Newsletter 05: Moving in

Wednesday, 5 November. We packed up everything into our suitcases, airport boxes, and two duffel bags that had been tucked inside them, and checked out of the hotel. We put ourselves and our stuff into two taxis, and pulled away.

Our new street, called Mosque street, was understandable to the taxi driver only as "MOHSS" street, rather than "MAHSK" street. The ends of words seem to disappear entirely at times. Don't get me wrong, English ability here is good; I would say merely that my ability to pronounce words needs some fine tuning! How am I supposed to say Liang Seah? Or Tiong Bahru? Raffles, Clarke, and Cavendish I can handle just fine. I think. But then, Clarke comes out differently with a British accent: Klaaahk, not Klark.

We unloaded the taxis just as a downpour began. Because everything was zipped in bags and taped in boxes, nothing but the bags and boxes got wet. The daytime guard helped us get everything into the elevator, and back out again into our living room. We went over the apartment again with the management, and they gave us a stack of manuals and a handful of keys. Hey, how about that! I have keys again! (The ez-link card is, arguably, like a car key; it's what pays for rides on the MRT.)

Our agent then dropped us off at a mall (Funan Digital Life Mall, odd name for a mall) where there was a store selling furniture. After eating lunch at the mall, I hoped to pick out a suitable desk to put my computer on. They didn't really seem to have what I wanted, which was a desk with a really tall hutch. For books, naturally: otherwise a large swath of wall gets, well, perhaps not wasted, but, in my view, underutilized. And it's not like I don't have a lot of computer equipment to stash in a desk, too; my computer is, unlike a laptop, a *place* and not a thing. Right now, though my computer is mostly connected (we have an internet connection, thank goodness, but no printer), it's a very uncomfortable place.

After we abandoned Funan, Aquinas went to NUS and I went back to Chinatown on a quest for sheets and pillows to go with our Coleman air mattresses. Aquinas had reminded me that maybe the air mattresses, made by an American company, might not fit local single sheets. I decided to shop first and check afterwards.

I wandered through various buildings near the Garden Bridge, found two CK department stores nearby, and bought a number of items at the second one: two sets of sheets, some sponges, some cleaning spray, some toilet paper, and a small plastic stepstool.

The stepstool, I reasoned, could be my computer chair, if my computer sits on boxes for a while. As a bonus, it would allow me to reach some of the higher cabinets in the apartment. Notice that I have taken the liberty of augmenting the stool with a cushion from the free sofa.

Sheet sets here, it turns out, contain the following items: a fitted sheet, a pillowcase, and a bolster cover. American sheet sets would be far more likely to include a flat sheet rather than a bolster cover. A bolster cover, I ask you! There's no top sheet; the idea is to put a cotton comforter/duvet cover over your comforter/duvet, and sleep under that. And, of course, the beds are all shorter here than in the US; annoying from a standards-perspective, but sensible, considering the population is also shorter than in the US.

I took the sheets home to check the size of the Coleman airbeds. I inspected all six sides of the Coleman box, and found no size information other than "twin." No dimensions. So, thinking the Coleman beds might have been a mistake, I opened the box to see if the manual had the dimensions. Nope. I then opened up the bed itself, opened up the motor, which was separate, and inflated one of the single airbeds. This didn't go as smoothly as I'd been expecting. Note to anyone shopping for an airbed: if at all possible, buy an AeroBed.

If you will permit me an extended aside: The AeroBed we owned in New Jersey was, I now realize, an underappreciated miracle of good design. That thing was idiot proof. The motor hookup required no fiddling whatsoever. There was a giant, hard plastic nozzle on the bed. You plugged in the motor in a wall outlet, and then attached the motor by rotating it onto the nozzle. This also turned the motor on; the motor doesn't have a power switch at all. The motor sound was loud, but not ear-piercingly high-pitched the way the Coleman motor is. Then, when the AeroBed was firm enough, you would just unrotate the motor to disconnect it from the nozzle. Absolutely *no* air leaks out while you fasten the cap to seal the nozzle; a flap inside the nozzle is already in place. The Coleman bed has a nozzle only about twice as big as your childhood floatie toys, and is even more annoying to inflate and secure. The Coleman motor, in addition to being noisy, leaked air if you turned it off while the motor was inserted into the nozzle. The motor came with three tips for inflating different things, one of which fit the Coleman airbed. But there was no real connection between the motor, the tip, and the bed. The Coleman airbed has a "unique" attached storage system that is actually inferior to the attached bag the AeroBed came in. And the AeroBed came with a plastic patch kit, and included the motor in the same box as the bed. To let the air out to put the bed away, you just open the giant nozzle; you don't have to squeeze anything to let the air out like you do with a floatie toy.

In short, the design of the Coleman airbed is adequate, but compared to the AeroBed, it is amazingly disappointing. Especially after a long day climbing learning curves. Furthermore, the Coleman airbed, despite being made in China, wasn't any cheaper than the AeroBed we used to have. Curse the American voltage disparity!

I had planned to measure the airbed after inflating it, and compare the measurements with the dimensions on the package of sheets. But Aquinas had the tape measure, which we'd taken on our desk hunting expedition. I didn't have anything to measure with. Or did I? I lay down on the bed and compared it to my height. I decided that the airbed's dimensions were probably similar enough to the dimensions of the sheets (though the printed dimensions were somewhat mystifying), and opened the package of sheets. Thankfully, they fit.

When Aquinas returned from NUS, we visited a couple of food stalls for dinner; some good, some not so good. You live, you eat some weird stuff, you learn.

We found an OG department store and escalated up to the 5th floor to learn about pillows. Hopefully, this store had something more comfortable than our hotel!

Pillows here seem to be made of some kind of foam, memory foam, or down-substitute microfiber. There were three types of microfiber pillow, with two of the three kinds being, to us, too stuffed, so we bought the "softest" type.

Back home again and sleepy, we were unhappy to discover that the apartment windows failed to keep out a droning mechanical sound coming from the building across the alley. It was a long night on our new, foreign airbeds, sheets, and pillows.

Thursday, 6 November. We had a chat with the management about the mechanical sound, and they agreed to look into it with us.

Afterwards, Aquinas left for NUS, and I went on another shopping quest for some kind of sheet, blanket, or comforter to sleep under. I went back to OG and again immersed myself in the unfamiliar bedding materials until I found what I was looking for: a cotton blanket and a cotton comforter.

Then, I immersed myself in the mystery of irons. I had no idea there were so many possible features. Of an iron. There had to be ten different kinds. Before I noticed the shelves that had two other brands of irons, one with only two models, and the other having seven or eight. They were different colors, but other than that, I couldn't see the difference. I stared at them. I still couldn't see the difference. So I asked for help, and was initiated into the mysteries of the Special Coating, the Multitude of Strategically Placed Steam Holes, the High Wattage, the Steam Control, and the Steam Jet, not to mention the Safety Feature and the EasyFlex Cord.

I ultimately selected what appeared to be a popular, mid-range iron made by Philips. It's blue.

At the register, I was again showered with vouchers for other OG products. I went to the cafe and had tea (though unfortunately they hadn't given me a drink voucher), and looked them over. There was one offering knives on sale; there was one offering stamps for a discount on cookware, there was one with instructions for some kind of SMS contest, there was one offering $25 off a particular brand of men's clothing, and there was one offering a free pearl. I decided to go after the free pearl.

I presented the voucher and receipt at a small glass counter, whereupon a guy grabbed an oyster from a tray inside the counter, and wedged it open with a knife. He fished out the nearly spherical cultured pearl inside and rinsed it between thumb and forefinger in a small dish, placing it into a small box and handing me off to the jewelry consultant. They want you to buy a necklace pendant or pair of earrings; they'll drill and attach your free pearl while you watch. I wasn't interested in spending the money, even for a very simple piece of jewelry, and managed to escape with my unaltered, unadorned free pearl in a tiny ziplock.

We had better luck at dinner at the hawker center across the street.

Friday, 7 November. Two contractors came by to look at the windows and gather information for a quote on what it would cost to reduce the noise penetration. Afterwards, Aquinas and I ate lunch and bought fruit at the People's Park Complex. Aquinas departed for NUS by MRT, and I went to refrigerate the fruit. I also sat in front of the computer until it became unbearably uncomfortable, and then decided that, rather than sit on the sofa with a book, which is about the only thing one can do in the apartment besides sleep, I would go walk around.

I visited the Yue Hwa Chinese Products store, and almost bought some sweets and cookies, but didn't. I did notice, as elsewhere, that some Singaporeans have a slippery grasp on the notion of plural nouns. Up on the wall in big letters in the food section was "NOODLE." You would never see such a sign in an American grocery store; it would say "NOODLES." This type of thing crops up everywhere. And it's not even consistent. Sometimes a word will be correct on the store directory, but not on the wall, for example, or vice versa. Also, it baffles me that just about every time you use a noun as an adjective, the plural crops up when it's not supposed to! For example, I would call a shop that sells noodles a "noodle shop," not a "noodles shop." I suspect this is an Asian error and not a feature of British English, but I don't actually know that for a fact. (Oh, and then there was the sign that said "Children Books." They got the plural, but not the possessive.)

I also noted several carefully laminated color signs, complete with clipart, saying that "shoplifters will be handled over to the police." Whoops, folks, there's an extra "L" in that word there. Ever since I saw one on Engrish.com, I've been aching to see a sign somewhere that says "No Smorking," because "smorking" is such a cool word. However, I think that "smoking" is a word that Singaporean sign-makers all know how to spell, on account of it being illegal to smoke in so many places. The rhyming "broken = sold" signs in Yue Hwa were also a little non-native sounding, but I don't remember exactly what they said.

After leaving Yue Hwa, I crossed the Garden Bridge, and wandered through some tourist shops. I keep wishing I had a shirt that says, "I may look like a tourist but, as a matter of fact, I live two streets from here." I suppose a shirt that just said "Not tourist, expat," or even just "expat" would serve more or less the same function. I wonder how you translate "expat" into Mandarin? Would it just come out the same as "foreigner"?

I crossed a large intersection marred by construction to the Chinatown Center building, where I perused a well-placed store full of rather nice, but expensive, rocks and minerals. Also in the same building were several stores, each one offering more collectible action-figures for sale than I have ever seen in my entire life. Sadly, these stores did not seem, upon an admittedly distant inspection, to carry collectible trading cards, dice, or strategy board games, as one might have hoped they would.

I also found a junk shop. On the second floor of this shiny new mall. I went in and peered around: it was full of Americana; there were old Coca-Cola bottles, marbles, records, suitcases, and, well, just junk.

We invited a colleague of Aquinas's at NUS over to see the apartment and have dinner out somewhere. We went back to the yakitori restaurant at Far East Plaza. Yummy again.

Saturday, 8 November. Went to eat lunch on Smith Street at "the best Thai restaurant in Chinatown." Bought mochi from a stall. Saw a bunch of Chinese men playing Chinese chess near Chinatown Complex. Went back to OG for another single, cotton comforter, and a nice Henckels knife to cut fruit with (fruit being the only food in the house; our utensils are limited to about six small mugs and one spoon). Got another free pearl, again refused to buy a pendant.

We returned to the apartment and fixed up the beds. Well, maybe "up" is the wrong word. They're still pretty low.

We had the windows measured by a contractor who's going to fit them up with extra panels to keep out the noise. For dinner, we went back to Smith Street. The satay stall, which had been, sadly, closed at lunchtime, was open, and we had satay. I also bought roasted chestnuts.

We issued forth from the apartment around 8:00, caught the MRT to Dhoby Ghaut, and found the Golden Village Movie Theater at Plaza Singapura in time to get seats for the 8:30ish showing of the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. It was okay, but not great. It was one of those movies where lots of stuff gets busted up in the fights, and this time none of it seemed to actually belong to Bond. He didn't have any cool toys of his own, he just kept hijacking vehicles. Also, it was yet another movie where the villain was an evil, greedy capitalist (an oil monger, no less) who doesn't care about the poor downtrodden people. Or mother earth. I've heard this before. The most convincing Bond villain was the media magnate who wanted to create the news. That guy's motivation was both bad and logical. Subtle villains are hard to find, presumably because they're hard to come up with. A lot harder than homogeneous flocks of unconvincing, evil, greedy capitalists, I guess.

Sunday, 9 November. We went on a cheese quest. Cheese is not very Chinese, and thus not so easy to find in Chinatown, or in Singapore in general, as far as we can tell. (There is, oddly enough, an Austrian bread and sausage stall in Chinatown, though, so you never know.) However, Aquinas managed to digitally identify a cheese destination, one that is, in fact, not so far from Chinatown. We walked north and crossed a bridge over the Singapore River (which is more like a canal or inlet, really; it joins the ocean back to the ocean). We arrived at a sleepy expat village, Robertson Walk, and poked around until we found La Fromagerie. After some debate and additional exploring, we decided to have dinner there. We had a cheese platter, a meat platter, and some melted cheese and potatoes (an unelaborated form of Raclette, in fact). We also bought some cheese.

We wandered back along the Quay, stopped for a drink, and took the MRT from Clake Quay back home.

Monday, 10 November. I had a silent, epic battle with the washing machine. It won; it took *forever* and stained a pair of pants. Also, I discovered that Previous Tenant left some laundry soap behind... after I'd already opened the new bag I bought.

Meanwhile, I updated www.spjg.com a bit. Late dinner at on Smith Street. 

Tuesday, 11 November. More laundry. More success this time. A visit from electrician bearing replacement light bulbs. A visit from management, contractor in tow, about the windows. Dropped off some shirts for washing and ironing across from the nearby ColdStorage, where I brought home cereal and milk. Milk in a 2L jug is just slightly, subtly, the wrong shape if you're expecting it to be half a gallon. Add to that the fact that it comes from Thailand, and not, say, upstate New York, and the world suddenly seems a wide, unmeasurable place.

Dinner at the downstairs Korean restaurant. Watch out for chili!

Afterwards, we took the MRT to Harbourfront (didn't even have to switch lines) and arrived in the basement of VivoCity. We primarily went to look for a chair so that I can more easily sit in front of my computer. We found one at Giant; we also found, among other things, a small rolling shopping cart (to carry liquids back from grocery shopping on foot), a cutting board, another umbrella to match the one we had (from Watson's), and some felt circles to muffle the sound of wooden cabinets closing. It must sound as though I'm becoming obsessed with eliminating noise...

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