Singpore: Day 1

Last weekend, I went to Singapore. After thirty days in Indonesia on a tourist visa, which is how I entered, it was necessary to leave the country. My company has it set up so that they send their teachers to Singapore for the day. I got up at 4 am, so I could be ready when my taxi arrived at 4:30. My flight was at six and I met the agent in Singapore at ten. I had to give him my passport (kinda scary) and then I was on my own until 4 pm, when it would be time to meet him again to get my passport and my new, 12-month visa.

I decided to stay for the weekend, since it's unlikely I'll ever have the opportunity to go to Singapore again, so my first stop after meeting the agent was the hotel to drop off my bag.

Mostly on Friday, I walked around the city. Singapore has a well-deserved reputation for being clean. Nobody litters (and nobody chews gum). Orchard Road is one long row of malls. It reminded me of the Brentwood area of Los Angeles. All the trees and flowers were immaculately manicured and the only God present was the God of consumerism. I wasn't impressed. But there was a Starbucks.

Next, I went to Little India. There were rows of shops selling souvenirs and purses and incense and scarves and other colorful items. I walked away from Little India before I started looking for a place to eat lunch. Kinda dumb.

Before I met the agent again, I just had time to ride the Singapore Flyer, the largest Ferris Wheel in the world, so I could get a glimpse of the city from the air. Then it was back to collect my passport and back to the hotel for a little break.

Singapore is clean and pretty, but you don't get immunity from the heat. It's hotter than Jakarta, which I didn't imagine was possible, and last weekend it didn't rain at all. I learned to stick to the shade and protect myself from the sun as much as possible.

Last Sunday was Chinese New Year, so the entire city was decorated for the celebration. But nowhere was it more apparent than in Chinatown. There were open air stalls on most of the side streets where I wandered up and down, checking out the goods for sale. In addition to souvenirs, clothing, purses, and such, they were also selling all the food one needs to celebrate New Year in style. Everything, even the malls on Orchard Road, was open until one or two in the morning, so everyone could get their last minute shopping in. I've never in my life seen so many people in one place as I saw in Chinatown on Friday night. I stayed for a couple of hours, but I had to keep disengaging myself from the crowd to get air. Chinatown was as colorful as Little India, but all in reds and yellows and golds.

By the time I got back to my hotel, I have no idea how far I had walked. I took Singapore's amazing MRT all over the place and walked around a whole bunch of neighborhoods. My skin was thick with sweat and I was relieved to get a shower and air conditioning!

Pictures are up on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=695739736&k=4V12ZWPXST6G6BD1YA52WTSRZ6BAY2Y1PSBV&oid=1333521254588

Ladies, Please Remain Seated for the Duration of the Performance

Last night, I went to a bar in Jaksa, which is a street in central Jakarta where expats and locals co-mingle. I managed to stay at the bar until 4:30 a.m.--which is the latest I've been out so far--and I had a really good time.

I left my friends behind at 4:30, because I was fading. The cab ride home took about twenty minutes and it was a struggle to stay awake. I must have started to fall asleep at one point because the cab driver said something to me that I didn't understand. Then he laughed and I think he said, "Tidak tidur," which I think means "no sleeping." He probably thought I was going to pass out in his cab and I didn't have the words to tell him I was sleepy as opposed to ready to pass out from too much alcohol.

In any case, the beer was cheap, the music was great, and it's a Cheers environment where everybody there knows everybody else. My favorite thing about it was the sign above the toilet in the ladies room, which read, "Ladies, please remain seated for the duration of the performance." Heh. I've never thought about peeing in theatrical terms before. Now that I have, I might start taking a bow after I flush.

Death by Angkot

To get to work or the mall or some other places that I haven't discovered yet, one form oftransportation is an angkot. To catch one, I stand on the side of the road and hail it like a taxi. Then, I climb in the open door and shuffle to the back, bent over at the waist like a 90-year old victim of osteoporosis. When you want to get off, you say "kiri," which means "left," and the driver pulls over. You get out, give him 2,000 or 3,000 rupiah, depending on the length of your ride, and you're done.

Most of them are as beat up as the one in the picture above and the drivers clearly have no grand ideas of preserving any sort of aesthetic. Still, it's an insanely cheap and quick way to get around. Until the other day, I thought it was a relatively safe way as well. But that all changed during my ride to work on Wednesday.

I hailed the angkot as usual. Instead of pulling over to the curb, the driver stopped in the middle of the street and I had to walk out, hoping that a motorbike didn't come racing through and clip me. I climbed in and we were off. Before we'd gone twenty feet, he'd taken a corner so fast I think the thing went up on two wheels. There were two men and one other woman in the back and I looked around at them to see if they were alarmed. They didn't seem to be so I tried to relax. But the driver was accelerating to about 30 mph on a street with heavy, two-lane traffic, while he weaved in and out of the lanes, coming so close to the other cars I was holding my breath. By the time we got to the bumpy part, I was giggling to myself. I'm pretty sure it was a defense mechanism so I didn't pee my pants instead.

The bumpy part is the last stretch of road before we reach the mall. It's about two blocks long and it's bumpy because the angkot drivers always go off road and drive through a concrete parking area that has long since been churned up into rocks and potholes. Usually, the angkot drivers take the bumpy part slowly, so they don't throw their passengers out the open door.

For my driver on this day, it wasn't such a problem. He might have slowed to 25, but he was driving so fast that all four of his passengers were coming up off the benches, in my case almost all the way to the ceiling. The other three got off sooner than my stop but I wasn't about to be alone with a maniac, so I followed them and walked the extra block to work.

I'm still alive, but barely.

Clouds

I love the clouds here. If it's about to rain heavily, they are cumulus, low and puffy with moisture and that sort of deep gray-blue color you see just before a thunderstorm. Just after the rain, they remain puffy but turn snow white, hanging so low I think I might reach out and touch them. If it's a sunny day, they are stratus, a little further up, spread out across the sky like a land mass. Occasionally, they are cirrus, thin and wispy and far out of reach.

More often though, there is some combination of the three, a clear reflection of the country below: islands in a sea of blue sky, with differing shapes, sizes, colors, and elevation. Each day, just walking out the door and looking up is an adventure. I wish my pictures could do them justice.