Ladies Perspire, Horses Sweat

Or so my Nanna used to say.

Clearly, my beloved Nan never made it to Singapore. Actually, I don’t think she ever left New South Wales.

But living in Singapore you most definitely sweat.  There is nothing ladylike or delicate about it.  It’s something you really just have to get used to living in this climate.  You sweat, then you go inside and the air-con dries the sweat.  Then you go outside and sweat again. Rinse and repeat for eternity.

There are times where I don’t even realise I’m sweating, but when I reach up to scratch my face my hand comes away wet. And not just a little bit damp, but wet enough that you can flick drops off your hand like a marathon runner.  Which is where my resemblance to elite athletes begins and ends.

Sweat is just a fact of life here in the little red dot.

National Day

Singapore like things to be perfect, which goes a long way to explain the efficient public transport system here.

August 9th is National Day in Singapore, which is a little like Australia Day except they actually celebrate the day, as opposed to just having the day off from work and watching cricket on the telly as we do in Australia.

I don’t know if it’s law or not but almost every condo (including ours) has decorated the entrance with Singaporean flags and bunting in the last week in celebration of Singapore’s 46th birthday.  I come from a country where we do not display our patriotism.

If you were to hang an Aussie flag off your house you’d be considered a bit odd.  The only times it’s really acceptable to be patriotic is at sporting events and even then it’s not the Aussie flag you’ll see, but the sporting one which features a boxing kangaroo.  We don’t deck ourselves in red, blue and white which are the colours on our ‘proper’ flag but the green and gold ones of the sporting flag.  This may (or may not) hark back to the fact our country was founded on convict labour, so we’ve always liked to thumb our nose at authority.

So, flags have appeared and it’s strange to me given my cultural background. But it’s nice at the same time.

On National Day there’s a big parade.  One of the radio stations here was giving away tickets to the parade as a prize. If Aussie radio stations offered that as a prize I’m pretty sure their phones would remain silent.  The parade is a BIG DEAL.  Such a big deal that they do practice runs for at least 6 weeks prior to National Day.  There are soldiers, tanks, cannons, helicopters, navy boats, light shows, songs, and fireworks.

Yes, they run practice fireworks shows.

It must cost a bomb to run 6 weeks of practice fireworks shows, but the benefit is it gives everyone a chance to catch the fireworks.  Which given we are heading to Hong Kong when the real parade is on is fortuitous for us!

So last night we headed down to the area near the Merlion. I think this is called One Fullerton, but I’m happy to say we parked ourselves at a bar near the Merlion   some spectacular fireworks.

My girls were spellbound. They gaped at the sky with open mouths and oohed and ahhed over the beautiful colours that lit up the night sky.  I was captivated by the reflection of the fireworks on all three towers of Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort, it was truly beautiful.

Unusual Singapore Things #7

Singaporean school children go on excursions (or field trips) to Ikea.

Pangs

I have been looking forward to today for weeks.

In my own home, with my own stuff and both the Missies at school and kinder.

I was desperately looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet.

I should’ve known that as soon as things settled down and I had a minute to myself that homesickness would rear it’s ugly head.

I’ve had a knot sitting in my chest all day.

A yearning to be somewhere where I knew the way things worked and where a trip to the supermarket didn’t zap my energy.

(Disclaimer: I will be fine.  My husband’s away, so things are a bit harder, but I will be seeing friends tomorrow, Friday and Saturday. This, too, will pass. x)

Stuff I Miss

Thing I miss:

• sausage rolls and pies from the bakery
• Schwarzkopf hair spray in the silver can with the green lid
• Bakers Delight cheese and bacon rolls
• the nightly news
• intuitively knowing which brands to buy whilst grocery shopping
• finding clothes that fit fat bottomed girls
• friendships that are past the ‘niceties’ stage
• walking outside of a morning and feeling cool, fresh air
• driving
• having clean feet
• not sweating
• carpet

Expat Princess

I tweet. I like to tweet a lot.  Somewhere along the road of tweeting I have earned the label of ‘Expat Princess’, which in the Twitterverse is written as #expatprincess.

I’ve had many 140 character conversations about how Expat Princess Life is filled with pedicures, long lunches, tennis lessons and shopping, while the live-in maid took care of all the things I used to do.  Like raising my kids and other such boring chores.

To date, I am a massive fail on the Expat Princess scale.  I don’t have a live-in helper (although we haven’t ruled that out all together) and my days are pretty much the same.

‘Same shit, different country’, to be crude about it.

But I’m not at all unhappy about this.  We’re only two months into this expat lark, so it’s early days and I am still very much stumbling through things blind with my hands held out in front, hoping to ward off any obstacles.

At this point having the same basic routine that we had in Australia is providing security and stability for all of us, but most importantly for the kids.  My days are filled with pretty much the same sort of thing they were filled with at home – tidying, mothering, cooking, grocery shopping and spending WAY too much time online.  The kids lives are filled with the same things – school/pre-school, playing and bickering. Same goes for hub.

I assume over time that the routine will change. Slowly, steadily.

But, for now, we need the anchor of routine to tether us.

Our House

Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, in the middle of our
Our house, was our castle and our keep
Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, that was where we used to sleep
Our house, in the middle of our street

Well, our house isn’t really in the middle of the street but I have had that song by Madness running through my head for weeks as my yearning for a home intensified to the point of drowning everything else out.

And, now, I have a home. And what a lovely home it is.  So lovely I would say that is was almost worth 8 weeks of  delays to get it. Almost.

Some of the things I love about this house:

• My girls have their own bedrooms. And they are bigger than the shoeboxes they had in our Melbourne house.
• We have a rainwater shower head in our ensuite. It is bliss. Sheer bliss.
• We also have a sunken bath in our ensuite but we haven’t used it (although the geckos seem to love it from the amount of poo they leave in it!)
• We are toward the top of a hill (hills are a rare thing in Singers), so there is often a lovely breeze blowing to cool the house down.
• The view from the roof terrace. Or, really, having a ROOF TERRACE!
• The turtles in the pond outside our front door.  The first few days they would swim away when they saw me, but today all three swam right up to me, lifted their little heads out of the water and looked right at me.  I would like to think this is because they find me fascinating, but I suspect it has more to do with them wanting food. (must  find out who feeds them.)
  
• Concrete walls and concrete floors means we don’t get any noise from the neighbours. I hope this works in reverse, and it’s not that we are so noisy that we drown everybody else out. (This may well be true).

Sure, there’s some annoyances (like the 70 steps) but the GOOD definitely outweighs the bad!

The Leasing Saga

We all have them.  A collection of stories that we trot out at dinner parties, or when we’re making new friends.

They are usually stories borne out of adversity or difficult times.  Mine include:

• the 3 day stopover in Singapore last year where I was doing a the solo parenting thing and wound up in the emergency room at 1am.
• a lion roaring really loudly in the vicinity of my very thin tent in Kenya.
• the Big Missy’s premature arrival (she weighed 3lb 15ozs!).
• forgetting to put the date on my wedding invites.

There’s a couple of other ones founded in awesome experiences (particularly the journey I went on for THE BOOK), but it’s the shitty, scary, frustrating experiences that most people turn into a funny story.  And that’s what I hope our leasing saga will become, something to laugh about with friends.

I’m not quite there yet, though.

We’ve been in Singapore just short of 8 weeks and our situation has not really changed much from Day 1.  Whilst we haven’t been truly homeless, we have lacked an address and this has prevented us from sorting out stuff (car, school buses, furniture, helper) that would have been sorted weeks ago had our plan had gone to plan.

So, I sit and I wait to hear if tomorrow is the day we will get the keys to our new life.

I look forward to turning The Leasing Saga into an amusing story.  But that may be some time away as we need to heal first.

Postscript: Thank you to all my wonderful friends who have had the misfortune to witness The Leasing Saga. x

Unusual Singapore Things #6

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