A touch of reality.

A touch of the 'unreal' has invaded our little world.

Last tuesday evening, we were told of the death of a 5 year old child from Maternelle. The reason for death was unknown but on safety concerns the Maternelle school would be closed until further notice. Maternelle and the first two grades of Elementaire are on the same campus but at opposite ends of the property. Elementaire would stay open (ie. Zoe's class). I sent Zoe to school wednesday, but later discovered 6 from her class were missing that day.

Within 24 hours, it was confirmed the child had tested positive to H1N1, but it was not known if this was the cause of death.
I decided not to send Zoe to school on thursday; I was not prepared to take the risk, and as friday was a public holiday it made sense to keep her home as a precaution. It turned out most parents thought like me, and kept their children away from school.

Today is monday - the first day back to school after the 3 day break. We have been updated over the break. The Singapore Ministry of Health and the French Embassy are also heavily involved.

This is the procedure in place.

The school is effectively in a lock-down. Only one entrance into each of the two campus' is open. At each entrance a testing station is in place.

Every morning, every parent has to take their children's temperatures and record it on a form.
On presentation of this 'temperature form', the smaller children will be admitted onto the school grounds. They will then be tested again in the classroom before class by health inspectors.

Parents who wish to enter the school grounds, teachers and older students must undergo a temperature test at the school gate before admitttance.
Any child with a fever, cough, cold or muscular aches will be not permitted to school. Any child with any of these symptoms will not be permitted back to school without a medical certificate.

The Maternelle is still closed until further notice.

The Embassy and Lycee have arranged a seminar wednesday evening for the parents of the primary school and a prominent doctor to talk about H1N1.

From what I'm hearing, this poor little fellow was not well over the weekend with cold-like symptoms, but went to school on monday. During the day he collapsed and was sent by ambulance from school to hospital where he died that night.

I think I have now read most of the literature available on the internet about H1N1, and I'm still not sure what to do, or what I should do to protect my family. There have been 19 deaths due to H1N1 in Singapore. Craig trys to calm me by telling me that there are far more deaths from normal flu than H1N1, but it doesn't help. It's the fact that it's like russian roulette, you may get it, you may not and if you get it, you may die or you may not.

Monsoon season - Singapore style.

First, some statistics. Singapore is the most lightning struck country in the world. Every house and building has a lightning conductor built in. A friend of mine living in Singapore for 18 months, has had their house struck by lightening twice.

Since late October, I've noticed a change in the weather patterns here.... normally that would sound like a dumb thing to say after living here for 4 months, but here in Singapore the weather forecast is always the same - storms and 27 - 32 degrees, add or minus a degree. That's because it's sunny for 11 out of 12 hours of the day, and one hour of seasonal rain or tropical storm....
But since the October school holidays, it's been more and more overcast, and slightly cooler, and the rain lasts longer. That was until this week.
In the last 3 days, we've had two of the most ferocious storms I can remember. The lightning flashes come so fast and often, you can't count them - and the thunder - I reckon I've jumped right off my seat on more than one occasion. The storms pass right over you - you see the flash of lightning, and immediately the thunder crashes and reverberates around you - you can feel the vibrations in the floor (we live on the 3rd floor!). It's deafening. The storm can stay directly over you for up to 10 minutes. And the rain - boy, your visibility is reduced to metres as it falls so heavily. It's like a curtain.

Yesterday's storm was a doozy... It hit about 1.30pm and boy was I glad to be at home at the time. The rain was so dense you couldn't see past the balcony. Our balcony flooded within 10 minutes. Shortly after I received a phone call from the condo office asking me to move my car as soon as I could, as the basement was flooding fast.
When I got downstairs, I had to wade in water about 10cms deep, but was able to move the car to the next level up. The storm boomed and crashed all around for about 40 minutes, then slowly moved on. The rain continued but lessened.
At 4pm while still raining I went to the front of our condo to wait for Zoe's school bus to arrive, and was met by total carnage. There were cars strewn across the middle of the road, with other cars trying to drive around them in both directions and people were everywhere. Someone said the major road (our road runs off) was closed and flooded (it's a 4 lane road). The adjacent condo's basement had totally flooded, and pumping trucks were being brought in to pump out the water. Some cars had been able to get out, and were now parking on the road, around the strewn cars and the cars trying to drive down the road. Chaos. Tow trucks were brought in to remove the cars stranded by the water.
45 minutes late, Zoe's school bus arrives from the opposite direction... by this time I was quite a nervous wreck.
The carnage in our road continues today. The pump trucks were pumping all night to remove the flood waters from the basement of the adjacent condo and cars were being towed out from the basement today. It has totally blocked our road. And guess what - it's just started raining again.

Halloween 2009 - Singapore style

There was evidence that Halloween was celebrated in Singpore by way of the paraphenalia on sale in the supermarkets, the Night Safari (Night Zoo) was having Halloween themed weekend nights in October, the French Association held a Halloween themed party for kids in mid-october, and the Disney TV channel here was advertising scary themed shows on sunday 31st october.

We had no plans to do anything - that was until we received a knock on the door, and an invitation to join some families for some Halloween festivities by the pool on sunday afternoon.

Z was very excited, as she had missed celebrating Halloween the past two years with having her tonsills out and travelling.

We were one of 4 families - Swiss-Italian, French, South African and us, with their children and maids. It was fun - the kids swam and played games together. Although we'd all seen each other in the pool from time to time, we hadn't introduced ourselves - so it was good to finally break the ice. As the time passed, the clouds were building for a storm (a daily occurence here), but the sky was turning from grey to black and green... and just as our pizza's arrived, the heavens opened... and boy it was a 'doozy'. We were huddled under the shelter by the pool eating pizza and drinking red wine in a torrential downpour with lightening and thunder all around us. We all thought it was quite appropriate for Halloween. The kids were amazing - if they were scared,they sure didn't show it. At 7pm more children from the apartments joined us in costume and then all the children accompanied by the 3 maids set off to go 'trick or treating' around several of the apartments. We returned to our respective apartments to await the knock on the door.

It was a really fun night for Z as well as us.

Borneo and the Orang Utans

Wow, wow, wow. Great holiday. We packed a lot into 4 days. We flew just over 2 hours from Singapore to Kota Kinabalu (capital of Sabbah, on the island of Borneo, Malaysia), then drove almost an hour to the Shangri-la resort. Talk about in the middle of nowhere....The resort was fantastic. You can do as much or as little as you wanted. You know me - I had our whole vacation planned within an hour of arriving.. well, not really.

On the first day, Z played 'ranger for a day' (which turned out to be for an hour and a half ) in the Wildlife reserve attached to the hotel and got up close to the Orang Utans with the guides.

The outdoor pool area was the central focus of the resort and where we spent most of our time when at the resort. We camped on comfy lounges under palm trees and relaxed. Z spent HOURS every day in the pool. I read two books. C got to play golf - twice. On Friday, we took the hotel shuttle back into Kota Kinabalu to did some exploring around the town.

On Saturday, we took a boat trip out to a remote island and got to snorkle over coral and cute fish - Z's first time snorkelling and she loved it. She even got to ride a pony - an activity organised by the 'kiddy club'. She also discovered malaysian satays.... one day she ate satay for breakfast, lunch and then at dinner time. Needless to say, she's getting into the asian food.

We all took a tour into the nature reserve to see the Orang Utans - at that time they had 7 little orphans. The rangers care for them and prepare them for their release back into the wild. We watched 3 Orang utans interact for close to 45 minutes. It was absolutely amazing to see them up close.

Z lists as one of the highlights of the trip as 'eating Teppan-yaki'. We ate in the Teppan-yaki restaurant one night and Z just loved Gary - the Teppan-yaki chef's antics. He was quite a character.

All in all - a great short break.

Mosiac class.

Singapore is great for kids activities... you name it - you can find it close by. I was excited (and knew Z would be too) to find a mosiac shop which runs classes in our local shopping centre. So - I signed Z up to 3 projects which she can do over a 3 month period. She had done mosiac last year at school and really enjoyed it.

The first project the children do is to choose a design, trace it into a board then mosiac it; which the children complete over 3 sessions of 2 hours. This is her masterpiece. She also made the heart design as she finished her project early. She can't wait to go back to start her 2nd project - she's tossing up whether to make a set of 4 coasters or decorate a box....

Exploring

Last weekend we planned two trips to explore new areas of Singapore. Saturday we set off to East Coast Park - Singapore's largest. It runs along the east coast of the island beside the sea. It was pretty wierd to see hundreds of tankers and ships anchored in a long queue formation some 200 metres off the coast. They were empty and waiting to enter the port.
Along the sea, the entire length of the park are bikeways and walkways. There were even places where you could camp. About every 200 metres facilities where you can eat, drink, have your own BBQ, hire bikes or rollerblades etc. I had stored away a two wheel scooter (which I planned to keep until christmas), which Z had been longing for - so we caved in and gave it to her so she could take it to the Park.

We had a nice day - walked a few kilometres and stopped for 'butter and garlic crab' for lunch, before heading back to the car. When we got back to the car, C realised the keys were no longer in his pocket.... so he walked back to the restaurant to look for them. No luck - so he called the leasing company who provided another set within 30 mins of the call... Bad end to a nice day.

On sunday, we headed down to Raffles Hotel to explore the heritage area of Singapore. We walked in and around Raffles, and enjoyed the hotel museum. We checked out the famous Long Bar, with peanut shells all over the floor, but at 10am, it was a bit early for a Singapore sling... another time! From the hotel, we took 1 of 2 heritage marked walks you can do... although to say we did half of one walk is stretching it. The heat of the day, with little breeze and the heat off the bitumen road and sidewalk was just too much - so we detoured and went shopping. I now know why there are SO many shopping centres and why besides eating, the national pastime is shopping! Anyway, we bought C a birthday pressie (noise reduction headphones for the plane & his music) , so it was worthwhile. I definately want to do these walks - just have to find a day when it's cooler (ha!).

Mooncake Festival

Last saturday, we joined the Association Francaise de Singapour for an outing to celebrate the Chinese mooncake festival. Although the festival runs for 3 weeks, most celebrations occured last weekend as a result of the moon appearing it's largest in the sky for the year. By the way, mooncakes in french are called 'gateau de lune'. Everywhere in Singapore you can buy and try mooncakes at the moment. All the hotels chefs sell their variation of mooncakes made by their chefs- from the traditional - lotus, egg, red bean to exotic - chocolate, passionfruit, nuts etc.

Their history goes something along the lines that they were used by revolutionaries to hide notes inside the cakes to amass the people against the Mongolian rulers of China at the time. It worked, and they overthrew the Monguls. Nowdays however, there are no notes inside the mooncakes.

Anyway, getting back to our tour. We met with the group at the Chinese gardens and had a brief history of the most famous chinese figures (whose statues appear in the gardens). The gardens were so pretty - decorated with lanterns. We were also able to taste 4 different mooncakes - Lotus, red bean, nut, and passionfruit. Can't say we love them; I think it's the texture that we didn't like. They are quite pastey and heavy. We liked the flavour of the lotus, nut and the passionfruit mooncakes- but the traditional red bean was a taste to be acquired.....

Z tried them all - and was a great little helper, serving the mooncakes for tasting.

Now, I have to tell you to score brownie points - the entire event was in french!