Tuesday, 14APR98

Well our first week here in Singapore came and went fairly painlessly. Tuesday and Friday were public holidays (Hari Raya Haj and Good Friday, respectively) and Wednesday morning was spent at Singapore Immigration getting our Employment Pass. We spent our days off doing even more shopping and are now further along in our quest to be settled.

Last weekend, we discovered we didn't have hot water in the kitchen. When we mentioned this to a co-worker as a problem, they were confused. We explained that we "should" have hot water in the kitchen. This was met with a confused look that seemed to indicate that we had requested a bar-be-cue pit in the bathroom. It turns out that we weren't SUPPOSE to have hot water in the kitchen; here in Singapore you have hot water in the bathrooms and use extra soap in the kitchen. To quote Yakov Smirnov "What a country!" Actually, we had some trouble with the hot water in the bathrooms too. After some experimentation, we discovered that each bathroom has it's own hot water heater that is turned on a few minutes before you need the hot water and turned off once you are done. I guess it is very efficient and wastes very little energy, but it is one more thing to remember in the mornings.

Speaking of mornings:

Veronica used the recipe with some bread one evening and the fact that our kitchen is outside proved very useful. Evidently, different breads have vastly different flash points. Raisin bread's must be very high, italian bread's very low. I suspect that the haze here in Singapore that the papers attribute to Indonesian forest fires may actually represent the efforts of a large number of Americans trying to figure out their convection ovens. Sunday's experiment with making biscuits also proved disappointingly unsuccessful. More experimentation will be necessary before we can actually bake/broil anything.

Our air shipment arrived Saturday morning and we've been busy unpacking. Unfortunately, we forgot to request a chest of drawers so we lack sufficient storage space for our clothes. We went out shopping on Sunday and purchased a dresser from an unusual European store that's been here in for 20 years: IKEA. Seems odd to me that Singapore had IKEA before Washington, D.C., but... It's right along one of our usual bus routes, so it is much more convenient than it is back in the states. We'll have to see if the prices are better here, I suspect that they aren't, but you never know. Our telephone gets turned on Tuesday (we opted for the normal service (within 5 business days) rather than Express Service (2 business days) or Super Express Service (within 6 hours)). We are hoping to have (cooking) gas delivered this evening, so that should mean we are connected to all of the necessary infrastructure. Our nifty Italian marvel (the washer/dryer) appears to be on the fritz already. We had someone out on Saturday to fix it. They claim that it is working fine but we can't even get a 2 T-shirts dry after 3-4 hours so we suspect it may not be completely operational. In any case, we bought a clothes drying rack from IKEA, so we are using that for now.

In less (marginally) mundane news, we socialized over the week-end. We saw Titanic on Saturday. Say what you will about Singapore censorship, but it allowed us to see this Academy Award winning movie in a very reasonable hour and a half. Just kidding, only a little editing was noticeable and the film still lasted close to 3 hours, so perhaps "censorship" isn't so bad after all. Of course, Titanic was relatively inoffensive. Sunday we accepted an invitation to dinner with a co-worker. We attended his church's 19th anniversary dinner. Just a small gathering of 1200 Anglicans and their friends eating Chinese food. It was outside under a tent, but we were lucky and the weather turned out very nice. The food was very good (Veronica tried jellyfish, Greg did not; Veronica said it tasted like chicken, Greg doesn't believe her). All through dinner a series of people spoke about their faith (we think that's what they were talking about, however, neither of us speak Mandarin, so they could have been talking about soccer). The final speaker was a very fire-and-brimstone evangelical speaker (although he was Chinese, he spoke in English with an assistant translating into Mandarin). It was all much more lively than we had expected. The food was good and it was an interesting/enjoyable experience.

We just test drove our new (used) car. Those that know Greg will no doubt be able to imagine his joy on discovering it is a FORD. However, it appears to be functional. Greg successfully drove out onto a local expressway and back to the office. Veronica successfully drove half-way around the building. Unfortunately, we discovered that effective March 1, 1998 the law changed and we now have to take a test to get our license. It appears to be a simple written test (yeah!) but it is only given on certain days (boo!). Right now we are hoping to take (and pass) it on May 4, 1998. Until then we are wearing out our bus passes and taking the time to check out all of the scenery along our way anywhere. Actually, traffic looks pretty ugly so we may still do a good bit of busing. On the other hand, the draw of the open expressway stretching out for an entire 20 miles and the ability to get up to 50 or 60 mph may be too much for Veronica to resist very often.

We'll close with some thoughts/requests/comments about e-mail. We've really enjoyed hearing back from all of you, it makes us feel that we aren't really 11,000+ miles away (your mileage may differ). However, Veronica is feeling left out since most of the responses to these updates get sent to Greg. This is a result of the way things were set-up (with our e-mails being sent from Greg's machine); this update is the first we've tried with a different set-up. You may have noticed that the FROM: line now includes both of us and if you respond to this e-mail, it should go to both of us. However, if you don't want a response to go to both of us, all you have to do is edit the TO: line. We think things are now set-up to clearly show which e-mail address is Veronica's and which is Greg's. Just delete the one you don't want. No offense will be taken and your e-mail may even give us something to talk about. This is an especially important benefit since we are never more than 10 feet apart from each other in a given day here and Veronica has heard ever anecdote and opinion Greg has multiple (multiple) times. (In case our new set-up doesn't work as expected, Greg's email address is [email protected] and Veronica's email is [email protected])

Also, when replying, feel free to delete our original message if it isn't really part of your response. Each morning our mail is downloaded from the computers in Cary, North Carolina and things are kind of slow; deleting our message from your message should speed things up.