I have been in Singapore for almost a month now. Things are doing ok. I don’t have a job and sometimes it frustrates me to not have money to spend but then again, I prefer not to work. So I’m actually not looking for a job. What’s the plan, you say? Dunno yet. The only plan right now is to use the free time to make up a plan. Call it an indefinite planning session period.

Believe it or not, I’m not even bored yet. I spent the first 2 weeks without TV or internet and I survived. I tried to focus on domestic stuff like doing the laundry, cleaning the house, cooking for the hubby, washing the dishes. But now I have internet and 24 hours is just not enough. 2 weeks ago, Jorey could live without lifting a finger coz I could do all the chores, but with the internet in place, he’s had to do some of the chores already.

Singapore is an interesting place to live in because the racial mix is so varied. One of the major challenges for us is trying to communicate. A lot of people speak in english – but it’s an english I can hardly comprehend. It’s funny because when we ride a taxi, oops I mean cab (in singapore pronounced as /keb/), and we want to go to Orchard road, just to make it easy for the driver and for us as well, we’d say “Uncle, can you take us to Ohlchad (Orchard).” – cause if you said Orchard, they’d go “Wha??” Ikea also has a different name here. You’d have to tell the driver to bring you to ikya (like dikya without the d). Once, we told the driver to bring us to I-key-ah and we spent a few minutes trying to explain where we wanted to go. When the driver finally understood we wanted to go to Ikea, he corrected us by saying “because you don’t say I-key-ah, it’s ikya. Ok!

We live on the 4th floor of a condominium building. In singapore there’s this (weird for me) way of hanging your laundry. People hang their laundry outside their window, in the the free air, even if they are at the penthouse of the building. One day I was wondering, what happens if our laundry gets blown off. Where should I look for it? And sure enough, when I got home, our laundry was blown off. I looked out the window and found my favorite fleece sea green blanket now hanging neatly at the unit on the second floor. I tried retrieving it but there was always no one home. So fast forward to today. I decided to pay the 2nd floor a visit. I knocked and a lady was saying from behind the door “haaa? haaaa?” like a typical chinese lady you would imagine from the scenes of old jackie chan movies or from that poor village in Kung fu hustle. I said: “Hi! Good morning! We’re the tenants from 4th floor and was wondering if you’ve seen our blanket.” She replied to me in relatively good english “You have to speak in Chinese.”
So I said “Blanket?… Green?… blown off?… you see?” She just said “Sorry no english.” But her English was actually pretty good. Errr. So that’s the end for my favorite green fleece blanket. Rest in peace and may you not give warmth to those people living in the second floor because they don’t rightfully own you.