Finally got some time to write something instead of just enough time to upload photos to facebook. One sister and her family is away at her in-laws. My nephews are watching Kiki’s Delivery Service and mom is frying some fish in the kitchen. The weather here is perfect. The sun is just beginning to peek out of the clouds (it’s 10:30 am) and the temperature is a balmy 80 (albeit with 98% humidity). I sitting in the balcão and can smell squash the next door neighbor is cooking and can hear coconuts being grated. The birds are being lazy, just staying perched on the trees and bushes and there are butterflies flitting about.
Other than the noise of the movie and the truck the four year old has starting pushing around the house, its quiet outside. It’s amazing how much difference that quiet seems to make. This does not seem like civilization – I can hear traffic from miles away and there are honest-to-goodness vendors who walk by shouting out their wares (mostly fish at this time of the day). Of course, I can also hear every word that the neighbors say and know in exquisite detail exactly how wrongly the mornings tea was made.
I’ve got here Sunday afternoon and it’s been a blast so far. I landed in Singapore for a stop over and found that my checked in suitcase had set off the alarm, and found a very amusing (to me) sticker on the outside:
I can just picture the suitcase in the machine now: oh no!, I’m all alone in the big, bad, x-ray machine. Help! Help! and the TSA agent pulling the bag out and saying There, there, little suitcase. I’ll just open you up and check you out and put you back with the other suitcases. See? That was painless.
Singapore was amazing. I guess I liked it more this time around because the last time I was here, I was on a business trip and did not have a relaxed time around. December is the rainy season in Singapore, so my plan for walking around the city (there are 5 museums within a 5 block radius) fell apart. I wanted to stay awake and start beating the jetlag, so I signed up for a guided tour.
The tour didn’t start till 2:00pm, so I went down to Orchard road and wandered around.
Orchard road was an eye-opener. Good lord, they have really taken the Christmas shopping spirit to heart. My favorite part was when I dashed into a shop to get away from a downpour and got lost wondering around. The shops are like twisty little mazes, all alike. And when I found myself at the very bottom, next to the garage, there was a little sign at the bottom of the escalator:
The guided tour was as expected. Most of the group were like me – stopping over in Singapore before catching the next flight leaving at an unearthly hour. The guide was a die-hard Singaporean: Singapore was the greatest country in the world and the Singaporean government was the best and was always looking to help out native Singaporean citizens.
The regularly scheduled program followed with frequent informercials.
One stop on the tour was the botanical gardens, where christmas trees decorated by the various embassies in Singapore were exhibited:
The next day I left for Mumbai (or Bombay as I knew it as). I was also excited about flying into Mumbai for the first time at a decent hour (ok, the whole leaving at 4:00 am wasn’t so good, but the arriving at 10:00 am – I was all for that).
There was a giant fish pond at the airport that stopped me in my tracks.
Luckily, I slept on the way and once we started our descent, opened the window shades and looked outside.
I guess LA must have looked like this before the Clean Air act.
My sister had been to Delhi for a conference and she was telling me that when they went outside, their eyes started burning and they found it hard to breathe. Mumbai is a coastal city, so the ocean breezes keeps things from getting that bad.
