This week I have mostly been breaking things or had thing broken for me without my permission. Last Friday night I came home from a very hectic session at China 1 and woke up fully clothed on the bed early Saturday morning, got up for a wee and then went back to sleep. Then I woke up to the sound of running water and found the toilet cistern had a massive crack in it and was gushing water everywhere. What the bloody hell happened there? I have no idea and am open to suggestion as to how that might have happened. Then we get a letter from the body corporate saying that out toilet is flooding the BBQ area. I don’t particularly like the toilet when I am in it and I am sure the people burning sausages downstairs are none too delighted about the odd turd emerging nearby. On the upside it is Halloween tonight and there is a party down there so we will be constantly tricking the party goers with poo. So now we are down to 2 toilets. This is also a little untimely as one of the other things I have managed to break is my knee. Well not really broken but it's sore, the GP said it was Housemaid's knee, but the surgeon I was referred to said it was jumper's knee which I am little happier about. Haven't been doing too much jumping of late though, my knee is too sore. He perscribed some anti inflammatory medicine and then gave me some other tablets for the gastric I was going to get. Bit weird going to the doctor and being perscribed a dose of bum wee, but it is getting better and I'll soon be jumping like an overjoyed housemaid before you know it. 
Last Saturday it was Octoberfest and Singaporians dressed as Germans doing the duck dance is quite a sight. I was a little dusty from the night before and didn’t manage to fully participate to the same level as Elliot who managed to drink half a pint with no hands and most of a full pint with his feet. Impressed the hell out of the locals nearby, but I didn’t end up liking them too much because they won the 42” Plasma screen and I didn’t. Then to cap it all off some wanker broke into our PC, not entirely sure what they did but it broke a lot of stuff. They seemed to like Gomez though as the music files that are there as a backup only because music piracy is illegal, were some of the files accessed. I should have got someone who knows stuff about computers to fix it, but I had to make do with me instead and rebuilt it. We have 2 public holidays next week, yippee. Annoyingly they holidays are on Tuesday and Thursday, but I will take what I can get. The upside of this is that the holiday on Tuesday for deepavali the Hindu festival of light which is also Melbourne Cup, very considerate. Deepavali is one of the biggest events in the Hindu calendar the Indians in my team at work were bemoaning the lack of fireworks allowed in Singapore for the event. It must be mayhem in India. With the clocks shifting for daylight savings that means we will need to start celebrating Melbourne Cup at around 11:00am, I’m sure we will cope.You can subscribe to this blog site for email updates by sending a mail to the address below:mailto:livinginsing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
This week I have mostly been entertaining visitors, 3 in a week has seen the alcohol index move from steady to relentless leaving my liver a pickled and angry little piece of offal. Unfortunately this has also involved tequila on a fairly regular basis and including a foolish decision to drink margaritas until the Café Iguana bar closed last Monday night. Tequila inspired hangovers on a Tuesday are not good at the best of times; they seem to be worse in 30° heat out in the Singapore heartlands. I’ve now officially given up trying to sort out a hangover breakfast so suffered in grumpy silence for most of the day. Tequila is also responsible for making me go to Orchard Towers with one of my visitors. Or at least that is my explanation; colloquially know as the four floors of ladies of ill repute that rhyme with floors this place is in fact four floors of seedy bars. These seedy bars attract some dubious people including some very friendly ladies, some of which have very large adams apples and big hands. It is an odd coincidence that seedy bars with friendly ladies seem to attract large sweaty blokes and I felt obliged to adopt a large sweaty name so decided I would like to be known as Stan (Apologies to any svelte and non sweaty Stans out there). There was no fooling the locals, the name was obviously not sweaty enough and failed to attract much attention except for a lady with an unsightly bulge in her frock and the biggest head and hands I have ever seen.I was heartened to discover during a rare lucid moment this week that the Singapore Navy has tomcat missiles. Can’t say I really wanted to know that but the poster in the train told me all about them. Apparently they can fly very close to the water for a range of 90km, which makes me kind of glad I didn’t bring my kayak over. I never thought of a missile having best things but, apparently they do and the best thing about these missiles is that I can sleep easy knowing Singapore was safe from attack. But it did get me thinking, I hope they check the guns to see if they’re loaded before they clean them and then I wondered what they would hit if it did go off. Well it turns out they could hit large chunks of Malaysia, Sumatra and a couple of Indonesian islands. Nice work. But if you could of all that damage without having to even travel to it why bother with a navy just give everyone a Tomcat Missile launcher for home and do away with National Service. I would make such a sensible prime minister.
This week I have mostly been working too hard, which is very annoying as it interferes far more interesting activities. The other Pinchie was in town this week and he was absolutley stunned at the amount of time he was expected to spend in the office. It is bordering on ridiculous, particularly when people organise meetings at 7pm on a Friday. I'm Australian for god's sake, if I am not in line of sight of a pub by 5:30 on a Friday I get a little twitchy. To make matters worse there isn't actually a pub in Tampines so I am twitchy anyway. The good news is I seemed to have finaly finaly solved my breakfast dilemmas; kaya toast, not healthy but tasty. But this discovery came at the cost of another unfortunate incident at Han's the inept coffee makers accross the road. I asked for a toasted ham cheese tomato and this time no stinking cucumber. Toasted sandwich with no stinking cucumber they repeated back to me, yeah no stinking cucumber I said. Well bugger me if the sandwich didn't come back with no tomato and thick slices of rancid devil's helmet. I have finally come to the conclusion that I am a victim of some sort of cucumber conspiracy and the people at Subway are in on it as well. I carefully explain I don't want cucumber or gherkins on my six incher (Subway is unfortunately is the best excuse for a sandwich at Tampines) and they equally carefully put them on. This by the way happens world wide and is not limited to Tampines in the Singapore heartlands. It turns out that plenty of other people hate the stinking stuff and also interestingly so do cockroaches. 
I have always been a strong support of meat loyalty programmes and was delighted to discover that every $10 spent at Shop N Save = 1 chop. They've got my business, although it's not entirely clear if that is lamb or pork. I have a sore head today due to tequila so am going to retire to the couch. Reidy is back next week... hoorah.
This week I have mostly been a bachelor because Reidy went back home, I only checked my voice mail the other day, but there was a desperate plea for me to bring her home. This was only after one night, so I don't know what she's doing to people but it is having an effect.
Surprisingly I have been pretty much hangover free this week at work and have no food stories, other than to report we were nearly thrown out of a food court for bringing in beer one evening. Apparently it was Muslim food court and someone complained. So we went downstairs to the Chinese food court where they throw you out for not drinking.
My suspicions around people using the toilet bowl as a hand basin have been confirmed this week. I didn’t really know who to turn to, but an Englishman who has done some time in the region said it would have been because they couldn’t get to the squat toilet and use the hose thingy on the side. His other advice was to avoid shaking hands with people. Wise words matey.
I was intrigued to discover there was going to be a Courteous and Safety road show on Saturday at my local Train station. Well that looked too good to pass up, I would love to be able to combine courteousness with safetynesness.
The courteousness bit I could understand as getting on the trains is a bit of a free for all despite the instructions on the platform clearly showing the recommended traffic flow for people getting on an off. But the safety bit I think would have been pretty brief, the most unsafe thing you can do is sleep standing up which the average Singaporean seems to be able to do and quite often without holding on to anything. You can’t fall on to the tracks or push someone on to them as a result of some spirited high jinx gone wrong. Firstly because there are doors on the platform timed to open only when the train has safely stopped, and secondly because there are no spirited high jinx allowed anywhere in Singapore.
But fortunately I got a call to go bike riding instead, so missed the road show, but there is one at a another station today which sounds far more interesting. It also includes a Safety and Courteous race where you have to complete various challenges in a safe and courteous manner and finish with a sprint to the finish line. I am so there. Or maybe I will go to the Emergency Preparedness Road show on at the end of Scotts Rd near us. They were just getting going when I saw it yesterday and don’t actually know what it’s about but did seem to involve a recruitment drive for prison guards.
So much to choose from…….
We got off the island last weekend, which was very exciting, and this time we even went to another country, which was even more exciting. But not that exciting, we went to Kuala Lumpur. Emma was even less excited when I told her that No, it isn't the place that Umper Lumpers come from. The hosties aboard our Japanese Air Lines flight barely had time to put away their life jackets and whistles.
The convenience of flying to KL is brought into question when a 30 minute flight takes you 5 hours door to door after check in times and transport and crap. Doesn't help when the KL airport is actually in Singapore. Well at least it felt like it was, the cab ride was at least an hour from airport to hotel. The cheerful lady at the luxury bus desk at our mediocre hotel told me it was 5 hours from Singapore on a bus to hotel door.
KL was fun for a couple of days, we went to catch up with and work mate who was on his way to India. The first thing Reidy noticed was the smell, and try as I might I just couldn't convince her it was the sewerage and not me. The second was the next day when we saw hills around the outskirts. It's a bit weird when you live in very flat place and you get excited about seeing earth bosoms in a city, but that's what happens.
The highlight of what was otherwise a pretty ordinary 3-hour "Country Tour" was the world's biggest pewter tankard at the Royal pewter factory, no it wasn't; Batu Caves was. This is a Hindu shrine in a cave (weird that) at the top of a 272 step climb. We didn't notice the climb because we were too busy being intimidated by the resident monkeys, I don't like monkeys in the wild they're just a little too sneaky and sure of themselves for my liking. The caves were pretty cool if a bit stinky but this time I couldn't blame it on the sewage. There was bit of stuff going on there, but it was pretty well deserted. Nothing like the festival of Thaipusam where 1.5 million people flock there over 3 days to either watch or participate in honouring the Hindu god Subramanian. Celebrating the occasion is up to the individual from offering up to bread and milk to sticking steel skewers through various part of the body. Apparenently the skewering doesn't hurt due to the trance like state you are in, but I would be quite content with offering up a saucer of milk and loaf of bread. It is also celebrated in Singapore but I would imagine it would be with a little less vigour, still I'm looking forward to checking that out next year.
Malaysia must be the pre-release movie capital of the world, how else could they could have such a wide range of current movies already on DVD, and so cheap as well. If you were to buy them, and I'm not saying we did, they would even deliver them to your table while your eating, which shits all over Video Ezy as a service.
The first time I checked our flight home was at the airport after the JAL check in lady said we didn't have a booking. Aha I thought, bullshit I thought, I have it here on my itinerary I said, and just to prove it waived it in her face. Emma took in a deep breath in order to give them a good serve, but had to downgrade it to an enormous sigh when we were told that while indeed it represents a confirmed booking, it was for next Tuesday. I thought I did well to escape the wrath of Reidy, but the check in lady was treating me with some contempt.
She did manage to get us on the flight, I'm not sure what the Malaysian for Arseclown is but I'm pretty sure that's what she said to her colleague, because she too started treating us with the same contempt. Our 30-minute flight home took 2 hours due to some issues with passengers being on the wrong plane, the only thing is they didn't know who and fortunately it wasn't us. So this meant 4 attempts at counting every passenger before they eventually worked out they could cross names off a list, sure enough 5 people were on the wrong flight and had to get off. How the hell did that happen? But I did manage to watch a 90 minute movie on a 30 minute flight, I think we'll get the bus next itme.
Last Saturday it was Octoberfest and Singaporians dressed as Germans doing the duck dance is quite a sight. I was a little dusty from the night before and didn’t manage to fully participate to the same level as Elliot who managed to drink half a pint with no hands and most of a full pint with his feet. Impressed the hell out of the locals nearby, but I didn’t end up liking them too much because they won the 42” Plasma screen and I didn’t. 
