Swedish in Singapore: Final touches

The main thing that happened during the week was that we got out new phones! I never have to worry about my phone changing operative language to Latvian ever again! Bliss. Fortunately I have huge support from my babe, or I think I’d still be trying to sort it out three days later.

Jonas being slightly fed up with the new phones..

I also finally found frames for our paintings and pictures from Japan! It hasn’t been that easy actually and a place tends to feel rather soulless without anything on the walls. Today we have finalized drilling them up properly so now our apartment looks much more like a home.

Hokusai over our is beautiful, but also sort of a reminder about what happened in Japan

One of the bright and fun paintings from South Africa

Three pictures from Kyoto and Narai

Three winter pictures from Hiroshima, of Fuji-san and Sweden

Various Japanese prints of famous locations and buildings

We’ve now set the last touches regarding furnishing and decorating, including filling the place up with suitable plants. That means really stuff that survive me. I’d love to get orchids all over, but I just have a natural occurring tendency to kill them even from a distance. I swear, it’s enough if I’m in the same room. It’s such a shame, ‘cause they are absolutely gorgeous over here. Everything else is kept as simple as possible and it has really started feeling like we live here for real.

One of the window sills with Singaporean money plants; very nice plants; very unkillable plants

I still miss the people in Sweden and Tokyo and things like the Japanese metro, sushi and politeness, but the quality of life for us here is a lot higher. I really did expect the ‘all-fun-new-n-shiny-feeling‘ about Singapore to be gone by now, but both of us still thinks it’s really great here. I also thought I’d almost be bored, since it’s a very small place really, but since there are so many cultures here we know so little about, there’s always something exciting going on.

The many cultures are really evident everywhere

Fogging is a strange thing they do here (pesticides brawled out by machines to prevent Dengi mosquitos and other insects from multiplying); at first I thought there was a fire

A normal snack for the evening in our current household: banana crisps, cashew nuts, olives and pomegranate

On the Sunday we were dinner guests at out friends’ new condo on Marine Parade. They were at floor 20-something with direct ocean view and balconies running on both sides of the apartment. It was very, very nice. We were also served western food from an oven! I really miss our oven in Sweden.. I actually even miss the 20 x 30 cm fish grill we had in Tokyo; at least you could make garlic bread in that one. Now we have a micro wave and have used it once. It sucks. Anyways, thank you Steph and Duane for a lovely dinner!

View over the ocean and parts of the marine ship yard; note the tennis courts on the building next to them!

Looking out from the dining room

The other balcony towards the ocean

I spent the week meeting up with a lot of people for lunches and coffee, in between shopping around for a dress and finding a tailor to sow up a tux for the Mid Winter Ball. We have just joined the Swedish Business Association of Singapore and the ball is supposed to be the shit.

Invitation to the Mid Winter Ball by SBAS

I was also taken to the National Museum of Singapore for the first time and it was quite a sight. Thank you Jess, Nima, Anette, Anna and everyone else for all the help!

One of the more interesting sculptures

It’s very popular to get married at the museum

Then of course it was Halloween! Since there were quite a few hick-ups with changing the phones, we had to spend the entire day doing so. When we finally got everything to work it was too late to sort out costumes; I had a wild idea we’d go as Swedish football players, but we scrapped it. Instead we met up with friends at the Promenade, The Sail, Barcode, Blujaz and Souk.