💾 Archived View for gem.sdf.org › jquah › news › sing2005.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 14:03:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Family vacation in Singapore to ring in the New Year
Thankfully we in the United States have not made it a tradition to open Christmas presents on Boxing Day; this year our joy at opening presents would be mingled with sorrow for the victims of the tsunami tragedy in southeast Asia. I woke up early this morning and read the news story while my family was still sleeping. At 6:30 I called the home phone using my cell phone to provide a wake-up call and a report of the news.
Today we washed several loads of laundry and made other preparations for the upcoming vacation, such as deciding which books and music to bring along in our carry-on and check-in bags. I managed to fit everything I would need into one small carry-on bag, including four changes of clothes, writing instruments and a travel journal, several packs of chewing gum, Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five, and some granola bars for the outbound journey. My family marveled at how lightly I had packed, and the contrast between the size of my baggage and theirs would provide ample grounds for friendly ribbing during the trip.
In the afternoon we invited our neighbors for a late lunch in order to polish off leftovers before the long vacation in Singapore. They arrived around 13:00, bringing large appetites but an even larger willpower, so that several of the dishes we offered them still remained when it came time for dinner. Mr. Demirkurt and I enjoyed a friendly game of ping pong after the late lunch, while the other adults lingered in the dining room to chat over biscotti and tea.
Three cups of barley tea before bed last night forced me to interrupt my sleep twice, for bathroom breaks at 2:20 and 5:00. Rather than going back to sleep at 5:00, I went downstairs to eat breakfast in the kitchen. I finished the last Fuji apple, the baby carrots, and the home-baked dill bread.
I waited until 6:45 before giving my parents a wake-up call from my cell phone. To pass the time productively, I turned on Papa's desktop computer to check e-mail, read news, and rip a few tracks from the music CDs I had gotten for Christmas.
When my parents finally woke up, there began a frantic search for Papa's misplaced glasses, which Katherine eventually found lying on the chair at the Queen Anne's desk. The song Manic Monday by the Bangles provided a fitting soundtrack to accompany the panic this morning.
We left the house at 9:00 but turned around shortly thereafter to check that the garage door had been shut. Our rationalization that we still had plenty of time before the 12:30 flight would soon be called into question.
Papa had a coupon for two free days in the Quik Park parking lot, but he had never parked there before, so he asked us to help him look for it as the car neared the airport. We found the entrance to the car park with little trouble, but the novelty of valet parking caused some confusion for us. After unloading the car and leaving the keys on the driver's seat, we found ourselves directed to a shuttle that would take us to the terminal for Delta Airlines.
In our panic searching for Papa's misplaced glasses this morning, we had neglected to check the updated status of our connecting flight to New York/JFK. It turned out that the recent crash of a ComAir computer system had caused several Delta flights to be delayed or canceled. Our scheduled flight to JFK met the latter fate, so we attached ourselves to an already-long line of Delta customers waiting to discuss their travel options with a ticket agent.
The two women ahead of us cheerfully discussed their respective itineraries, exuding the confidence of seasoned travelers who had navigated their way past similar difficulties before. Meanwhile, Papa's modus operandi was to contemplate worst-case scenarios and work himself up into a frenzy. Katherine urged him not to get too stressed out, invoking in her own way the dictum that we "accept with serenity the things we cannot change."
In the event, the Delta ticket agent found us four seats on a Northwest flight to JFK at 14:01. We would arrive at the New York airport at 15:45, allowing us plenty of time to pick up our checked luggage and check in for our Singapore Airlines flight this evening.
Now that our departure from Detroit had been postponed a couple hours, we could enjoy a leisurely lunch in the terminal from which our Northwest plane would depart. We checked in at the Northwest ticket counter at 11:30 and then proceeded through the security checkpoint. Katherine and Mom ate lunch at McDonald's, while Papa and I dined at a Japanese sushi restaurant. Papa ordered udon noodles with shrimp tempura, and I ordered a roll of spicy tuna sushi.
The 14:01 flight from Detroit to New York was smooth and uneventful. After reading Slaughterhouse Five for a while, I put away the book and leaned back to take a nap. The in-flight refreshments had already been served by the time I woke up, but Papa had made sure to save a bag of pretzel twists for me. The plane began its descent into New York shortly after I woke up, but I managed to write a few notes about the morning's events and read a few more pages of Slaughterhouse Five before landing.
The first order of business upon landing in New York was to determine whether we would have to switch terminals to catch our Singapore Airlines flight. Luckily we had landed at Terminal 4, and our flight to Singapore would also be departing from Terminal 4.
We followed the signs to the domestic baggage claim on the lower level. While waiting for the checked-in bags, I played hacky-sack and continued reading Slaughterhouse Five. When all three checked-in bags had been retrieved, we went back upstairs to the ticketing counter for Singapore Airlines.
The Singapore Airlines ticketing counter opened for business at 17:10, and our family was the first to be served. We got four seats near the middle of the plane: three in row 34, and one in row 35.
Our flight did not take off until 22:00, and we only began boarding the plane at 20:45. In the meantime we found a table near the food court where we could grab a bite to eat. Katherine and Mom each got a slice of pizza; Papa got chicken tenders from McDonald's; I had the leftover pretzel twists, a Quaker Chewy granola bar, and a banana. We then passed through the security checkpoint and waited at gate A2 for our flight to begin boarding.
Once on board and airborne, we were treated to a pleasant variety of entertainment options. Individual viewscreens and audio equipment offered a huge selection of music and movie channels. We were served a full-course meal for dinner after reaching cruising altitude. Dinner included salad, rolls with butter, fresh vegetables, and either chicken with potatoes or fish with rice. Papa, Mom and I ordered the tray with fish, while Katherine ordered the tray with chicken. Ice cream and hot tea were served after the main meal. When our empty trays had been cleared, we were free to enjoy a restful night's sleep as the plane flew steadily over the Atlantic Ocean.
Greeted by the light of an emerging dawn shining through our window, Katherine woke up to comment on the view, wondering which countries might lie below our flight path, hidden from sight by the clouds. With the help of the flight status report on one of the video channels, we tracked our progress during the part of our flight that took us over Northern Ireland.
Soon the flight attendants came around to distribute steaming hot washcloths for us to wipe our hands and faces. In this way we were yanked more firmly into the waking world.
Before our descent into Frankfurt around 10:40 local time, the flight attendants served a light breakfast. I ate orange juice, strawberry yoghurt, and a chicken croissant.
Our stopover in Frankfurt lasted just over an hour, but we had enough time to use the restrooms, buy a newspaper, and fill out the paperwork required for Singapore customs and immigration. As usual, Papa joined the line for boarding before our rows were called. We were allowed through the gate anyway, and soon we found ourselves back in our seats in the middle of the Singapore Airlines jumbo jet.
I fell asleep before the plane took off, and when I woke up we had reached cruising altitude, and the flight attendants were bringing individual bags of mixed nuts down the aisles. Together with a glass of orange juice, the mixed nuts served as an afternoon snack.
The afternoon snack prompted me to use the lavatory in the aft of the cabin, and by the time I emerged, the preparations for the evening meal were already underway.
For dinner I ate pasta salad, a roll with butter, peas and red peppers, spicy cajun chicken, potato wedges, ice cream, and hot tea. Then I slept for a few hours while the plane continued its flight over eastern Europe.
As we slept fitfully, growing ever more uncomfortable in our confining seats, the plane crawled slowly towards its destination. We passed over the Caspian Sea and the Indian subcontinent. By 3:23 Singapore time we still had not reached the Bay of Bengal. The three and a half hours before our scheduled arrival at 6:55 would see us cover the remaining distance of 2900 km.
For an early morning snack at 3:00, I finished the last bag of pretzel twists and the last Quaker Chewy granola bar. The flight attendants had come around earlier during the night to offer food from a basket of fruit and snacks, but our row was skipped because we had posted a do-not-disturb sign on our headrests.
Around 4:30 the cabin lights were switched on, and flight attendants came around to distribute hot washcloths. The next and last in-flight service was breakfast, for which we had a choice between eggs and bacon or noodles with chicken. All of us wanted to try the noodle dish for breakfast, but Katherine told Mom to order eggs and bacon so that they could switch if Katherine found the chicken noodles unappetizing.
During the remaining ninety minutes of flight time between the end of breakfast and landing in Singapore, the crew carried out the necessary cleanup procedures to make up for the disorder to which the myriad in-flight services and entertainments had contributed. Again we caught another hour or so of fitful sleep while the plane began its descent.
The plane landed gracefully on the Changi airport runway at 6:53. So eager were the passengers to stretch their legs that the pilot's delay in switching off the fasten seatbelt sign prompted many of them to disregard the letter of the law but not its spirit, and they rushed to unfasten their seatbelts as soon as the roar of the engines died down.
We disembarked and made our way to the baggage claim, passing through immigration with our passports and the immigration cards we had filled out in Frankfurt. Papa left me at the baggage claim to watch for our bags while he went off to exchange travelers checks into local currency.
Our three checked-in bags arrived intact, although one of them had lost an identifying label in transit. We loaded our heavy bags onto a hand truck and then went out to where Uncle John was waiting.
Light drizzle rained on the city as Uncle John navigated the rush hour traffic to bring us to our hotel, the Meritus Negara. He made sure we checked in successfully, and then he left us on our own for the morning.
Before meeting Uncle John and Uncle Remie for lunch, we decided to go for a walk down Orchard Road to get our bearings and combat the effects of jet lag. Papa, Mom and Katherine lost track of me when I disappeared into an underpass. I had not noticed them stop to retrieve a map that had fallen from Papa's bag, and so I continued into the underpass thinking they were close behind. When I turned around and saw no trace of my family, I decided to wander around aimlessly for an hour before pulling out my own map and finding the route back to the hotel. I arrived back at the hotel at the same time as Mom and Katherine, and we ascended the elevator to the 16th storey together.
We rested a while in our hotel rooms and then set out towards the Meritus Mandarin, where we had agreed to meet Uncle John and Uncle Remie for lunch. Uncle Remie brought his two sons and their appetites; together with us and Uncle John we would need a table for eight people.
A crowded hawker center/food court near the Meritus Mandarin provided the setting for our first full meal since breakfast on the airplane this morning. Papa and Katherine ordered two dishes from a vegetarian vendor. Uncle Remie, Uncle John and I each had a plate of kway teow from a vendor of Penang cuisine.
Back in the lobby of the Meritus Mandarin, Uncle Remie invited us on a tour of some local farms with his two sons. Mom still seemed to have the energy and the interest to visit the farms, but Katherine and I were ready to crash in the bed of our hotel room. So we said goodbye to our uncles and cousins and returned to our hotel for a nap.
Using Papa's computer and some songs from my USB flash drive, I set up a music alarm to wake us up in time for dinner. I ended up sleeping through this alarm, but when the phone rang to announce the arrival of Uncle John, Aunt Jo, and Christian, I dragged myself out of bed to join them for a sushi dinner.
Katherine slept through dinner, but Papa, Mom, and I followed Uncle John, Aunt Jo, and Christian across Orchard Road to the Forum shopping center, where we ate dinner at a sushi restaurant called Genki. One of the interesting features of this sushi restaurant was a conveyor belt carrying individual containers of sushi. Customers seated around the conveyor belt could grab any of the various sushi dishes that passed in front of them, in the same way that airplane travelers wait around the baggage claim until their bags pass in front of them. The six of us would not have been able to find adjacent seats around the conveyor belt, so we were seated at a booth, and Christian would get up from time to time to fetch sushi dishes from the conveyor belt. We also placed orders with the waiter who came around to serve us, which allowed us to sample an even greater variety of Japanese cuisine from their menu.
On the way back to the hotel, we picked up spring rolls from a streetside vendor, so that Katherine would have something to eat for dinner when she woke up from her nap.
Still recovering from jet lag, we awoke early after our first night in the hotel. I had set an alarm on Papa's computer, but we were all awake well before it began to play music at 6:00.
After showering and getting dressed for the day, we descended to the lobby floor for a buffet breakfast at the Claymore Cafe. An impressive selection of Asian and Western dishes greeted us, and we all went back for seconds to sample the foods we missed the first time.
For sightseeing this morning we walked to the Botanical Gardens, following Napier Road until we reached the Minden Gate. A closer gate through which we had entered when we lived on Bukit Timah Road was closed due to park renovations, but it still served as a useful landmark to orient our path on the return trip.
Soon after entering the Botanical Gardens and establishing a meeting time and place in the event we should split up, I took off on a half-hour run around the park, visiting all three cores at a pace that did not permit thorough reading of all the informative placards.
I met up with Katherine, Mom and Papa at 8:30, already having returned to a walking pace a few minutes earlier. Together we continued walking through the gardens, even paying a fee to enter the orchid gardens and the cool house. At appropriate photogenic locations we paused to take pictures with either Katherine's digital camera or Papa's freebie disposable camera. We also stopped at the visitors center to browse the gift shop, buy some postcards, and drink some fruit juice as a mid-morning snack.
We had to be back at the hotel by 11:30 so that Uncle John could drive us to the waterfront during his lunch break, as he and Papa had a bank transaction to conduct at the OCBC branch there. I walked back from the Botanical Gardens ahead of the others, so I stopped at Jason's grocery store to buy conditioner for the half-Asian hair of me and Katherine, which tends to behave better in less humid climates. Once back in the hotel room, I called Papa on the cell phone to let him know that he need not buy conditioner on the way back.
I took a shower to wash off the sweat of my morning run and to test out the new conditioner I had bought. When I emerged from the shower, Papa, Mom and Katherine had returned to the rooms, and we would soon set out with Uncle John to the waterfront. But first we would grab a bite to eat from the SBC food court/hawker center around the corner. Mom ordered claypot vegetables; Papa had his noodle soup; the rest of us ate other spicy noodle dishes.
Uncle John drove us to the waterfront, where the tight turns of the OCBC parking garage would have challenged the drivers of even the most compact Japanese cars. Mom was impressed by the beeping collision warning system on Uncle John's car, which was activated when he put the car in reverse. We parked safely and then descended to the ground floor, where we parted ways after establishing a meeting place across the street at The Coffee Connisseur. We agreed to meet at 15:00, which presumably would leave enough time for Papa and Uncle John to conduct their banking business.
Katherine, Mom and I walked along the quay for a while, and then we went inside the Asian Civilizations Museum for the first forty-five minutes of a guided tour.
It was raining lightly when we left the ACM at 14:45, so I closed the bag of clean laundry I had been carrying, and we made our way to the rendezvous point at The Coffee Connisseur. On the ground floor of TCC, Katherine and Mom browsed the menu and the dessert display. They placed their orders just before Papa arrived, and after browsing the menu he ordered another drink for himself.
While the rain continued throughout the afternoon, we wandered around nearby Chinatown to admire the traditional architecture and to enjoy some shopping. I bought a new pair of sandals at Bata, and Katherine found some fashionable clothing items at an open-air souvenir shop on the ground floor.
Loaded with bags of shoes, clothes, and souvenirs, we hopped on the MRT at Chinatown station and rode back to Orchard station, from whence our hotel was just a few minutes' walk.
We sorted out today's purchases in the hotel and then freshened up in preparation for a dinner outing with Papa's colleague Eric Lim and his family. Eric's two daughters attend college in the USA, which made it easier for us to find common topics for conversation. Yet when Eric insisted that I return to Singapore to give a series of guest lectures at one of the universities, my muted assent offered only temporary respite from an awkward one-way conversation.
The Chinese buffet dinner at the Amaya hotel offered a tantalizing array of Straits Chinese cuisine, and after several plates of entrees and dessert, it would be hard not to sleep soundly tonight.
Our second breakfast buffet at the Claymore Cafe provided another opportunity to stuff ourselves with delicious dishes from eastern and western culinary traditions. We planned to visit the Chinese and Japanese Gardens this morning, and even for such an active outing a much less elaborate breakfast would have sufficed.
We rode the MRT from Orchard station to the Chinese Garden station, switching from the red line to the green line at City Hall. When we alighted at the Chinese Garden station, the sky had opened up and let loose the first of several intermittent rainshowers today. We waited until the intensity of the falling rain lessened, and then we left the shelter of the MRT station and ventured out into the gardens.
The seven-storey pagoda served as a convenient landmark and rendezvous point in case we ever got separated, but this time we remained always in plain view of each other throughout the entire morning walk, thanks to the rain and the renovations that had closed off the Japanese Gardens. On our walk back to the MRT station, we took shelter in smaller pagodas when the rain began to pick up in intensity.
We climbed up the 180 steps of the seven-storey pagoda, stopping only when we reached the top, with its stunning panoramic view of the gardens and the surrounding area. Mom took several photos with her camera, and Papa captured some scenes with the digital camera, intending to stitch them together into a wide panoramic picture using a dedicated photo editing program on his laptop computer.
If the weather had cooperated, we could have taken the green line back to Tanjong Pagar and walked to the Copthorne Kings Hotel, where we had been invited to lunch with the McGoldricks at a Thai restaurant. Instead we rode the MRT back to our hotel, and from there we took a taxicab to our lunch appointment. We only missed at most two hours of shopping due to the inclement weather, and the next couple days would offer plenty of opportunities to make up for this loss.
We had not foreseen the heavy lunch hour traffic, but our cab driver seemed grateful for the opportunity to show off his aggressive driving skills, and he brought us to the hotel well before most of the host family had arrived. Pat McGoldrick was there, however, and he took the liberty of ordering several dishes on behalf of his family and ours. He suggested we order soup or salad as individual appetizers, but when the waiter said the mango salad would be enough to serve two, Katherine and I decided to share a plate of mango salad.
Soon the rest of the McGoldrick clan arrived, including an unexpected guest who had been a classmate of Stacy McGoldrick at the Singapore American School. Stacy and David McGoldrick currently reside in the USA, the former finishing college and the latter diving wholeheartedly into the working world, having recently earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy.
Stacy's friend Chris is a psychology major who chose a school in in Tempe, Arizona, over other universities closer to his Florida home. The fond memories of Singapore American School that cropped up in the conversation among Stacy, Chris, and David ofered Katherine and me a glimpse of the life we might have known if we had stayed in Singapore for all of our pre-university schooling.
The Thai food was excellently prepared and elegantly served, but again it filled our bellies more than necessary -- the unfortunate result of the adherence to two independent and best-left-unmingled philosophies: the Chinese injunction that no guest should leave the table unsatisfied, and the environmentally conscious condemnation of letting food go to waste.
Exhausted by jet lag and the heavy Thai lunch, I crashed on the hotel bed shortly after we got back to our rooms. I slept through the New Year's Eve party at Uncle John's apartment and a subsequent party on the 21st floor of the Meritus Negara, barely able to wake up to say hello to Nerissa, who came to our room for a visit after hearing that I would not be attending the New Year's Eve celebrations.
I woke up at 23:48 and glanced over at the bedside clock. I lay in bed for another twenty minutes, awake but not yet energized enough to jump out of bed and perform a song and dance to welcome the new year. The final two minutes of 2004 in the Singapore time zone passed without me watching the clock at all.
When I finally did arise from bed at 0:15, I was fully rested and ready to work off some of the excess energy from yesterday's heavy Thai lunch. I put on shoes and went down to the ground floor. To avoid the wild, drunken crowds lining the sidewalks of Orchard Road, I set off towards the Botanical Gardens, following a quieter route along Tanglin and Napier Roads. Although the Minden Gate was still open, it would not remain so for long, so I took a run along the sidewalk of Napier Road instead, passing Tyersall Avenue on both the outbound and inbound halves of my run. I arrived back at the Orchard Road shopping district around 1:30, and I tried not to attract too much attention to myself as I caught my breath outside Show House and the Orchard Towers shopping complex.
By 2:00 I had returned to the Meritus Negara, climbed 14 flights of stairs, entered our hotel room, and begun a refreshing shower. I changed into clean clothes and then tried to find quiet activities to pass the time before everyone else woke up. Writing in my travel journal kept me busy for a while, and then I turned on Papa's laptop computer to check e-mail and news online. Eventually I crawled back into bed for a couple more hours of rest before plunging into the scheduled family activities on this first day of the new year.
Mom enjoyed her last buffet breakfast at Claymore Cafe this morning, since her flight to Thailand on the fiber arts tour would require her to leave Singapore today. We said our goodbyes at the hotel, and then Mom took a taxi to the Changi airport.
Uncle John invited us to eat at a roti prata joint around 10:00 this morning, since Katherine had expressed her liking for roti bread, and Christian was hungry for breakfast. Aunt Jo drove the car to the restaurant, dropping us off by the curb before parking the car herself, so that the rest of us would not have to be drenched by the rain.
Seated at a long table under an awning, we ordered several flavors of roti bread and curry dipping sauces. Uncle John was disappointed that the paper roti was not available, but we would make do with thicker breads, either plain or containing eggs, mushrooms, onions, and various seasonings. For dipping sauces we ordered mutton curry and chicken curry, but these were consumed faster than the bread, so we supplemented our order with additional bowls of meatless curry.
Christian drank a dinosaur Milo; the adults ordered hot beverages (coffee and tea); Katherine and I asked for bottles of mineral water. The waiter had to be reminded several times to bring the mineral water, and this dismal level of service prompted Papa to recall a restaurant in Boston famous for its unapologetically rude waitstaff.
As we finished up the last of the bread and curry, Uncle John went to a soya bean specialty shop next door, where he bought a soy beverage and two containers of soya bean curd, one plain and another flavored with bird's nest. These he would bring back to his apartment and offer to us during the lavish New Year's Day lunch.
Uncle John's apartment was packed with family and friends for the New Year's Day feast. Some guests were in the kitchen helping prepare the many dishes, even though there still remained leftovers from last night. Other guests lounged in the living room, enjoying lively conversation or (in the case of Christian and Uncle Remie's children) playing games on the X-Box.
To build up an appetite for the feast we were about to enjoy, we went for a swim in the pool shared by Uncle John's apartment community. Aunt Jo had told us earlier that the pool offered a uniform depth of 1.2 meters, which would allow most adult swimmers to pause for a break at any point during laps across the pool. My trust in the uniform depth of 1.2 meters went too far, for I attempted to swim through a curtain of falling water, which was actually designed to be approached from the stairs right below it. The stairs under the curtain of falling water reduced the depth substantially, and I would have banged my head against the concrete if my hands had not discovered the stairs first.
The water felt cool to skin that had grown accustomed to Singapore's tropical heat, and not everybody could muster the willpower to submerge quickly and begin swimming in the pool. As one of the braver swimmers this afternoon, I got my head underwater earlier than others, but I also exited the pool before everyone else and went upstairs to shower and change into street clothes.
Once we had all returned to the third floor apartment, Papa retreated to the guest bedroom for a nap, while Katherine and I seated ourselves at the dining table and chatted with the other guests, who shared from the bounty of traditional family recipes cooked in Uncle John's kitchen. I sampled all of the dishes that were brought out to the table, washing down some of the spicier mouthfuls with the soy beverage that Uncle John bought earlier this morning. Lively conversation among family and other guests allowed us the chance to savor each bite, in keeping with the traditional Peranakan practice of tasting the distinctive flavor of each dish rather than mixing dissimilar flavors on the same plate. After she had eaten her fill, Katherine also retired to the guest bedroom to take a nap.
Papa did not want to leave without showing me the paved track that runs parallel to the river near Uncle John's apartment. We waited until the next gap between today's intermittent rainshowers, and then Christian led us down to the river and showed us the path. Leaving the other pedestrians to walk at their own pace, I ran 3.2 kilometers along the track. I joined the other walkers at the gate to Uncle John's apartment complex, and we went back to the apartment to say our goodbyes.
Back in the Meritus Negara hotel, I crashed on the bed and slept through the evening. Papa met his colleague and friend Wester Jan for dinner at a Thai restaurant, which he described as even better than the restaurant where we had dined with the McGoldricks.
Papa, Katherine, and I visited the Singapore Science Center today, postponing our Sentosa trip for a day with less rain. When paying the admission fare, we also inquired about the IMAX movies that would be playing today. The noontime show would be Forces of Nature, a documentary about natural disasters and the scientists currently studying them. We arrived early enough to walk through the exhibits for a few hours before the movie, so we split up and decided to meet in front of the theater by 11:50.
Many of the exhibits in the mathematics room had stood the test of time, remaining essentially unchanged in the twelve years since I last visited the science center. Other rooms had seen more substantial upgrades, and twelve years additional experience gave me a better appreciation of the exhibits in such diverse fields as biology, agriculture, and automotive engineering. I quickly realized that there was more information here than could be digested in a short day trip, so I contented myself with an extended look at some of the more interesting exhibits before making my way to the IMAX theater around 11:30.
The Forces of Nature documentary featured three scientists studying different natural disasters: volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tornadoes. In light of the recent tsunami disaster, the segment on earthquakes held my interest the most, perhaps also due to the unusual setting in which the lead researcher gathered his data. Seeing a volcano researcher taking rock samples and measurements at the site of an active volcano, or a team of tornado researchers patroling the Oklahoma countryside in their instrument-equipped vans, would have been easy to predict for an uninformed viewer. The earthquake segment, however, showed us a scientist making observations at the site of an ancient cathedral in Constantinople, deciphering the thousands of years of geological history that left their mark on the building's architecture. I came away from the movie with a newfound respect for interdisciplinary approaches to scientific research.
Papa had a lunch date with a colleague at Raffles City today, so Katherine and I joined him on a day trip to check out the shopping scene there and at nearby Suntec City. In the morning we toured the shopping complexes together, so that Katherine and I would know our way around once left to our own devices. In the department store Carrefour, I found an updated version of the Pentel "Shaker" mechanical pencil I remembered from my days at Singapore American Middle School. Considering its rarity outside the Pacific Rim, I bought two such pencils right there, without even shopping around to compare prices.
Finding a food court in the City Link shopping center, Papa offered to buy us a mid-morning snack. Katherine was in the mood for mee goreng again, and I offered to help if she couldn't finish the dish. Still full from the buffet breakfast at our hotel, I ordered only a cup of honeydew melon juice for myself.
Katherine and I accompanied Papa on the walk back to Raffles City, and we noticed the shops getting ever fancier as we approached the hotel favored by international business people and wealthy tourists. We kept an eye out for more practical shops selling books, music, and other small but useful items. After we parted ways to let Papa attend his lunch date, Katherine and I would shop for a while and then take the subway back to the hotel ourselves, so Papa made sure we knew how to get there from any of the three shopping centers near Raffles City.
With less than 48 hours before our Singapore vacation comes to a close, we are lucky to see one last sunny day in which to enjoy outdoor tropical adventures. Today we decided to visit Sentosa Island, one of our favorite day trips when we used to live here.
We rode the MRT from our hotel to HarbourFront. Surfacing to the ground, we walked the short distance to the cable car departure point, where we bought tickets to Mount Faber and Sentosa Island. The first leg of our cable car journey brought us to the Mount Faber visitor's center and gift shop. We alighted there briefly, enjoyed the view from up high with our binoculars, and bought a few souvenirs. Then we hopped on the next cable car bound for Sentosa Island.
Before splitting up to tour the island separately (I wanted to rent a bicycle, but Papa and Katherine preferred to walk), we bought tickets to Underwater World, including the cost of admission to the Dolphin Lagoon show. We agreed to meet outside Dolphin Lagoon just before one of the scheduled shows, and from there we would continue together around the rest of the island. With one hour to enjoy my bicycle rental, I wished Papa and Katherine a pleasant walk and then rode off along the Siloso Beach bike path.
I passed the Dolphin Lagoon and reached Tanjong Beach without seeing any kiosks where I could return the bike, so I retraced my route and rode back to Siloso Beach. When I checked my watch and saw that I still had half an hour left on my bike rental, I rode further inland and explored the nature trails leading through Lost Civilisation/Ruined City. Twenty minutes later, I brought my bike back to the rental station and started walking to Dolphin Lagoon by foot.
Katherine, Papa, and I entered Dolphin Lagoon together, arriving just in time to catch the next show. We sat on folding beach chairs in the bright mid-day sun, while the pink dolphins and their trainers performed right in front of us. Huge speakers provided accompanying music as the dolphins performed their stunts, and most of the tunes sounded familiar, even though I could not identify one of them.
After the show we rode the monorail around the island, stopping at Underwater World to eat lunch and view the other ocean animals that our $17.30 ticket entitled us to see. Papa tried to take photographs through the aquarium glass, but usually the camera was unable to capture a good picture.
Rounding out our day trip, we toured the rest of the island on the monorail and on foot, visiting the Nature Walk/Dragon Trail, the Musical Fountain, the Sentosa Orchid Gardens, Fort Siloso, and the Southernmost Point of Continental Asia. From Ferry Terminal we took one more monorail ride to the Cable Car station, and then we returned to the mainland to enjoy another evening with friends and family.
Our departing flight back to the U.S. leaves late tonight. In the past week we have seen many of the attractions unique to Singapore, but nothing so simple as a recent movie in the theater. To rectify this imbalance, Papa suggested we see the latest film version of Phantom of the Opera at the Lido Theatre just down the street from our hotel.
We bought tickets for the 10:00 show, which would let us out just in time to meet Aunt Jo for lunch at the Shangri-La hotel. Papa called his brother to inform them of our plans, so that they would not arrive too early at our hotel, before we had a chance to return from the theater.
After lunch at the Shangri-La hotel, Aunt Jo dropped us off at the Plaza Singapura, a shopping center across from Istana Park. Papa, Katherine, and I split up again to go shopping on our own for a couple hours, to be followed by a relaxing evening and dinner at Uncle John and Aunt Jo's apartment. During this last shopping trip before flying out tonight, Papa got his hair cut at a cheap haircutting chain called QB-10.