Everyday Life

Now that I've had a few days to digest my surroundings, it's time to take note. First, I decided to get back in the exercise routine a couple days ago and checked out the hotel gym. A few treadmills, bikes, the regular stuff. I hopped on a treadmill, pressed START and it asked for my weight - in kilograms. No clue. It asked how far I wanted to run. That was the easy part - hey, how about a 5k? How fast would I like to run in Km/hour? Foggy recollection of driving in Germany, but at 6am my brain wasn't sharp enough to do the conversion. Turns out I was a bit slow because I only ran a little more than 4k in 30 minutes. That's okay because the slow speed allowed me to pay attention to the story on NewsChannel Asia about the store in Singapore that offers matchmaking. They're running a special right now due to the economic downturn, so if you're looking for love (and I swear that's exactly how they reported it) you can stop in this store, see which Vietnamese woman you are compatible with and for a bargain price of $5,000 USD, you can be married. How long does the process take? I was thinking maybe 30 days. No, 12 hours. They interviewed a potential bride who said, "one of my friends has a Singaporean husband and he treats her very well." Good grief.
I've had a few grocery store outings to date and they've gone well so far. The lack of a language barrier makes a huge difference in everyday life. We walked over to Great World City shopping mall Saturday afternoon, which is about a 15-minute walk from our apartment. We went into Cold Storage grocery and it was a fairly spacious place with decent selection. We wanted to cook something for dinner so we stopped at the Meat Market first. We chose some stir-fry style chicken with vegetables so naturally we wanted some rice. Care to guess how big of a selection of rice you find in a Singaporean grocery? How about how many different kinds of soy sauce one can choose from? I ended up with Thai style "fragrant rice" (looked like white rice to me) and it was hard to find a bag of it small enough that I could carry it home with the stroller. I let Megan choose the soy sauce because how on earth would I know the difference anyway?! Then we were able to experiment with a rice cooker at which point I give Brian credit for taking on that task while cooking the chicken. Turns out that it's pretty darn simple and I'll definitely be getting one for the apartment because it just seems like a good kitchen staple over here. You can practically give yourself a facial with the steam coming out of it too. Happily we ended up with a tasty meal and topped off the evening with a Tiger beer (the local brew).
After inspecting our future home more closely, I discovered that there are no electrical outlets in the bathrooms. Or air conditioners for that matter. Apparently these people like to bathe in a natural setting? Good to know that I won't be able to accidentally electrocute myself in the bath tub though. Every room has its own A/C unit with control, which can be handy but the kitchen and maid quarters also lacks A/C. I'm going to have to be highly motivated to bake to withstand cranking up the oven in my A/C-less kitchen in the tropics! Perhaps that future housekeeper will be fixing more meals than I originally thought :)
The other aspect of life over here that I have to point out is how incredibly friendly the people are. Everywhere I have been so far, the locals are more than happy to lend a hand and they seem geniune about it. It makes it much easier to be a clueless foreigner when you can feel at ease about asking for assistance, especially when you're with 3 children. Oh yes, and they get plenty of attention! Especially Miss Emily. Lots of smiles, rubbing their heads, speaking sweetly in some other language (hopefully compliments?!) It's funny to observe the girls' reactions. Emily eats it up - Elizabeth turns away and acts shy. No big surprises there.
I'm sure I'm forgetting other observations but I have plenty of time to add them later...