transposable element

awesome. dazzling. breathtaking. spectacular. all superlatives aren’t enough to describe the visual extravaganza during the opening ceremonies of the youth olympic games, and i’m only talking of images that we’ve seen over tv. i can only imagine how exhilarating it must have been on site.

it’s a pity that jan missed it as he was on a sleepover, but maybe we can still snatch tickets to some of the events. being the first ever youth olympia, and being staged right here on our backyard, it would be a pity not to take the opportunity to see any of it live. pity that taekwondo is almost over now; he’d have been interested in that. hm, we’ll see…

drought is over; rainy season has arrived. and that means: flood time, and yes, in singapore, too! we were not here when orchard road got submerged in knee deep water in flashfloods that were repeated in other parts of the city just a few days later. since we got back from our holidays, the weather has been rather cool, and the last few days, rainy. yesterday was particularly heavy in our area, and the amount of rainfall appeared too much for the drainage systems to handle.

fortunately, floods here subside rather quickly, once the rains stop, and the gov’t agencies are quick regarding damage control and repairs. i heard orchard road was restored in just one day!

and while we live just next to a river that drains to a water reservoir, i’m not that worried of rising water levels. call it the perk of high-rise living. if we owned a landed or a flat on the first levels, we should probably get a homeowners insurance. but then again, does insurance cover “acts of god”?

it been raining for hours now… i wonder if it will be flooded again….

sheesh. where did the month of may go? one lone entry for the entire month? i think this must have been my lowest batting (blogging) score.

the blogger’s paradox has hit me big time. and it’s a shame because this is one month where so many things have happened and i’ve captured none of them for posterity. yowza.

there was mia’s birthday, which she co-celebrated with 2 of her other girl friends since birth. it was a great get-together of the families we’ve gotten to know because of mia. i baked her birthday cake myself– a three-tier tower or princess lillifee mini cupcakes. thank you for the help, dr oetker.

there was our saturday at the national museum where where we caught ‘monkey-see, monkey-do’ as part of the children season. jan and mia still re-enact some of the spiels to this day…

oh there was the evening where i screamed in shock as jan shaved half of his eyebrows while he was in the shower. my beautiful son! now he looks like yoda’s human half-brother.

there was the day we received jan’s semestral report card. glowing accolades from his form teacher, marks for english and maths that were high enough to put him on “band 1″, or the first tier of students. he flunked his mandarin, though.

oh there was that saturday afternoon when i thought my heart would be permanently lodged in my throat as i navigated the tree top trails at forest adventure, zipping across land and water, with my life totally dependent on two hooks on steel cables. i should have browsed for insurance online. it was fun, yes, but once is enough, thank you very much.

and birthday party after birthday party for the last weekend of may.

i’m sure i missed a lot of little things– shuttling jan to guitar and tae kwon do lessons, mia’s pajama party at the preschool, our new dslr toy, my foiled attempts at job search, my shrek date with jan… and the hundreds of photos that are yet to be downloaded, ack!

it’s been a merry month of may, indeed!

after months of unusually hot and dry weather (nov-jan is usually the wet season here), we are now being drenched with rain for the last couple of weeks. it now rains almost everyday. initially it was a welcome reprieve from the drought, but lately, it’s becoming as much of a nuisance as the burning weather we previously had.

“if only it wouldn’t be so hot…” is now replaced by “drats, it’s raining again!” but either way, it limits the kind of activities you could do outdoors. true, we have perpetually warm weather all year round. but it’s not like the kind of summers we enjoyed in germsland– picnics, ice cream, walks in the fields, breakfasts in the garden, bring-the-outdoor furniture-out type of weather.

hay. sala sa init, sala sa lamig.

when parts of metro manila went under flood water last month, it was difficult to explain to folks here why this was an abnormal phenomenon. “but typhoons always hit the philippines! isn’t flooding a normal thing over there?”

how can one explain that ondoy was extraordinary, dumping more water in a couple of hours than the already saturated soils of manila can possibly hold?

and a few days ago, it happened right here, too. flashfloods after a few hours of unabated rains.

this road shown here is lined with condominiums on one side, some of which have underground parking lots so you can imagine what happened to the cars when the waters rushed in. i’m sure car repair shops are now inundated with auto insurance quotes.

and this, in singapore. can hardly believe it.

even before halloween, the stores here in singapore, especially in the shopping districts, have already been decked in christmas decorations. malls have been handing out flyers of their christmas programs and promotions and the papers are already replete of gift ideas and offers of jewelry, designer fashion, techie toys, digital cameras, toys, and all sorts of bric-a-bracs!

i don’t know about you, but i think it’s too soon, though. i know that christmas is coming, and that one has to start early to avoid the rush, but… this early? i don’t know, but for me, there’s just something missing…

hm, i think i actually enjoy the christmas rush after all. the throng of people in the shops, the sparkly shopping bags, the frantic search for that one special gift, the piped in christmas carols, the mad cacophony in the toy stores… that’s what christmas shopping is all about!

Futsal is a variant of association football that is mainly played indoors. Its name is derived from the Portuguese futebol de salão and the Spanish fútbol sala/de salón, which can be translated as ’salon football’. In Madrid 1985 the name fútbol de saló and all other names the game was called were changed officially and internationally into FUTSAL.

that was the theme of jan’s 7th birthday party. technically, it was not futsal, just indoor football, having played on grass turf (artificial, i think, not unlike some of those bushy car mats) using a normal soccer ball. we booked an indoor soccer pitch at turf city, and it was just as well because it was rainy that day and the outdoor fields would have been muddy. and if it hadn’t been raining, it could have been scorching hot even at 4pm. we also booked a coach (and we were given two) from the little league to facilitate the warm up drills for the kids and referee a friendly match. i think the coaches did a fabulous job, introducing soccer basics to kids who were mostly beginners at the game. i wouldn’t be surprised if jan asks to enroll in soccer training soon (ka-ching!).

after almost two hours in the pitch, it was obvious that the kids had a whopping good time. they came out of the pitch sweaty, tired and hungry. we ordered a halal (at least one of jan’ buddies doesn’t eat pork) high tea mini buffet from delihub and a soccer-themed birthday cake from smiling orchid, which looked fantastic and tasted great, as always. in addition tothe ice tea we ordered, the pitch also provided ice-cold mineral water bottles and 100plus (a kind of isotonic drink for athletes) as part of the package, so we no longer had to cart most of the drinks to the venue; just added a couple of bottle of sodas and that was it.

it was a good thing that we were given the seating area at the back of the office. it was directly overlooking the pitch were the kids played so it was easy for parents to keep an eye on the game without having to appear like cheerleaders, hehe. the guests also naturally overflowed to the open veranda for extra seating and elbow room, especially after the game when the kids joined the parents to jostle for food at the buffet. after a “tea break”, the boys retreated from the buffet, chose the table farthest from the parents, and played a game of trump cards (or at least that was what they were called during my time) while the girls entertained themselves with song and dance. it was a good wind down after an energy-sapping toggle with the soccer ball.

it was really a great party, if i may say so myself. it didn’t take much to organize but jan really enjoyed it. most of the planning and booking were done online and a couple of trips for the party supplies (invitations, birthday candles, serviettes, etc). the lootbags were probably the one that took most effort, small toys having been bought all the way from manila! they couldn’t fit in a regular lootbag, so i just bought clear plastic lootbags and printed a thank you note using some soccer clipart. c’mon, you think kids this age pay any attention at all to the wrapping? all together, i think it took us just about a week to organize everything, though if i had the time, it probably could have been even better– more theme-related lootbag fillers, balloons, additional games, prizes. photos(!)– but honestly, in hindsight, i’m not sure jan would have really cared.

jan had a fabulous time, spending his birthday with his pals. as far as he’s concerned, it was a score! goooooaaaalllll!!!!

last weekend we had the opportunity to see the da vinci exhibition at the science centre. yes, the science centre, not at an art museum.

the exhibition focused on da vinci’s life as a scientist and engineer, and the works of pascal cotte who made high-resolution photographs of his paintings. cotte’s studies of the mona lisa in particular, revealed the true pigments da vinci used and other details such as her eyebrows and lashes (she did have some!). da vinci’s machine inventions were amazing, considering the industrial supplies available to him at the time. his anatomical drawings looked like they were taken straight out of some medical textbook. and though i knew that he could write backwards, i didn’t realize that he wrote all his notes this way!

it was a small exhibit, wouldn’t have taken a couple of hours (especially if you do not have antsy kids with you who’d rather go to the water playground within the centre), but one which left me in awe of da vinci. he’s well known as an art maestro, but he’s more, so much more than that.

if you’ve read the da vinci code, and would like to read another fiction of such genre featuring da vinci and his work, i can recommend Painting Mona Lisa and The Secret Supper: A Novel.

a few days before we were set to fly to thailand for a week’s holiday, i was so close to canceling the trip. not only is thailand included in the list of countries with community spread of swine flu, it was also jan’s last week of school holidays, so if he does fall sick, he would have to miss the first few days of classes, which i consider very important in setting students off to a good start. i was chastising myself for not having considered these before i made the bookings, but then, at the time, there wasn’t a single case of swine flu in southeast asia. how was i supposed to know it will spread like fire, and from zero, the number of cases here in singapore has ballooned to about 700 in a span of just a month!

and although we were armed with hand sanitizers and N95 face masks, i felt so heavy about the decision to push thru with the trip, knowingly putting my children at risk, for a reason as frivolous as having a vacation. it was an unnecessary travel we could have easily skipped.

it’s been a week since we’re back, and i think i can now safely say that we have made it unscathed. both hubby and jan have been ordered to stay away from their office and school though, as a form of quarantine. jan has been receiving lessons and worksheets from school which we work on at home sans the classroom desks. it helps to at least keep him busy, instead of just whiling away the week.

we are scheduled to fly to the philippines in september. but if the swine flu alert does not ease up until then, we might just have to skip it altogether. good thing we got those flight tickets dirt cheap, so it’s not a lot of money thrown away!

two years ago today, we arrived in singapore. and, what a colorful and eventful couple of years it has been. somehow, i have found it to be fairly easier to integrate here than in germany — no language barrier, easier to make friends, easier to navigate even for a novice expat, and being an asian myself, the culture shock hasn’t been too much. although we still sometimes feel like tourists, and there are still a lot of places in this little island that we haven’t explored, i think we’ve come to the point of calling singapore home, however temporary we might feel it to be. in fact, living among the locals and jan going to a local school make us feel like we’ve successfully integrated ourselves into the local society.

naturally, the past two years did not pass without any challenges or misgivings, but nothing that probably wouldn’t have happened were we living elsewhere.

two years. not that long, actually, but so far it’s proving to be an educational and entertaining experience.