I left Cincinnati at 11 am on Thursday and the total travel time was supposed to be 25 hours with layovers in Newark and Hong Kong. On the flight from Newark to Hong Kong the person in front of me had bought a seat for his cello! I hope that cello was made of gold for him to have paid for a seat for it. On the plus side the cello didn't recline the seat so I had plenty of room. When I got to Hong Kong I found out that my flight to Singapore was delayed 4 hours. So instead of arriving in Singapore at midnight on Friday I got there at 4am on Saturday. (Singapore is 12 hours ahead of Cincinnati). Jimmy had been in Beijing on business all week and planned his flight back to Singapore at 11pm so he could just wait for me so he ended up sitting at the airport for hours too waiting for me. There have been fires in Malaysia that caused a really bad haze in Singapore for the past week so visibility wasn't great as we drove to the apartment Jimmy's been staying at but by Saturday it wasn't bad at all. We spent Saturday and Sunday walking around some of the different neighborhoods trying to get a feel for what area we want to live in. Saturday night we walked around Little India and went to a place called Banana Leaf Apolo where our food was actually served on a banana leaf.
On Sunday, we stopped by Marina Bay Sands for lunch which is a huge casino/resort/shopping mall.. It's 3 towers with a sky park on top that has restaurants and an infinity pool that is supposed to be amazing.
I started the company sponsored look see/house hunting part of the trip on Monday. Jimmy decided not to join since he's been here before and had work to do. I got picked up Monday morning and we drove around all day hitting all of the major points of interest in the city (Fountain of Wealth, Singapore Flyer, Merlion Park, Marina Bay, Raffles, Clarke Quay, East Coast Park, The Grandstand, Holland Village, Little India, Kampong Glam, Chinatown etc). I can't wait to get here and explore each of them and of course take pictures for you all to see! On Tuesday, I went to the P&G office to meet with a potential hiring manager about a job at the Singapore office. I was so proud of myself for getting from the apartment to P&G all by myself using mass transportation. From there I was picked up to do house hunting all day. We saw 8 places and there was 1 I was interested in that was right by Orchard Road. Most of the apartments here are pretty small and the majority don't have dishwashers. Some don't even have ovens. We already have our furniture being shipped here so a big factor in picking where to live will be making sure all of our furniture fits. Most of the places I saw wouldn't fit our king size bed but the place by Orchard had tons of space. Tuesday night Jimmy and I went down to the Promenade for dinner - it's this cute area right on the Singapore river with a lot of restaurants (pretty much every area here has a lot of restaurants). I had 2 beers and they were more expensive than my meal! I think we'll have to do drinks at home even though alcohol isn't very cheap at the grocery either.
Wednesday was my first day with nothing scheduled. I started off by doing laundry - I'm going to be doing laundry every few days here because the washers are tiny compared to the US. I took a trip down to the gym for a run (I'm too much of a wuss to run outside in this heat). I got on the treadmill and put in my normal pace and thought, wow I'm in really good shape because this seems really slow to me. That's when I realized the treadmill paces were based on kilometers! Of course I wasn't in better shape after a few days of stuffing my face. All of these conversions are going to take awhile to get used to. We also received our air shipment on Tuesday so I had to go through those boxes to make sure there was no damage to anything. Once my chores were done I decided to head down to Orchard Road for some shopping. WOW is all I can say. Orchard Road is like the Magnificent Mile on steroids. It was raining when I got there so I kept wandering into different malls and I pretty much got lost in all of them. I think there were even times that I ended up on the other side of the street when I came out of the mall and didn't even realize it until later. Hopefully after a few more trips down there I'll get better at navigating my way around.
Wednesday night Jimmy and I went to a hawker center for dinner. A hawker center is an open air food court with good food that's pretty cheap. Jimmy ordered a chili crab and the crab actually crawled out of the bucket while being weighed - you know you are getting fresh food when you watch it try to run away!
That's it for the first half - I'm off to do more house hunting today - fingers crossed we find a place we like!
