Sober as...Singapore
Hello friends, I arrived in Singapore this afternoon to be greeted by torrential rain of the extremely wet variety. I was assisted in the Metro station by a seemingly good-doing citizen with few teeth. Then he started following me around and wanted to hold my hand. I told him no thank you. He kept telling me he thought I was a man at first. He wouldn't stop telling me that. Luckily, I lost him. Unfortunately, an hour later he spotted me around a food stall area and begged me to have a meal with him. I ran for the hills. These are the liabilities of being a woman alone.
Things here seem to be quite rigid. In the hostel, there are signs everywhere telling you what you can and cannot do. "To open the door press this button. DO NOT PRESS ANYTHING ELSE." When I went through customs, I realized I had change in my pocket and put it in a little basket they provided. The basked had holes in it and the change fell through onto the conveyor belt and I was afraid I would be reprimanded for dropping change all over the floor. I was not.
Everything here is in English. Embarrassingly, I do not know what language they speak here. I will need to find this out. It definitely feels different from Malaysia. Big city, but also very very green and clean.
Ok, thanks Wikipedia, official languages are: Mandarin, Malay, English and Tamil.
Not much else to report. The country is much more expensive than other places I've been/am going to.
To answer some questions posed about food: Eating out all the time is not so bad since portions are not so big you either want to vomit after you've eaten the whole plate, or feel guilty about starving children in Cambodia when you eat a reasonably-sized portion. Also, food hasn't really been that spicy till I got to Malaysia. I didn't eat much Cambodian food after my food-sickness incident. Vietnamese food was only spicy if you added the chili-infused oil provided on the table. Malaysia's the first place I've had Indian curries, etc. I definitely have craved Western food and last night I enjoyed a mediocre cheese sandwich. They don't really know how to do cheese in this part of the world. Sigh. I love cheese.
Anyhoo, friends, be well.
Lauren
posted by Lauren at 4:09 AM
1 Comments:
Hi Lauren:
Even in your Habitat "uniform", wielding a hammer or lugging a skillsaw around, none of us ever thought you were a Man!! Besides having no teeth, that guy must have had no eyesight! Lucky you were able to ditch him, twice!
The latest H4H info, picked up today while working and on break:
Troy, the site super at Goodrich is leaving Habitat. He is moving to Iowa. His wife is from there and she has found employment and wants to move back. I understand that Troy also has found something to keep him off the streets.
We were all working in one unit today, most of us painting (college girl work) until that was completed and then started putting down underlayment for bathroom floors. This is similar to the work you did in the back hallway on Goodrich, nailing the stuff down every 4 inches or so. Loud and tiresome.
We found that none of us are getting a raise again this year. That makes 4 years in a row (for me......longer for many of the guys) without an increase in remuneration. Makes one wonder if we're really appreciated all that much. In protest, we all took 5 minutes longer for our lunch break.
Three of the guys from our crew are heading to Mobile next week to work on the houses that Twin CIties Habitat provided for the victims of Katrina. Twin Cities H4H will have people on site down there for about 4 weeks to complete the 4 houses. Sort of a "blitz-build".
A number of the guys asked about you again and I gave them a brief rundown on your whereabouts and experiences. There was still a fair amount of head-shaking and tsk-tsk-ing but we all share a mutual interest in your well-being. At the time I hadn't heard about your "do-gooder"....that would certainly have caused some consternation. So you see, we haven't forgotten about you.....at least not yet! And when you're feelin' lonely, you can think about all the people back here who are wishing you well!
One of the guys said that he had tried commenting on an earlier blog but couldn't quite figure out how to do it, so being the computer genius that I am, I gave him a step-by-step procedure to follow. Hopefully, sooner or later, you'll have more comments than you care to review in one sitting. He's one of the guys going to Mobile so you may not hear from him for a couple of weeks, but, who knows?
So that's probably more information than you cared to digest all at one time. There will be more later....I Guarantee it!! (ala Men's Warehouse commercial)
George
5:55 PM
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