Pulau Dayang (2008)

This weekend Matt and I took our second trip to Pulau Dayang, off the coast of South East Malaysian peninsula. We hopped on a van on Friday after work (and after the best chicken rice I have ever had), and took it all the way across the boarder to Mersing. We got off there, waited for a few hours (until 2am), then we got on a dive boat - I was selfish and went in near-first, and grabbed a bed for us - and we slept on the rocky four and a half hour boat ride to Pulau Dayang. We arrived and slept in beds for a few more hours.

Basically for the whole weekend we dove and ate and then dove and then ate. Literally this was our Saturday and Sunday:
Breakfast
Dive
Lunch
Dive
Snack
Dive
Dive (night dive)
Dinner
Sleep
Dive
Breakfast
Dive
Lunch
Boat ride back to Mersing and bus ride back to Singapore.

Luckily the food was good - and the diving was excellent. This was our first time using our new underwater camera and case, and we loved it. Now I don't have to link to wikipedia to show you what we saw!

Matt did his underwater photography specialty, so we had an instructor just for the two of us, and we loved her. We had met her last year when we went to Pulau Dayang. I had my longest dive (69 minutes), and I don't think we went deeper than 16 meters the whole time. It was super relaxed, great diving.

We were with a fun group of people as well.

A few thoughts about diving and Melanie - diving pushes me. I am not comfortable on boats. I take dramamine, and I listen to NPR on my ipod. Somehow that makes it okay. I am totally scared of the dark, but I pushed myself to go on a night dive. Somehow after a minute or two, I felt pretty comfortable under water, and I didn't think that the coral boogie monster was going to come after me. Sometimes we are getting pushed by currents, and it scares me that I am not strong enough to swim into them, but I always am, and it's always okay. I think I have learned a lot just by pushing myself to do this.

The pictures that are on the blog are (in this order):
The "resort"
us
giant puffer fish
blue spotted ray
turtle
sea worm (it was HUGE!)
starfish
bumphead parrotfish (these are the ones we swam with in Perhentian - not a great photo, but they're huge and so cool!)
clownfish (Nemos!)

Click here to see more pictures.

2nd Anniversary

Though we just had our Singaporeaversary...yesterday was our second wedding anniversary. We're not much for these types of celebrations, so at the last minute, I decided I would skip out on my Spanish class, and we went out for Italian food. I think it was the same place we went for our anniversary last year (but this time I didn't get sick after). We talked about how much we've grown over the past year, blah, blah, blah...it was nice.

Tonight we went out for our friend, Selina's good-bye dinner. She's going back to the States (she is Singaporean but studied at SAIS with Matt) to do her PhD. We went to a local restaurant in Geylang and had great food. I was offended, though, because I was one of three white people at the table, and the "waitress" lady brought ME (and ONLY me!) a plate, fork and spoon!!! I swear I'm a chopsticks expert. I have been complimented by the locals! I was totally offended.

My Chinese Day

This morning we were supposed to hike McRitchie reservoir, but it was thunderstorming and had been for hours, so we went for dim sum instead.

We met Jeff and Tenley at a dim sum restaurant recommended by a Singaporean in my Spanish class. It's on the seventh floor of an hdb (public housing) complex in the middle of nowhere, but still downtown. It is the most random thing ever.

It's a huge dim sum hall filled with Chinese families. We saw two other white people, and we literally saw hundreds of people waiting in the line and eating...It was a place where they have carts of dim sum and other foods that they bring around and you choose what you want. We ate so much food - we had no idea how much it cost. I ate chicken feet. Why not. I didn't like that I could feel the little toe joints, so I'm not sure I would do it again, but I wanted to try. My picture of them didn't come out too clearly. The rest of the food was outstanding. It was S$50 (about $35 US) for us all to stuff our faces for hours. Not bad.

Then I went to find a cheap pedicure or foot massage. This week was rough on my feet, so I thought I would treat them to one of those. I found a foot reflexology massage. It was outstanding. There were only two places that were too ticklish to touch. That I would do again.

The third Chinese thing I did was use a squatter toilet. I did it three times today (I drank a lot of tea this morning).

The Water Show that Wasn't

Today was a busy day for Hildebrandts in Singapore. We got up, went to the market, Matt and Peter got hair cuts by the cute Malaysian Chinese lady. We got back and ate some left-overs from last night, and then Matt and I went to see our friends Tali and Alon's baby. We hadn't seen her for a few months, and she is so cute and fun! It was great to see her. Then we headed to our dive shop, and I got my first diving mask and some booties. Now I will not get bruises in my uni-brow area and blisters on my feet. I think I will enjoy diving more. Then we hopped on the MRT and went to the mall to meet up with a bunch of friends to see You Don't Mess with the Zohan. I cannot believe that is a movie. I was DYING the entire time. It's so outrageous. He is hilarious. I have to see what Arabs are saying about this movie, and I'm 99% sure there's not much positive, but I can tell you that we were entertained and that 70% of the movie went over the heads of most of the people in the audience. There were so many funny jokes. I HIGHLY recommend that people see this movie. I think I'm the target audience for it - N. American Jew who gets the Israel jokes and appreciates silly penis humor.

Then we took cabs to the Bedok Reservoir, where there was supposed to be this Dutch music thing on the water that closed the Singapore Arts Festival. We walked and walked and we saw a bunch of people sitting on the grass. We asked if it was happening where they were sitting, and they said "yes. That is why there is this wooden platform here." Okay. We believed them. Then I called our friend whom we were meeting there, and I heard music, an announcer and realized that there was something we were missing. She couldn't describe WHERE on the reservoir she was, so we walked around the reservoir. We walked for about 10 minutes, and we passed literally hundreds of people who had set up chairs around the reservoir - looking at nothing. You couldn't tell anything was going on, but Julie swore it had already started. Okay - so we turned around when we ran into a European family who said there was nothing in the direction we were going in. We walked back, passed those hundreds of people sitting in chairs and on the platform near the water. There were no signs. The sound was NOT traveling across the water. We saw some small lights far away. Finally, we got there, and you could not see ANYTHING, because everyone was standing, and we are too short. I sat on the grass at the back with some friends. We saw a bit robot that had fire coming out of his eyes and water spurting out of his head. Then there were fireworks. Then it was over. Julie and Paul said it sucked, so I guess we didn't miss anything, but it sure was annoying not being able to get there...

Please enjoy this photo I took at our friend's condo. It says "poo" on a public sign.

Manicured Piggies

This week was really hard and tiring. Luckily it ended up with a super fun Shabbat dinner in our clubhouse with 16 of our friends. I ended up figuring out how to deal with only one little fake oven...but I found out that we can really only use two of our four burners at the same time if we're using the wok. There's just no space. Anyways - I made one oven dish (carrot kugel), and one cold dish (couscous salad), and green Thai curry, rice, and lentil soup. People brought other food, and it all worked out swimmingly. We are lucky to have people we like so much - and to be able to have shabbat dinner with 18 people one year after we move here is a pretty cool thing.

Other than dinner, I had to be at work at 7:15 on Thursday and Friday, and we had big events, so I was "on" for a lot of hours this week. I'm happy this week is over.

Since I don't have much to write about this week, I wanted to write about a phenomenon I have seen here that blows my mind.

In the US we do (not ME, but WE) get manicures and pedicures. Pedicures are usually to clean up the feet and keep the toe nails short and cute looking. Here, there are women who have super manicured - and LONG!!! - toe nails. This means that these feet NEVER go into shoes (they wouldn't fit!). Can you imagine never wearing shoes, only sandals? Such a weird concept. It makes me feel a little nauseous when I see it.

Catching my Attention

On the way home yesterday I saw three ads that made me laugh.

1) On the side of a mall, there was a picture of a happy couple and next to it was a picture of a diamond ring. I then had the word "monogamy" and a definition. It looked like it came from a dictionary. I didn't catch the whole definition (I was on the moving bus), but I did see the last line which was something like "for a life of guaranteed intensity." In Malaysia there is a lot of talk recently about how men need to recognize monogamy more...I didn't know it was a problem anymore in Singapore...

2) I saw an ad for a cream or soap. The ad said, "You are the sparkle. You don't need diamonds." My first thought is - GREAT! Focus on the woman, and not the things she HAS. Then I saw that the product advertised guaranteed that your skin would be lighter in just three weeks. So much for that idea.

3) I saw an ad with fake newspaper headlines. "Hand Food and Mouth Disease Hits Singapore." "...3 more in China." There were a bunch of headlines that implied that it is killing people in Singapore and China (which isn't necessarily UN-true). It was an ad for soap, and how if you use this soap you can keep your family safe.

Singapore definitely bases much on fear, and this is another example. This makes me think that after 9-11 in the US, that ads would have sprung up like - "The terrorists are coming to your neighborhood. Use this protective sealing tape so you don't die of nuclear god-knows-what."

Bollywood Gardens

On Saturday I went with my friend, Peter and a family he knows to Bollywood Veggies. We took the bus to the MRT, took the MRT for about an hour and 15 minutes, then we took a taxi for about 20 minutes, we passed Malaysia, we drove (we convinced the taxi driver NOT to turn around), and finally we arrived (two hours later...).

It's this great garden that grows nearly everything we see in our stores. I took some pictures of the foods that we eat growing.

I loved the banana flowers.

I also ate pickled kedong dong. I have no idea what it was, but I love picked things. The guy said it was sort of like a mango, but it was picked, so it wasn't really like a mango. He said it was like a gurken. I had no idea what a gurken was (I'm sure I'm spelling it wrong), but then I found out it's a cucumber, and then I realized that's neat, because "Ogurek/ogurki" is cucumber(s)/pickle(s) in Russian.