Singapore & Back

Ah, Singapore. The fine for littering is $1,000. The streets are wide and immaculately clean and the taxis are big and fat and air-conditioned and the traffic is calm and quiet. Nobody honks at you for no reason. No one almost runs you down with motorcycles on the sidewalk. And the famous Singapore food, so good: crab with a hot creamy chili sauce all over it served with sweet white bread for sopping it all up.

And where but the Singapore Zoo can you get good Indian food? Also, the pictures below show Little India, one of our favorite parts of the city where you can get big softball-sized samosas for a Singapore dollar.

We shopped; we did. For clothes, really cool clothes, but also things we cannot get here: pancake syrup, good whole wheat crackers, an Edith Piaf CD, shoes that fit.


We saw one of my old friends from graduate school, Noelle, who we haven't seen for fourteen years. She and her husband, Tanny, took us all over the city, to malls, to the river, to eat, and we got to see their busy, bustling life. A big perk: they have a nanny who speaks English who watched our kids for us twice.
We rode elephants; we took a city tour on a double-decker bus; we swam in the hotel's rooftop pool.

But there is something odd about Singapore. I got scolded a lot. Taxi drivers would tell me to put my seat belt on or else. People told me not to open doors a certain way. Asking a waitress to push two tables together seemed to send her almost over the edge. There's a perfection, a rigidness, that really stuck out in contrast to the crazy wild chaos of Vietnam. Can't say which is better, just different.

Now we are riding out these hotter-than-can-be-believed days here in Can Tho. We're readying for Hudson's birthday this weekend. Big bash here, and then we're going to stay overnight at a little resort, My Khanh, just outside of Can Tho: little bungalows on stilts over the water, a swimming pool, restaurant and crocodile fishing!

--Anne