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Published: October 25th 2011
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colourful little India Well hello! It has been a while. We have had a hiatus these last couple of weeks. We have been in Singapore staying with our dear friends/my ex-workers Con and Alice and recovering. I came down with giardia or something related about the time that we arrived in Sri Lanka, and was sick, nauseous, and generally dragging the entire time we were there. We tried out the local medical care and weren't too impressed so we decided to wait until we arrived in Singapore to try to figure out what was wrong with me.
Singapore is an interesting place. It is incredibly clean, organized, and safety conscious. There are signs everywhere forbidding smoking, spitting, food and drink, pets, and durians, all with fines from $500 to $1000. There are also signs reminding people to drive carefully, to get rid of stagnant water in their homes (mosquito prevention), and there are even signs warning that you are about to go down stairs so please hold on to hand rails. We got on an MRT (subway/skytrain) car one day that was entirely done up in food and cleanliness posters all about washing your hands before eating and checking expiry dates on food
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Chinatown containers. It's a little extreme, but overall it's a nice city. There are lots of green spaces, and they are actually expanding annually. There are parks everywhere with walking and jogging trails, all with distance markers painted on them, tennis and badminton courts, swimming pools, indoor soccer fields and outdoor exercise equipment. The rest of it is either apartment complexes (the grounds are power washed monthly, and they all have little green parks and cheap cafes on the ground floors)or large, very airconditioned shopping malls. It reminds me of a slightly more manic soccer mom version of Yaletown. But I could like there fairly contentedly for quite a while, I think. In fact, Ev and I are batting around the idea of trying to find a job there when we are finished our DELTA courses.
Anyways, we landed in Singapore and Con and Alice welcomed us with open arms, set us up in their spare room and directed us to a doctor. Over the next week and a half the docs ran various tests and stuffed me with antibiotics, and Ev and I sat on the couch and watched movies and caught up on sleep, until one morning I
woke up feeling like a new person. Thank goodness for first world medical care, travel insurance, and excellent friends! After I got my feet back under me we spent a few days exploring Singapore by day and hanging our with Con and Alice in the evenings (they were both working), and we even managed to line up a day touring around with our friends Goh and Samantha.
Here is the backstory on Sam and Goh: We met Goh and Sam about a year and a half ago in Vancouver, while having dinner with my folks. Dad went out to get chicken for fajitas and ended up bringing home a young Singaporean/Malaysian couple on a motorcycle. They were in the middle of a nearly two year long world tour by motorcycle, and they had been in Canada for about 5 hours, having just come up from Seattle. Dad noticed the bike (huge, covered in boxes and gear, with signatures, stickers, and flags all over it) outside Safeway and struck up a conversation with Sam while Goh was getting groceries. They ended up having dinner with us and staying the night before continuing on towards Alaska the next day. They were
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Hindu temples decorations awesome, and we have kept in loose touch via facebook. When they heard we were coming to Singapore they invited us to stay with them and offered to show us around. By the time I got well enough to make the most of Singapore we were running out of time there, but we got in a day with them. They took us to Chinatown and the Heritage Museum there (really awesome, very worth visiting), to the Merlion (Singapore's marcot/symbol), to the beach/park on the east side of the city, and to Little India in the evening. We ended up sitting in a hawker's center with them eating chicken and rice and drinking Tiger beer (Samantha got a lucky bottle cap and won a Tiger towel) before eventually heading back to the apartment to have a last nightcap with Con and Alice. We said our goodbyes, packed our stuff, and headed to the bus terminal early the next morning. Goh and Sam insisted on picking us up at 7am and taking us to the bus, since the smaller terminal we needed to find is tricky to locate. We said our second set of goodbyes to them, and got on a bus
to Malaysia.
We are now in Malacca, drinking tea and eating some rather excellent coconut brownies in an eccentric little cafe and watching a storm roll in. We have wandered the streets a bit so far and found a variety of local art galleries, family-owned antique stores and knick-knack shops, good food and a generally laidback atmosphere. We are looking forward to getting a very good night's sleep tonight (since we got almost none last night) and to exploring the town more fully tomorrow.
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