the eagle has landed
so we made it!
shehz and i arrived safely in singapore as of two nights ago. i think primarily this post will focus on some pictures we've taken so far and generally what we've been up to since we arrived.
the plane trip seemed to take forever, for sure. we had a five hour flight from toronto to LA to start things off. they served us waffles made of human remains. they showed us "les choristes" as a film, which i actually really wanted to see, but both shehz and i made it about half way through the film before we lost conciousness.
so that was it for LA. after we got there, we had to switch terminals around a bit to head over to the tom bradley international terminal where our singapore airlines flight would leave from. that took a bit of a nice walk outside, which was pleasant (especially in california)! nice to get our legs stretched. so at that point, we found our terminal/gate and waited for our next flight to tokyo to begin!
this one was a monster. spent about 8 hours of flying time going over the entire damn pacific ocean. however, there were two upsides. one: the stewardesses have the sweetest outfits you could possibly imagine! they're what i would call "traditional", although i'm sure they're far from it, given what stewardesses on air canada wear. two: they had the most obscene in flight entertainment system you could possibly imagine. i spent the better part of the first hour on the flight playing "in flight trivia" against some guy in seat 48C. i whooped his ass! but it was funny, because we were the only two people playing, and eventually we realized where the other was seated, so we'd start doing little victory dances whenever we got certain questions right. the even better news was that we actually had a tie one round, but the stupid computer gave ME the win. YES!
followed up the crazy trivia game with a little bit of poker. it was a pretty terrible poker game, though, because it consisted of some weirdo five card draw thing and you had to just sit there and try to bet to make the best possible hand. i ended up playing for too long and won too much money, and then the meal came but i wasn't willing to quit before losing all of my money again. i got through it eventually, however, and decided never to play that again.
then was super mario bros 1. what a great time. played for about 5 minutes before the stupid remote control thing became so painful i had to stop. on to movies.
they were showing about 30 on the flight, one on each channel. you had to kinda come within about 10 minutes of the movie starting, or it wouldn't let you rewind anymore. but you COULD rewind! pause, fast forward. it's all there. they do it up right in singapore. i watched uhmmm, the wedding date and coach carter. shehz managed to get through 3/4 of four movies: hotel rwanda, melinda and melinda, thirteen going on thirty, and xxx. the one with vin diesel, not the kind you watch at the hotel.
anyways, the food was pretty decent, and they sure love feeding you orange juice on the flight. i had a grand total of about 7 orange juices before hitting tokyo. anyways, we had about a 2 hour stopover in tokyo before the last flight to singapore.
last flight now. good old naive ian was under the impression that this flight would be 2-3 hours. try 7, asshole. now it was ian's turn to watch parts of movies. got through about 30 minutes of finding neverland before i went into "russian pilot in the centerfuge" mode. drooled all over my pillow. shehz was approximating the same behaviour. for some strange reason, this flight didn't seem to last as long. in retrospect, i'm not exactly sure how i passed the time, because i didn't really do much of anything. i guess i just tried to sleep.
so then we finally arrived in singapore at 1am! shehz's first cousin once removed (i'm serious) Abid and his gramma Nargis (dad's mom) came to pick us up at the airport. it was great timing, so we got right into their car and headed off to shehz's gramma's place. it's an incredible apartment in the heart of singapore. i believe i have a picture of the interior here. hopefully it'll go... here.
well, that should work later seeing as it sure isn't now.
anyways, Nargis-auntie (that's what i call her, supposedly) had a room prepared for us at about minus 20 degrees centigrade because it was about 30 degrees C when we landed (and it was 1am!). we had a nice sleep that night and had a big day planned for the next (which was yesterday, at this point).
off we went around singapore with Nargis -- to visit takashimaya shopping centre. some crazy-big japanese shopping place. kinda funny, especially because of my experiences at narita airport in tokyo (forgot to tell you that). i tried to go pee in tokyo. that was my first mistake. of course, the washroom is one of those crazy hole-in-the-ground types (arthur probably has a picture), and i was ultimately confused by it. i didn't quite know how to pee into it, so... well... needless to say i managed something after a while. i think you're SUPPOSED to crouch over it. my apologies if i'm wrong on that one. so then i tried to wash my hands. second mistake. i hit a button that i thought was for water. spewed shaving cream-ish soap stuff all over the place. oops! tried to look cool and continued to wash my hands, then left as quickly as possible. shehz and i managed to get one japanese person to say "HAI!!!" too, so we were happy about that.
anyways, back to the shopping centre. seems everybody here in singapore is obsessed with the movie "madagascar". they have big animated things everywhere, and the mall had this live stage show going while we were there. anyways, we scored some water and then waited to meet up with shehz's second-cousin Farha. she met up with us at the mall and started taking us around. first order of business was food, so we went to the food court and shehz and i indulged in some laksa. apparently, it's a soupy mixture of fish paste, noodles, shrimp... fish... cakes, or something, and... tofu. shehz had to help me out there. so we ate that. it was spicy (big surprise), but fairly tasty. we also chowed down on an oyster omelette, which was a little bit too fear-factor inducing for me.
it was now time to wander downtown a bit with Farha. she showed us around orchard ave (the yonge st of singapore) where they have lots of shopping centres. we decided shehz and i should partake in the "duck tour", which is a big amphibious city tour in a decommissioned military vehicle from the vietnam war era. a bit scary, but my feelings were negated by the giant duck paint job on the side. no worries. most of the pictures i've taken so far are from that little excursion.
anyhoo, shehz and i had dinner that night at newton circus with Farha again. it consisted of stingray, crawfish (huge!), sate (i made up that spelling, but it's chicken and mutton kebabs dipped in peanut sauce), rice dumplings, more rice of the non-dumpling variety, chicken wings, sugar cane juice... i feel like i'm forgetting something. oh yeah, some business i forget the name of that is stringy, spicy, green-beenish/spinachy stuff. it was actually really good!
after dinner, we all felt like vomiting seeing as we ate enough food to feed... a giant duck. the walk home was slow and painful, but shehz and i headed back to Farha's place where we proceeded to play dead or alive volleyball. with her parents. have you ever played this game? trust me, it was quite the experience watching her MOM play poker in the dead or alive casino using cards with half-naked women on them. yikes. so the whole family sat around and played xbox. we started out with $300,000 (in the game), and managed to lose it all. i was profitable at blackjack, getting us up above 1.4 million for a while. then we let shehz work the slots. big mistake. he managed to toss away the family mortgage. oops.
so that was last night! brings us to today. shehz and i are headed to sentosa island. kind of like an amusement park, kind of not. more like the zoo/aquarium/cable car kinda deal. should be pretty entertaining! i hope i can get these pictures posted for you. anyways, we'll probably send you another update tonight to let you know how the day went.
bye bye for now,
> eeeboo and shehzzy-pants
shehz and i arrived safely in singapore as of two nights ago. i think primarily this post will focus on some pictures we've taken so far and generally what we've been up to since we arrived.
the plane trip seemed to take forever, for sure. we had a five hour flight from toronto to LA to start things off. they served us waffles made of human remains. they showed us "les choristes" as a film, which i actually really wanted to see, but both shehz and i made it about half way through the film before we lost conciousness.
so that was it for LA. after we got there, we had to switch terminals around a bit to head over to the tom bradley international terminal where our singapore airlines flight would leave from. that took a bit of a nice walk outside, which was pleasant (especially in california)! nice to get our legs stretched. so at that point, we found our terminal/gate and waited for our next flight to tokyo to begin!
this one was a monster. spent about 8 hours of flying time going over the entire damn pacific ocean. however, there were two upsides. one: the stewardesses have the sweetest outfits you could possibly imagine! they're what i would call "traditional", although i'm sure they're far from it, given what stewardesses on air canada wear. two: they had the most obscene in flight entertainment system you could possibly imagine. i spent the better part of the first hour on the flight playing "in flight trivia" against some guy in seat 48C. i whooped his ass! but it was funny, because we were the only two people playing, and eventually we realized where the other was seated, so we'd start doing little victory dances whenever we got certain questions right. the even better news was that we actually had a tie one round, but the stupid computer gave ME the win. YES!
followed up the crazy trivia game with a little bit of poker. it was a pretty terrible poker game, though, because it consisted of some weirdo five card draw thing and you had to just sit there and try to bet to make the best possible hand. i ended up playing for too long and won too much money, and then the meal came but i wasn't willing to quit before losing all of my money again. i got through it eventually, however, and decided never to play that again.
then was super mario bros 1. what a great time. played for about 5 minutes before the stupid remote control thing became so painful i had to stop. on to movies.
they were showing about 30 on the flight, one on each channel. you had to kinda come within about 10 minutes of the movie starting, or it wouldn't let you rewind anymore. but you COULD rewind! pause, fast forward. it's all there. they do it up right in singapore. i watched uhmmm, the wedding date and coach carter. shehz managed to get through 3/4 of four movies: hotel rwanda, melinda and melinda, thirteen going on thirty, and xxx. the one with vin diesel, not the kind you watch at the hotel.
anyways, the food was pretty decent, and they sure love feeding you orange juice on the flight. i had a grand total of about 7 orange juices before hitting tokyo. anyways, we had about a 2 hour stopover in tokyo before the last flight to singapore.
last flight now. good old naive ian was under the impression that this flight would be 2-3 hours. try 7, asshole. now it was ian's turn to watch parts of movies. got through about 30 minutes of finding neverland before i went into "russian pilot in the centerfuge" mode. drooled all over my pillow. shehz was approximating the same behaviour. for some strange reason, this flight didn't seem to last as long. in retrospect, i'm not exactly sure how i passed the time, because i didn't really do much of anything. i guess i just tried to sleep.
so then we finally arrived in singapore at 1am! shehz's first cousin once removed (i'm serious) Abid and his gramma Nargis (dad's mom) came to pick us up at the airport. it was great timing, so we got right into their car and headed off to shehz's gramma's place. it's an incredible apartment in the heart of singapore. i believe i have a picture of the interior here. hopefully it'll go... here.
well, that should work later seeing as it sure isn't now.
anyways, Nargis-auntie (that's what i call her, supposedly) had a room prepared for us at about minus 20 degrees centigrade because it was about 30 degrees C when we landed (and it was 1am!). we had a nice sleep that night and had a big day planned for the next (which was yesterday, at this point).
off we went around singapore with Nargis -- to visit takashimaya shopping centre. some crazy-big japanese shopping place. kinda funny, especially because of my experiences at narita airport in tokyo (forgot to tell you that). i tried to go pee in tokyo. that was my first mistake. of course, the washroom is one of those crazy hole-in-the-ground types (arthur probably has a picture), and i was ultimately confused by it. i didn't quite know how to pee into it, so... well... needless to say i managed something after a while. i think you're SUPPOSED to crouch over it. my apologies if i'm wrong on that one. so then i tried to wash my hands. second mistake. i hit a button that i thought was for water. spewed shaving cream-ish soap stuff all over the place. oops! tried to look cool and continued to wash my hands, then left as quickly as possible. shehz and i managed to get one japanese person to say "HAI!!!" too, so we were happy about that.
anyways, back to the shopping centre. seems everybody here in singapore is obsessed with the movie "madagascar". they have big animated things everywhere, and the mall had this live stage show going while we were there. anyways, we scored some water and then waited to meet up with shehz's second-cousin Farha. she met up with us at the mall and started taking us around. first order of business was food, so we went to the food court and shehz and i indulged in some laksa. apparently, it's a soupy mixture of fish paste, noodles, shrimp... fish... cakes, or something, and... tofu. shehz had to help me out there. so we ate that. it was spicy (big surprise), but fairly tasty. we also chowed down on an oyster omelette, which was a little bit too fear-factor inducing for me.
it was now time to wander downtown a bit with Farha. she showed us around orchard ave (the yonge st of singapore) where they have lots of shopping centres. we decided shehz and i should partake in the "duck tour", which is a big amphibious city tour in a decommissioned military vehicle from the vietnam war era. a bit scary, but my feelings were negated by the giant duck paint job on the side. no worries. most of the pictures i've taken so far are from that little excursion.
anyhoo, shehz and i had dinner that night at newton circus with Farha again. it consisted of stingray, crawfish (huge!), sate (i made up that spelling, but it's chicken and mutton kebabs dipped in peanut sauce), rice dumplings, more rice of the non-dumpling variety, chicken wings, sugar cane juice... i feel like i'm forgetting something. oh yeah, some business i forget the name of that is stringy, spicy, green-beenish/spinachy stuff. it was actually really good!
after dinner, we all felt like vomiting seeing as we ate enough food to feed... a giant duck. the walk home was slow and painful, but shehz and i headed back to Farha's place where we proceeded to play dead or alive volleyball. with her parents. have you ever played this game? trust me, it was quite the experience watching her MOM play poker in the dead or alive casino using cards with half-naked women on them. yikes. so the whole family sat around and played xbox. we started out with $300,000 (in the game), and managed to lose it all. i was profitable at blackjack, getting us up above 1.4 million for a while. then we let shehz work the slots. big mistake. he managed to toss away the family mortgage. oops.
so that was last night! brings us to today. shehz and i are headed to sentosa island. kind of like an amusement park, kind of not. more like the zoo/aquarium/cable car kinda deal. should be pretty entertaining! i hope i can get these pictures posted for you. anyways, we'll probably send you another update tonight to let you know how the day went.
bye bye for now,
> eeeboo and shehzzy-pants
posted by ian at 9:14 PM
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