1. Cameron Line Dancing.

My dad teaches line dancing to senior citizens in church and one Friday, he took us all there. Cameron was shy at first but then he joined in the lessons!  After 10 minutes of dancing, he decided that he knew it all and proceeded to “teach” the ladies how to dance. It was hilarious because all his steps were out of sync! James thought it was kind of “weird” to dance so he preferred to watch!

2. Train Rides

I am so sick of train rides. It seems like every country we go to, we HAVE to take the public transport there. Sometimes, they just want to ride on it with no specific destination in mind. The boys just want to sit in the train, observe the stations and look at the mechanics of the train.

Fortunately, my dad was very patient, he took the boys many times on the different trains - there are like 4 to 5 different types of trains in Malaysia. They have the LRT, which is driverless, the Monorail which services the city, Starline (I don’t know where this leads to), KTM Komuter, which is a diesel line servicing the further cities and the interstate line, the ETS, which is the latest addition to the complicated Malaysian railway system.  It opened its services in June 2010, and it goes about 140 km/h.  James was very excited and wanted to go on it. My father went to check out the prices and it was about RM256 for all of us to Ipoh, a town about 4 hours away from Kuala Lumpur.  In the end, because it was so expensive, instead, Jo-Ann, my sister decided to surprise the  boys with a trip on the KLIA Express, the Airport Train. They were over the moon about it!

Here are some photos of the various trains from Singapore to Malaysia (I already had a separate post about the ones in Australia)

KLIA Express (the airport train)

With Aunty Jo-Ann

The Singapore Sentosa Monorail

Inside the Monorail.

The Sengkang LRT.

I haven’t even uploaded some of the other trains yet! That is a lot of trains!

3. Our Trip To Singapore.

This was a difficult trip for me.  It was so good to be back, and of all the places I visited during this trip, I felt that Singapore was “home”.   However, because we had nowhere to stay, and had to put up in a hotel, it felt weird, like we were home, but did not have a home in that place anymore.  I met up with old friends, caught up with our previous maid who I miss dearly. However because we had such a short time, I could only settle for quick snippets of time with people - another difficult thing for me to handle as I wanted to see more of them.

We caught up with some of my good friends, Christina (whose oldest, Lauren was off to a Starcruise trip for 4 days to shoot a TV advertisement for them and while she was away, ANZ Bank picked her up for another TV commercial. Her girls are just gorgeous!) Martha, Jenny, Cara, Sarmi and Sapiyah.

No trip to Singapore would be complete without a playdate by the pool!

It was great to see how my friends’ children had grown so much! Especially little Brandon, Martha’s youngest, he was such a cute little toddler. Also it was so sweet to see how James and Cameron bonded with Josh after such a long absence. All the girls in the photo above are Christina’s daughters. She is expecting her fifth child, a boy, which is a precious gift for her and hubby!

This has got to be my favourite picture of all. Christina took all the photos, aren’t they lovely?

Catching up with Jenny and Andrew at the American Club.  Cameron was not very interested in building a friendship with Alex, their son, the last time but this time, he was playing so well with him.  Jenny and I were so happy to see that.

We got to see Sarmi very briefly.  Sarmi lived with us for 3 years as our nanny and she and the boys share a closeness. We were very sad that we could not see her more because of our tight time frame. This picture was taken at our hotel room, which was cramped but in the ad, it was a “deluxe room”.

We were also privileged to break a Ramadan fast with our old neighbours. The boys were very close with their youngest, and it was so nice to be able to chat like old times. Oh Sapiyah! I miss your family so much!

The typical Singapore “suburbia” - full of HDB buildings, housing hundreds of thousands of people.

The boys at the Esplanade during one of our very long trips using the new Circle Line.

The boys love Phua Chu Kang, and so do I. He is one of Singapore’s most well known icons.

4. Korean Dramas

My mother is a big fan of Korean drama and during our stay, we ALL got hooked on some of the series, including the boys. It was so funny to see James requesting to watch, “Happiness In The Wind,” and Cameron asking for his favourite, “Bread, Love and Dreams.”  Now that I am back, I am considering getting Korean TV by cable or satellite.

5. My Family

It was a little different this time around.  My youngest sister Janice has moved to Singapore to work and we only got to see her for 2 days.  We also saw her in Singapore but she was working for the most part.

Cameron likes to pull faces. It is a phase that he is going through right now, to be the clown of photos.

One morning when my Dad was doing a quiet time with the boys. C was upset because he wanted to play. Notice how James is wearing the same shirt as Cameron in the above photo? I had underpacked that they did not have enough clothes so I was letting them wear each other’s clothes.

Cameron and James were very taken by my cousin, Li Ling.  They both do not have cousins so the idea of having a “cousin” was cool.  Li Ling came over 3 days and even took days off work so she could play with the boys. That is my Aunty Choon Yong in the photo.  Here, you can see that I have really run out of clothing options for Cameron because he is in his boxers.  Since we were at home, I told him to treat them like regular shorts.

My other sister, Jo had bought a house and was thick in the process of renovating it.  Renovating a house in Malaysia is very stressful.  The contractors make errors and you as a customer sometimes must foot the bill. Not only that, customer service is non existent there and there were times where a project was delayed and another service provider would get nasty to my sister about the delay. Hello, do you want us as customers or not? My Dad was undertaking a lot of the supervision for her as she was at work most of the time.  Cannot wait to see how her place turns out at the end of it all. It has been a long process for her.

It was a very relaxing time spent with my folks.  My parents are not going to recognise the silence in the house after the boys leave.  They complained that whenever the boys talked, it sounded like a Singaporean food court! Miss you all!!!

]]> http://lifeonplanetmum.com/?feed=rss2&p=2800 http://lifeonplanetmum.com/?p=2775 http://lifeonplanetmum.com/?p=2775#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 14:21:32 +0000 grub http://lifeonplanetmum.com/?p=2775 I am now in Singapore, at my friend’s, Cara’s home. The boys are asleep in the room and the reason for me not writing for so long is how surprised I am at how painful it is to be back in Singapore.  It has been hard for me to articulate the regret I feel.  I have left Malaysia for the longest time, since I was 17 and have always considered Malaysia as home.  However, I love Singapore so much and coming back for the last 4 to 5 days has been bittersweet.  I am here on a very tight time frame and staying at a cheap hotel (still not cheap) but not having a home to return to has been hard. Seeing friends like my helper Sarmi for an hour and snatches of conversations with my younger sister, Janice - not being able to be with her and all the people I have missed, has hurt. I miss them, I miss Singapore, I wish I could live here for always.  I am very grateful to be back and grateful for the short visits. I know it is going to be tough once I get back to the USA.

Thanks again to Facebook, I met up with my primary school friends, and some of them I have not seen for 23 years! My goodness! I was so happy to see them all again. We arranged to meet at the Coffee Bean. Out of the group, with the exception of Ivy and myself, every single one of them is a high powered working woman. Most of them had 4 children.  One is a”Datin”(titled person, like a “Lady”"- Lady Diana, for example) as she married “Datuk”(Lord).  She works for the government on international assignments, she travels all over the world to exotic locations like Iran.

Azni was the Head Girl in Form 5. She sat with me when we were both in Form 3 and I think I terrorized her with my antics. I was quite fearful meeting her again since not seeing her in 1987 but it was so good to see her again. She is now a Company Secretary.

Siti Sarlina is an Aeronautical Engineer, graduated in NY, USA and is now a General Manager of a multi million dollar construction company in Malaysia. She has four children!! How do these ladies do it!? Ivy is a full time mother of an 11 year old girl.

These women are movers are shakers in their own industries. It was so nice to see them all after so long and I feel a sense of marvel and wonder how far they have come.  Many Muslim women are perceived by the world to be trodden upon or very subservient in their roles but my friends from their very humble backgrounds have such important roles. 

 Sulina (the little one in black on the extreme right) was the smartest girl in our year. Every year, she would be No 1, as they would tally up all the marks for the exam papers and rank us all from 1 to 200 over. It was a dreadful time for me as I would always end up somewhere near the bottom of my class. I was in the A class until Form 4 when I had to go to the B class. It was a terrible time for me as I was separated from my good friends. I met Ivy in this B class. She came from a different school and was “parked”there, although she was smart enough to be in the A class.  Sulina now runs her own architectural business from home. Her parents are both artists, her mother taught in our school. I remember her paintings, they were a class above everyone else’s.  Not only was she artistic, she was brainy as well.

We filled the Coffee Bean place with so much laughter while remembering embarrassing moments and laughed at memories of teachers. It was a special gathering,  short but very much cherished. See you all again someday, my friends, hopefully it does not take us another 23 years before meeting again!

The weather was a lot colder than I expected but I had packed too little for the boys and myself,

I found myself wearing the same clothes for a week! Yikes, I wonder if I was a bit of a pong! 

Matt’s parents took the time to take them to the toy library which is such a great idea, it kept them both occupied with several board games, Mecanno toys, puzzles and scooters. I had my “fix” with a local craft market along a main street. Matt’s parents live in Mornington, a beach town about 1.5 hours away from Melbourne. It is a beautiful area. The houses are all so beautiful and modern, and I wish that Maryland could have homes like that!

The best thing was observing the interaction amongst the kids and the grandparents. Matt’s brother, David visited and both my boys were kind of starry eyed with hero worship for him, especially James. It was really important and great that the boys bonded so well with Matt’s family and it is times like this that I start questionning if it is worth staying so far away.

For me, the highlight of the trip was seeing my very good friends. I had not seen one of them for over 10 years and we were recently reconnected via Facebook.  Linda organised high tea up in the Dandenong Mountains, in a German restaurant called The Cuckoo.  Our children were there but as we only had 2 hours to catch up, it was over all too quickly. I was unsatisfied, you know, a bit like having a piece of chocolate but really wanting to eat the whole thing. I could not really catch up in depth with anyone too specifically and that was my only regret. 

The lovely ladies, Adeline, Elaine, me, Maria and Linda.

Our gorgeous husbands, doing the Aussie footy pose!

Our precious kids.

We managed to squeeze in one trip by train to Melbourne City. We sat on a tram too.

Off the train and onto the tram next!

We also spent some time with my brother. He took us to the boys’ very first yum char in one of Melbourne’s finest Chinese restaurants.  While we were staying with my brother, the boys unexpectedly became hooked on a very old British comedy, “Mind Your Language.” They watched about two seasons of it and continued watching it in Malaysia, where my sister Jo-Ann, has it on DVD too!

I also did catch up with another family but forgot to take their pictures, can you believe that? It was great to see them - I miss Australia so much and wish we could have stayed another few more days. Hopefully, we will get to stay a bit longer next time. On to Malaysia - will be writing about my stay there next, there is not much to report, we have been home the whole week, down with food poisoning! No trip to Asia is complete without an episode of purging! (Sad but true!)

However, it has been so great, seeing Matt’s parents, the boys had not seen them for about almost four years.  When Matt’s dad came to pick us up at the bus stop, Cameron kept whispering to me, if that was really “Pop, from the computer,” as we Skype sometimes.  They been down to the toy library already and borrowed toys to keep themselves amused.  It has been pretty low key in terms of activities because it is a short trip and been too cold to do anything outdoors.

One of the things that we caught on was watching “Masterchef.” What a great program that is! I wish we had something like that in the USA.  There is a very down to earth feeling about the contestants and judges, which makes it “real” and it has been the most watched program locally.  I heard that the elections had to be moved a week later because most people would be staying home to watch the finale of Masterchef!

Of course, no trip would be complete without train rides. The boys wanted to sit on the train and tram, so yesterday, all of us, without the grandparents, took a train from Frankston to the city.  From there, we caught a tram to Victorian Market. Over there, we ate at the food court, and we were reminded how wonderful food is in Australia.  Even though DC is a melting pot of cutures, the food cannot be compared to the freshness and diversity that we get in Australia.  Totally amazing. I was thinking all the time that I should take a picture of the food we were eating but I just couldn’t stop eating and the food was finished before I could even think of bringing out my camera

I did not take many good photos because it is so dark and dreary and wet! Still, more photos to come when I get a chance to upload them somewhere.

I love Australia and it is so good to be back, even for a short while.

Pray that the house will be safe… am excited to catch up with my family in Australia, it has been about 4 years since the boys met their grandparents! Can’t wait to see my brother too!

It only lasted for a few seconds and we went back to bed, mildly scared and anxious. This morning, someone called me to collect boxes that I am donating away and she said she was up, “since the earthquake.” I was like, “WHAT?” I never knew Maryland was on a fault line and it seemed like the epicentre of the earthquake was about 2 miles away from us.

This is Matt’s fourth earthquake experience and my first. I can’t say that I want to experience it again!

As I unpacked, I realised that I have a lot of things which I do not use anymore and will have to start getting brutal. I have been putting things aside to donate, the kids’ toys and books…we are just running out of space. Next, I will start donating my fabrics to charity. But what I might do is start having giveaway fabrics on my craft blog, just to increase readership.

This is very short because I have to unpack and go back to the previous home to clean it before returning the keys to the landlord.

We go on holidays Sunday and I am so looking forward to seeing everyone I missed.

Aside from that, our current place is almost ready to go. I have been packing over the last 2 months, slowly and with no type of plan or thought.  I hope everything gets there without being broken! We kept all our boxes from our move from Singapore and it was a good thing because here, you have to buy boxes at US$3-5 each.

Here is what our house looks like now:

The kitchen.  See how much it needs an updating?

The living room.

The basement. Well, the basement has always looked like that because I never really unpacked from Singapore as we knew we’d be out of here by the end of the lease.

Our landlady has been here almost everyday and yesterday she said she was bringing over a man to get a quote on the carpet to replace it. In the middle of everything!!! Matt was so furious, he wrote to her a very rude letter to ask her for space so we could get our packing finalized instead of workmen running around. She is panicking because she leaves for a vacation on the 12th July and wanted someone in by the end of the month.

We move tomorrow and our internet will be down for 5 days - sometimes I wish that America had the efficiency of Singapore.  I will not be blogging for a week.

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