Hola! Vanakkam! Hello!
It has been a long time since I wrote. Almost four years, but I haven't had students to write for, and many of my adventures have not been fully documented. In that time, I had a computer stolen, and many photos were lost, never to be replaced.
As I sit now, it is a little after 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning in Chennai, India. It is still Monday evening, just after 5 p.m., on the west coast of the U.S.A. Outside the window, I can hear bells ringing and the recorded chanting of Hindu religious songs. The birds are tweeting loudly, as they have to compete with the honking horns from Old Velachery Road.
Velachery is the name of the neighborhood where my in-laws live. We have a very nice apartment with three small bedrooms and three bathrooms. They recently built a brand new mall here, with a lot of stores, and a new movie theater. In the neighborhood, they are taking down a lot of the old crumbling buildings and building new ones.
I've written a lot about India in this blog before (if you look back to August 2010, you will see all my posts from my very first trip here.) but I will happily share this adventure with you, too.
This year, we took a different route to India, flying through Seoul, Korea, and into the island of Singapore, where we spent an entire day. Both flights were extremely long, but I was so tired that I slept through most of the entire flight, both times. I was so tired that I was asleep before the plane took off!
On our first flight, from San Francisco to Seoul, Korea, we flew west, straight across the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean is huge, over five and a half thousand miles. That's like driving from my house to ROMO ______ times!
We took Singapore Airlines, which is a wonderful airline. The food is good, and the airline hostesses wear beautiful uniforms. They are all very pretty. These aren't the ones that were on our plane, but it's a good example of the uniforms.
When we landed in Seoul, it was cold and rainy. We didn't stay long. We had to get to our next flight pretty quickly. It was strange to think, however, that I was in yet another country I never thought I'd be in, with people so different from me, whose language I didn't speak; I kept thinking how lucky I am to be able to have such experiences.
On the flights, there's not a lot to do. There's not much room to wiggle around, so people mostly watch movies, read, or sleep. Even though I slept most of the time, I watched a bunch of movies, too. I think I watched about four movies, although, if I had been awake, I could have watched a lot more.
When we flew into Singapore, it was about 1:30 a.m., local time. It's 16 hours ahead in Singapore, which means it was about 9:30 a.m. on Friday, which means my calculations were a bit off there in my notes to you. I was forgetting about all of the time changes! So, while you were doing math and reading, I was falling over my feet, carrying my bags off the plane and into the most beautiful airport I have ever seen.
Let me go back a bit. As we were descending (remember that word?) into the airport, there were dozens of boats, all lit up in the bay below, and on the shore, hundreds of tiny white lights sparkled. It was so beautiful. I couldn't take a picture that did it justice.
Unfortunately, my iPad and phone were not charging well, and I did not get many pictures of this amazing airport. It is certainly a work of art. I have been to many airports, and while some are very nice (and some are not nice at all), Singapore was just breathtaking. I'll be sure to take some pictures on the way home to show you what I mean.
Despite the fact that I had slept on and off for an entire day, I was still sleepy. It is not very comfortable to sleep on a plane. Imagine being a little kid and sleeping strapped into a high chair for a whole night. Since it was the middle of the night, my husband had made us a reservation at a travel hotel.
This was not like a regular hotel. Located inside the airport itself, The Haven has tiny little rooms, called "nap rooms." All they have is one small bed inside, and a TV and a small shelf with a box of tissue and a bottle of water. If you need to go to the bathroom, you have to walk down the hall (sort of like at school.) There is also a shower room. You need to get a key at the front desk to take a shower.
The bed in the nap room was the most amazing bed ever, but maybe only because I was so squished up from being on the plane, and the covers were so soft, like a cloud. Even though I had slept so much, I fell asleep almost right away, and slept for five hours. Even after I got up to take a shower, Rodrigo wanted to sleep some more. I don't blame him.
After Raja (that's what I call my husband on this blog) and I took our showers, we checked out of the hotel (and yes, we made Rodrigo come, too) and went off to explore Singapore. We drank a lot of coffee on our journey, and today was no different. We began our day with coffee and a sausage puff (that's like a pastry with a sausage in the middle. I liked it, but Raja didn't) before heading out to catch the MRT, which is the subway train. It's actually the Singapore MRT, which means it's SMRT (it looks like "smart".)
The Republic of Singapore is a group of 63 islands in South Asia, between Malaysia and Indonesia. It's not part of the world I'm very familiar with, so I had to look it up. I used the internet as my main source. (Remember that word? The place you get your information.) We were on the main island, called just Singapore. The word "Singapore" means "Lion City," although it's thought that lions never lived here, and the animal the island was named after was actually a tiger.
One of the cool things about Singapore is that it's very multi-lingual, which means that people there speak a lot of languages, and signs are written in four languages: English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil. Most of the people in Singapore are of Chinese descent, but there are many Malaysians and Indians, as well.
I was excited to see Tamil on the signs. Tamil is Raja's home language, and while I don't speak or understand it well, I can read it. The train station sign below says "City Hall." In Tamil (the squiggly letters below), the words are "Nagar Mandapam." (That means "City Hall.")
It has been a long time since I wrote. Almost four years, but I haven't had students to write for, and many of my adventures have not been fully documented. In that time, I had a computer stolen, and many photos were lost, never to be replaced.
As I sit now, it is a little after 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning in Chennai, India. It is still Monday evening, just after 5 p.m., on the west coast of the U.S.A. Outside the window, I can hear bells ringing and the recorded chanting of Hindu religious songs. The birds are tweeting loudly, as they have to compete with the honking horns from Old Velachery Road.
Velachery is the name of the neighborhood where my in-laws live. We have a very nice apartment with three small bedrooms and three bathrooms. They recently built a brand new mall here, with a lot of stores, and a new movie theater. In the neighborhood, they are taking down a lot of the old crumbling buildings and building new ones.
I've written a lot about India in this blog before (if you look back to August 2010, you will see all my posts from my very first trip here.) but I will happily share this adventure with you, too.
This year, we took a different route to India, flying through Seoul, Korea, and into the island of Singapore, where we spent an entire day. Both flights were extremely long, but I was so tired that I slept through most of the entire flight, both times. I was so tired that I was asleep before the plane took off!
On our first flight, from San Francisco to Seoul, Korea, we flew west, straight across the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean is huge, over five and a half thousand miles. That's like driving from my house to ROMO ______ times!
We took Singapore Airlines, which is a wonderful airline. The food is good, and the airline hostesses wear beautiful uniforms. They are all very pretty. These aren't the ones that were on our plane, but it's a good example of the uniforms.
When we landed in Seoul, it was cold and rainy. We didn't stay long. We had to get to our next flight pretty quickly. It was strange to think, however, that I was in yet another country I never thought I'd be in, with people so different from me, whose language I didn't speak; I kept thinking how lucky I am to be able to have such experiences.
On the flights, there's not a lot to do. There's not much room to wiggle around, so people mostly watch movies, read, or sleep. Even though I slept most of the time, I watched a bunch of movies, too. I think I watched about four movies, although, if I had been awake, I could have watched a lot more.
When we flew into Singapore, it was about 1:30 a.m., local time. It's 16 hours ahead in Singapore, which means it was about 9:30 a.m. on Friday, which means my calculations were a bit off there in my notes to you. I was forgetting about all of the time changes! So, while you were doing math and reading, I was falling over my feet, carrying my bags off the plane and into the most beautiful airport I have ever seen.
Let me go back a bit. As we were descending (remember that word?) into the airport, there were dozens of boats, all lit up in the bay below, and on the shore, hundreds of tiny white lights sparkled. It was so beautiful. I couldn't take a picture that did it justice.
Unfortunately, my iPad and phone were not charging well, and I did not get many pictures of this amazing airport. It is certainly a work of art. I have been to many airports, and while some are very nice (and some are not nice at all), Singapore was just breathtaking. I'll be sure to take some pictures on the way home to show you what I mean.
Despite the fact that I had slept on and off for an entire day, I was still sleepy. It is not very comfortable to sleep on a plane. Imagine being a little kid and sleeping strapped into a high chair for a whole night. Since it was the middle of the night, my husband had made us a reservation at a travel hotel.
This was not like a regular hotel. Located inside the airport itself, The Haven has tiny little rooms, called "nap rooms." All they have is one small bed inside, and a TV and a small shelf with a box of tissue and a bottle of water. If you need to go to the bathroom, you have to walk down the hall (sort of like at school.) There is also a shower room. You need to get a key at the front desk to take a shower.
The bed in the nap room was the most amazing bed ever, but maybe only because I was so squished up from being on the plane, and the covers were so soft, like a cloud. Even though I had slept so much, I fell asleep almost right away, and slept for five hours. Even after I got up to take a shower, Rodrigo wanted to sleep some more. I don't blame him.
The Republic of Singapore is a group of 63 islands in South Asia, between Malaysia and Indonesia. It's not part of the world I'm very familiar with, so I had to look it up. I used the internet as my main source. (Remember that word? The place you get your information.) We were on the main island, called just Singapore. The word "Singapore" means "Lion City," although it's thought that lions never lived here, and the animal the island was named after was actually a tiger.
One of the cool things about Singapore is that it's very multi-lingual, which means that people there speak a lot of languages, and signs are written in four languages: English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil. Most of the people in Singapore are of Chinese descent, but there are many Malaysians and Indians, as well.
I was excited to see Tamil on the signs. Tamil is Raja's home language, and while I don't speak or understand it well, I can read it. The train station sign below says "City Hall." In Tamil (the squiggly letters below), the words are "Nagar Mandapam." (That means "City Hall.")
We took the train to the Marina Bay area, where there are a lot of botanical gardens. I love gardens, but we weren't able to visit them this time. What we chose to do was to visit the Sands Hotel. At this hotel, you can take an elevator up to the 65th floor where they have a roof. Up there, you can take pictures of the whole city.
As you can see, Rodrigo enjoyed the sights from so far above. You could see almost all of the city, with the bay, the boats, and the tall buildings. Singapore is very green, as a lot of nature is preserved there. It is a tropical climate, which means it is very hot, and it rains a lot. You can see the clouds in the sky. I thought they looked amazing. Later, on the way home on the train, there was a huge downpour of rain. I was glad to be inside the train when that happened.
Here are some more pictures of the city.
Here you can see the boats out on the water. They are all lit up at night.
Those two silver bumps are botanical gardens there are tons and tins of flowers growing inside.
If you look closely, you can see flower-like structures. These light up at night, too.
Singapore is a very modern city. A lot of international business is done here.
There are a lot of tall, fancy buildings
Another view.
The "50" is made up of balls floating in the water of the bay. This year will be the 50th year of Singapore's full independence. It used to be part of the British Empire. Then it was briefly part of Malaysia. Now it is its own republic, and proud of it.
I made Raja take a selfie with me at the top of the hotel. He always gets this look when he has to squint into the sun. I look relaxed, I think! All that sleep was good for me. I hope you are all feeling relaxed on your vacation, too.
I am going to sign off now, as I have some more adventures to go on. I will post more later on the rest of my day in Singapore, and our flight into and arrival in Chennai. I will see you later.
Until then, Be Good!
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