The Real World: Singapore, Part 1

The Tureff's

Sam and I have moved to Singapore. As a result, I'll be hijacking this blog for a few weeks to post some updates on our daily life here as well as regale you with stories that have only the smallest possibility of being entertaining.

It's hard for me to sum up our experiences so far in a concise, orderly manner, as that would take more than 1 minute of preparation before just sitting down and diarrhea-ing words into this page. I guess what I'm saying is: please bear with me as I struggle through this first post -- it's 6:35am here and Sam and I have not gotten what is considered to be the amount of sleep necessary to not murder people. I mean, just the sheer abomination of punctuation that just took place should be demonstrative of this fact.

I'll try to gloss over the traveling portion as much as possible, because while it was without a doubt hell exemplified, I don't want to spend too much time complaining about our white-people problems (our international flight was long....boo hoo).

Basically, from Saturday to Monday morning we did a lot of this:

And after that, we did some of this:

Then we did some more of this:

This is me being fat in Tokyo.

And on and on and on. The traveling was definitely unpleasant, but much like our dog, Foxy, I've already forgotten about it. Honestly the worst part was having to constantly provide documents for Foxy in addition to the never ending worry of whether or not we could get her to go to the bathroom between flights. If it weren't for that little a-hole (literally and figuratively, I suppose) it would have been an otherwise bearable experience. The reaction we have gotten to Foxy in Asia has been a tale of two equally bizarre extremes. In the US, everybody has close to the same reaction to Foxy: a wide smile, a barely audible "aww," the possibility of a quick pet and then they move on. In Asia people either react in extreme horror or freak out with unbridled excitement. In Tokyo, within minutes of each other we had a flock of girls run up to me, grab Foxy out of my hands and play with her/take pictures for like 5 minutes. 2 minutes after that another girl saw Foxy and completely freaked out, screamed and started waiving her carry-on bag in the manner a lion tamer would use a bar-stool. All she was missing was the whip in her hand.

And then we finally arrive in Singapore. I could immediately tell that we had left Seattle when Sam and I were handed this piece of paper:



Moving quickly along, another way we could tell we were no longer in Seattle, is that this guy jumped from the ceiling and ran up Sam's back about an hour after we woke up.

It's cool though, she handled it gracefully by screaming while gesticulating wildly.

Let's take a minute to clear up some misconceptions I had about Singapore.

#1. Everybody speaks English. This is so close to an accurate description. However I would add two words to this statement. I would say everyone speaks English to you. When people speak to each other they speak their own language, be it Malay, Mandarin, Hindi or another language that sounds like what the Prawns spoke in District 9. Additionally, Sam and I can't understand 20% of the people here, even though they speak better English than I do. We'll be sitting on the train and will just start laughing because we realize that the couple next to us has been speaking English to each other the whole time and we had no idea.

Ech. Typical Asian train station. Coming from the US its hard to adjust to the train stations here being "clean," and "sanitary" and "well lit" and all of the people "mind their own business" and move "efficiently" and "quickly" and the trains are "on time" and nobody tries to "stab you" or "have sex with you without your consent." I mean really, when are they going to join the 21st century?

It's no wonder we take cabs all the time:

Who wears a seatbelt in a cab?

#2. It is unbearably hot. Actually, I haven't felt that way at all. I mean don't get me wrong its not exactly Minneapolis here, but because it rains twice a day here for 20 minutes, it helps keeps the heat down. Seriously though, the rain here makes Seattle look like a little girl. The rainy season here is going to be off the hook. Let's illustrate. This is a gutter in the US:

This is a gutter here:

#3. All of your appliances will work here. Ok maybe this was not a misconception, just me not finding out something in advance. We get to our hotel and all the plugs (all one of them) look like this:

The people who designed this socket were obviously born without the gene that gives you the ability to experience penis shape humor.

There are a million small differences like this, for example, when you set the temperature in the shower, remember that the degrees are in Celsius, lest you experience my morning flash-boil.

THE FOOD!!!!

My favorite thing about Singapore so far is the food. In Singapore, people eat out for every meal, often in little "food courts" filled with these things called hawker stalls.

For about $6-$8 US, you and your wife can eat a laughably delicious meal for two. If you don't have a wife, for $2.50 US you can stare longingly into your Black Pepper Mee Hong Kong w/Prawn and contemplate dying alone. Each food court has a bunch of these stalls each serving food from a different country or style. You just walk up, point to a picture and announce loudly "I WILL PAY YOU MONEY AND YOU WILL MAKE THE PICTURE ON THE TOP RIGHT AND I WILL PUT IT IN MY TUMMY. THANK YOU."

Sam and I eat like kings for about $16 US per day.

The last thing we did yesterday was go visit Foxy in dog jail. According to Singapore law she has to be quarantined for 10 days upon our arrival.

Is the barbed wire necessary, guys?

We get an hour conjugal visit once per day. These visits are the most fun I've ever had. I can't even explain how exciting it is to sit in a cell with your dog for an hour. This picture captures only a small part of how enthralling these daily visits are:

I put a pack of cigarettes and a file in her squeak toy.

With Foxy out of the way, we get to do all sorts of exciting things.

Like stand on the street we live on.


And stand in front of some kind of fountain.

And take pictures of people very early in the morning while they brush their teeth.

Ok as you can probably tell I don't want to write anymore things. I'll make another equally banal post in the next few days and send it to you completely unsolicited. Bye!

Somebody left a surfboard on this hotel.

***Update: Some store names we like: Chewy Junior, House of Condom, Republic of Steak, Cake History