A Taste of Things to Come?

New York has a Chinatown. It's cool to hang there for a couple of hours and grab dinner at a hole in the wall restaurant like Wo Hop, my favorite - then walk across the street to LIttle Italy for dessert. Well folks, our China town's got nothing on Singapore's version. I mean - nothing.

I'm guessing Singapore's Chinatown is probably a lot like the real thing. The streets are incredibly narrow and you can buy just about any kind of crappy trinket you want. We struggled through with our stroller barely making it's way down the street. Maisie whined and whined until I told her she could buy a toy. Dear God. Maisie buying a toy is like my husband buying sunglasses: it takes forever! She looked and searched and fondled every single toy in the market until she finally found a 3-D puzzle. You start with one layer of stickers and add others on top of it to match the pictures. She's good at that sort of thing.

There are different parts to Chinatown besides the narrow streets. We also went into a lovely department store where besides clothes, they also sold all sorts of things used in Chinese medicine. We're talking odd things like flattened mice (I think that's what they were!) and horns of various animals. Maisie was fascinated.

The subway station in Chinatown is different from the others I've seen and it was the least stroller-friendly of all the stations. Immediately outside? The smell of durian wafted by. Ugh. Durian stinks. It's a fruit that I can't even begin to taste becasue the smell is so bad. There are signs all over the subways - no durian allowed! Ha! Tom got some durian ice cream by accident yesterday and it was disgusting. I couldn't even stand within three feet of it because of the smell. Seriously! I tasted it and it wasn't bad, but man - that smell is terrible! Funny because many areas smell like jasmine - far more desirable!

I'm glad we went, but it wasn't really all that enjoyable. It made me more than a bit nervous about our upcoming two-week trip to China. Toddlers, narrow streets and weird food may not be such a good mix though it'll be Fall in China so that will help.

One of the absolute best parts about living here is that we can travel to all sorts of cool places. All of Asia is within reach. Heck, we can even travel to Australia fairly easily. There are budget airlines like Southwest that make country-hopping pretty easy.

So we spent the morning with a travel agent planning our first escape this - heading to Bintan, an Indonesian island reachable by high speed ferry. More about that next weekend!