Happy New Year!! We hope everyone had a wonderful and blessed Christmas. We were unable to fly home to spend Christmas with family, and it was a little sad being away from our loved ones. We missed everyone, but Kevin and I created new memories spending our first Christmas in our shorts and flip flops in and around Singapore. Kevin had two weeks off for Christmas and New Year. Four of those days were spent in Bali, Indonesia. Details and lots of pictures will follow in a later post.
We were here in Singapore for Christmas day and had a wonderful buffet dinner at Melt the World restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. There was a turkey, ham and roast beef carving station, Indian and Chinese specialties, barbeque, sushi, fresh crab, shrimp, lobster, oysters, a decadent dessert station, and much more. We were sitting next to a large group of people and the men were dressed in their formal Scottish kilts and Sporrans (leather or fur waist pouches). They were having such a good time with their loud merry making, that we expected them to break into song with a folk ballad. No such luck.
Not only was the warm and tropical weather in December kind of fun and different, but so was watching children playing barefoot in the "snow" generated by a soap making machine. This stuff was sprayed all over the ground and on a huge Christmas tree in front of a shopping mall. This happy scene was complete with snowmen, reindeer and the all too familiar sound of Elvis singing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" over loud speakers.
Since we live in a very small apartment, we did not have room for a Christmas tree. Plus, all our decorations and ornaments are back home buried deep in storage. But we had to do something festive in our little dwelling place. Our inspiration came from all the blue and silver decorations along Orchard Rd. (The well known elite road in Singapore with endless high-end shopping.) We did a simple garland with blue, silver and gold trimmings. The lights were fiber optic stars.
There were so many different Christmas trees throughout the city with various themes, colors and sizes. We spotted traditional red and green trees, turquoise trees, teddy bear trees, fairy trees, elephant forest trees....
Tangs is a department store comparable to Macy's or Nordstrom. They hosted a Christmas elephant exhibit which showcased large, hand painted elephants by different groups of people around the world. These elephants were all over the city, but most of them were on Orchard Rd. near Tangs.
We ended 2011 by watching the new Mission Impossible movie at the nearby Imax theater, and going to the Titanic Artifact Exhibition at Marina Bay Sands ArtScience Museum. Singapore is the first city in Southeast Asia to host this exhibit. There were real artifacts recovered from the ship's wreckage and intriguing stories of some of the passengers. They replicated the grand gold staircase and different areas of the ship with great similarity. We felt like Titanic passengers walking through hallways of first class, steerage and the boiler room. There was even a large chunk of ice on display to look like an iceberg for people to touch and feel how painfully cold it was for the doomed passengers fighting for their lives in the freezing ocean.
We had a wonderful time during Kevin's time off. He's back at work now working hard, and I am catching up on our blog. Time flies by quickly when your working and playing hard. I plan to upload some video of the "Christmas Around the World" musical presentation from our church in my next post. So stay tuned...
