Bang it, Baby!

I'm from Midland, Texas where high school football is king. Seriously. In a town of about 114,00, my high school stadium holds more than 35,000 people. The book, movie and TV show are based on Odessa's football team, my high school's arch rival. I knew a lot of the boys in the book as it was written the year after I graduated high school. Life definitely revolves around those Friday night lights when you live in West Texas.

With football, comes marching bands. I played the flute and also twirled rifles and flags in our band, one of the best in the country. The Mighty Rebel Band as were known was a corps-style band, the forerunner of the today's drumlines. I'm a sucker for heart-pound drums so when I saw tickets were on sale for Drum Tao, I just had to go. Plus, I'd been hankering to see something Asian while I was here , but not TOO Asian. The thought of getting Tom to sit still - and stay awake - through a 5-hour Asian opera wasn't wetting my whistle.

It's hard to describe Drum Tao. Billed as "The Art of the Drum" it is a showcase of drumming at it's best. The likes of Ringo Starr and Buddy Rich have nothing on these guys. And these guys are hot! Muscular and sexy in a very ancient Asian kind of way. The show was a true spectacle, an ensemble playing drums of every shape and size. Sometimes there were gongs, flutes and weird Asian-banjo type instruments sprinkled in for effect. The musicians sported modernized, traditional-type costumes that were absolutely gorgeous and added to the overall effect. The staging and lighting was as cool as the music.

I kept thinking this was the Asian version of "Stomp" or "Blue Men Tubes" or "Riverdance." It was like something I've never seen before - and the kind of thing I'd hoped to experience in Asia.

I talked Heather and her husband Mitch into going with us. Of course, I asked Tom if he was interested, but in typical husband-doesn't-really-pay-attention-to-wife fashion, after the first two songs, he leaned over to me and said, "Are all they going to do is drum? When does the show start?" HA! He obviously liked what he saw and heard because for the first time in a long time, he didn't fall asleep during a show!

The star of the show is actually one of the women! All told, there were more men drumming, but women were well represented. Heather and I both like that they were portrayed as ultra feminine, yet powerful.  There was also some silent, comic relief, humor in front of the curtain as they reset the stage for the next numbers. We Westerners sort of got it, but the Asians really ate up. Oh - there were a few displays of martial arts sprinkled in for good measure - also amazing. You should definitely clink on this link and watch some of the drumming.

The show as at The Marina Bay Sands Complex - a very nice, modern theater, the size of a Broadway theater, but in a mall. Imagine! Heather said the shopping center depresses her. So many lovely things - all at your fingertips, but far too expensive! She is totally right! Who can afford all that stuff? How do they stay in business?

Before the show, we went to DB Bistro, one of Daniel Bouloud's restaurants. Oh! My! God! DELICIOUS! It was directly across from the theater - a 2-minute walk if that. 

The day was kind of a waste. I was supposed to go see a bunch of apartments, but the realtor's mother was in the hospital. Instead, Cheryl took the kids to Royce's and I went in hunt of shoes for my giant feet. I destroyed my one nice, black pair that I brought the first day here! Naturally, Asians don't have feet my size. They just kind of look in horror when I ask for a 43. Heck, American men don't have feet as big I do! So... no luck on shoes, but I did find a cute dress for about $24! 

Today? It's raining - the terror of any mother with two toddlers. Wish me luck!

Hot Enough for Ya?

Today was the hottest day here yet. The real feel temperature was 105. Stupid me, I walked around in it for more than three hours total. Yes. Three hours pushing a double stroller loaded up with two kids and a backpack! What in the world is wrong with me? Obviously, my brain is baked from the heat.

By the way, my new do did not hold up. When you're that hot and sweaty, even the best of hair cuts don't hold work. Heck, if I'm being honest, I looked like I'd been swimming - that's how wet my hair was by the time I got home. Oh I also heard that EVERY place here charges what I paid and most color doesn't come out as good as mine. So... I guess that's something. 

To dodge the heat, me and my short hairdo - and oh, yea the kids - met Heather and Mason at a playspace on the Singapore River at Clarke Quay. I should have taken a taxi, but no - I walked in the extreme heat - to a place to get cool. I'm feeling about as bright as a 10 watt bulb.

The place is called Royce's Gym. I was very excited to go because it's billed as a sensory gym which is a perfect place for Maisie, my sensory child. Turns out, it's not as much of a sensory gym as it is just a great play area. I have never, ever seen so many toys in one place. Seriously. Toys R Us has nothing on this place. 

Hudson stuck by the double train table most of the time though he also found the car ramps fascinating. Maisie? She was all about the Barbies. Forget all the sensory swings and other things that would be good for focusing her. There was just no separating her from the two dozen or more long-legged, perky-breasted dolls. 

 

We grabbed lunch and they were both asleep before I even got to the door of the mall. So I walked to the salon to pick up something I left there yesterday, then walked home. I was sure I'd melt like the Wicked Witch of the West - all to keep my little ones napping. Hudson has to learn to nap in his bed. That's it!

One of the things that's been hard here is that we have very few toys with us. Keeping two toddlers busy all day without playthings has been a Herculean challenge. I flip on the TV the very minute they're both out of bed to keep them from running around screaming to appease the cranky, kid-hating neighbors. Most days, the kids and I do a new "Singapore thing" and go swimming, but there are a lot of empty hours that all the coloring books and LeapPad games in the world just won't fill.

Watching the kids today, I knew what I had to do:

I bought a memebership to Royce's. If I take a taxi, it's not all that far. If we go just once a week until we leave, the membership will pay for itself. A kid's job is to play and that's hard to do when they don't have any toys. Cheryl will take them again tomorrow while I.... ready for this... HOUSE HUNT! I figure I better see what's here in case we do end up coming back full time. I love looking at real estate so I'm pumped! I just hope the realtor has an air-conditioned car!

Meanwhile, Maisie is STILL awake and it's 2.5 hours past her bedtime! Tom is out for a business dinner and I'm watching yet more educational TV - about the only thing in English is Discovery, BBC, TLC and the like. I'm learning so much!

Mother Knows Best

If we end up moving here for good, I'd have to consider breaking a promise I made to my mother on her deathbed. 

You might be thinking it's something deep like when I get the chance I should dance or perhaps something like I need to be good to my husband. No, my mother made me promise never to cut my hair short. Seriously. One of the last things she ever said to me was, "Whatever you do, don't cut your hair short." Ha! It cracks me up that was on her mind at the very end. Of all things to ponder, my hair was first and foremost?! The absolute very last thing she ever said was that Tom and I would have children with big hands and big feet. That's my mom - funny to the end.

Back to my hair... have I mentioned it's hot here? Having long, thick locks is lovely in West Texas where there's no humidity. My curls stayed put. As my friend Laura from Mississippi says, "The higher the hair, the closer to God." 

That's not the case in Singapore. The higher the hair, the bigger the fall. My hair has been a mess since I got here. I've tried every kind of updo I can possibly manage. Yesterday, Hudson (unhappy to be insidea store) wailed for a half hour while I waited at H&M to buy some kind of new fangled hair clip - all for naught.

Today, I got my hair cut - not short - but definitely shorter than I've had it for years. Mostly, she thinned out the neck hair. It was incredibly expensive - twice as much as I pay in Westchester - and I'm not even sure I like it. Alison was referred to me by Typhaine, the woman who is kind enough to let us stay in her apartment. When I called to make the appointment, I asked how much it was. The receptionist told me the price. I thought that was for both a cut and color. Turns out, the cut and color were EACH that price. Gulp!

I think I look like I'm one of The Beatles. I feel as though I should break out into a few bars from Sergeant Peppers. And get this... it took FOUR hours. That's right! FOUR hours! Yes, I got my roots done, too, but dear God. FOUR HOURS? I think my hair actually grew while she cut it. Hudson's haircut - even with him wiggling and whining - took a total of seven minutes. What the hey?

It took so long that I missed bedtime with the kids tonight. Cheryl had to do it all by herself. The good news is that I was close to Tom's office so he met me down at Boat Quay for a nice Indian dinner. We sat at a table right on the river looking across town at some of the lights from the nightly laser show. It sounds romantic - and it was, sort of - but it was also hot. Sweaty ain't that romantic, eh - nor is Tom's cold. Poor fella.

Having the most expensive haircut on the planet may not be so bad. My hair actually held a shape walking home from dinner with Tom - a shape I don't like, but perhaps any shape is better than hot, sweaty, frizzy, long, limp hair. Heck, if I picked up stringer work covering a tsunami (God forbid!), my hair would look good for the liveshots probably. If you look hard enough, there's always a silver lining, right? That's something else my mother taught me.

Sorry no photos tonight. I didn't take the camera with me. Who thought I'd be gone ALL day!?

Not a Happy Camper

UPDATE: Turns out there are SEVERAL places to get a kid's hair cut complete with TVs and kid-friendly chairs. Oh well. My get rich scheme is a bust. Sigh.

I know how I can get rich in Singapore! All I need to do is open a kids' haircut place - a REAL kids' haircut place.

Back home, we have a host of kid-friendly hair joints filled with distractions for the kids. You know the places... special chairs that look like fire trucks or Barbie, pink jeeps; TVs in every seat; toys to buy at the end. That's the kind of place I was expecting when I heard the place to go in Singapore is Little Red Dot at the Forum Mall.

Forum Mall is one of several that cater to kids here. The smart thing about these malls is that there are floors filled with regular, adult stores and then whole floors with nothing but stores packed with crap for kids. Seriously. There are clothing stores, specialty toy stores, playgrounds, learning centers - the works - all on one or two floors in these various malls. I see lots of other lonely-looking, bored mommies strolling the floors. I actually ran into Heather and Mason (not that she's lonely and bored). Of course, the place is close to Heather and she's one of the moms who told me about The Little Red Dot which is far closer to her apartment than ours. I walked a good hour each way in the boiling humidity. Walking is the best way for me to exercise and for the kids to nap. I've finally figured out all these shortcuts including how to walk through air-conditioned malls. It's like when I first moved to New York and worked in sales. I learned all these underground passageways running under Rockefeller Center. Shortscuts are lifesavers.

The problem is that the salon could have been any adults salon. There was nothing very kid-friendly about the place except for the stylists. That was bad news for Hudson. He hates getting his hair cut anyway, but if you stuff a lollipop in his mouth and turn on the TV, he forgets that he's getting his hair done. Today, he was fit to be tied crying and crying. More so, he was MAD. He whipped around in his chair, starting wagging his finger and pointing with great purpose and kept screaming at the stylist, "No! My hair! My hair! Not you! STOP!" I'm pretty sure he threw some toddler curse words in there, too. He honestly sounded like a guy in a brawl at a seedy bar. The stylist and I were trying not to laugh as he was obviously very serious, but it was pretty darn funny. I think he knows that his trademark curls are his big draw here. He must be worried he won't grab the interest of as many photographers with his hair bobbed short.

The scary thing is that he wasn't tied into his seat. Rather, they just had this wooden board thing that stretched across a regular chair. I'm pretty sure I remember the same kind of thing at the salon when I was a kid. I had to hold him in for dear life. 

Somehow, the stylist managed to sheer his golden locks and he looks just great. As soon as she finished, he was back to his happy self. He's been doing that a lot lately. He WAILS when I go into stores that he doesn't want to enter. As soon as he gets his way and I leave, he stops. It looks like the terrible twos are here in full force. Lucky me.

Maisie? She's the dear opposite! She LOVES getting her hair cut. She would get her hair cut every day if she could. I think she likes the pampering. She got one of the best cuts of her life. Yea! 

Oh yea! The kids are in bed and I just turned on the TV. They're showing the closing ceremonies of the Olympics. I thought I'd missed them! It's been an eye opener to watch the Olympics in another country. America the great has a whole different meaning. (The John Lennon face was fabulous, but holy cow, George Michael is old!) Singapore won it's first medal in 52 years. Malaysia? It's first medal EVER! We have it good in the US. We take so much for granted like the money to train our athletes.

Holy Melaka!

Note to self: what's fascinating to UNESCO might not be the easiest travel spot for little kids. 

The cool thing about Singapore is that it is literally a hop and a skip away from all sorts of other places. Malaysia is literally across a short bridge so we decided to visit Melaka (also spelled Malacca) , a UNESCO World Heritage site on the West Coast of Malaysia, south of Kuala Lampur. Melaka was a major trading port for the Portugese, Dutch and British. Visiting Melaka was the first time I felt like I was in Asia. Not many folks speak English there and things weren't shiny and new like in Singapore or the resort area of Bintan, Indonesia (see earlier blog entry).

Like any good traders, we spent our one and only night on Jonker Street, the shopping "mecca" of Melaka. The entrance to the street has a Chinese dragon draped above the square. Maisie loved it!

We got there just in time to see the quaint, shop-lined street transformed into a flea market. In other words, we got there just a little too late. The tables were mostly filled with crap - different crap from other flea markets, but crap just the same. Some of the tables did have interesting foods. Tom and I sampled some deep-fried durian balls. Uh no. The taste was okay, but the smell is just too strong. No wonder the fruit is banned on subways in Singapore! I think the shops probably had some really wonderful trinkets in them, but we couldn't really access them, especially with our gigantic stroller with a sleeping Hudson. There were also some really cool religious-looking buildings.

Hudson woke up on the wrong side of the world, too - screaming his hungry, little head off for all he was worth. Hudson is already an attraction all his own in Asia, but a crying, blond, curly-headed kid? You'd have thought I was walking around holding a tiger on a leash. Once again, Maisie thought all the attention was for her and she did her best Vogue moves!

Luckily, we found Melaka's version of restaurant row and got some kind of yummy Asian food. I was hoping for Portugeuse food here, but kid-friendly food was a must with our hungry little man. I miss just picking our restaurants for us. Now? The big requirement is does it serve something that resembles chicken nuggets which this place did. What would traveling kids do without nuggets and french fries?

This meal was nothing like our lunch! Let me backtrack a little.

Tom wanted to take a bus, but I thought a bus ride with toddlers would be sheer hell. According to Google, the drive was to take 3 hours, a bus ride 5. I always think it's a good idea to be able to stop with toddlers for things like bathrooms and food. Plus, driving is always a big more adventurous - if not a bit terrifying when the driver sits on the right front seat and the car is on the "wrong" side of the road. Tom did a great job even though I gasped in fear every 15 minutes. Poor guy!

Then again, driving was kind of a pain. We had to wait to pick up the car til 9:30 which meant 10. Then Tom had to come get us and the car seats. Then we had to figure out how to get out of town. We didn't really get on the road til 11.

Going through Singapore customs was simple. Malaysaia? Ouch. We had to get a toll card. Nobody told us that until we got there. Negotiating with Singapore dollars didn't really get us much of an exchange rate. So at the first rest stop, we pulled over to get more ringgits, the Malaysian currency, to buy more mone for our toll card. By then, the kids were hungry so we got some food.

This wasn't like our rest stops - no McDonald's here. Nope. Nobody really spoke English either. Tom fetched some food and I was a little nervous at first glance, but it was actually really good. Imagine getting a fresh-cooked, hot meal at one of our roadside rest stops?! I really loved some sort of okra dish. Who would have imagined okra here? I always think of it as deep-fried, Southern food! I used to eat leftovers cold for breakfast! I really miss my mother's okra fried in cornmeal. This okra wasn't fried, just sliced and cooked in some sort of spices. Yum!

The kids weren't so impressed. Once again, thank God for french fries. The great thing about this rest stop is that they had a playground for the kids to burn off energy. Brilliant! Why don't our rest stops have playgrounds? 

Then we drove for a couple of hours passing hundreds and hundreds of acres planted with palm trees for palm oil. The red oil is used for cooking (french fries cooked in this are gorgeous!) and biofuel. The plantations are controversial because to plant them, they've had to cut down lots of rainforest endangering orangutans and tigers in the Sumatran plantation areas.

We finally got to the Renaissance hotel at 3:00. By the time we got to our room, the whole day was practically gone! The hotel was really tired, but one of the nicest in town, I think. Oh what a view out of our window!

The guy told us that we could easily walk and the stroller wouldn't be a problem. HA! Sidewalks - where they existed - were multi-level - up a few steps, then down a few steps. Getting to town took forever. It didn't help that we stopped to buy sunglasses (I just heard my brother groan because he knows how long it takes Tom to pick out a pair!) Both of our sunglasses have been casualties of traveling. Replacing them in Malaysia was FAR cheaper than buying in Singapore. That's why we were so late to Jonker Street.

After dinner, Hudson cried and cried until we let him walk. Keeping up with our short, little man on the world's busiest street was no easy task. Back at the room? The kids screamed and played for hours before going to bed. Hotel rooms and toddlers are not fun for the adults. I'm a little worried about our upcoming two weeks in China!

Sunday, we did a little better. After a less interesting breakfast at the hotel, we went swimming then took a long walk along the river that runs through town. This was a FAR better way to get to town. Maisie loved that we saw an alligator scampering into the water. Well, she heard it and I saw it. What I found really interesting about the river is that on one side there sat all these beautifully, painted buildings while on the other side Malays lived in shanties. Seriously. Extreme poverty looked directly at extreme wealth. 

We grabbed lunch at a little cafe along the river. The kids were thrilled to get some french toast! Finally, we made it into the old city - the reason UNESCO preserves this place.

 

There's an old Dutch square with a cool, red church and a zillion trishaws each beautifully decorated with flowers. We were going to take a ride, but we needed two of them to accommodate all of us plus our stroller. It was a little much to manage.

So we walked in the hellishly, hot sun. I didn't think it was humanly possible to be hotter than I'd been in Singapore, but I was hotter in Melaka. I think that's because there's no shade there. Whatever the reason, it felt like the sun was literally sitting on our skin. Maisie said, "Man, Mommy. I'm really sweaty! 

The historical area has an old fort called A Famosa, built in the 1500s. It's among the oldest European ruins remaining in Asia. This area is also littered with museums, graveyards - you name it.

There's even a replica of an old palace where the sultan once lived. The kids loved the palace! By the way, this was the first time I've ever had to take my shoes off to go inside a museum! We mostly just walked by everything, getting to really study very little - another casualty of traveling with kids. 

We left the hotel at 3. Big mistake. HUGE mistake. Many Singaporeans took a four day weekend because of National Day on Thursday. We had to wait - are you sitting down - TWO hours to go through Malaysian customs! Luckily, we stopped to get gas just before we got in line. There was a KFC for the kids! (KFC is big in this part of the world). Tom and I grabbed some really yummy satay from a big grill in the middle of the rest stop. We also bought some local cookies. Wow! No wonder my clothes are starting to fit tight. 

I keep forgetting I'm LIVING in Asia. This isn't a vacation. It definitely still kind of feels like one. It's also a big strange being back in our Singapore apartment. It's like we took a vacation from our vacation. Okay - back to reality.