September 30, 2006

We made it back from Singapore. We had such a good time...a lot of r & r but also lots of sightseeing. My favorite was Arab Street. It's more than a street, a whole neighborhood with a mosque in the middle. I had never been inside a mosque before. We bought a picnic basket in the same area (totally cute yellow), ate some killer street food (vegetarian samosas..soo good), and even went rug shopping...way out of our price league though. Getting to the airport was pretty hilarious. Our flight was THE first flight out of the new airport. So it was the first day for all the workers there too. I'm putting up pics so you can see how things run here. Anyway, getting out was okay. Coming back in though is another story. I guess people on the long distance international flights were having to wait 4 hours for their luggage. Yikes! Ours was fine..yeah budget airlines!

It was so nice to be on vacation for a bit. The past few months were really wearing. It's Saturday today and we don't have too much on the agenda. We're taking Cheddar in for his annual vaccinations....oh fun! Oh, the food in Singapore was soo good. We ate Indian food the first few days, ate a whole bunch of Western food too including some serious molten chocolate cake. Oh yeah! Soo good. We drank more beer than we probably have in over a year here and good beer too. So that was fun. We went to the Night Safari, which was sweet. It's a zoo at night and you can't see the fences so it feels like you're right there with the animals. We walked through a bat-sleeping mangrove forest. One almost hit my head. There was also an animal show that we went too. We sat down in the first 3 rows and a woman comes up and asks if we're afraid of anything...I'm like..what do you mean?? She didn't really say but didn't want our section to freak out. Great. So the show goes on and I'm waiting for a bat to jump at my head or something. The seats directly behind us (underneath their feet and at the same level we were sitting) was housing a python. I thought something was going to jump out on my head but the python wasn't scary at all. haha.

Another funny trip we took was to this resevoir that's been preserved sicne the early 20th century as a rainforest. What attracted us was a suspension bridge canopy walk! Well, little did we really know that there was one way in and one way out. We hiked about 7km to get the canopy but couldn't backtrack so we had to make a huge loop to get back to the closest exit. Oh man. We must have walked 11km. It was soo hot too. The suspension bridge was cool. Dave was freaking out a bit on that one. It was a beautiful view, not much flowering this time of year but we saw lots of lizards, monstrous ants, a few birds and loads of macaque monkeys.

Anyway, a great vacation. We got a nice fix and now we're super excited to come home. Nothing is new with the coup. That's fine with me. I just hope they can work on organization at the new airport before we have to fly out again. Sweet. My favorite analysis on the coup situation is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from September 20th. Sooo funny. Have a happy weekend!