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03-22-2000 Back to all Archives Back to 2000: January - March Archives Back to Current Entry list |
I was wide awake at 3am today. Yesterday it was 5am. The day before, 5am. The day before that, 6am. No matter how late I force my poor exhausted brain to stay awake, it doesn't matter. I am waking up earlier and earlier. Granted, the view outside my hotel window is spectacular with all the city lights. But at three in the morning I'm not necessarily thrilled to see it. I can see this spectacular view in the evening. That early in the morning I'd much rather be sleeping. I suppose on the one hand this might not be so bad. After all, when I fly home on Saturday, I won't have quite as bad a time with jet lag because hey, I'm already adjusting backwards while still here in Singapore. On the other hand, I'm not getting to bed any earlier, so I'm not so sure that this little tactic is going to work. I found a Starbucks this morning. Somehow it seems a bit odd to be drinking coffee when the temperature is so warm, but it was just something familiar again. Since it was a different route than I normally take to the meetings, I got lost. Oh, it wasn't a major thing - I just ended up backtracking back to the hotel. But on the way I found cats. Yay! Cats in Singapore! They were strays, of course, but not the common housecat that you would think about as a stray in the states. These were delicate, thin-featured felines with fawn coats and ticked fur. I think perhaps there was Abysinnian in their parentage at some point. Anyway. I had to stop and take a picture. I'm so pathetic. Finding live cats just made my day. They were curious, and as normal cats do, did not want to pose for me or be any friendlier than a hesitant sniff of my fingers from the safety of beneath a bench, whiskers quivering. I'm sure that I made at least a few of the locals laugh, crouching down between empty tables to take a picture of cats. This evening we had a group dinner in a Chinese restaurant next to the world's largest fountain. I think it's the world's largest.....there was a sign saying something like that. It's rather impressive. This huge metal tripod with a fountain in the middle. Every once in a while the water does spectacular leaps and sprays into the air, and apparently in the evening there are laser light shows with accompanying music. All in the middle of a shopping mall. I can now add abalone and crawfish to the list of things I've had the opportunity to try while in Singapore. Oh yes, and boiled peanuts (which, in my opinion, is rather low on the list of things I would recommend doing to a peanut. But eating them with chopsticks was amusing). They served us another version of shark fin soup than what we had Sunday night. It was a very odd consistency. And it made me grin. See, when I was in college and high school, I was in synchronized swimming (Trust me, there *is* a correlation here.). In synchro, when you do routines, you have to put your hair up - usually in a bun on top of your head - and you need to make it stay. Normal gel and hairspray won't do the trick because when in the water, it all just eventually washes off. Bobby pins also just don't hold it all in. So we would use unflavored Knox gelatin. We'd heat it up, extra-thick, and then glop the stuff onto our hair to create a spiffy little gelatin-based 'helmet'. It sounds icky, but it's quite effective (although washing that all out again was always a challenge). So I giggled quietly into my soup and tried to ignore the fact that it was the same consistency as stuff I used to glop onto my head years ago to hold my hair in place. Same color and everything. |