Matt and I went with a couple Justin and Emma to Sentosa yesterday. Matt knows Justin because they both went to SAIS (grad school), and Justin's girlfriend is Emma, a woman from Indonesia whom Matt enjoyed speaking Bahasa with. You can take the MRT (subway) to a mall, of course, and then transfer to another train that goes right to Sentosa. (If you go to maps.google.co
m and type in "Sentosa, Singapore" you can see exactly where it is). It's sort of Mackinac Island mixed with Disney World (no fudge shops, no middle-Americans, no rides, but plenty of bikes, few cars, and people feeling like they're on vacation). We went to the beach stop and walked around a bit. Yet again, we could have a beautiful beach if there weren't about 150 ships in immediate sight. In order to make Sentosa beautiful, they have imported white sand and palm trees, so it almost looks like the beautiful beaches we saw in the Dominican Republic, except there are a million ships, and it's all imported! Luckily, though, that doesn't seem to bother anyone. On a super cloudy day (thank god for clouds!) there were still hundreds of people playing volleyball, playing on the beach, eating, swimming, having general family fun. We ate pizza and then walked over to Fort Siloso, which had amazing history. It was built in the 1880s as a British fort, and had a great part in the Japanese take-over of Singapore from 194
2 to 1945. I won't give a history lesson, but when picking colonialists, it appeared that the British were way less brutal than the Japanese, so when the British got it back in 1945 (thanks (?) to the US bombing of Japan) people actually seemed pretty pleased. It was a super interesting fort. You can see Matt and Justin standing near the "12 Pound Gun" which sits at the far west of the island and would shoot vessels coming into Singapore's port.In other news, on Friday night (like good Jews) we went out for Indian food and went back to Mustafa's (see here) and made quite a night out of it - not necessarily on purpose. We went to buy some appliances: two more fans (did I mention that it gets hot here?), a dvd player, a clock radio, a phone, tennis racket, the essentials...Well, in Mustafa's, you decide on which appliance you want, they give you a slip with the information about it on it, you pay for it and then you go back and get the appliance. Well, Mustafa's is HUGE, and there are many floors and tons of stairs, escalators, lifts, etc., and it's really impossible to know your way around (particularly on your second time in the store!). We were in the electronics section, and then we wandered away and went through the store for about an hour, and then all of the sudden we came across another electonics section which seemed to know nothing about the first or how to get there! The same happened with the sports section - we found a tennis racket, and then about an hour later found another sports section with TONS more rackets, and they all sort of looked the same, but it wasn't the same place, and the guy there had no idea how to get to the other one! By 11:00 we were both pretty tired, and we had to find our way back to pick up all of our booty. It took a while and was challenging, but Matt's directional ability prevailed, and we were okay.
Last night we went out with an amazing couple. We had a great time. Matt knows the woman from work, and she's working here with Treasury, and her family has been here six months. They were super interesting and nice, and we hope to see them again.
Most importantly, they have Alfonso Mangos (see here) in Little India, and they're good.
One more thing...why did the peacock cross the road?
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