Sharon picked me up at the hotel lobby and drove us past the forest of cranes working on the new casino and resort to the south marina, where we met with Claude, her colleague Eugene, and T.S., Winnie, and their 11-month-old Matthew.\u00c2\u00a0 We caught an enclosed boat, barely bigger than the bumboat to Pulau Ubin, that took us to the island of Kusu, where we figured out that we only had 15 minutes to see the island, unless we wanted to spend all day there.\u00c2\u00a0 We opted to continue on to St. John’s Island, which meant boarding the boat again and watching another thirty minutes of 2Fast2Furious.\u00c2\u00a0 Obviously, you gotta be good-looking to drive a fast car.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
St. John’s is a very un-Singaporean island: no shops, no food, no air-conditioning.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And then again, it is very Singaporean: barbed-wire fenced to protect against pirates, camps, government facilities, no trespassing signs.\u00c2\u00a0 We walked to a few benches, ate, and talked, then got up and walked around the island a bit, which although we walked slowly soon had me sweating, especially as we came out of the forest into the sun at the Tropical Marine Science Institute and walked up the hill at the end of the island.\u00c2\u00a0 T.S. got stung by a lot of mosquitos, I got only one.\u00c2\u00a0 There were some attempts to figure out why – blood type, etc. – but maybe they’re just mosquitos with a Swiss mindset: they don’t like foreigners.\u00c2\u00a0 Back at the benches we snacked again and watched Matthew chew his rubber duckie.\u00c2\u00a0 Later I’ll have more time and post the picture here.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
We headed back for the main island, and Eugene invited us to the Amrita spa in the Swiss\u00c3\u00b4tel building complex where he’s a member.\u00c2\u00a0 The spa is connected with a gym, as well, and almost all the visitors were well-built guys, either slender or beefy, so that I felt a bit out of place with my office-honed body.\u00c2\u00a0 No tan, no tone, no muscle – slobmaster hits the spa!\u00c2\u00a0 But it felt great – bubbles, warm water, steam room, sauna, and the “dip tub,” in which you cooled off, but the little words “dip tub” just don’t do this formidable basin of numbing glaciality justice.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
For dinner we had fish head curry, tauhu telur (fried tofu\/egg\/stuff with a dark sauce), stir fried kai lan (kale), and teh tarik (literally, pulled tea, which means it’s been poured back and forth between two containers to make it frothy and to mix in the sugar and milk).\u00c2\u00a0 The kopi tiam we ate at was right next to the Swiss Caf\u00c3\u00a9, where I could have had papet vaudois and Engadiner Nusstorte.\u00c2\u00a0 Singapore is all about food.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
We went to see Transformers, which was fun because it was about transformers and transformers are cool.\u00c2\u00a0 How can a car that transforms into a fighting machine and back not be cool?\u00c2\u00a0 The story itself wasn’t too bad, either, and kept me enthralled and wide awake.\u00c2\u00a0 I think there’s one moral to the story: if you want to fight evil, you must be beautiful.\u00c2\u00a0 Kind of like for driving fast cars.\u00c2\u00a0 Personally, judging from the previews, the Transformers moral will be repeated in the widely anticipated July 12 release of Harry Potter vs. Black Sabbath.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Back in the hotel, at a quarter past midnight, the elevator wished me a good morning.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sharon picked me up at the hotel lobby and drove us past the forest of cranes working on the new casino and resort to the south marina, where we met with Claude, her colleague Eugene, and T.S., Winnie, and their 11-month-old Matthew.\u00c2\u00a0 We caught an enclosed boat, barely bigger than the bumboat to Pulau Ubin, that took us to the island of Kusu, where we figured out that we only had 15 minutes to see the island, unless we wanted to spend all day there.\u00c2\u00a0 We opted to continue on to St. John’s Island, which meant boarding the boat again and watching another thirty minutes of 2Fast2Furious.\u00c2\u00a0 Obviously, you gotta […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}