No pictures today but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t interesting.
We started off our day not knowing what to do for breakfast. There’s nothing really close to our apartment and it’s not like we can just drive over to Shipley’s. Tommy walked over the nearest food center which is about a 10 minute walk one way and brought back some freshly made apple juice and lemon juice. That was all he could find. Luckily, we bought some pancake mix yesterday so we made pancakes and I rationed our S$7.95/bottle syrup. We bought some cereal and milk today. Two boxes of cereal and a 1/2 gallon of milk and spent about $15 USD on what should have cost about $9. That’s not too bad. We were happy to find some regular milk.
So, yesterday we tried to scope out the cell phone situation. Tommy asked the girl a few questions and she kept having to go ask for the answers and come back to tell us. I guess he finally asked one too many questions or something and she pretty much told him she couldn’t help us anymore and walked away. Nice. Then today, I had a momentary breakdown after the Pizza Hut lady hung up on me. There are some communication issues even though they speak English.
We went to look at houses today. We saw some interesting places and a couple of just plain weird places. Glass showers and toilets opening up into the bedrooms and a sliding glass door off of the kitchen that steps into a 5′ wide pool. Literally right into the pool. We didn’t find anything that would work for us, though. Our realtor took us to a big grocery store called Giant and we bought a box fan and a case bottled water since she had a van and we could get it home easy. That was nice.
So we got “home” and it was about 2pm and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet. Tommy suggested pizza and our friend here Jennifer, had told us they delivered so I called for the number and then tried to dial out and our room phone wouldn’t work. So I called the front desk and they said they’d send a technician. I called on Tommy’s loaner cell phone and the lady (keep in mind that it’s 2pm on jetlag day 2) asked me something that I didn’t understand so I asked her to repeat. She said it again and I asked her to repeat and she hung up on me. I was pretty ticked and went to my room and kinda threw a fit. Long story short, no one else wanted to order it either so we didn’t eat pizza today. We ended up putting our shoes back on and walking to the subway, going to Orchard Road and getting a little lost which caused us even more needless walking, found a Burger King and ate lunch finally around 3:30 or so. We walked around a bit after that looking at some shops and then found some cereal for breakfast and then walked and rode the subway back. We got back from our lunch excursion at about 5pm.
At about 6:30, we went to the nearest hawker center, aka open air food court, and boy was that an experience to behold. The smells were overwhelming. We walked around trying to figure out what to order and had people pushing up to us asking us what we wanted and trying to sell us their food. It was a crazy experience. Probably the most Singaporean culture experience we’ve had so far. We ordered a few different things to try. Some of us left full and some left nautious.
We’ll be going out for Father’s Day tomorrow. I told Tommy we’d take him somewhere new for lunch. 
Then we’ll try again to get cell phones, maybe they’ll be more helpful on Sunday. And we need to open a bank account here. We’ve heard that’s interesting too. It’s little things that would normally take an hour at most in America that just take so much more time to do here. Like ordering pizza.
