singapore, part 2

First full day: Hotel breakfast. You can go with local breakfast items (like bee hoon, something noodley with something green like kale; or rice porridge, which is basically watery rice) or with the British inspired side (baked beans, many types of meat, boiled eggs). It started raining around noon -- right when I wanted to go out exploring and find lunch. I wandered around Little India in the pouring rain, found a place with butter naan, soon felt very sick to my stomach, had my food poisoning out, fully recovered. So for dinner, I went with safe -- a food court on Orchard Road called Food Republic. Don't judge: lots of the best food here happens to be in food courts. Promise.

Anyway, managed to stay up till a normal hour! Mildest jet lag EVER. Maybe because I had the luxury of dozing for like 12 hours and still having a mad early start to the new day... and the homeopathic no jet lag meds from Vincent.

Second day: Marissa & I had breakfast in the hotel... lesson planned... went with Ming Yang and his father to the cricket club for lunch (weird: old colonial)...went to the school. First day was ok, I think, although not finessed... Teaching middle school girls is *difficult.* I tend to try for teaching by having them *do* stuff (showing, not telling), and I'm not always sure the message is getting across. Dinner: AMAZING vegetarian Indian food downtown, Bombay Woodlands. Then an "ice" at Food Republic: iced strawberry with passion fruit jelly. Merrie, you'd love it: they cater to people who like jelly things! Imagine, a snow cone meets gummy candy...

Third day: More hotel breakfast. More lesson planning. Lunch with Ming Yang and his father at Food Republic (again!). I had Malaysian food: grilled stingray and some sort of amazing rice and what they call "spinach" (in the grocery store, it's called "slippery spinach"). More teaching. Went to the Esplanade for dinner -- mall, food, and arts center on the river/bay. Amazing local food: Simply Peranakan. We tried the green mango salad... some sort of fish/coconut/spice concoction...more of the slippery spinach in egg and sauce. Wandered around by the water.

Fourth day: Yet MORE hotel breakfast. Lunch at another mall: Takashimaya (the mall) and Toast (the restaurant). Great salads (had the tofu and pumpkin). Highest percentage of westerners. More teaching. Ended up going to the same mall for dinner: seaweed salad and nyonya dumplings (filling inside rice wrapped in leaves -- kind of like a Chinese version of a tamale?). And cake.

Fifth day: And yet more hotel breakfast, because I was busy with not only lesson planning, but also the presentation Meredith is giving for me in Franco's class. Hurried repeat lunch at Sprout again -- this time, wild rice with raisins and granny smith apples and nuts. More teaching -- I went off the grid this time, and I think it went a little better. Started thunderstorming right after we talked about melodramatic presentations of emotion. I'm hoping they got that the second round, the round where we *didn't* give away the emotions of the characters, was the better aesthetic... Dinner tonight was the new favorite: an Egyptian place in Little India. We had a salad (ok), shish kabobs (best lamb I've ever had), and the MOST AMAZING EGGPLANT YOGURT. Followed by wandering around, getting lost in the district's mall... so many people trying to go in every direction down the vegetable aisle of the supermarket... so many aisles of imported chocolates...

Now... exhausted.