Singapore

My baby is on the eve of turning 11 or seip et! I can't believe how quickly time has flown by. In celebration of his upcoming birthday we took all the boys to Singapore over the weekend. Mark was there all last week for business meetings and the boys and I joined him there Friday evening. I've been clicking along thinking on how well the boys are adjusting and then realize from several comments they made this weekend how hard this has really been for them. When we were landing in Singapore, Dustin commented longingly on how the runway reminded him of Dulles and then went on to say that he really missed his room in Virginia! I'm thinking-wow! where did that come from? Ethan in response to Dustin replied that he wishes that we could be back in Virginia. As we were navigating through the airport and later the streets of Singapore they all relished the signs in English, hearing English spoken in most places and they were all amazed on how clean Singapore is. Nathan stated, "Man, I miss the US."

I also was very much impressed with how clean Singapore is, really amazing that an island, half the size of Bailey county and home to over 4.5 million people can be so immaculate. But they take littering very serious in Singapore, and enforce the $300 fines readily. It is still against the law to purchase gum in Singapore, you can't find it anywhere but in pharmacies. When the Federal Trade Act was passed with America they demanded that American gum be allowed to be purchased in Singapore (sounds kind of silly to me :) but what do I know?) Singapore agreed but only if it is sold in a pharmacy and can only be obtained with a physician's prescription!! I'm trying to think of any reason gum would be needed for medical reasons? Wonder if insurance covers it? Needless to say we didn't see anyone chewing gum and consequently no gum was seen under any tables or railing!! It is also against the law to spit in public. Just FYI, one other tidbit of information I learned from our taxi driver. If there was no traffic you could drive from one end of the island to the other in 30 minutes, it's that small. So you can imagine how crowded it is, so many apartment buildings and few single home dwellings because land is outrageously expensive.

Shopping is the main thing most tourists do in Singapore but this weekend was all about Ethan and his birthday so we spent our time at all the kid attractions. Mark met us at the airport and we headed to the harbour front for Chili Crab, a Singaporean signature dish. It was delicious, really messy and expensive. After living in Thailand I've become spoiled with how inexpensive most things are. We can go out to a nice restaurant down the street and enjoy a really great meal for 5 under $30. Our chili crab meal was close to $150.

We stayed at the Lion's City Hotel, a Singaporean friend here recommended it because a friend of hers owns it. Singapore means Lion's City. Singapore used to be a part of Malaysia and Singa in Malay means Lion and Pore is city. You can drive to Malaysia over a long causeway and many people speak Malay in Singapore. There is also a strong Muslim presence in the city because of the connection with Malaysia.

On Saturday we took the cable car over to Sentosa island, a tiny island right off the coast of Singapore. We spent the day at Underwater World, the 4-D show pirate show, walking on the beach and that night we attended the Songs of the Sea show on the banks of the island, a laser light musical. As soon as the show was over we drove 45 minutes to the north of Singapore to the night safari. We saw some animals for the very first time-an Asian Rhino, a bearded pig, and an Asian bear. We also watched a tribal show with some interesting fire eaters. One of the highlights for the boys may have been the Dr. Fish. I had never seen these fish before but their specialty is eating the dead flesh off of human bodies and they have some enzymes that are supposed to be beneficial for our skin. I'll put the pictures up of the boys having their feet attended to by the Dr. Fish, they seemed to be most interested in Dustin's feet probably because he is trying to get over athlete's feet-isn't that kinda gross? We finally returned to our hotel around 12:30 that night.

After sleeping in to around 10 am the next morning we headed to Wild, Wild, Wet a waterpark on the outskirts of Singapore. We had fun navigating our way around the subway and bus system, that was half the adventure! After 4 hours of fun in the water we finished up our time in Singapore shopping for new IPOD earphones, and a new X-box game. One of the stores we really enjoyed was the National Geographic store and Dustin and Nathan purchased a crystal making set for Ethan's birthday there. We had the latest flight out of Singapore and arrived home finally at 2 am! We tried to smash as much as we could into our trip to the Lion's City!