Random SG Musings Pt. II

• Maids.  Upon arrival, and after my first week noticing that no one had one, I had to ask, "So, what does Asia have against dishwashers?!" The crowd simultaneously responds with, "Maids!"  When I first started looking for an apartment, nearly every single listing had a maid attached to it.  I just thought, "Okay, sweet, I don't have to clean."  Come to find out, the extra "storage room" in the kitchen is actually a bomb shelter (ya know, for when Malaysia invades) and people have their maids LIVE in these windowless boxes.  Nice.  Apparently, that's becoming less en vogue because people are catching onto this weird thing called human rights, but still, everyone has a maid.  Now, she may live with you or not, but everyone has one.  Ours comes once a week, will do whatever you ask of her, and charges $15 SGD/hour.  In other words, it's insanely cheap.  It's kind of slavery, but I'm also kind of into it?

• Hot water, where are you?  So, typically the shower gets hot.  The water that comes out of the sinks is very lukewarm.  So, you brush your teeth in warm water and we have to refrigerate glass jugs of water for drinking.  But HOT (unless you're showering one at a time) doesn't exist.  So without a dishwasher, we wash everything by hand, in lukewarm water.  Super sanitary.  Jess Heimer would die.  Die.  At least I'm giving my immune system a boost?

• Refrigerate everything.  And I mean EVERYTHING.  Coming from CO, I'm super used to leaving things like bread, garlic, tomatoes, peanut butter on the counter/in the pantry.  Unless you are really into mold, I suggest not doing that here.  The heat and humidity do not allow for this kind of behaviour. (See that spelling?!  I'm practically a local.)

• No napkins.  Restaurants don't really give napkins.  Some will if they're really nice or they notice your alabaster skin, but for the most part, people either don't use them or it's BYO tissues.  Tissues.  Strange and not something I'm getting used to because even in America, I got super hostile when restaurants would serve you a sweaty drink without a serviette.

• The heat.  Seriously though.  It feels like the heat is ON.  Just muggy blasts of hot air at all times.  I keep waiting to get used to it, but I don't, and people say you never do.  I thought my skin would freak out in this climate, but it actually LOVES it -- turns out I'm just a glowing goddess.  A glowing goddess with really frizzy hair, but 1 out of 2 ain't bad.

• Along with the rest of the world, pretty much everyone in Singapore speaks two languages.  Makes me super jealous.  When is America going to start putting this into our school systems?  We live in a global world.

• Being in a new country that was more conservative , I thought I was going to have to be really careful to be PC.  On the contrary, I have found people to be quite comfortable pointing out differences in race, language, religion, etc.  On occasion, some of these comments could probably be regarded as "racist," but you'd have to ask the subject of the joke for a definitive answer on that.  Generally speaking, people move to America to become American and we aren't taught to celebrate different cultures or places of origin and pointing out people's differences is seen as rude or prejudice.  I have found this part of life here to be refreshing.  There's no harm in pointing out someone's race as a way to identify them and, I think, it's nice to recognize that we're all different.

• Metric system.  Just one more thing the US needs to embrace.  WHY is the rest of the world content to operate on this and we just can't seem to get over our feet and miles and pounds?!  It's incredibly annoying.