2/3/13 - Cold Weather Karma

After a full weekend of hanging out in Boat Quay and getting a taste of Chinese New Year in Chinatown we needed a day to relax.  Luckily that is what Sundays here are turning into.  Our favorite weekend pastime is sitting on the porch with our coffee and newspapers (WSJ, Economist, Facebook, Pinterest) and listening to various I Heart Radio stations.  It gives you a flavor for what is going on back in the States and keeps us in the music loop.  The I Heart Radio app has almost moved past our "iPad to TV" connection for overseas necessities.  Buying all the music we would want through iTunes would have gotten prohibitively expensive in a hurry.  We already have bought more music since being here than we had in the last four years combined.

There's also something refreshing about looking out and seeing lush vegetation, tropical birds and butterflies and then realizing its early February.  We're still in that snooty bubble that people who have moved from cold weather to warm weather geography's reside in.  We look at weather reports back home with a shiver, a smile and a twinge of schadenfreude.  I'm sure we'll get over that in the next few months (OK, probably not), but for now we do a little toast with our coffee mugs about our good fortune.

Of course karma is a vicious beast and reared her ugly head about 2 hours later.  The sun went behind the clouds and what seemed to only be a slight sprinkle turned into an 8 hour tropical shower.  One of the best parts about being here was no more snow storms wrecking our weekend plans for a portion of the year.  Well its pretty hard to go watch an outdoor concert when the lawn we were going to picnic on is likely a giant slip and slide and some of the paths to the pavilion might even be under water.  If the Singapore Chinese Orchestra played through the storm, they might have been using their instrument cases as flotation devices.  Needless to say, we did not find out.

Time for Plan B.  First, I still squeezed a swim in.  At least when its raining its still in the mid to high 70's so the pool feels good (there's a little of that snootiness popping out again).  Even better, the kids who like to set themselves up as moving obstacles will be stuck inside getting in their parents way instead of mine.  Next, it was off to our new Sunday restaurant of choice.  With a little local assistance we found a hole in the wall French restaurant that serves outstanding, reasonably priced food.  Its only one subway stop away, you can sit outside and the chef looks like he could be on a Paris travel advertisement - Gusteau would be proud.  Duck confit, spinach ravioli and some of the creamiest au gratin potatoes I have ever had.  So the day wasn't a total washout, we're getting much better at defeating rain than we ever were at snow.

You could say we've gone soft, but that would mean that we were the hardy, cold weather type at some point in our lives and everyone knows that is just a bold faced lie.  I'll leave it at that - I need to reverse this karma jinx, we want to have a pool party next weekend and want to use the umbrellas for shade, not shelter.