Two weeks later ….

I cannot believe that it’s been two weeks past since my last post.   Life here in Sing is starting to get more settled for us here.  As we only arrived with clothes and some personal effects, I had to get busy setting up the condo and making it livable for us.  Fortunately, during my husbands three month stay this past summer, he set about purchasing beds and linens for us, and he had them all prepared for us.  After 24 hours of traveling, and landing here in the wee hours of the morning, it was lovely to walk into our condo and have beds ready for the five of us.  Besides the beds, we had no other furniture!  It has taken all my time and energy trying to get this condo set up and livable.

We have completely recovered from our jet-lag, that took about two weeks.  We are 13 hours ahead of Minnesota time, and they say the body adjusts about one hour a day, so 14 days was about right.  For the longest time, we all felt like we were in a fog.

Going to school orientation, the first week of school, learning to drive in very heavy traffic (British-style: on the other side of the car, and on the other side of the road), searching for stores and purchasing furniture, searching for american food in the grocery stores:  all in a jet-lag fog.  We managed to get through it, without any major melt-downs or break-downs.  That in itself is a miracle.  Thank you all for your prayers, we have certainly felt them and it has helped us knowing that so many people were praying for us.

LIfe here in Singapore is TOTALLY different from anyplace we have already lived (Pittsburgh, St. Paul, Chicago suburbs, and rural Hudson Wisconsin), and it has been a bit of a shock.   We are in the minority in this land, and we see very few Americans.  In fact, we see very few non-Asians.  We chose not to live where all the Americans live, and we don’t regret it.  In our housing, there are people from all over the world:  Brazil, Kenya, France, Belgium, Australia, Hawaii, to name a few.

Most surprising to us is that while the kids are enrolled at the Singapore American School, and there are very few Americans there!!  I don’t know the exact percentages, but I would bet only 30-50% of the students are Americans.  The rest are Chinese, Indian, or other Asian.  I know of one German & one Japanese boy as well, both are seniors and swimmers.  Most of the teachers are Australian or American.  Marias spanish teacher is from Minneapolis, no kidding.

I will go into more detail about the kids school later, as I do have many items to post about if I am to keep this journal up-to-date.  I will try to post at least every other day until I am caught up.

Hubby is traveling this week  (he is in China) and since I don’t sleep well when he is gone, so I’ll use my late nights to get caught up on interesting topics I want to journal about!