Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Wet and other matters

From Saturday evening until late Sunday night, it rained. It rained incessantly. This is unusual for Singapore. In some ways I like it because it's a good excuse to hole up inside. We had a brief respite Monday morning, but pretty much it's been raining again since yesterday noon (it's Tuesday morning). I'm starting to feel like I live in Seattle.

The Saturday evening rain started when we were in the Expo, which is a huge conference center kind of place here. We went to City Harvest church which has 20,000 people. Normally not much would induce me to attend a church that large - really doesn't appeal to me at all - but some friends invited us to go. Joyce Meyers was speaking. Anyway, that's so not my point. My point is that afterwards we went with our friends, the Monsivaizs, to eat chili crab. It's one of those things you have to do in Singapore, like drink a Singapore Sling and incur a fine.

It was by far the messiest meal I've ever eaten, but good. We would have taken a picture, but no one's hands were clean enough. What made the meal more enjoyable was the difficulty of ordering. It's one of those places where you quickly realize it would have been better for the server if you were speaking Chinese instead of English, but by the time you know this, it's insulting to change. So some hand gestures and pointing were necessary. I also encouraged Erik to try his luck at getting two kinds of juices mixed together. Here's how that conversation went:
"Can you mix . . . "
"Cannot!!"

So we can check chili crab off our list. This weekend we'll be checking Malaysia off our list too, as Erik and I are going to drive up there for the weekend and leave the kids in bliss at the Monsivaiz house. I doubt they'll miss us (they have four great kids who our kids love).

Maybe today we'll see the sun. Yesterday when it was raining my friend observed one of the maintenance men in the courtyard with an umbrella cleaning the sidewalk with a pressure hose. You gotta love it!

2 comments:

Liz said...

Did they think it would make the rain go away if they sprayed it with more water?! Maybe it's a superstition.

Gina Marie said...

He was pressure cleaning the sidewalk. I saw him do it again the next day, and you'd be amazed how much dirt he was moving!