New Year's, Take 1

Last year, we celebrated our first New Year’s Eve in Singapore by nursing our collective jet lag from the long flight home, so this New Year’s Eve it seemed appropriate to celebrate in somewhat higher style at the Eurasian Association’s black-tie charity ball - thanks once again to the social involvement and charitable instincts of our good friend Monica.

Fortunately, I’d remembered to pick up a dress while in the US, where most people are not a size 0. And back in Singapore, Joey managed to rent a dashing tuxedo from a local tailor, where he was surprised as they immediately started measuring him. Contrary to his fears that they’d try to hard-sell him a suit on the spot, he quickly discovered that they would be altering the tux to fit exactly - none of that “adjustable” nonsense they have in the US.

Suitably turned out, we arrived at the beautiful Marina Mandarin hotel downtown to spend the last hours of the year with some great friends from many cultures and a band from, possibly, America, given the sometimes unique song choices. (You just haven’t lived until you’ve danced with the whole Eurasian Singaporean community to “Sweet Home Alabama.” How, and why, do they know all the words to sing along?)

Midnight came quickly, with the city’s fireworks drowned out by a massive balloon drop. Balloon drops are quiet, you say? Not when the main reason they’re dropped is so people can pop them with their designer stiletto heels. The result dwarfs the sound of a thousand firecrackers.

Sometime after midnight, we slid into our taxi (pre-booked, to send us straight to the head of the queue - we’re the kiasu ones now!) and went home to sleep. Why such an early end to the night, you ask? Because otherwise we never would have woken up by noon the next day, just in time to get to the American Club and watch the ball drop in New York City, at exactly 1 p.m. Singapore time.

On the Island of Borneo

We couldn’t finish out the year without including a posting about the island of Borneo, which we visited in September. Borneo is one of those places you hear about but never expect to see; it sounded far away to us, too, until we got our car in Singapore and the dealer’s license plate said “Borneo Motors.” Turns out that Borneo is only a couple of hours’ flight away, even if you’re visiting (as we were) the far side, the Malaysian state of Sabah.

Sabah is a strange and fragile place, in which the truly exotic rain-forest flora and fauna are forcibly intermingled with the ever-encroaching roads and palm-oil plantations. The great rain forests of northeastern Borneo have been squeezed up against the muddy Kinabatangan River until only two narrow strips are left. This means you can see a lot of wildlife from the river, since their only habitat is right up against the banks, but there’s an overwhelming feeling (perfectly captured by this article in a recent National Geographic) that the days of this precarious paradise are numbered.

Just beyond the rain forest’s edge, the neat rows of lush green palms look beautiful (and environmentally sound, as the oil they supply often goes into American and European biofuels). But the impact on Borneo’s plants and animals is inescapable. Spend some time watching the monkeys and orangutans swing (or even jump) powerfully through the rainforest foliage, and you begin to understand: with the rows of palm trees, there’s nothing to grab; the monkeys are reduced to crawling slowly along the ground.

We couldn’t visit Borneo without seeing part of the Gomantong Caves we’d seen on Planet Earth, replete with swarms of bats, skittering cockroaches, swallowtails, and workers climbing a hundred feet high on flimsy ladders to harvest empty birds’ nests for soup. David Attenborough never mentioned the happy and enthusiastic stray dogs that serve as self-appointed tour guides, though. They love to meet visitors at the entrance and lead you along the slippery boardwalk inside, making sure you keep up with your group and don’t fall into the massive heaps of bat guano. Perhaps they belong to a breed without a sense of smell...

Call It What It Is

“Merry Christmas!” said the woman in the hijab.

Having spent much of the holiday season in December in a US work environment, I’m accustomed to the carefully coded holiday greetings there. With Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, and secularism competing for the same airspace, I heard lots of “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays.” For the politically correct, “Merry Christmas” is virtually extinct.

Since our return to Singapore, though, I’ve been wished a “Merry Christmas” at least half a dozen times - most recently by my favorite nasi padang lady, who wears a Muslim hijab. I would surmise that we are so glib about the phrase because there are few other competing holidays at this time in Singapore. We’ve already passed the Muslim holidays of Hari Raya Puasa and Hari Raya Haji. Deepavali, the Hindu festival of lights, ended two weeks ago. Chinese New Year isn’t for another six weeks. So now, we say “Merry Christmas” because it is Christmas.

With a festive season that runs from October to February each year, people in Singapore would get pretty tired of saying “Happy Holidays” all the time. So here, we call each celebration what it is. All in all, it’s quite refreshing to hear someone wish me “Merry Christmas!”

How to Prevent Jet Lag

To prevent jet lag when traveling across 12 time zones:

1. Pull all-nighter the night before (or sleep one at a time, in 4-hour shifts), while trying to redistribute luggage so that all 4 bags are under the 50-pound limit.

2. Nap during 4-hour first leg of flight. (Bonus: Being oblivious to the indignities of domestic US air travel.)

3. Arrive at transit airport in evening with hours to spare and nothing to do. Allow sheer boredom to induce sleepiness. Prepare to sleep on 18 1/2-hour second leg of flight.

4. Board plane at 10:30 p.m. Attempt to sleep in sitting position in between weather updates (“still no change”) every 20 minutes. Give up at 2 a.m. and recline seat despite (remote) possibility of takeoff. Doze fitfully until actual takeoff at 5 a.m.

5. Alternate sleeping and eating for the next 12 1/2 hours. Wake up at 6 a.m. (local time at destination) thinking,
“We were supposed to be getting off the plane right now.” Stay awake by contemplating outrage of 25 straight hours on same airplane.

6. Disembark (gratefully) at noon and return home. Function long enough to find toothbrush and climb into bed. Succumb to jet-lag-induced sleep from 4 p.m. to midnight. Upon waking, medicate self for head cold which has mysteriously sprung up. Sleep until 7 a.m., and resume normal schedule in local time.

Traveling Abroad

It appears we may have adjusted to life at the equator, after all. On our home leave trip, predictably enough, we nearly froze to death in New Jersey. But this time, we also froze in Florida. And here in Texas, the final stop on our multi-city tour, it ain’t warm either, y’all.

In other ways, too, the America we know (and mostly love) is strange to us now. We’ve read the news about the economic crisis, and the markets in Asia have fallen, too, but we weren’t prepared for the mood of gloom. We didn’t know the standard greeting had changed from “Hi there!” to “You still have your job?”

America looks different to us, too, after our year in a crowded city-state on a tiny, tropical island. It’s a land of squandered space, where the houses are built on tiny postage stamps of grass but the big-box stores get acres and acres of parking lots, most of their spaces empty even during the holiday shopping days. And the flat, sprawling suburban vistas of the South confuse our sense of proportion, accustomed as we are to our vertical cityscape.

In the malls and the theme parks and the grocery stores, there are so few people at any time of day that we keep wondering: where is everyone? In the restaurants and hotels, we squirm when the staff keep up a never-ending stream of conversation and then expect a tip. And it must be said that the food courts disappoint us. In any of Singapore’s neighborhood hawker centers, we could easily eat the mom-and-pop food of a different culture every night. In US malls, the choices range from fake Chinese to fake Italian - all processed by the same conglomerate.

On the upside, we’re now in a country where “salsa” is not the same as marinara sauce. And we did make the switch from driving on the left to driving on the right quite easily. We were happy to find that the roads and buildings in the places where we used to live were still very much the same, in contrast to the perpetual construction and reconstruction in Singapore, where everything seems to change every six months. And we were lucky to be able to see family, friends, and neighbors after being away for so long.

But it does make me wonder what it will be like to move back to the country where we lived all our lives until two years ago. I always thought it would be like coming back home. But now I wonder if it might feel more like our move to Singapore - learning to live in a country that’s foreign to us.

Finding Peace in Cambodia

We cancelled our October trip to Cambodia to stay at home with our cat in what turned out to be the final weeks of his life. Only a few days after his death, we were sitting at home trying to absorb the shock of living without him, when I remembered we still had to cancel the plane tickets for the trip that weekend.

To make a long story short, the tickets turned out to be nonrefundable. And rather than face the prospect of a long weekend in a house that suddenly seemed silent and empty in the way of an old, bombed-out building, we began to slowly put the pieces of our trip back together. We would take our grief with us to Cambodia.

Cambodia has had more than its share of unspeakable horrors and tragedies, so it may seem a strange place to choose for quiet reflection and peace. But we were going to wander through the ancient temples of the Khmer empire—contemporaries of the great Mesoamerican peoples and rivaling them in the construction of huge stone edifices in the jungle. Somehow it was fitting to spend time in the ruins of a great and beautiful kingdom lost in the passage of time.

We looked at the smiling carved faces of Bayon, the sweeping grounds and carvings of the spectacular Angkor Wat, the delicate pink sandstone of the “women’s temple,” Banteay Srei. Mostly, with our understanding guide, we wandered quietly, avoiding tour groups and midday heat, preferring instead to creep out in the mornings and late afternoons for the cooler, gentler sunlight and the near silence.

One morning just after dawn we walked down a long path, utterly alone, and came upon the ruins of Ta Prohm, left in their jungle state with banyan trees slowly working their roots through the rock and dismantling the structures, bit by bit. We spoke in hushed voices, feeling as if no one had ever discovered this place but us, walking slowly and turning corners to find staggeringly tall trees whose roots on the walls were several times our height. Huge blocks of stone lay in piles where the roofs of long galleries had fallen (the columns still stood in their places).

A scene of destruction? Perhaps. But there was beauty and even peace in the slow but sure transition. Time and the trees were only taking their natural course, slowly but surely, knowing nothing could last forever.

Farewell My Furry Friend

This is my first, and it’s really hard. I can only hope he was comfortable. It’s difficult to know what to expect – six days ago he was still chasing his favorite string around, still waiting for us at the front door when we came home in the evening, still smacking his lips when he heard the sound of ice clinking in a water glass.

Now he will no longer come bounding down the stairs when he hadn't seen us for half an hour. No more lying on his back like a furry rug with four paws sticking straight up in the air, as if gravity suddenly reversed itself. No more patting of my leg with his left paw when he wanted my attention. And no longer will I have this fuzzy warm animal snuggling against my feet at night, or jumping up and down on my tummy to wake me up in the morning.

But he will no longer be vomiting bile and blood. Nor will he lose 10% of his body weight in two weeks. No more seizures, pills, injections, blood tests. No more shaving just to find a vein or conduct an ultrasound (he was an incredibly placid cat, but electronic shavers and hair dryers really freaked him out). No more x-rays, barium meal, steel sterile cages at the hospital.

Probable diagnosis: non-leukemic feline lymphoma. He was ten; that’s like being 50 in people terms. Inside always so he didn’t have leuk or FIV (we confirmed with bloodwork). Prognosis: median of 60 days, even with chemotherapy. When we visited him today at the hospital, his liver had just completely shut down in the last three hours – despite all the supportive care. He was in no condition for further treatment or diagnostics, so at 3:30PM Singapore time, 18th of October, we let him go.

What’s so weird for me is that I work in the field of medicine, and this isn’t the first time I’ve listened to physicians and patients talk about dire life expectancy. But it’s the first time I’ve had to deal with this personally. And it’s complicated because he’s an animal. That means the notion of trying to live a little longer just to be able to see or participate in some future event is meaningless. Patients will often want to “make it” to the next graduation, wedding, birth, etc. With pets, they’re just miserable and suffering.

So I had no idea when I played with him and brushed him six days ago, it would be the last time I would see him as his former self.

Were it to be the last

How infinite would be

What we did not suspect was marked

Our final interview.

- Emily Dickenson