Hello blog. Remember me? It's been so long.

My mother once said something to me after a long stretch of not hearing from one another, (for no particular reason, just busy).  She said, "Don't worry, I know you're doing ok when I don't hear from you."  I could think of so many things she could have said to me for not calling regularly, but instead she was sweet and never tried to toss any guilt my direction. 

So I'm here today to tell you all we are doing fine, albeit missing everyone back home this time of year.  We're happy to have some of our own personal Christmas decorations this year.  For the first 2 years here in Singapore we have been living on rented furnishings and could only bring over a small fraction of our things.  None of which were holiday decorations because things like toys, books, computers and my kitchen knives took priority.  When Rob agreed to stay another 2 years, we were able to get into our storage this summer and ship about half of what we own over here.  We did not bring everything because the remaining half is stuff that would be in our garage or our yard (shop tools, patio furniture).  With condo living we have traded these things in for a swimming pool and a tennis court! 

The first year in Singapore, I purchased a 3-ft plastic tree and a set of ornaments from Ikea.  It was the year they did everything in red and heart shaped so our tree looked more like a valentine. Now we are reminded of the joy in small things and grateful for the decorations that were given as gifts over the years.  It has been a delight to pull them out and think of those that gave them to us.  And of course the handmade ornaments made at school by the girls. Those are precious.  I love pulling those out of the box.  There is even a decoration I made when I was a kid in the 80's.  I've included a picture.  You might wonder how is this a Christmas decoration??  Santa in his younger years?  No, this is a stuffed image of my father mounted to the top of a jar.  Who remembers porch people?  I made this out of nylons and stuffing.  Each year we would pull this out around the holidays and fill the jar with roasted peanuts (his favorite).

A tradition Rob and I started long ago before we were married, was to collect an ornament from places we've traveled.  We quickly realized how hard it was to find ornaments in Asia, especially places like Vietnam and China.  A big surprise was not being able to find a single ornament in Hong Kong Disneyland last year.  Thank goodness for key chains that can be converted.  However, we can find many things Western over here when it comes to Christmas.  They even decorate their malls in ways I have never seen.  You can even order a traditional turkey dinner from just about every grocery store.  Now if I could just find some egg nog and real mistletoe.

We hope you are ringing in the season with the love of family and enjoying your own yuletide traditions.

Happy Birthday Rob!!

The Lion King in the Lion City

Friends and family near and far, I hope you had a nice Mother's day.  My brood treated me to a show at Singapore's newest theatre venue in Marina Bay Sands.  We saw their inaugural event, The Lion King.  How definitive as the name Singapore comes from the Malay name "Singapura", which means Lion City.  The show was incredible, dynamically creative and innovative.  We all loved it very much.  It's wonderful to see how our most beloved Disney movie was adapted for the Theatre.  The story line and music remains a class act, and I love that Rob and I can can get just as much enjoyment out of the show as our kids.  Parrish was especially intrigued by the young boy playing young Simba, whom looked to be about her age.  LONG LIVE musical theatre!

 

Jingoism, egoism and Ray the Hippie

I think the last time I used jingoism or egoism in a sentence was in college history class, or perhaps a philosophy class. I think I was writing something on aggressive forms of nationalism. Hmmmm, must have been a political science class now that I think of it. Why bring this up? Just reflecting on how crazy things have been for the last decade and these two words came to mind for describing it. One thing is for sure, I wont be doing any dancing in the street, having a celebratory drink or fist pumping over a dead guy. How tacky and embarrassing. The reaction I prefer to this news is a shrug. Or at most, relief, not elation like we just won a gold medal or our favorite team just won the world series.

Ok, hopefully I can switch your gears now that I got that off my shoulders........time to exercise your sense of humor with more John Paragon. I promise, more Asian adventure updates coming soon. But for now, meet Ray the Hippie....

Mixed emotions....

In my last post I was inspired to inject some humor into your lives and share with you some old comedy I found particularly funny.......however this post takes a 180 turn I'm afraid. More humor later, just have my mind elsewhere at the moment.

American travelers outside the US or living abroad are being advised to be very aware there could be anti-American demonstrations that could break out at any time. Especially in countries that have had terrorist activity. Pakistan and Afghanistan are obvious candidates, but I keep thinking of how close we are to Indonesia and the Philippines.

So after a busy weekend, Royal Wedding....the killing of Bin Laden, I'm sitting here trying to figure out my thoughts. I've gone from a celebratory feeling of love that the royal wedding inspired, to a feeling of concern. Although I am glad Bin Laden is gone, I just wonder if he's more dangerous dead?? As I do internet searches on the motivations for the terrorist activities that have occurred in this region in the recent past, I am trying to figure out if my initial feelings have merit. My husband works in Malaysia (questionable security and corruption) and Parrish goes to an International "American" school. I just don't want either of them to leave the house tomorrow or this week! Too extreme?

Ramone Azteca

Rob just introduced me to an 80's comedy routine by John Paragon that aired on Showtime way back. I can't stop laughing so had to share.

Be prepared to enjoy the next 7 minutes of your life....or most offensive.....

Book Week

Last Friday, Parrish was to dress as her favorite book character to cap off a week full of activities organized by the school librarian.

This year it was Scooby Doo. Can you hear my audible sigh? I kept asking Parrish, "don't you want to be a princess again and just wear one of your dress-up costumes?" I know what you're thinking....."common mom! Where's your fun?" It's just incredibly un-motivating to try and find stuff to put a costume together in Singapore because finding costumes or finding material to make costumes is difficult at best as the selection is very limited. Although Halloween seems to be getting more popular so maybe that will change in the future. But luckily we found a set of boys brown pajamas and a craft store with the right colors of felt to make dog ears, a tail, spots and scooby's collar. At the end of the day I realized one important forgotten prop........scooby snacks! Oh well, it got the point across and it was fun to have a free dress day for the kids as they normally wear uniforms.

Guinness Book of World Records

I've been very lackluster about updating our blog. We've had an interesting start to 2011 and I will update you all soon. But while I had a moment, I just had to share these pictures. A friend of mine ran into this scene a few days ago. Hundreds of Singaporean's gathered together to get into the GBWR for most people applying face mask.


This is quintessential Singaporean at it's finest!! They had to have over 828 people to win. I have yet to find out if they did it.

Travelogue - playing catch-up - India Part 1

We've started off the year with a packed schedule thinking the next 7 months would be the last we would spend in Asia before returning to the US. Even though we knew our travel plans would make for a hectic couple of months, the prospect of the adventures we were about to take were too hard to resist.

From Jan 27th to Feb 7th, our family set off for India and Nepal traveling with one of Rob's work colleagues. We decided to explore what is called the Golden Triangle of India, which is in Northern India and consists of the cities New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra (home of the Taj Mahal). The latter part of our trip would consist of a 3-day side trip to Kathmandu and few day stopover in Mumbai (based on avail itineraries to get us from Nepal back to Singapore). Our side trip to Nepal gave us a glimpse of the Himalayas and more understanding of what it means to practice Buddhism.

We saw some truly amazing ancient and historical sites, had fantastic weather, stayed in wonderful hotels with great service, and took in some truly unique cultural experiences. On the flip side, there was a yang with our yin (or yin with our yang?). We all got sick at some point during the trip. With the exception of myself and Sabrina, our party dropped like flies one after the other on one particular afternoon starting with Parrish. However, we were soon to follow. The origins of whatever we consumed or breathed in that made us sick was really hard to know. Was is the breakfast at our hotel? Lunch at the cafe? Was a utensil we ate with washed with bad water? Was it airborn? We navigated each day following trying to rest and still take advantage of the typical tourist sights. After all, this was our trip to India! Most likely our only trip. Unfortunately, it is the norm to get sick in India and we knew this, but despite our precautions, our Delhi belly was apparently inevitable.

Experiencing the poverty conditions in India by being among the massive amounts of people living this way was mind-boggling. The traffic, the begging, and the pushiness of street vendors were all things that we were very happy to leave behind. When you experience this kind of poverty where people are using the road side as a toilet, milk producing cows are eating from the trash dumped on the street, and you see kids clothed in dirt from head to toe. Empathy takes on a deeper meaning.

Here is the beginning of a few pictures to highlight the regions we visited.

Jaipur -

'Tis the season

To our friends all around the globe.........

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays!

Love, Rob, Heidi, Parrish & Sabrina

Hong Kong Part II

From Hong Kong 4

Hong Kong Disneyland

Thanksgiving Day was celebrated this year in Hong Kong. The kids had a great time, the weather was just right and the food was excellent!

Hong Kong Disneyland

Fun with Malay

Malay word of the week.......

I thought I would let you all in on the fun. I think most of you know that Rob actually works in Malaysia while we are living here over the boarder in Singapore. We are doing this so that the kids can go to a decent school and we can live in a safer/cleaner place. Rob's commute is not pleasant and he has to go through customs everyday and this takes at least an hour. He's had to add pages to his passport 4 times since we've been here. To keep a sense of humor about this, one of the things Rob does is gives me a Malay word of the week. The Malay language uses the alpha-numeric writing and doesn't have another character set (not that we know of anyway). So all the street signs have the English translation, the Malay word, the Chinese Characters and sometimes Indian.

So here's a quiz for you. The following is a list of Malay words that sound very similar to the English translation. See if you can figure them out.....common now!

butik
teksi
tuisyen
kolej
kastam
imigresen
treler
polis
lif
ais
kad

Bonus word:
air (hint: it relates to ais)

Tattling and bickering

Rob just said to me tonight, referring to the bickering and tattling our kids were doing, " I know this is what Todd (his older brother) and I did to my mom and dad. I don't know how we survived."

So, we are sitting here on the couch on a Friday night in a bit of a stupor, thinking "Please go away.....if we ignore this, it will go away.....please!" Maybe if I write about it on the blog it will go away.

No such luck..... Gotta go!

China

For the kids' Fall break we took a week long trip to to China. Planning this trip was a little bit spur of the moment. We never thought we would be able to take a family of 4 to China because of the additional Visa costs on top of all the other expenses ($180 Visa per US passport, Chinese pay the same to come to the US). But when we realized a round trip flight was only 20k miles on a partner airline, and there was availability, our dreams of taking the kids to the Great Wall and Worlds Expo in Shanghai quickly became a reality.

Highlights of the trip, according to Rob and I, were hiking the Great Wall, touring the Forbidden City and Jingshan park, and going to the World Expo in Shanghai. Highlights according to Parrish and Sabrina were the Asian Acrobat show in Beijing, the Blue Zoo aquarium (particularly the turtles) and riding on the passenger tram under the Huangpu river in Shanghai.

You have to be ready for China. Things we packed were our own toilet paper for the public restrooms (hotels, malls and some restaurants were clean and ok). Yes, both girls had to learn how to use the squatters but we tried to find proper toilets when possible. We also packed a sense of humor for the traffic and the crowds, particularly for Beijing. And nobody, let me emphasize, NOBODY queues up for anything.

Packing a winning smile for all the photographs and stares we would get each day. Many Chinese tourists love getting their picture taken with a "Westerner", especially our kids. Mostly our kids. We were well aware that we would gain celebrity status here, but never knew how hard it would be to get through a crowd. Tourist locations where particularly bad. We realized we couldn't stop to take a rest for very long or a crowd would descend around us. Sabrina and I found ourselves surrounded by a bunch of screaming school kids at one point. It was a Beatle moment! But the girls started to tire of it even in the first day. Parrish and Sabrina started to refuse to smile for pictures and actually ran away from a few. The Chinese are so polite and nice about it, but to get anywhere we had to start saying no.

Last thing we packed was a little bit of Mandarin tongue. Rob has been taking classes each week for over a year, I did a 6 month course, Parrish and Sabrina get lessons at school. But Rob was the real hero. Parrish was too shy to speak and it was too long since my last lesson to remember anything of value, other than knowing how to say hi and tell someone how old my children are. However, in both cities, there is English on road signs, in the subways and nearly all the hotels have someone who speaks English, at least the ones we stayed in. When it comes to reading characters, we were all lost, naturally. There was only one restaurant we went into that did not have the English or pinyin translation (English alphabet to express Chinese language). There was a lot of pointing to make our order. Rob knew how to ask a question, but understanding the answer was another story. *grin* Luckily we ended up with something edible, but we didn't always know what we were eating. This actually was part of the fun and mostly worked out for us. We went back to that restaurant for breakfast the next day too.

I've loaded some pictures in these slide shows for sharing:

Beijing_10

Shanghai_10

Labor of Love

I volunteered to make these mini apple pies for the International Food Festival at Parrish's school. I thought making single size serving would make it easier on the parent volunteers who were serving the food. I didn't know I would be up until midnight rolling out pie crusts!

Now I want you to respond to this.......I had a hard time figuring out what food represents American cuisine, especially since we mostly eat Asian or Italian. Besides apple pie, what do you think of when you think of American food?

Some more race pics

Some spectators trying to get a good vantage point of the track during the parade of celebrity drivers.

Stands were lined in various places along the track. These race marshals had an up-close view of the track (and the deafening noise).

The rumor I heard was that Ferrari makes more money in merchandise sales than it does in car sales. At S$70 a t-shirt I would say so!

I bike stunt show (also shown on big screen) for pre-race entertainment.

I enjoyed this event much more than I thought I would, not being into cars or racing for that matter. But the whole spectacle was entertaining and it was fun to learn about all the intricate rules of the race and scrutiny in the design of the cars.

Night Race Experience

I have a new appreciation for motion photography. How do the professional photographers make fast moving objects look like they're suspended? Tell me if you can see the subject I'm trying to capture in this shot....(*grin*)

The Formula 1 was in Singapore a few weeks ago and Rob and I decided to share a ticket this year. The race runs for a full weekend with a practice on Friday, qualifying runs on Saturday and the final on Sunday. This is a high profile race that takes place in many countries throughout the year. What makes the race in Singapore so unique is that this location is the only place they race at night. Thank goodness for the spectators because there was no shade in the grandstands where we were sitting! Here's a picture from our seats during the twilight with the iconic Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Casino in the background.

Tripolitan

Readers of this blog......who's tried Tripolitan ice cream? Mango, sweet corn and yam flavor. The purple one is the yam flavor.

So I bought this thinking, "oh, this is something we can't find in the States. We should try it." Being the more adventurous foodie of the family, it didn't occur to me the ribbing I might get when I brought this home.

When I said, "who wants ice cream?" The kids were in a roar and hovering while I scooped. Rob said, "I just want the mango." A few minutes later Parrish gave me back her half eaten bowl and said, "can we put this in the fridge? I don't want the rest." Sabrina just simply said, "I don't like it" as she set her bowl down in front of me. Rob finished his despite scooping him an equal amount of all three flavors, but grimacing at me the whole time saying, "what made you think of buying this?" I said, "well, you finished yours!" See what I have to put up with. *grin*

A kiss for you....

We have returned to Singapore from a wonderful trip back to the US this summer. We had a great time catching up with friends and family, got to spend time with our black lab "Lucy", visited our favorite hot spots for eating and shopping, we welcomed a new niece/cousin to the family, Heidi went to her 20 year high school reunion, Rob had guys weekend in Seattle for a Mariner game......and we also dealt with the not so fun stuff with our rental properties. All of this sent me back to Singapore with a mix of feelings about where I prefer to be.