National Day

Yesterday was National Day in Singapore. It was its 42nd birthday, and it called for the National Day Parade (NDP - they love acronyms here). We met our friend Arkadi downtown and walked around for about an hour and a half before we actually found out where to go. There were THOUSANDS of people and no signs. The major "parade" was happening on a stadium thing that was floating in the Marina Bay area. We walked in that direction for a while, but then we realized that we wouldn't actually be able to see anything. I had read something in the paper about there being a screen on the Padang, and that there was space for 15,000 people. We walked and walked, and we finally found thousands of people making a flag out of umbrellas (really - that's normal). It was the largest human Singapore flag ever. Have you ever seen a small human Singapore flag? I haven't.

The people were so well organized. It was nuts. We ended up walking behind the flag and planting ourselves on a field with a bunch of thousands of people. There was a huge screen in front of the flag people that we could see when people weren't walking by. It sort of reminded me of Opera in the Park. The NDP was ridiculous - I mean amazing. There was supposed to be an air show, and there were three jets and then five jets. Then there were some helicopters who brought the (smaller) Singapore flag through the skyline to the stadium on the bay. Then there was this crazy show of performances. They had snipers, they had army-ish boats running all over the water chasing each other. They had something that looked like fisher price ambulances. It was outrageous. Then they had all of these people in costumes singing and dancing. We were able to sort of watch it. We were supposed to meet someone in Holland Village (which happens to be right by my work), so we wanted to beat the crowds to the MRT. We started walking as the fireworks started. They were fireworks, and that wasn't so impressive, but what was impressive was the THOUSANDS of people. The farther we got from the action, the people didn't thin out. There were tons of them! They were sitting on every part of lawn, bridge, stoop, etc.

Matt and I thought it was interesting that their "pride" was very militarily based. Between the boats, the snipers, the fighter jets...it was a lot of military. In addition, there was a lot of focus on the skyline and the economic stability that they're so proud of. In America parades are more about community - the marching bands, the kids, the scouts, the men's whatever club. Here there was none of that. It was also interesting since it's such a young nation - the feeling of a national birthday is so much more meaningful, because many of the people who live here remember when there was no Singapore.

Click here to see all of our pictures from National Day.

After the national day celebrations we met Matt's friend Carthik for dinner. It was really fun. We like him a lot. The food was good as well (though I realized that I am either allergic to a) Holland Village, b) Italian food, or c) dairy products. I was a disaster all night and all day today!

In other news, I successfully sent out a newsletter to our listserv at work. That was actually a big accomplishment, since the coding was all messed up. I'm inadvertently learning HTML. I think that might help me one day...