Where did the week go?! Sometimes it seems like everything is going smoothly, I am on top of my daughter’s progress at school, have a steady stream of care packages going to Afghanistan and know the general location of our toddler, and then something unexpected comes along and I get derailed. Which is what happened this week.

Ants.

Our kitchen, dining room and living room were invaded by a colony last night, so I will blame them for not writing during the entire week.

Catching up, however, here are a few photos from a dumpling workshop we went to a couple weeks ago. I signed Citrus up since it was being taught in Chinese as a way to improve her conversational Mandarin.

Dumplings are not difficult to make but were at the right skill level for Citrus. I liked how the instructor also made the wrappers instead of buying a stack of them from the grocery store.

I just got to hang back and watch my daughter interact with the other students and become friends with an older girl.

Baby Lemon, in the meantime, also made his share of friends and, as is typical, was temporarily adopted by someone else who held and played with him for almost an hour. This, of course, made it easier for me to eat dumplings and try an onion pancake.

It might be fun to have a dumpling-making party, something Elysia did once in NYC when we were friends in the mid-1990s. For some reason I was unable to attend, so I have been living with a dumpling deficit ever since. It might be time for closure.

Citrus and her abacus.

Citrus went to her first abacus class. These classes are popular in Singapore both for learning math and for developing ‘mental agility’.

I signed her up on a whim, figuring that it was something unique to living in Asia and would be a tactile approach to learning math that she might enjoy.

I liked that some classes are advertised as Abacus 3G, as if there is a broadband connection involved instead of simply an extra row or two of beads.

Instead, I signed her up for an introductory class with a regular abacus, although I like to refer to it as eXtreme Abacus since the class is taught in Mandarin. She gets an hour and half of conversational Chinese practice at the same time so it is like two classes for the price of one!

She loved it.

On our way home we ran into a Navy sailor who said hello and asked how we were doing and my daughter practically shouted at him, “I just went to Abacus!” He was not really sure what to say, but I appreciate him not saying something confirming that we are the weirdest family in the neighborhood. Weird, maybe, but at least there are other contenders.

At first I was a little nervous dropping her off because she was acting shy with the teacher. Our experience has been that people assume she cannot speak Mandarin and so I urged her to start by introducing herself to the teacher in Chinese. She barely said a peep and as I walked away I am sure the teacher, who speaks very little English, was wondering what to do. When I picked her up, however, all was well. After all, her Mandarin is as good as many Singaporeans her age.

Naturally, when we arrived at home I got to hear a new excuse from her for taking too long to get ready for bed.

Dad! I want to finish doing my abacus homework!

Okay, it is a little weird but just wait until we are back in the United States and she wants to bring her abacus to school.

Two videos below. In the first one she is explaining how to use the abacus. In the second video she is talking about her first day in class.

Tonight we had a Chinese New Year dinner with a few Singapore families. An authentic experience for a foreigner from the United States: steamboat, lo hei, Wii and Van Helsing.

Despite having lived in Singapore for a couple years now, we have never tried steamboat. It is a fairly common dish here for a group to share although you can also get individual versions at the hawker stalls. Otherwise known as a hot pot, or shabu-shabu in Japan, it is simply a boiling pot of broth to which you add your favorite ingredients. They cook for a few minutes and then you retrieve them — or steal someone else’s contribution — and eat with rice.

As you can see, ours had about twenty different ingredients. Beef, chicken, prawns, fishballs, several varieties of tofu, beef tendon, fish, hot dogs, dumplings, eggs and assorted vegetables. At the end you have a nice soup for that night or another day.

Steamboat dinner for Chinese New Year.

Adding ingredients to the steamboat.

We also had lo hei, also known as a Prosperity Toss. It is a salad of auspicious ingredients that the group tosses together while calling out wishes for the coming year. It is also very tasty.

See this Wikipedia entry, which I think gives an interesting history and other details.

I had never heard of this special dish, which is only served during Chinese New Year. Although its origins are in China, the modern version was introduced in Singapore in 1964.

Lo hei for Chinese New Year, Singapore. This is what the dish looks like at the start.

Additional ingredients including fish, crackers, crushed peanuts and oil are added.

The Prosperity Toss.

Lo hei for Chinese New Year -- Delicious!

A couple weeks ago we went to a Chinese New Year celebration at a shopping center where, previously, we had seen a few fun performances.  A low-key casual community event next door to a place we often go for noodle soup.

The God of Wealth and Citrus

Noodle soup hawker stall, still one of our daughter's favorite places to eat in Singapore. Note: Photo taken in 2010.

I feel like my daughter has grown up at this the hawker stall. When we arrived in Singapore she was three years old and could not speak with the woman behind the counter, who was from China. Now she can hold conversations in Mandarin with anyone there.

Citrus and friend at the noodle soup hawker stall in 2011.

We arrived just in time to say hello to the God of Wealth and watch a lion dance. I never tire of seeing them, even if this performance was nothing compared to the Lion Dance championship we saw downtown in 2009.

How often do you get to see a lion dance troupe on an escalator? I like to imagine that somewhere in Singapore is an old performer who is telling today’s generation that when he was younger, lions had to take the stairs.

Lions on the Escalator

After the lions departed, we sat through a feng shui presentation. Since the events were in Mandarin, I guessed, incorrectly, that there would be other performances to come. Forty-five minutes later it was beginning to feel like the time my mom took us to a wedding ceremony on the wrong day and we sat through a Catholic Mass, unable to politely extricate ourselves.

It started to become clear that there would be no events following the lecture and that a sales pitch was going to be the end of the evening.  Our cue to leave was the flyer being handed out which offered several different products designed to maximize prosperity in the coming year. I decided that we did not need any Auspicious Shower Foam and we headed home.

Lion Dance at a local shopping center.

I discovered today that Google Maps is able to give driving directions from Singapore to Kabul. It would only take about four days of non-stop driving (4,400 miles/7,100 kilometers). Singapore to Malaysia to Myanmar, and through Bangladesh and Northern India along the borders of Bhutan and Nepal.  Other than the last 1,000 miles through Pakistan it would probably be smooth sailing!

I have driven across the United States twice by myself and once on a Greyhound bus. If I can survive a solo drive with a cat, a kitty litter box and no air conditioning from Barstow to Oklahoma City, I think I could get pretty far with the kids on the South Asian Subcontinent.

The goal, of course, would be to make it an adventure in eating. When I drove from Seattle to Washington, D.C. via the southern route I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Calvin Trillin, figuring I could sample BBQ all along the way. Which I did, in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Kentucky. As they say in academia, more research is needed.

I ran into a dry spell of good food along the Virginia highways but it was just as well as the cat had been through a lot by then. To keep her cool I put a zip-lock bag of ice under a towel in the cat carrier but by Amarillo she no longer waited for me to fold the towel and straddled the bag of ice. I had never seen a cat panting before, or a cat as sad-looking as when the the ice melted and the bag leaked.

Of course the weather is always an issue. It can be brutally wet or hot in India, and Elysia reports that this week there has been a lot of snow near Kabul, so it is not a good time to visit even if I could go there. In any case, it would not be a lot of fun to get into a snowball fight with someone who carries a 9mm Beretta M9 pistol and has a Sharpshooter qualification.

Click on the photo for a larger version. 

Sadly, we are unlikely to make it to India any time soon. Higher up on the list are Cambodia, Laos and Taiwan and we will be lucky if we make it to two of those places this summer when Elysia returns from Afghanistan.

Instead, the kids and I will just have to suffer through a six-day trip to Bali in February, something I felt obligated to book when I saw sale fares for US$100 round-trip from Singapore. We have heard good and bad things about Bali — beautiful in parts, Spring Break party in others — though I am also hoping to ferry over to Lomboc for some time on the beach.

Until then we will just have to stare out the window and look for monkeys, such as this one. He rejected what was in our trash bin but seems to be headed toward our patio furniture. It seemed slightly used last time we returned from traveling and someone left mango pits behind.

Walking along the drain at the back of the house, near the maid’s quarters:

Well well well, look who is outside my kitchen door:

Happy New Year from Camp Blackhorse, Afghanistan!

Elysia received a large box of Chinese New Year candies and decorations from her sister — this lantern was pretty complicated to put together — and I sent another 16 pounds of treats for her to share with other servicemembers and her Afghan mentees. It is a good thing they have a gym on base!

I am at a pool party today and another father comes to me and says that he must tell me something that my six-year-old daughter said to his wife.

“Uh oh,” I say, “Did she start talking about castration?”

“No,” he says. “She told my wife that she already has three boyfriends.”

“Yes,” I said.  ”She told me on the second day of school that she had a new boyfriend.”

“And so my wife asks her if it is because she is beautiful. And your daughter says

‘No, it is because they are handsome, and I started it.’”

Citrus reads everything. For the past three months her face has been buried in books and it seems that many of our conversations are about how to spell words or explain their meaning. After our flight to Laos she told me she could spell “Fasten Seat Belt  While Seated” without looking and, when returning from the lavatory, asked me what a sanitary napkin was and why it should not be put in the toilet.

Her day at primary school begins in the assembly hall and the students are instructed to bring a book for silent reading until it is time to begin the national anthem, but a few days ago a guest presenter came to tell jokes and small life lessons. The kids loved him but when I learned that he was going to be selling his books at the school for two days, I was not thrilled.

I have a strong aversion to commercial activities in schools but reminded myself that Singapore is different than America and that the lines between government and corporate activities can often appear blurred. In America many parents are very wary of marketing efforts aimed at children, while in Singapore public-private partnerships are viewed as positive involvement in the community.

I gave her SGD$11 to buy a book that she would be interested in reading and she brought it with us during our neighborhood walk this evening.

Dad, what does castration mean?

I was startled but usually the best approach is to just ask for the context, so I did. She told me that in the joke, a boy was thinking of castrating a cat.

Hm.

It would not help for me to ignore the question or postpone it so I spent a block of walking explaining how cats that are allowed to live outside often have babies, and a lot of them. I explained that even young cats can have babies and that many people feel that it is not good to have lots of unwanted cats, or dogs, around so there is an operation that a veterinarian can do so that the cat will not be able to have kittens.

It seemed like a reasonable explanation.

Well then why does the girl say that she is going to castrate the boy?

Uh.

Time to punt. I told her that I did not know.

Later, I looked up the full joke:

An animal lover passing by saw a naughty kid pointing a knife at a helpless cat.
“What are you doing with that cat?”
“I was thinking of castrating him.”
“Don’t you dare! Whatever you do to that cat I’ll do to you.”
“Well, in that case, I think I’ll just kiss his backside!”

The lesson of this joke was “We can learn from the wit of the boy in which he gave the answer but not from his rude and crafty ways.” It was a bit lost on me though of course now I can look forward to the day where my daughter uses castration in an inappropriate context, like asking someone if they are going to have any siblings or if their parent has been castrated. At least it will be amusing.

By the way, did you hear about the cat that gave birth in a Singapore street?

It got fined for littering.

/p

p

The kids and I celebrated my birthday today by going to Din Tai Fung for dinner. We had a basket of their great xiaolongbau, Citrus and I each had about three bowls of hot and sour soup, Baby Lemon helped eat most of the noodles and my daughter finished off the spinach sauteed in garlic.

Baby Lemon was entranced by the candle and tried to eat most of my steamed cake. We will have to get him his own piece next time.

Elysia has promised me that we will celebrate when she comes home in about five months. I am already looking forward to repeating this evening.

Click on the photos for a larger version.