there's never enough time: Leaving Singapore

Other ships

The albatross was at the pier yesterday. We have seen it in Sydney near us as well. Today is a huge German ship with lots of folks who are a much younger population than we are.

Also coming into and out of Singapore, there are so many other ships carrying cargo, oil??, and whatever. We also saw lots of cranes on the water but Lord only knows what they were doing. At night you see lights everywhere from these ships and the cranes.

Left or right: make up your mind

For the most part, in Hong Kong and Singapore, you must go to the left for example in walking or standing on escalators. But it doesn’t seem to be predictable all the time and so I often wanted to say: so what is it? Just let me know and I’ll do it.

Today’s discoveries

After a quick breakfast we were on our trek to the MRT station. Our first stop was Chinatown where I wanted to see a few temples we had seen there last time. Well this is definitely not the same as last time we were year. We never found those temples but we did find huge malls with stores of all cost levels. The people’s market, which seems to go on forever, has these little stalls where copious dishes (don’t ask: I haven’t a clue) emerge for folks sitting at common tables in the middle of this big complex. Later it becomes stalls for produce and such. Often the odors were not so pleasant and other times, quite nice.

Toilets

We found that the toilets in the subway were clean, free and did include toilet tissue. Those in the people’s market had a charge and were good enough but no paper, something that I don’t think was really soap, and no paper for hands.

Paying for things

You have to develop a degree of trust. For example at the toilet, I held out my hand with the various coins on my palm and the lady picked through them until she had sufficient for the two of us. This method is not uncommon for tourists and I don’t think I’ve ever been cheated in doing this.

Little India

Back on the MRT and made it to Little India where the smell of spices dominates. The offerings here included foods, but also flowers (marigold leis and small white flowers that were very fragrant). As soon as you get off the subway you notice that the ads are now of India women and products. We wandered around checking out the architecture and being totally lost. Since it was near lunch time, I suggested ed choose a restaurant he liked.

Eventually he found one that had a TripAdvisor sign on it and an A rating on health so we stopped in there. I had vegetable Biryani and he had chicken and something else including that Mango drink they have all over Asia and which he loves. I’m not sure what I had but the yogurt and cucumbers were like Greek dish, the red stuff clearly had hot spices in it, and so on. It was an adventure.

They had a women’s restroom here but I found it puzzling. The seat was up: probably the last lady squatted on it as they do here. But it also had a wand for water and the floor was wet. So who knows.

So we left the welcomed air conditioning and ventured back into the hot humid air. We have been dripping sweat each day we are out. Eventually we realized we had again missed the temples and decided to find the subway station before we were totally lost.

So we retraced our route and again made the mile plus walk back to the ship’s terminal, through the phalanx of checking our cruise card, going through metal detectors like the airport, and through immigration for the last time.

And then we surrendered our passports to the ship.

Trivia

We decided to go and two men joined us. One has played with us in the morning before. He is very bright, a nice team player, and an interesting person to boot. Another fellow he knew also joined; so we were 4.

Well we won and by a way long too. The rules were a little different this time: the questions were divided into sets of 5 and there were 25 questions. If you got all 5 of a set correct, you got an additional 5 points. So we got 21 questions correct and made 10 bonus points as we got all the answers to two sets of questions, for a total of 31 points. The next nearest score was 17. We were in high cotton by this time. The prize was a bottle of champagne which none of us wanted so the trivia person said he’d look if new prizes came on board today and he’d make it right. I hope so.

Dinner

Everyone was present and the two other couples had done the nighttime safari in the zoo which is highly touted. They had a good cloudburst while there but weather it through. They didn’t return until 11 pm and no one was up; they all headed straight for bed.

Tonight’s entertainment is a dulcimer player. We are going to pass. Ed is in the position and glued to the TV as usual. I’ve busied myself with tasks that keep things moving in the cabin.

I’ve kind’ve sorta figured it out

You recall my odyssey to find a way to transfer photos from the camera to the Apple products. I had been downloading them to the PC and then putting them on an SD chip which I then inserted into an Apple product. Well it wasn’t working yet I knew it had.

So here’s the deal:

If I take the SD chip immediately out of the camera and import the pics into the devices, it works. So there’s some secret that gets lost when they go onto storage in the PC. So I can’t really see the images as they are too small, and I don’t want to try to edit them, so I’ve decided to import them as is and post as is. Sigh… Best laid plans.