Noel in Singapore

25 December 2008

I woke up early to talk to my family on Skype. Everyone was happy and healthy which is always nice to see!

We treated ourselves to room-service breakfast in bed with champagne! What a change from camping! It was a real treat.

The Wombat should be leaving from Jakarta today. There are still no news from Mr Indrawan, but it’s Christmas! Most offices are closed.

I was very happy to watch “Muppets’ Christmas Carol” on television. We usually watch it in early December when we put up the Christmas tree.

After lazing around, we decided to go see the pool and hot tub. Turns out the hot tub was a “room temperature” tub...but we found a steam bath! Woohoo! The were seperated for men and women, but I was happy to have a whole steam room to myself. In the men’s there was a sauna, so Jonny was trying to figure out whether he would rather have a sauna or a steam bath in his house....so he tried both...he is still undecided.

Afterwards, we got all nice and cleaned up and walked around Clarke Quay. We had dinner reservations at 8pm, so we had time to kill. I found a black bikini (finally!) to try on at the mall. A little word of warning: If you’re self conscious about your booty in North America, don’t shop in South East Asia. In North America, I am a size small (perhaps medium) in Singapore, I was bursting out of a large. No good. Jonny got bored and his back was aching, so we went straight to the restaurant.

I was a little sad about spending Christmas dinner at the restaurant, but it was brilliant! We went to a lovely buffet. They gave us a cracker with toys, balloons (mine was handed to me personally from the real Santa Claus) and a hat that Jonny wore all night. There was a fantastic choir walking around the restaurant singing hymns. They truly sounded like angels. I thought a buffet was perfect because you get to have a lot of your favourite things. We started with the sushi/seafood section. We had sushi, sashimi, oysters and shrimp. It was a great way to start the dinner! We had another course with salad and then the main meal. We even had room for desert! Jonny went crazy and decided to try the durian pudding, as I hogged the chocolate fountain. Jonny asked me to take his pudding back to the table so that he could use the chocolate fountain. He warned me to make sure I didn’t smell the bowl. He made the mistake of smelling it and almost got sick! I couldn’t believe he was going to eat that! Old women were loading it on their plates with it like there was no tomorrow...so we figured it couldn’t be so bad. Then again, we read on someone’s blog that eating durian was like eating rotten eggs next to the sewage. In the end, it was not a good experience for Jonnyboy. He said I should try, just to see but I didn’t want to ruin the perfect evening with a gross dessert!

To think of it now, nothing could have spoiled our perfect Christmas day. Not even sewage fruit.

Marie-Claude