First days in Singapore!

I arrived in Singapore exactly 2 weeks ago, and exactly one week after P. The third semester was already in full swing when I arrived so my first day in Singapore was a poor welcome of, ``Here`s your house key, have a nice day!``. I was also not prepared for the fact that P had absolutely no food in the house and it was a public holiday and so every shop and restaurant in the city seemed to be closed!! After snacking on nothing but leftover airplane almonds and water for most of the day, I was going crazy and so when P finally got home at 10pm he ordered pizza delivery! Not a great intro to life in Singy.

Our apartment here is great! Especially compared to the tiny home in Avon we endured for four months. It is large and spacious, and even though we share it with another couple (K and M from Greece), it feels like our own. Luckily we have air conditioning because it hovers around 30 degrees every day!

During that first week in Singapore, I saw P an average of 30 minutes per day. Definitely a shock after long leisurely lunches and dinners together in Fontainebleau, but I recovered from my jet lagged happily by the pool and caught up with the few friends that came to Singapore from Fonty as well. There was a Buddhist festival during that first week and so me and some of the partners from Fonty explored Chinatown together!

Another highlight has been a visit from my good friend Tim!! Visiting from his new home in India, we went on an impromptu foodie tour of Singapore and found all of the foods that we had been missing from home! For Tim that included hunting down jars and jars of Adam`s peanut butter to take back with him, and we both were amazed when we discovered an American breakfast joint, with bacon!! If you look closely, you can see that between the layers of my pancakes there are actually layers of bacon and eggs! PERFECTION!

P was home from school by 8pm that night (yahoo!!!) and so we went to our favourite hawker center Lau Pa Sat for some SATAY! Tim and P proceeded to polish off 50 skewers of meat and prawns, and a crayfish.

Tim`s visit was a short one, but it was so nice to see someone from home! After he left on Saturday morning, P was back to school for work with group mates and I, not having the jet lag excuse to stand on any longer, set myself up at Starbucks to begin work on my thesis. With the infallible deadline of the birth of our baby looming before me, I have no choice but to apply myself and get this thing finished!! An added incentive came when my thesis supervisor informed me that I can conduct a thesis defense over conference Skype, meaning that I can still graduate with my Masters degree before P does! (he has been bugging me ALL YEAR that he will finish first). Cha ching!

Like I said before, I have been here exactly two weeks, and it wasn`t until that night (Saturday night), LAST night, that we got to spend some time together! P got home at 8:30pm from group work, and we had a date night!! This involved dinner at another hawker center downtown, and a movie - Kung Fu Panda the kaboom of doom in 3D! It was a fab movie, and 100 times better than the first one, so i recommend it fully! And today, Sunday, we even had a chance to walk around Singapore together before he went back to school! We went to the harbour for breakfast (I had promised pancakes and bacon) but the restaurant Tim and I had been to was closed (oops!). Instead we had a relaxing breakfast at a nearby cafe and strolled through Little India!

This is a picture of the Marina Bay Sands hotel, the newest monstrosity to grace Singapore`s skyline. From a structural engineering point of view, it is incredible (as I am told by P), but I can`t help but be weirded out by this and a dozen other wacky changes to Singapore since I was last living here in 2004!