Monsoon is the other season

Usually I am quite a vocal hater of rain. The cold whipping diagonal kind that spurts and gusts and makes the idea of an umbrella laughable. In other words the Pacific Northwest from September to May. All kidding aside, that late fall cold rain with the darkness is really something left coasters like to complain about and why shouldn't we? It's god awful. Singapore actually gets more rainfall than Vancouver (shock and awe I know). Rain here is that tropical gush of water with a few customary claps of thunder. It falls straight down (and at a rate that makes it bounce as high as your face) but then it ends. So yes... it rains here but it's different. Until Monsoon.

Top things we miss

Vancouver, BC

1. Solly's Bagels and cinnamon buns

2 Great coffee shops for cozy winter gatherings with friends (and macbook huddles)

3 As many skating rinks as Starbucks locations

4 Long Summer nights (even though they were cold) those long pink sunsets were amazing

5 The weird and wonderful Commercial Drive and our little organic food haunts along there

6 Main St boutiques with local designers and Vintage clothing stores. Gravity Pope. Nuff said.

Our Bali trip album on flickr

Bali - Sept 2011, a set on Flickr.

I'm getting our pictures up today from the iphone and our camera. What a great weekend!

Mozaic and tales from the back of a scooter

Our first day in Bali we took off down an unpaved 'road' through the rice fields. Joel navigated like a pro handling all the potholes like he was cruising on his mountain bike and sometimes giving me fair warning before diving down a particularly bruising embankment.

Back to Bali

On a whim we booked a couple of tickets to Bali this weekend. Joel hadn't been to Indonesia yet and I couldn't wait to get back to Ubud. We arrived late last night to our guest house which is along the rice patties. A cut through took us right onto Monkey Forest Rd where we spent the evening listening to great live music. The local musicians have quite an astonishing repertoire of alternative rock covers. It sure beats the nauseating Justin Bieber/Celine Dion soundtrack of Singapore. We woke at 9 with the roosters and sat out on our deck overlooking The rice patties. Joel has just secured a scooter and is excitedly planning our day of exploring.

Mooncakes

We decided to go out last night. If you live in Singapore you'll just laugh. Yes, we tried to go out on the last night of Hari Raya Puasa which is also on a National holiday at the beginning of the Chinese Mid Autumn Festival (also known as the Moon Festival and a time people give and receive mooncakes). The plan was, dinner at Vivo and then a cab down to Chinatown to check out all the mooncake vendors.

Once at Vivo we were sucked into throngs of multi-generation Chinese families out shopping for mooncakes right in the middle of the mall. Having seen the line-ups just to get onto the MRT to downtown we decided to ditch the idea of Chinatown and just check out the mooncakes here.

The mall exhibitors were all patisseries from the big luxury hotels. They often had the classic flavours like lotus, egg yolk or red bean but others had adopted some other ideas like chocolate or rum raisin. While the most common cakes had a tough pastry on the outside, some were what they call "snow-skin" mooncakes which are coated with mochi. Through peer pressure we somehow ended up buying an elegant gift box of snow-skin mooncakes from Raffles hotel. This is what we got:

The yellow mooncakes are Champagne Truffle & Chocolate Ganache, the pink ones are Dark Rocher Chocolate, the orange ones Bailey's Chocolate and white ones are Rum and Raisin Chocolate Truffle. Now that's my kind of mooncake selection!

As luck would have it

There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.

—Robert Heinlein

Do I believe in luck? I'm not so sure. I believe in chance and I think we all have chances given to us all the time. We make decisions, we turn down offers for perfectly good or completely the wrong reasons. Sometimes we take risks, sometimes we calculate those risks and other times we just jump.

I met my husband a very long time ago. We were 11. It was chance. As teenagers we had the opportunity to become friends, that was a calculated risk (with diary pages to prove it). When we were 21 we decided to turn that friendship into a romantic relationship which was a moment where we both just jumped. Ten years later we are both really happy about that jump.

When we first moved away from Canada we used to hear some people say "you guys are just lucky" in a dismissive tone that just made me bristle. Why did it bother me so much? Well, it's like saying to me "you don't deserve this, you just sat on your ass and the world was handed to you."

I think sometimes these back-handed comments are jealousy or insecurity. I also think sometimes they just come from ignorance. The romantic idea of moving abroad is pretty abstract to most people. They couldn't imagine just upping suddenly and expatriating. And that certainly would be unimaginable. I don't know any expats who just woke up one morning and left. Most of us planned for a while, some of us many years even planned our jobs and educations around making a move one day. With that kind of planning and focus it's hard not to end up on an adventure.                

Singapore on Ice

So somehow eight months blew by with my skates sitting in the back of my closet. The lining has actually cracked and there was a spot of rust on the blade from the humidity. I finally went to Singapore's only ice rink today with a friend to see what it had to offer. It's small (studio size) with a few rows of bleachers down one side and a music room in the corner. Pretty standard set-up. They don't have hockey here and the figure skaters skate on public ice with a flood every 3-4 hours (tear). Yup, it's like Russia with nicer coaches and 99.9% less vodka. The rink is a little sketchy but I've seen worse in California.

I have to say it felt really good to get out there. I might have overdone it a little because I went home and passed out for hours. We'll just call that a "happy nap" and not a "you are not 19 anymore nap."

Art in Singapore

Most people who just visit Singapore report that it's a sterile place, with more sky-rises than soul, with no independence from simply consuming and regurgitating art and design from other places. There are art galleries but it's true, you don't see alleyways of graffiti or hear independent artists playing music at bars in the evenings. It's hard to find the boutiques with hand made things and independent clothing labels. That said, Singapore's art scene is there, it's underground and it's popping up every now and then if you know where to look.

We went to check out a Flea Market this past Saturday called Pubic Garden. The market was a small collection of tables at a venue known as the Old School.  About half the vendors were girls clearing out their closets (hey at least they supported something good with those knock off handbags) and the other half were independent artists with their handmade goods. The artists represented a little group spanning the underground network of art here in the city and I wanted to show off a few that I thought were quite remarkable. The first was an Illustrator, a young woman who in known as MessyMsxi. Her work was a brilliant narrative about the human experience. The two books I looked at were her view into our world of waste and pollution.

thelittledromstore.tumblr.com

I also found the table for Books Actually. They have an independent book store in Singapore and showcased chapbooks and notebooks with local talent and some interesting typography.

mercurybrief.com

There was also a table with a collaboration of graphic designers and artisans. Check out Session and Pupil People.

So that's the tip of the iceberg. I'm looking forward to checking out some cafes and galleries off the beaten path in the next little while. Art is here in Singapore but you need to look for it and sometimes I think that hidden or underground nature is something we reminisce about it the West. How many times have you seen a sullen hipster complaining that everything is mainstream? How many artists have you known who are constantly in the swamp of post-modernism complaining that it's all been done before? Cheers to emerging.

Hari Raya Puasa and an American BBQ

Last night we went to Joo Chiat to check out an American BBQ restaurant called Smokey's. Smokey's turned out to be a cozy gastro-pub serving up a menu of smoked BBQed meats with classic American sides in portions we haven't seen since we left the US. The food quality was very high, beer list was impressive and they serve California wines too!

Another wonderful thing was the lack of second hand cigarette smoke. I'm not sure if they allow smoking but their patrons certainly weren't going there. If it stays that way we'll be back often!

After dinner we took a stroll through the Hari Raya Puasa night markets. I had no idea this night market was even going on or that it had taken over so many city blocks down at this end of town. You could literally walk for hours and not reach the end! The goods are Malay and Indonesian and are mostly clothing, linens, furniture and festive foods. We found a vendor with Javanese lanterns and bargained our way into purchasing three. Now I need a good electrician so I can turn these into chandeliers.