of leftover desserts at home, so we opted simply to pay the bill for our three main courses.
Also among the leftovers from Saturday's party were two large containers of mee goreng. Mom tried to convince Katherine to ride with us to Kent Vale and take back one of the mee goreng containers to her home with Brian. In the event, Katherine stuck with her alleged plan of a quiet home-cooked dinner and alighted the bus across from her condo on Pasir Panjang Road.
Back in the Kent Vale flat, I donned my headphones in front of the 14-inch laptop screen and watched August Rush, so as to fill the two-hour gap between our return from Sentosa and the arrival of Louise and Paul (who would take us to dinner at The Curry Wok) with something other than a nap.
Thanks to the late bedtime last night after staying up to watch The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I slept straight through until Bryan and Uncle Remie started their morning toilet in preparation for seeing Bryan off to work.
For breakfast I toasted two slices of bread, topped with American peanut butter and Scottish berry preserves. Then, seeing the ripe bananas that were attracting ants and flies, I pulled out two mixing bowls and started to make chocolate banana bread. Around the same time Papa entered the kitchen to fix himself some breakfast, leaving me one banana short for my intended recipe. Improvising with a little extra orange juice to make up for the flavor deficit, I put the pan into the oven and hoped for the best.
I wouldn't learn until much later how the baking experiment turned out, because we were about to embark on a full day adventure in the untamed lands on the northern coast of Singapore. Our first stop: River Safari.
Papa plotted a route to River Safari that involved two bus-train transfers and one train-train transfer. A misinterpretation of his remark about the LRT while on the elevated train to Choa Chu Kang led to my standing alone on the LRT platform while Papa and Mom had already passed through the gates headed toward the bus interchange. Papa re-entered the station to fetch me from the LRT platform, and we resumed our journey to River Safari.
Although some of the aquatic vistas on display felt like a repeat of what Mom and I had seen at the Sentosa aquarium, this park emphasized freshwater life. A few of the world's rivers were represented only by walls of text and color photos, but at least the Mississippi, Ganges, Mekong, and Amazon rivers had living exhibits. One organism in particular captivated me and Papa with its grace and "limbless" locomotion. The giant freshwater stingray, which generates a wavelike undulation in its body, had apparently been discovered only twenty years ago!
For $5 each we got to board a boat that took us past some species that thrive near the banks of the Amazon river, starting with the collared peccary. True to the disclaimer at the ticket office, some of the beasts were nowhere in sight as the boat proceeded past their roaming areas on the Amazon River Quest. I would make up for failing to see a live giant anteater by getting an anteater T-shirt from the gift shop at the end of our visit.
We ate lunch at the River Safari Tea House next to the welcome center. Two vegetarian dishes and a slab of ground-up-and-reconstituted meat helped us put some cognitive distance between the animals we had just seen alive and the dead animals that provided our mid-day sustenance. Two pots of hot tea, an ice-cold Diet Coke, and lukewarm bottled water that we had been carrying since Kent Vale, if they didn't make their way out of our pores as sweat, settled in our bladders to grant us the pleasure of faux-outdoor micture events at the half-open toilets in Sungei Buloh.
Sungei Buloh wetlands reserve, famous for its migratory birds and monitor lizards, did not disappoint on the latter (we counted 11 on our walk through the park), but birds were in short supply at this time of year. Maybe they were scared off by the loud music being played by Malaysians across the water celebrating the New Year. At least the mudskippers and crabs, with their more limited range, came out in greater numbers. Their friskiness made a neat contrast to the laziness of all the monitor lizards except one, who crept across a 20-m stretch of mud in search of food.
The return trip again made use of Choa Chu Kang interchange, except this time we transferred to another bus instead of boarding a train. From the bus we got a ground-level view of what Papa called "the heartland of Singapore," a more affordable area where ordinary people live.
An early evening workout in the fitness center put the finishing touch on an active day. A well-earned shower provided the only overhead dose of water on this unusually rain-free day.
Last night I chose a regular bedtime over an irregular dinnertime, despite Nassim Nicholas Taleb's contention that the body actually benefits from a bit of randomness in its refueling schedule. The exhaustion from a full day of activity helped me sleep soundly until 3:45 this morning. By that time, the dinner that Mom and Papa had left out for me had already been sitting at room temperature for at least six hours, and even before that it had undergone one heating and cooling cycle. I would not have been surprised at a high toxin and pathogen count if a microscope had been aimed at the plate of food I ended up calling breakfast.
Chasing after squash balls in attempts to return Papa's tactically-placed shots could only further agitate a stomach that was trying to digest a partially-poison breakfast. I felt a wave of nausea that forced me to quit after only two games. I went upstairs, took a shower, and tried to resist any vigorous activity for at least a few hours.
In contrast to New Year's Eve, which is still a regular business day in this workaholic country, today we could expect to encounter crowds wherever we went once we left the flat. Staying inside the rest of the morning gave us time to be more deliberate in our choice of where to go.
My suggestion to see Mockingjay Part I on the big screen was met with enthusiasm, thanks to the interest piqued by our recent rental of the Catching Fire DVD. There would be a 3:20 showing of the film at the Orchard Road Cathay cineplex, which Papa said lies within easy walking distance of Fort Canning Park. Our ten-year-old Singapore map made it seem as if [1]that vacation's trip to the Asian Civilizations Museum would have taken us right past Fort Canning, but Papa insisted that we never climbed to the summit. So at 1 p.m. we set out down the hill of Clementi Woods to catch our first bus of the new year.
The 143 route held no surprises for me until we passed St. Teresa's church, at which point I was now being introduced to new streetscapes. Papa pointed out the apartment where Katherine had made her first home, as well as the storefronts and street markets of Chinatown.
We alighted the bus near the Dhoby Ghaut MRT station and strolled to Orchard Road, ducking into the Hawpar Centre to avoid what would turn out to be the only real rain on another relatively dry day. The Cathay cineplex closest to Dhoby Ghaut station actually wasn't showing Mockingjay, but the box officer suggested we try the other Cathay cineplex deeper inside the Orchard Road shopping district. Papa knew which direction she meant, so we took an unplanned walk past the presidential palace and found the cineplex right next to Uncle John's hotel.
The unplanned walk had given us an appetite, so after buying movie tickets we stopped at a Japanese restaurant for snacks and cold drinks. The restaurant's seating and plentiful natural light gave me the opportunity to continue reading the Tracy Chevalier novel that I had started after our last visit to the Clementi library.
The seats available when we bought tickets did not include three together at a comfortable viewing distance, so we had to sit apart as we enjoyed the movie. Despite the warning in one of the reviews Papa read, the movie didn't seem to end on a cliffhanger. None of the main characters' lives was up in the balance, and the exchanges of violence had come to a temporary standstill while each side reassessed its position. There were plenty of more suspenseful places to end the movie, but then the director would have been taunting the audience just as Katniss had sent Buttercup scampering after the moving spot illuminated by a flashlight.
After the movie we retraced our steps back to Fort Canning and explored the non-restricted parts of the hill. We descended the hill onto the street where Mom and I had visited the Peranakan museum, only this time the lack of rain gave the street a more cheerful color.
Papa navigated us toward the Singapore River via the Armenian Church, beside which I popped open the can of pork floss that he had bought for us on Orchard Road. Not wanting another repeat of yesterday's irregular dinnertime, we stopped at the Indochine restaurant on the waterfront for a tasty, refreshing meal.