Singapore Zoo

The weather was nice so we headed out to the Singapore Zoo today; we had been reading review about how great it was. Never a good idea to have your expectations raised. The zoo is in such a lovely location almost fully surrounded by the Upper Seletar Reservoir and surrounding mountains. Sadly they didn’t take advantage of all these lovely water views and the space they had available. Many of the original animal enclosures (like that of Taronga Zoo) were sadly small with the animal pacing back and forth. Some of the newer animal enclosures are very nice. Even though Marika doesn’t like baboons we particularly liked the Hamadryas Baboon enclosure, it was big & open, had many viewing locations and no evident fences other than a moat between the baboons and the people. Mind you some people might have been considered as baboons by their behaviour. They have good variety of big cats, African animals and primates. We gave the Australian animals a miss this time, other than a Blue Tongue lizard that a keeper was walking around with. Next we plan on going to the Night Safari Zoo, which is located right next door to the ‘day zoo’. The Night Zoo is a little larger and sound impressive, but we’re not going to build up our expectations. I would recommend visitors to Singapore visit the zoo if they like animals, go early before it gets to hot. The zoo’s design has made good use of shaded tree coverage and there are special cool rooms and a kid’s area with a water feature they can play in.

Happy New Lunar Year, Woof! Woof!

Welcome to the year 4703, as determined by the Chinese calendar. The Year of the Fire Dog. We had a great view of the New Year fireworks last night, no 9pm show, only Midnight, I had the video camera out and running, I’ll see if I can work out how to add it to our website, I still need to add the Bangkok photos too! Nothing much will be open today so we are planing a nice quite day at home. If the weather is good tomorrow we’ll head out to the zoo.

Goodbye Year of the Chook

It’s the end of the Chinese year today, we say goodbye to the Year of the Chook (Roster) and hello to the Year of the Dog. So our child will be born in the Year of the Dog, good, strong, cunning characteristics, mmmm I see trouble on the grow, for us parents to be! There should be some good fireworks viewing from our place tonight.

We had a successful shopping trip today and we have nearly finished replacing all the items broken in transit from Australia. We finally found some suitable office chairs. All that is left is to replace two broken glasses. We also purchased a little Chinese style cabinet that will sit in our entry way / lift foyer. We have been looking for something special for that space, hopefully it will fit nicely. I’ll update the foyer photo when it’s delivered in a few weeks.

Australia Day

Well it’s been a week or so since our last update, sometimes life just gets busy!
Anyhow here's wishing you a great Australian Day for 2006.

Taxi Drivers

The more we travel, the more we believe all taxi driver must have the crazy driving gene. The general drivers in Singapore are a little wilder than those in Sydney, but they are a lot less agro which is a very nice change. As the general drivers are wild, the taxi drivers are a little further over the edge. Now let's visit Bangkok, general drivers just don't like to drive in a straight line or even in their own lane and we saw a three lane roundabout turn into a five car plus three motorbike lane madhouse roundabout derby. We were happy to be riding in a four wheel drive! So following the theory that taxi drivers are further over the edge than the general drivers, we were happy to survive all our taxi trips without incident or accident! Woohoo, these taxi drivers must have a special sixth sense. One step further out than the taxis are Tuk-tuks. We decided to leave that experience until we had better life insurance. J Travel tip; cars don't stop for pedestrians on pedestrian crossing - run like heck and pray to Budda that you get across safely! One very nice aspect of this madness, drivers in Singapore and Bangkok know how to merge 2 or 3 lanes into 0ne without causing a traffic jam. Australian drivers it’s your turn to learn this skill!

Bangkok, Thailand Visit

We have just arrived back from a great long weekend in Thailand, thank you Ning for being our hostess with the mostest and driving us around the Bangkok area and making Jason eat all the Thai food, his belly is still full, mmmm satay… we’ll work at getting some pictures on our site in the next few days. This was more a family visit than tourist trip, but we managed to take about two hundred photos. I love that about digital cameras, you can just keep shooting, never miss a moment. The bugger is now we have to sort through the dang lot of them! Take the good with the bad, and the digital good out weighs the bad in this case.

Speaking of the good and bad, getting through the airport / customs can be good or bad! Our landing in Bangkok was delayed about 30 minutes, its fun flying around and around and around your destination because you can’t land due to an aeroplane traffic jam, then we spent over an hour in line at the customs counter. Leaving Bangkok customs was quicker, it was only about 30 minutes and the customs guy almost hinted he was happy to be alive! Then whack they made us a pay a special going through the customs gate tax kinda thingy. It wasn’t a tax as such; we had already paid Thai taxes with the tickets. We don’t like dodgy you have to pay this or you can’t get on your plane kick-backs. The Thai’s we met were all very friendly (except customs) and there are many wonderful and interesting looking places in Thailand. We would love to go back! Now for Singapore airport / customs, our plane was delayed about 5 minutes landing but we were through customs and in a cab in about 10 minutes, and the customs guy even smiled, though he might have had gas!

Regards
The bitter and twisted ones!

Well after a week of rain, today has been mostly dry; alas Jason has a cold and thinks it best that he doesn’t enter the pool! I’ll have to keep this short; we’re about the pop across the Bangkok for the weekend. It great to be able to say that, kinda like just saying I’m head down to the shop to pick-up a sausage roll, not that we eat sausage rolls very often, come to think of it Marika most likely could eat a shop bought one, with all that butter and milk goodness. Back to Bangkok, it will be great to catch up with Jason’s sister Ning. Nice to have someone who speaks the local language and knows the lay of the land to show us around! And now Jason gets to eat real Thai food, mmmm, green curry, satay, pad thai…

Not sure if it a good idea to fly on Friday 13th!

Rain! Rain! Rain!

It’s been raining fairly constantly since last Friday, a week solid. We have found a few leaks in the apartment, one in our bedroom and two in the en-suite! Lucky us, that reminds me I need to empty the cup, we don’t have a bucket to catch the leaking water!

Our First Visitor

Another milestone for us today; our first visitor. Marika’s friend Leanne was visiting family in Singapore and was able to drop by. The girls caught up on what’s happening then moving on to talking about having babies, about that time Jason’s attention wandered over to… look the TV is on, what’s on HBO…
We have to go shopping and buy a bed for visitors that wish to stay, we have to buy a cot too, but I’m thinking that might be a bit small for most of our friends to sleep in!

Today marked a milestone for Jason in Singapore, he wore long pants for the first time. This was not because it was cold, but because we were going out to dinner. However it has been raining hard for three days now and is properly the coldest it’s been, I think it may have reached as low as 23C. Pull out the woollens, winter is here! We had a nice dinner at a sailing club on the eastern end of the island, right at the end of the airport runway. We watched a few 747-400’s, 737’s and some Airbuses land; dinner conversation had to pause when planes came into land! We had a quick walk through Chinatown; it’s all decked out with lights and paraphernalia in readiness for the Chinese New Year on the 29th January. It’s the year of the Dog, good bye year of the chook, well Rooster. We watched fireworks from our apartment last Saturday night which we later found out signified the lighting up of Chinatown. Chinese New Year celebrations run for 15 days, but here they start 3 weeks early! So the Chinese really know how to celebrate the arrival of a new year!

20 Plus 2 Week Scan

Well it’s finally here; we’ve been waiting to see Junior again, to check all is OK. The 20 plus 2 weeks scan went well, Junior is growing as he or she should be. This was a long scan about 30 minutes. We were able to see in detail Junior’s head, face, heart, spine, arms, legs and various other internal & externals the doctors like to check. Junior however keep his or her back to us most of the time making the scan difficult at times. Junior wanted to keep their, his or her a secret from us, which was OK by us as we didn’t want to know their sex. Marika’s belly is continuing to grow, so we are off to the shops today to buy some more accommodating clothing. We have updated the website with two scan pictures showing Junior’s face. Take a look if you have time.

New Website Design

Well we finally finished & uploaded the new website. It has the same look and feel, just better division and functionally, plus this new weblog. The update includes Christmas and New Years Eve photos plus some baby belly picture for those that have been requesting them. We hope you like.

Jazz in the Park

Well our adventure last night to the Botanic Gardens for a jazz show was rained out, maybe I should say flooded out! Well it is the rainy season!

The Start of the Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Hello WORLD! It's 2006 and I decided to start a weblog to see if it's easier then updating our website all the time. I'll copy all the old notes from our webpage here. I plan on revamping our webpage soon; I'm just having a little trouble with the template.