ARE WE THERE YET?

Dearest Friends,

I thought those backpacks were a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself, and they did, in fact, keep the kids quite entertained.  For an hour or two.  Then we only had to put up with another 18 or 20 hours of "Are we there yet?"  You think long car trips with small kids are tough?  Try being cooped up on a plane for two days, with no way to "pull over" and let them run off some of that pent up energy!  In Alexis' own words, "The plane trip was exciting at first, with our new backpacks full of goodies that I couldn't wait to take out and play with, but it got pretty tedious, pretty quick.  I couldn't seem to sleep on the plane, and the food was really nasty!" (she ate nothing but rolls the entire flight, and most every flight for the next three years)

In order to break up some of that flying time, and to ease them into Indonesia gradually, as he had done with me that first time, John arranged for us to stop in Singapore for a few days, on the way over.  Woohoo!  Have I ever mentioned how much I looooooove Singapore?  Here's what Lex had to say about it: "Singapore was amazing.  I remember us taking a cab to our hotel in the middle of the night, and just staring out the window the entire time.  The next day, I saw that it was green everywhere, even though we were in the middle of a huge city.  I couldn't get over how different everything was!"

We made many trips to Singapore over the next three years, so it's hard for the kids to pinpoint which memories are from which visit.  Also, Austin wasn't quite six yet, so his memories are a bit more hazy than Alexis', and, as with all siblings, their memories of the same events can be vastly different!  I asked if either of them remembered our trip to Tiger Balm Gardens, one of three mythological theme parks in Asia that were created by the Aw family, to promote their line of analgesic salves, Tiger Balm.  Asians think it's almost a miracle salve.  The ads say "It works where it hurts!", and they believe it.  They don't just put it on sore muscles, they put it on everything.  If you have a migraine, just dab some on your temples!

image from www.gamasutra.com

Alexis replied to that question with, "Was Tiger Balm Gardens the place with the boat ride showing all the levels of hell, and that horrible stage show about the spirits of the four elements?", while Austin remembered it as the cool place "with the really funny stage show, where they pulled a guy out of the audience and made him pretend to climb something, then squashed him down into a squatting position, then made him try to climb up, then squashed him down again, over and over until the poor guy was about to collapse."  I don't remember a boat ride (she may be confusing that with another place that came later) but I do remember some pretty disturbing statues and dioramas, including the Ten Courts of Hell, which was set into the 60 meter tail of that huge dragon.

image from www.panoramio.com

What John and I remember most about the trip, while the kids barely remember this at all, is hooking up with old friends SS and SM, from our first stint in Indonesia, who just happened to be living in Singapore at the time.  SS was now married to a lovely woman (German or Dutch?) who was quite happy to spend her life hopping from one place to another, and they had just adopted a baby girl (from Romania, if I remember correctly).  SM and his auburn-haired beauty now had two sons who were around the same age as our kids, so they invited us to leave the kids with their housekeeper/babysitter, ordered pizza for them all, then the three couples went to one of the open-air seafood restaurants that overlook the ocean, gorged on chili crab and pepper crab, and caught up on all the news of friends from back in the good ol' days.  A magical evening for us, but all Austin remembers is "playing Samicon (the Japanese version of Nintendo) and watching a Stephen King movie (Yikes!) called Stand By Me, or something like that." (The Stand?)

The one place where all our memories are in sync, is on the upper floors of a building called Shaw Centre.  Shaw Centre was one of those ubiquitous Asian shopping centers that looks more like a tall office building than a mall.  In the basement was a Japanese supermarket and a food court (which sold foods our kids had never seen before), then there were several stories filled with shops, mostly selling electronics and video games.  One day we decided to keep going on the escalator, just for the fun of it, to see what was on the uppermost floors.  They were primarily filled with offices, with a few masseuses, acupuncturists, and clinics mixed in.  Several of the clinics had their windows plastered with photographs, a way to advertise the various problems they could relieve you of.  The kids ran over to take a closer look, and John and I couldn't help but follow.  The photo of someone's behind?  Someone with the worst case of hemorrhoids ever?  That is a memory we all share quite clearly, as much as we'd like to forget it!

As I was surfing the internet for info about Tiger Balm Gardens, I suddenly had the urge to go rummaging around in our medicine cabinet.  You'll never guess what I found!

A jar of Tiger Balm!  It has to be at least 20 years old, and neither of us ever uses it anymore.  So why have we never thrown it away?  Well, probably because, each time we remove the lid and take a sniff, as I did just now, it whisks us straight back to Singapore!